This week has got me thinking, probably with a great deal of pessimism than usual especially after reading the debate on Hansard regarding the Welfare Reform Bill.
And what has also made me think was listening a talk given a trade unionist about the Winter of Discontent. Parallels and similarities can be made with this current economic climate. The latter days of a dying Labour government crashing into crisis after crisis of its own making, monetarism of Callaghan/Healy that opened the way for Thatcher to ratcheting the ecomomic system up to neo-liberalism and Blair/Brown/Darling carrying on with that particular economic legacy.
And then ka-pow…!! Everything goes bust.
And that’s what amazes me is watching this fallout. You coulda predicted what would happen but the banks and NL all stand around watching catastrophe unraveling with this astonished, ‘Who knew…” reaction.
You base an economic system on debt, free market piracy and neo-liberalism then it is only matter for it to go bang…
And let up remember the dawn of a new age that was May 1997. The Tories had been kicked out and this anti-Tory vote brought about a Labour victory. This election represented the hatred for the Tories and a desperation for new times, the collective trauma imprinted on the psyche of the working class.
Labour won a massive majority, unprecedented, bigger than the Labour victories of the 60s/70s and even for 1945. And yet they quandered it. Majority after majority…. That’s what angers me, Blair and co. squandered those majorities too busy ratcheting up the neo-liberal dream and imperial dominance.
Indeed a dream, a fantasy of what Labour could have accomplished and achieved instead of the Frankenstein monster of New Labour created. Blair’s legacy could have been positive, remembered for real social democratic policies, reforms that brought about an equitable society not one that has a wider schism between rich and poor, a society riddled with ever more poverty, a society that attacks the poor by punitive measures of benefit sanctions and stigmatisation while NL wordships of the altar of corporate capitalism, watched the banks behave in orgiastic self-indulgence, unfettered market ecomomics. Then the chickens come home to roast and we will will pay for this, their crisis. Bailed out banks at the tune of billions, tax havens still operating and gagging anyone who happens to ask questions, the bail-out money lost in a void (just what did the banks use the billions for, Mr. Darling..?). Somehow I don’t see the banking system in the dock being accused of quandering money, negligence, corruption and stealing…. Neither do I see NL in the dock for aiding and abetting, or indeed war crimes.
This brings me onto the article written this week by Jon Cruddas. Unfortunately, he is right about one thing is that Britain faces a severe and deep economic crisis, bigger and nastier than probably other European countries. Yet Cruddas seeks a political solution in 1995 Tony Blair (and accusing the left of ‘fundamentalism’ is an utter meaningless attack!!).
Actually, this article exposes the rank contradictions and hypocrises of Cruddas and the think-tank, Compass. If Labour has lost the ‘language of generosity, kindness and community as it lost the tempo of the country’ then why is Cruddas consistently voting for a party that has lost its way…?? His voting record exposes a NL apparatchik desperately trying to please. If Cruddas is really concerned about the soul destroying alienation experienced by the working class then he would stop nailing his politics to the NL mast.
And his argument for another way, is not looking for a real equitable socialist opposition to the politics of NL. No, we get an early Tony Blair soundbite. This isn’t new (rather like when Kinnock/Hattersley invented ‘New Realism’… it wasn’t new nor realistic!) the rhetoric of NL was being created by the likes of Gould, Mandelson and Blair (and Cruddas having worked with Blair coming up not through the activist layer but through the TU bureaucracy). A quote which exposes spin and insincerity that really describes aptly the politics of Jon Cruddas.
And no, it is not a New Socialism. It is early NL. Lets be crystal clear about that.
Again, another reason I felt despondent this week was the reading of the Welfare Reform Bill. I believe NL have the won the arguments of welfare reform and the culture of dependency theory, which are now being played out as reality courtesy of the media and other misguided individuals of the liberal intelligentsia. But the Poll Tax (Community Charge Act) went through Parliament yet there was still resistence and a concerted campaign on the ground that helped to bring Thatcher down. Maybe there’s still hope but I don’t know. What NL has done with welfare reform will soften it up for the Tories who will inevitably say: “Well, it was a Labour government that brought in Workfare”….. And they can continue with the turbocharged attacks.
The talk I attended on the Winter of Discontent organised by my union, GMB, brought all this into focus. I remember the winter of 1979, I was 9 and my dad was on strike (funnily enough, he was a member of the GMB). I think there was a resistence, an energising fight-back against the Callaghan government. Does that exist now, or as working class militancy been shattered, fragmented and smashed by continual attacks by Tories/NL? The Left is small, fragmented and disorganised. What is similar is the reaction of the trade union bureaucracy, Len Murray then and Brendan Barber now. The sheer duplicity of Murray, Scanlon and Jones towards the strikes was breathtaking. Trade unionusts were comdemned for striking for a living wage and where also told to cross other workers picket lines. What is the TUC and the whole union bureaucracy doing over the economic crisis? Sod all….with the exception of demanding that JSA is increased..
And failure seems to be rewarded in this society as Unite trade union has given £2m to NL (I am against disaffiliation from Labour but what shocks me is that huge sums of money are handed over WITHOUT any conditions!!). But that’s the nature of the trade union bureaucracy, full of contradictions and tensions rather like the nature of the bourgeois workers’ party.
I will be still be engaged in activism and won’t give up fighting against this vicious ideology inherent in NL. Though I wish I could be more optimistic. You get used to the defeats as victories are thin on the ground.
I remember a former work colleague who was anti-trade union and she pontificating about how appalled she was the RMT was on strike. Her response was that the strikers ‘were bringing the government to its knees’….
I argued with her about the rights of collective action, solidarity and strikes, and finished by saying:
‘Christ, I wished the unions did bring the government to its knees”!…..
