>Socialist Appeal on the elections
>--The British General Election and the perspectives for the Labour Party
>By Alan Woods
>Tony Blair, the new leader of the Labour Party
>promised a new and "radical" policy to build a "better Britain". But once
>installed in Number Ten Downing Street he has followed a policy tailored
>exclusively to the interests of Big Business.
I would say that the New Labour government has had its alliance with big business, (more, financial capitalism) as an absolute precondition of its politics. But it is not true to say that the policy is tailored exclusively to this. New Labour has attempted to win consensus from the great majority of the population for its policies so it slightly socialised the interests of finance capital. The opinion polls suggest that it has been very successful in this, but the price is there is little enthusiasm.
>One of the first actions he took was to give the Bank of England control
>over interest rates, thus handing over effective control of economic policy
>to the representatives of the City
A modern capitalist economy is already very effectively under the control of finance capital. This clever move made the body taking the decision accountable for their reasoned decisions which they have to publish once a month, and avoided the government getting blamed by every critic of every turn in the interest rates.
It slightly increases rather than reduces the social control over the economy, given that it is extraordinarily weak anyway.
>The austerity policies of the Blair government led to attacks on the poorest
>and most vulnerable groups in British society, such as single parents.
The working class cannot be assumed to be the poorest and most vulnerable, or the latter taken as a proxy for the working class.
[Various points with which I agree]
> While Blair struts around the world stage,
Blair is too clever to strut. He has done very little boasting about Kosovo.
>The much-vaunted National Health Service is now in ruins.
No. A major internal success of the government has been to roll back the Conservative government's fiction that the NHS can be run with an "internal market". It has also largely socialised the independent providers of health care, the general practitioners, in "primary care trusts" Although they are threatening to resign en masse if they do not get better terms and conditions, they are shifting from being petty bourgeois independent professionals to being privileged workers in a complex socialised economic system.
>After decades of neglect, the infrastructure is crumbling.
By winning support across the range of working people with low taxes the Labour Party is now in a position to benefit from the change in the mood of the electorate that is recognising the need for expenditure comparable with European continental standards, on the social infrastructure.
>When Labour wins on 7 June it will not be because of, but in spite of, Tony
>Blair.
That assertion will convince few except the already converted!
Blair and New Labour have shifted the whole terms of debate, and have brought in ideas about the total social management of a complex late capitalist country.
>Why Labour will win
>
>Despite everything, Labour will win this election by a sizeable margin. This
>is a decisive answer to those on the fringes of the labour movement who have
>left the Labour Party and are desperately striving to build phantom
>"revolutionary" armies in the clouds.
This argument is presumably the main target of the article.
> The discontent with Blair is particularly strong among the activists in the
>Party and especially in the unions, which are still organically linked to
>the Labour Party. Once the election is out of the way, the decks will be
>cleared for action.
The old cry of the entrists.
>London, 31st May 2001.
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I have got to skim otherwise you won't get any response from me at all.
The author is incorrect that there is no alternative to working in the Labour Party. In some respects the Liberal Democrats have policies more progressive than Labour at present. Furthermore there is a much increased role for pressure group politics in a pluralist civil society. Half the agenda of Charter 88 has been achieved with major constitutional changes in the position of Wales and Scotland and of the House of Lords. The Conservatives will lose their control of the Lords in the months after the General Election. There is a lot of tactical voting going on. There is a big need to push through the agenda of constitutional change to get proportional representation in local and national elections so as to allow parties to the left of Labour to get some representation without letting in the Conservatives.
That would avoid the need for entrism.
This article also seriously misstates the identity of the working class. The working class is all bourgeoisified and includes all who sell their labour power to capital, including half the population who think they are middle class. New Labour now has majority support among Class AB. That is progressive.
The tired old entrist strategy of plugging away at entrism in the Labour Party linked to certain trade unions (which are bourgeois organisations as Lenin argued) and their murky maneouvring politics, is a strategy of defeatism.
The article is however correct that after a Labour victory there will be new opportunities - but among working people in general - to move the agenda further onto social production controlled by social foresight, to use Marx's phrase at the First International.
>------------------
>-What do you find Chris? This analysis seems to be somewhat optimistic on
>British working class mood, isn´t it? And what about those polls on
>nationalization? Are they reliable?
Yes. They most definitely are! People want their rail and health services run with social foresight.
When the citizens of the USA stop their politics being sold to the highest bidder (BTW another reform New Labour has brought in is growing restrictions on the ability of money to fund politics) then they will realise an expensive health system in which the doctors kill tens of thousands of patients a year should be run in a more socially responsible way.