EUROPE IS SOLUTION TO BALKAN CRISIS

By | |
Leave a comment

Tribune leader, 5 July 1991

Unlike previous Balkan crises, the current upheaval in Yugoslavia is hardly the stuff on which continental or world wars are made: the collapse of Soviet power in eastern Europe has seen to that. But this is not to say that the attempt of the Yugoslav federal army and airforce to suppress Slovenian aspirations to indepen­dent nationhood can be dismissed by the rest of Europe as an internal Yugoslav affair. Already scores of people have died in the fighting. To avert disaster, it is impera­tive that the other European states, acting in concert and using every diplomatic means available to them, do their utmost to secure a binding ceasefire and withdrawal of federal forces from Slovenia.
Nevertheless, it has to be recognised that such mea­sures will probably not be enough. The unavoidable fact is that Yugoslavia is falling apart. The Slovenes and Croats have had enough of being dominated by the Serbs and want to be out of the federation, preferably becoming part of an enlarged European Community. The federal armed forces, the last remaining functioning part of the old communist federal apparatus, whose officer corps is dominated by Serbs, are prepared to go to war to preserve Serbian hegemony.
Even if a ceasefire can be secured, it seems unlikely that the protagonists can be brought to the negotiating table; it is even more unlikely that negotiations will produce a way of keeping Yugoslavia in one piece. Sooner or later, probably sooner, the rest of Europe is going to have to decide whether it will take a constructive role in the creation of several new states out of Yugoslavia or whether it will merely be a passive witness as those new states attempt to go it alone.
Established governments do not like nascent states because such states are, at best, unpredictable and, at worst, pose a threat to international security; states that are the products of secessionism are almost anathe­ma. If Slovenia can do it, what about (to take just a few examples close to home) Northern Ireland, Wales, Scot­land, Brittany, Corsica, Catalonia and the Basque coun­try? It is perhaps hardly surprising that the chancellories of Europe have so far been unwilling to grasp the nettle of recognising Slovenia as an independent state.
Eventually, however, the nettle will have to be grasped – which in turn will raise the question of how the new state should be integrated with its neighbours. It is not too Utopian to suggest that the problem could best be solved neatly by rapid, simultaneous enlargement and deepening of the European Community. In a “Europe of the regions”, with a judicious mix of pan-European control of economic, defence and foreign policy and regional (or small nation) control of most of the rest, Slovenian independence would threaten no one. But to get from here to there requires that the governments of the EC put aside the sterile debate between the deepeners, who want to exclude rich neutral and poor ex-communist states from an affluent militarist EC, and the enlargers, who want to hold on to national sovereignty at any price.
The real task is the creation of a democratic federal European polity that takes in the entire continent.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN WALTON

By | |
Leave a comment

Tribune, 21 June 1991

Paul Anderson visits the by-election campaign in Eric Heffer’s old seat
The by-election campaign  in Liverpool Walton got under way in earnest last weekend as members of the Militant Tenden­cy from all over the country arrived to canvass for Lesley Mahmood, the Militant  member  standing  as  a “Real  Labour” candidate  against Labour’s Peter Kilfoyle.
Most went home on Sunday, but there is still a large Militant pre­sence on the rubbish-strewn streets of the north Liverpool constituency, dishing out leaflets and stickers printed in the same colours as Mr Kilfoyle’s, though without the Labour rose. “They’re doing their best to confuse the voters,” says one of Mr Kilfoyle’s campaign workers. “They’re trying to give the impress­ion that Kilfoyle was imposed on Walton by the Labour leadership even though Mahmood was the loc­al choice. They’re also insinuating that Kilfoyle voted for redundancies on the city council – and he’s not even a councillor.”
Ms Mahmood, a Liverpool city councillor expelled from the Labour Party this year for opposing the setting of the council’s poll tax, denies the charge that she is run­ning a dirty campaign or trying to confuse the voters. “I don’t see how anyone can be confused,” she says. “We are the real Labour Party in this city. I was selected by Walton Real Labour supporters. They’ve built the party in the area. I wouldn’t want to be known as the official Labour candidate. He’s Kinnock’s yes-man.”
Mr Kilfoyle makes a great show of steering clear of arguments about Liverpool Labour politics and Mili­tant, at least for the time being. Labour is confident that Ms Mahmood will do herself damage by her constant repetition of Militant slogans – “everything from nationalise the top 150 monopolies to a workers’ MP on a workers’ wage,” says a Kilfoyle supporter – and that any confusion about the identity of the Labour candidate will be quickly cleared up by the media coverage of the campaign.
The unspoken fear is not that Labour will lose but that its victory will not be crushing. Militant has few firm friends among the Walton electorate: an opinion poll pub­lished in the Liverpool Echo on Tuesday gave Mr Kilfoyle 40 per cent, with Paul Clark, the Liberal Democrat candidate, on 16 per cent and Ms Mahmood trailing on 9 per cent, just 2 points above the Tories’ Berkeley Greenwood.
Nevertheless, there are worries in the Labour camp that the Kil­foyle campaign could be hampered by Militant intimidation of canvassers and that Ms Mahmood could yet benefit from popular opposition to the 1,000 council job cuts current­ly planned by Liverpool City Coun­cil’s official Labour group in the face of a growing financial crisis.
The council is the largest single employer in the city, and feelings are running high, particularly among the council bin-men, whose industrial action against the cuts has left 12,000 tons of rubbish on the city’s streets.
Ms Mahmood supports the in­dustrial action. She is campaigning on a platform of “no redundancies and no rent rises”, and is hoping to emulate the success of the “Real Labour” candidates run by the Mili­tant-dominated Broad Left in last month’s local elections. Five out of six candidates put up against offi­cial Labour candidates for the city council won their seats, one of them in Walton.
Her opponents argue that she is advancing not practical policies but Trotskyist “transitional demands”, designed to be attractive but im­possible to implement. The idea, according to the theory, is that workers “taken through the experi­ence” of having their hopes dashed will become more receptive to re­volutionary socialism.
If there is any place where work­ers should have been radicalised by Militant slogans, it is Walton. The constituency is the cradle of the entrist sect: as long ago as 1955, Ted Grant, the leader of the Trots­kyist group that became the Revolutionary Socialist League later the same year and started pub­lishing Militant newspaper in 1964, just missed being selected as Labour parliamentary candidate for Walton. In the 1959 general elec­tion, the Labour candidate, George McCartney, who lost to a Tory, was an RSL sympathiser.
Although Eric Heifer, who was MP for Walton from 1964 and whose death caused the by-election, was never in Militant, Walton was the base that Militant used to ex­tend its influence throughout the Liverpool Labour Party as the old right-wing Labour machine de­clined in the sixties and seventies, coming eventually to dominate the city council in the early eighties.
Even though its sway over the constituency Labour Party has been much reduced by expulsions in the past five years, many of them the responsibility of Mr Kilfoyle, until recently Labour’s north-west re­gional organiser, the tendency re­tains a strong influence in the area, particularly in the trade unions. The Walton by-election seemed to Militant to be an ideal opportunity to exact its revenge on its tormentors in the Labour Party nationally and locally.
If the opinion polls are anything like accurate, however, it seems more likely that Militant, either through desperation or stupidity, has overplayed its hand. Certainly, whatever happens in the by-election, the future now looks almost impossible for Militant in­side the Labour Party.
It is difficult to see how Militant supporters who have managed to stay in the Labour Party since the expulsions began can possibly sur­vive the wrath of all sections of the party after their organisation has run a candidate against Labour in a parliamentary by-election: the posi­tion of the two Militant MPs, Dave Nellist and Terry Fields, is particu­larly sticky.
Militant knew this before decid­ing to run Ms Mahmood, but was gambling on using a good showing in Walton as the basis for estab­lishing itself as a credible Leninist party far more outside Labour than inside. If, however, as seems likely, Ms Mahmood does badly, the Tendency’s credibility will be wrecked. As Trotsky himself might have put it, The Revolutionary Socialist League seems to be head­ing straight for the unemptied dust­bin of history.

KEEPING TABS ON THE TAPPERS

By | |
Leave a comment

Tribune leader, 21 June 1991

Last week’s official announcement that, in 1990, 539 warrants to tap telephones were authorised by the Home Secretary and the Scottish Secretary sounded very reassuring. It gave the impression that there is only one tapped telephone for every 100,000 people hi Britain. Given the prevalence of crime and terrorism, we are supposed to conclude that the extent of telephone-tapping could not possibly concern anyone but a con­firmed paranoiac.
Unfortunately, the official figure is absolutely meaning­less. Only one warrant is required to cover an entire organisation. According to insiders in British Telecom, the number and deployment of telephone engineers and support staff employed on tapping are consistent with many more lines – possibly as many as 35,000 – being snooped upon by the state.
If anything like accurate, these estimates are cause for serious concern. They indicate that the state has an unprecedented and frightening capacity for engaging in surveillance of the population. Perhaps we are not yet staring 1984 in the face, but the right to privacy is being systematically undermined.
Labour is committed to bringing telephone-tapping under tighter control, but a Labour government will have a hard time putting the party’s commitments into practice against the resistance of state surveillance and security bureaucracies. As became clear last week, police plan­ners are already meeting in secret to work out how they will obstruct or circumvent a Labour government’s attempts to carry out policies they do not like, among them the proposed restrictions on telephone-tapping. If Labour is serious about even modest reductions in the size and influence of the surveillance state, let alone about making what remains democratically accountable, it will have to be well prepared for a very tough battle.
What’s wrong with federalism?
It is always pleasant to see Tories at each other’s throats, and it is quite understandable that Labour is for the moment sitting back and laughing as they tear one another to bits over Europe.
In the longer term, however, the Tories’ current row raises a crucial question that Labour cannot duck. Giving the vague impression to the voters that Labour is now the pro-European party is all very well, but before many months are out, Labour will have to decide whether it is in principle in favour of the eventual creation of a federal united states of Europe.
Largely because it knows what damage splits on Europe can cause to British political parties, Labour has concentrated on more immediate, everyday matters of European Community politics – the Social Charter, re­gional policy, making the Commission more democrati­cally accountable, ensuring that a European Central Bank is supervised by elected politicians, reforming the Common Agricultural Policy and so on. If Labour be­lieves Britain is in the EC to stay and if it endorses, with whatever conditions, European Monetary Union and a European central bank, it makes sense for it explicitly to embrace the idea of giving directly democratically accountable all-European institutions the primary re­sponsibility for European government within 20 years.

MILITANT PUTS ITSELF BEYOND THE PALE

By | |
Leave a comment

Tribune leader, 14 June 1991

The Militant tendency had few friends even on the far-left of the Labour Party before the Liverpool Broad Left, which it dominates, decided to field its own candidate, Lesley Mahmood, in the by-election for the Walton seat left vacant by the death of Eric Heffer. Now it has quite simply put itself beyond the pale.
Peter Kilfoyle was chosen 16 months ago as Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Walton accord­ing to the party’s agreed selection procedure. It is wholly irrelevant that many people believe that the selection procedure needs to be reformed: it is the one the party has lumbered itself with. It is equally irrelevant that Mr Heffer did not approve of Mr Kilfoyle: Labour MPs do not appoint their successors as prospective parliamentary candidates, nor should they.
Like him or loathe him, Mr Kilfoyle is the official Labour candidate, and publicly to support rivals to official Labour election candidates is rightly considered by the party constitution as one of the most serious disciplinary offences a party member can commit. Party members who campaign against Mr Kilfoyle will deserve no sympathy from anyone, left or right, when they are expelled.
Nevertheless, the most important thing about the Broad Left’s decision to run a rival candidate is not what it means for Labour Party members who back that candi­date but its impact on Labour’s chances in the general election.
If Mr Kilfoyle is beaten as a result of the Broad Left intervention, either directly by Ms Mahmood or because she takes enough votes from Labour to allow a Liberal Democrat victory, Labour’s standing nationally will be severely damaged, just as it was by its by-election defeats in Bermondsey in 1983 and Greenwich in 1987. The damage might be reparable, but it will be far better for Labour if the Broad Left challenge in Walton is crushed.
Whether it will be depends on how far the Broad Left is able to turn the substantial support it has had in local politics into by-election votes, and there are good reasons for believing that it will not. Militant and its dupes and cronies inspire no great loyalty or idealism among the people of Liverpool: it is just that many people in a city where the council is the predominant employer and provider of housing are prepared to vote for prom­ises of no cuts in council jobs and no increases in council rents. That the gang making the promises is corrupt and dishonest is well known – Alan Bleasdale’s portrayal of brutish boss politics in his GBH will strike a chord throughout Merseyside – but short-term self-interest easily trumps such considerations for many voters at local election time.
In the by-election, on the other hand, self-interest on the part of the voters could well work against the Broad Left. Although the Militant central committee might consider it worth taking the risk of sabotaging Labour’s chances in the general election on the grounds that a Labour government led by Neil Kinnock would be worse than a Tory government, it is unlikely that the voters of Walton agree. If Labour can convince them that voting for the Broad Left is the most effective way of helping the Tories to retain office, Mr Kilfoyle will be returned with a thumping majority.

MAKING A EUROPEAN BANK ACCOUNTABLE

By | |
Leave a comment

Tribune leader, 7 June 1991

This week, Neil Kinnock delivered a speech to Euro­pean socialists in Luxembourg in which he argued that the European Community’s council of economic and finance Ministers – Ecofin in Europeak – should play a “strategic role” in formulating member states’ domestic monetary policies, overseeing the operations of a new European central bank.

As the Financial Times said, the speech was “the clearest indication yet that Labour is ready to hand over some control of the UK’s internal economic policy to a supranational agency”.

For many on the left, the idea of relinquishing national sovereignty over key elements of economic policy to any supranational agency is anathema. Yet national sovereignty over the economy is, for countries as small as Britain, part of the past. Like it or not, supranational agencies are essential for the development of viable alternative economic strategies: the crucial question is whether they are democratically accountable.

A European central bank, overseen by national econo­mic and finance ministers who are answerable to nationally elected parliaments, is of course much more democratic than a European central bank overseen by bureaucrats who are not answerable to any elected body. But it is far less democratic than a European central bank overseen by directly elected MEPs.

Labour shies away from any such arrangement, believ­ing that the powers of the European Parliament “must complement but not replace” those of national parlia­ments. In line with this, during his visit to Luxembourg Mr Kinnock made clear his opposition to the creation of a single European socialist party.

But it is difficult to think of any reason apart from sentimentality for this attitude. If Labour accepts that national sovereignty over the economy is now severely limited and that economic policy should be determined at a European level, it should surely accept that the Euro­pean Parliament will increasingly replace Westminster as the focus of democratic politics.

TURN ON, TUNE IN …

It is unusual for Tribune to agree with Judge James Pickles, but his call for the decriminalisation of cannabis makes perfect sense. Use of cannabis is now so widespread in Britain, among all classes and ethnic groups, that the law banning it has become a joke – except for the 30,000-odd people convicted each year for posses­sion of small quantities for personal use.

The drug is not addictive and there is no evidence that it causes significant harm to health, as alcohol and tobacco undoubtedly do. If a tiny proportion of cannabis-users move on to addictive and debilitating illegal drugs, it is not because of any property of cannabis but because its very illegality means it is sold by black-market traders who also sell drugs that are dangerous.

Decriminalisation of possession would not remove can­nabis from the black market – supplying it would still be illegal – and it is arguable that complete legalisation, with the state regulating or even monopolising supply, is a more coherent option. But Judge Pickles’ proposal is at least a step hi the right direction.

By contrast, merely adjusting the law to make posses­sion a less serious offence, as Justice, the British section of the International Commission of Jurists, recommended this week, would continue unnecessarily to clog up the courts. Dope-smokers have found an unlikely friend.

THE SPECTRE HAUNTING LABOUR

By | |
Leave a comment

Tribune leader, 31 May 1991

According to reports in most of the quality papers, the Tories have decided to give a high priority during the forthcoming general election campaign to alleg­ing that Labour offers only a return to the politics of Harold Wilson. If these reports are true, and there seems to be no compulsive reason to disbelieve them, the Conservatives are making a quite extraordinary political blunder.

Most apparently, they are assuming that the British people remember the Wilson years with horror. But, although Wilson has few admirers these days among politicians, journalists and historians, it is far from obvious that his reputation among the electorate as a whole, insofar as he still has one after so long out of the political limelight, is particularly bad. Indeed, Labour might even benefit from being associated with the man who was Prime Minister when England won the World Cup and the Beatles recorded all their hits.

More important, it is difficult to see how the Conserva­tives can seriously draw parallels between Wilson’s Labour Party and Neil Kinnock’s. There are, of course, superficial similarities. Kinnock, like Wilson, came from the Left of the party and has ditched much ideological baggage in pursuit of electoral success. Labour today, like Labour in 1963-64, has a clean-cut managerial image, is strong on the rhetoric of economic and social mod­ernisation, and is well ahead in the opinion polls.

Beyond this, however, the differences are immense. In particular, Wilson came to power in 1964 with promises of massive state intervention to transform the British eco­nomy, including widespread nationalisation, with the trade unions playing a key role in planning. By compar­son, Labour’s proposals today are extremely modest. Nationalisation and corporatism are out; so too is increas­ing state expenditure unless growth allows it. If unethusiastically at times, Labour does recognise the limits on state economic intervention now imposed by multination­al capital. Should the Tories claim that nothing has changed in Labour’s outlook since the early sixties, it should not be difficult to prove them wrong.

NATO FAILS TO ADAPT

Nato’s announcement on Tuesday that it is to res­tructure its forces, with a “rapid reaction force” under a British commander playing a key role, had been trailed so widely beforehand that it barely made the evening television news bulletins. The announcement is nevertheless worthy of note – largely because it shows how inadequately Nato’s planners have responded to the transformation of Europe in the past two years.

Despite the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, Nato remains as committed as ever to the out-dated core assumption that it is necessary to deter a Soviet attack on central Europe by threatening to esca­late any conflict into all-out nuclear war. The force reductions which it is now putting forward are depress-ingly modest, while the proposal for the “rapid reaction force” will exacerbate fears that Nato ispreparing for a much greater “out-of-area” role.

The Labour leadership has tried to calm critics of Nato’s intransigence by claiming that the Alliance is hi a state of flux and increasingly open to new ideas about the future security structure of Europe. This week’s announcement shows that the Nato planners know only one tune and cannot be taught another. It is time for Labour to stop kidding itself that a bloc-free, peaceful, secure Europe can come about without the winding down of Nato.

TOO DANGEROUS TO KEEP AFLOAT

By | |
Leave a comment

Tribune leader, 17 May 1981

Last week’s admission by the Ministry of Defence that 50 workers at the nuclear submarine base at Faslane have received doses of radiation above official safety limits is extremely worrying.

The workers have been exposed to excessive radiation because cracks have appeared hi the cooling systems of the nuclear reactors hi Britain’s first-generation nuclear-powered submarines – among them the four Polaris boats that constitute Britain’s “independent nuclear deter­rent”.

These cracks need to be repaired if the submarines are to be kept hi service, and there are few workers willing and able to do the job. Those employed are being worked right up to radiation-exposure limits and some­times well beyond, at severe risk to themselves and to the health of their children and their children’s children.

The reason for this is simple. The Trident nuclear-missile submarine programme, which is supposed to replace Polaris, is running behind schedule because the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston is having severe difficulties with the warheads. If Britain is to maintain without a gap the independent nuclear deterrent, the lifespan of the Polaris boats must be extended until Trident is ready. But is this really worth the risk of ever-increasing exposure of repair workers to radiation?

Tribune, which has long considered British nuclear forces to have no role except that of deluding the British people into thinking that their country is still a major player on the world stage, believes that it is not. But in current international conditions one does not have to be a convinced unilateralist to take such a position.

SOUTH AFRICAN JUSTICE

The six-year prison sentence imposed on Winnie Mandela this week creates problems for the African National Congress, but it would be a mistake to exaggerate them. The credibility of the ANC will inevit­ably suffer some short-term damage among those, black and white, who believe Mrs Mandela to be guilty, and in the short term the beneficiary will be F W de Klerk’s white government, which has an interest in weakening the ANC to extract concessions in negotiations over the future of South Africa.

But Mr de Klerk knows that he needs ANC participa­tion hi the talks if his promises to end apartheid are to have any international credibility, and he knows that time is not on his side. The outcome of the trial will inevitably give added impetus to the already growing pressure on the ANC to withdraw from negotiations with the Government. With reason, black South Africans do not trust apartheid justice. Whatever the truth of the matter, many believe Mrs Mandela to be the innocent victim of a state frame-up, and take the verdict and sentence of proof that nothing has really changed hi the Government’s attitude. Mr de Klerk may have to make concessions to keep the ANC talking.

WHY NOT ADMIT LABOUR WAS RIGHT?

By | |
Leave a comment

Tribune leader, 26 April 1991

Michael Heseltine’s scheme for local govern­ment finance has pleased his party, which is hardly surprising. Just about anything that was not poll tax and did not involve an explicit admission that Labour was right all along would have done nicely for the desperate Tories. A tax that can be portrayed as a means of ensuring smaller average bills must seem little less than a godsend.
The problem, however, as Bryan Gould said immediate­ly after the announcement of the new “council tax” on Tuesday, is that, by refusing to admit that Labour was right all along – in other words, by refusing to go back to the rates – the Tories have opted for a scheme that is not only impossible to introduce for several years but is also patently unfair. The “banding” system for Mr Heseltine’s new tax and the reintroduction of 100 per cent rebates mark a belated admission that “ability to pay” has to be taken into account hi local taxation. But the way the “banding” has been set up means that the very richest will get off with disproportionately small bills.
Getting this message across in the last week of the local election campaign will be quite a challenge amid the clouds of sycophantic Tory hype in the newspapers. It is unlikely, however, that the Tories will reap too many benefits from Mr Heseltine’s announcement. His coup de theatre cannot obliterate the popular sense that the poll tax fiasco has revealed the Tories as incompetent and pig-headed; still less can it conceal the extent of the economic crisis in which the Tories have landed us. Labour is still set to do well on May 2.
Germany moves Left
The extraordinary result in the Rhineland-Palatinate Land elections at the weekend, which saw the Social Democrats take 45 per cent of the vote, pushing Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union into a poor second place with 39 per cent, is cause for rejoicing for the Left not just in Germany but throughout Europe.
If the SPD can win hi Rhineland-Palatinate, it can sweep Germany. Its victory ends 44 years of CDU hege­mony in one of Germany’s most prosperous states, just five months after Chancellor Kohl won a dramatic gener­al election victory on the back of his success in securing unification of the two Germanies.
Mr Kohl has now lost his majority in the Bundesrat, Germany’s upper house, and his grip on power, so recently seemingly unassail­able, suddenly looks tenuous. Put simply, the West Germans recognise that Mr Kohl lied to them about the costs of unification, while the SPD told the truth. Mr Kohl’s party is worn out ideologically, charmless and vulnerable.
These are early days, but the prospects for an SPD-dominated government hi Germany are now better than at any time since 1983. And that, given the central role of Germany in Europe, means that the prospects for a Europe dominated by social democracy are better than at any time in living memory.
The last thing Labour needs right now is to start working on the assumption that a future SPD general election victory will sort out all its problems: there was too much of that attitude in the late eighties, when Labour’s belief in the inevitability of SPD victory took the place that should have been occupied by serious thought about European security policy. Nevertheless, the Rhine­land-Palatinate election result gives real cause for re­newed hope. It is now up to the SPD to sustain it.

FEW SURPRISES IN LABOUR DOCUMENT

By | |
Leave a comment

Tribune, 19 April 1991

Paul Anderson takes a look at the policies that will be the basis for the party’s election manifesto

The main surprise in the f Labour policy document launched this week is just how few surprises it contains.

Labour’s Better Way for the 1990s, which will form the basis for the Labour election manifesto, was agreed by the party’s National Executive Committee on Monday and publicly unveiled at a press conference on Tuesday. Neil Kinnock told journalists that the document reaffirmed the approach of Looking to the Future, taking “further account of changes in the condition of our country and our world”. Indeed there is little in it that is not familiar from previous policy meats and speeches.

Nevertheless, there has been no clearer statement of. Labour’s current “social democratic austerity” programme, particularly on the economy. The process of drawing up Labour’s Better Way was closely supervised by Labour’s Treasury team to exclude ambitious spending commitments, and the final document, drafted by Patricia Hewitt, is notable for its pro-Europe stance and its extreme caution about the role of the state except as the provider of “a stable national economic framework” for private enterprise and as the rectifier of the failure of the market.”

Kinnock sets the tone in his preface, where he argues that “the old ideologies – command economy at one extreme, crude free market economics at the other – do not work”. The priority of a Labour government would be. “the modernisation of Britain”, he writes, “creating the conditions in which business can succeed – getting interest and inflation rates down to German and French levels and keeping them down, improving investment in science, research and development and new technologies as others do”.

The document itself emphatically rules out expansionary fiscal and monetary policies: “There will be no irresponsible dash for growth under Labour”. Instead, it stresses the role of government working “in partnership with industry to meet clearly defined goals – improving skills, crossing new technological frontiers, encouraging long-term investment and securing balanced economic growth in every region”.

The state should also ensure “that consumers are protected, monopolies restricted or dismantled and the environment protected”. Government “has a particular responsibility for securing long-term investment in education, transport and regional development which the market, left to itself, has failed to provide”.

NO ALTERNATIVE TO SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

By | |
Leave a comment
Tribune, 12 April 1991
The left must face up to the fact that the traditional socialist programme has had its day, writes Paul Anderson
What does it mean to be a socialist in Britain today? For the first 60 or 70 years of this century, it was reason­ably easy to answer that question. Socialism, for the overwhelming majority of its adherents, meant state ownership of the means of production, state planning of the economy and a state welfare system “from cradle to grave”.
There were, of course, other cur­rents which emphasised non-state forms of social ownership and plan­ning – the co-operative movement, the syndicalists of the second de­cade of the century and the guild socialists who took up many of their ideas. But they had limited influ­ence, particularly after the Bolshe­vik revolution had provided the world with an example of “nationalisation-and-planning” socialism that seemed to work economically, whatever its other faults. When socialists differed (and of course they disagreed about a lot) it was not usually over the core fea­tures of a socialist economy. The debate among socialists was about the means of achieving socialism and about what else socialism en­tailed apart from nationalisation and planning.
Most socialists were democrats and gradualists who believed the Labour Party was the vehicle for socialist change: it was the party of the working class and was at least nominally committed to socialism, even if its basic reason for existence was simply to pursue trade union interests in parliament and, from the thirties onwards, its economic theories owed more to John Maynard Keynes than to any social­ist economist. A sizeable minority, believing for a variety of reasons that Labour was incapable of introducing social­ism, opted for parties to its Left that were more thoroughly socialist and, more often than not, revolutionary in rhetoric if not in practice. It was not until the late fifties that the consensus about what con­stituted the core of socialism began to crack even a little.
The 1945-51 Labour govern­ments had introduced a wide range of measures that were in line with socialist thinking, notably nationa­lisation of key industries and a comprehensive welfare state. But, far from heralding the beginning of a new socialist age, the nationalised industries and the welfare state instead became key elements of a revitalised mixed economy capital­ism in which state planning played a major role. By the mid-fifties, revisionist in­tellectuals on the Labour right were arguing that Keynesianism allowed the state to control the economy without resort to further nationalisation. Progressive taxa­tion policy could take care of reduc­ing inequality, they said. Socialism was obsolete.
Most defenders of the socialist faith, particularly those in the Labour and Communist parties, countered that the revision­ists underestimated the task: nationalisation and planning had not been taken far enough, they argued, and Labour conference (though not the leadership) agreed. But a small number on the left began, cautiously at first, to raise questions about the model of nationalisation that the 1945-51 Labour government had adopted, in particular its lack of any concern for workers’ control and its alienat­ing bureaucracy.
For a while, however, the social­ist consensus remained largely in­tact, with demands for workers’ control (or at least participation) added to the end of the traditional programme. The 1964-70 Labour governments presided over econo­mic stagnation and increasing trade union wage militancy, and did little to shake the conviction of most socialists that the answer to Bri­tain’s problems was more nationa­lisation and planning. After Labour lost office, it swung sharply to the left. Labour’s Prog­ramme 1973, on which the party was returned to office in 1974, was a traditional socialist document, stat­ing Labour’s aim as being “to bring about a fundamental and irreversi­ble shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families”.
Of course, nothing of the sort happened. The 1974-79 Labour governments were plagued by eco­nomic crisis and a continuing fai­lure to cope with trade union wage militancy. The left, defeated in the 1975 referendum over membership of the Common Market, which it had denounced as a capitalist club, found itself increasingly marginal­ised. From 1976 onwards, after the International Monetary Fund step­ped in, Labour introduced a regime of economic austerity unpre­cedented in the post-war era.
Much of the left once again re­sponded by reasserting the old veri­ties of nationalisation and plan­ning, putting their faith in an alternative economic strategy, based on Labour’s Programme 1973, which had at its centre the idea of regaining national sovereignty over the economy by imposing strict controls on imports and foreign exchange and leaving the Common Market. But the ground was less and less fertile.
Popular disillusionment with the unresponsiveness and inefficiency of public sector bureaucracies had, by the end of the seventies, critical­ly undermined support for the tradi­tional socialist programme even among the working class – a fact seized upon eagerly by the Tories’ propagandists. When the Thatcher Governments of the eighties set about privatising nationalised industries and reduc­ing the role of the state as planner, they met little popular resistance.
It also became increasingly clear that the measures put forward in the alternative economic strategy would have been insufficient for the 1974-79 Labour Governments to have resisted the pressure from multinational capital to toe the austerity line. In France in the early eighties, Francois Mitter­rand’s government was rapidly forced to retreat after it tried a very similar approach. Although the alternative econo­mic strategy made it into Labour’s Programme 1982 (the basis for the 1983 election manifesto, the in­famous “longest suicide note in his­tory”), by the mid-eighties it was apparent that a medium-sized na­tion-state now had even less room for economic manoeuvre than the alternative economic strategy assumed. Capital was now multina­tional and mobile, and it could call many if not all of the shots in the formation of national economic poli­cy. If the international bankers and multinational corporations wanted austerity budgets, there was little that any national government could do but submit.
Meanwhile, the Soviet model for “nationalisation and planning” socialism was becoming increasingly economically unattractive (it had long before ceased to be politi­cally attractive to more than a handful of diehards.) In the early sixties, Nikita Khrushchev’s boast that the Soviet Union would soon overtake the West economically was taken seriously even by con­servative Western politicians; by the mid-eighties, it was obvious to anyone who was awake that the Soviet Union and its satellites faced a gigantic economic crisis rooted in the profound irrationality of the planning system. By the end of the eighties, the crisis had become ter­minal.
Unsurprisingly, in the face of all this, the remains of the consensus among self-styled socialists about the core of socialism slowly dis­appeared as the eighties wore on. The influence of the alternative economic strategy waned rapidly, and nothing has really taken its place. Labour fought the 1987 elec­tion on a manifesto promising refla­tion and economic intervention, but without any hint of the siege mea­sures it had offered in 1983. Today, like all its West European sister parties, it stands for social democratic austerity. The party re­mains committed to redistributive taxation, but it embraces Europe more enthusiastically than the Tories and emphasises that its fis­cal and monetary policies are as tight as anyone’s. It seems likely to limit it intervention to training, transport infrastructure, environ­mental controls and defence diversi­fication.
All of this would, of course, be an improvement on what we have now, but one cannot help but think that in today’s Labour Party, the revisionists of the fifties and sixties would come across as irres­ponsibly profligate economic med­dlers.
So is British socialism dead? The right would like to believe so, but all that has ended is the hegemony of one conception of socialism – state socialism in one country. The arguments for social ownership and control of production remain as powerful as ever. Capitalism still means chaos, waste, exploitation, inequality and alienation; private ownership still denies us the power to influence the decisions that fun­damentally affect our everyday lives. The global ecological crisis and world poverty both demand urgent radical attention to curb the ravages of capitalism.
The challenge facing socialists today is two-fold. On one level, it is essential to develop feasible, attrac­tive, empowering, non-bureaucratic models of social ownership of pro­duction as alternatives to tradition­al nationalisation. At very least, socialists should be pushing Labour to adopt policies nationally that, without frightening away capital, actively encourage municipal enter­prise, producer co-operatives and other forms of self-management.
But that is the easy bit. Beyond this, it is also essential to develop the means of controlling democrati­cally the activities of multinational capital throughout the globe. So far, the institutions to do this simply do not exist and, so far, socialists have given the issue very little thought beyond gesturing at the potential of a democratised EC with greater powers. One of Tribune‘s priorities in the coming months will be to attempt to kick-start this crucial debate.