The Thatcher government scored a decisive victory over the labour movement in 1985. After the defeat of the miners the official leaderships of the trade unions and Labour Party have moved decisively to the right dragging the dispirited and crisis-torn traditional left in their wake. Yet despite this victory the Tory government faces a pre-election period in which its political fortunes threaten to decline and its electoral base grow narrower,
The British bourgeoisie looked to Thatcher to apply drastic surgery on their behalf. She was expected to confront and defeat the organised working class and push up the sagging profitability of British capitalism. The plan was to let the slump rip through the economy and by not supporting ailing companies to end up with a leaner and more productive economy. It would lead to a massive shedding of labour thus increasing the productivity (and profitability) of what remained. In addition the great mass of unemployed would act as a pressure on the employed workforce to accept the loss of workplace rights, elements of shopfloor control and craft demarcation. ‘
It was also envisaged that this would exert a powerful downward pressure on real wages. Throughout most of the economy this would be seen as the pressure of ‘market forces’: The government itself would refuse to spend money to create jobs because these would not be what Thatcherspeak calls ‘real jobs’.
There could be no question of state funded job creation. If that took place in profit-generating industry it would only result in yielding a profit below the average rate. If the spending was to take place in the non-market or social service sector it would constitute a further tax on profit. Either way was an anathema to a government whose fundamental task was and remains that of raising the rate and mass of profits.
In order to raise profits the subsidy-eating nationalised industries had to be cut down and if possible the ‘profitable remnants’ sold off – e.g. profitable parts of cars (British Leyland), steel, rail, coal: some £12.6bn of state assets. On the other hand highly profitable areas ‘trapped’ in the public sector such as telecommunications and its associated electronics and North Sea oil had to be ‘liberated’ under the guise of selling them to the ‘public’. Social Services, health and education were to be reduced to a sort of poor law with a more opulent (and profitable) private sector for the professional middle classes and skilled workers,
Local government was to be hit by the big claw-back too. Labour local authorities had avoided the worst cuts of the Labour government and the first years of Thatcher by raising the rates. Whilst this hit working class families in many cities it hit retail and manufacturing capital too. As a result spending ceilings and then rate capping were introduced to force local authorities to make drastic cuts in unprofitable expenditure.
The achievements of the Tories in the slump and subsequent recovery period have been extremely uneven and patchy. Between the first quarter of 1980 and the second quarter of 1981 Gross Domestic Product fell by 3.7%, while production contracted by a full 9%. Unemployment leapt by over one million to top the 2.5 million mark. In the slump phase of the cycle which reached its trough in mid-1981 profits slumped by 33% in real terms compared with their 1979 levels. The number of bankruptcies in 1982 was double the 1979 figure.
However the anticipated post-slump recovery did not arrive with the degree of vigour the Thatcherites promised and business circles had hoped for. Since the trough of the slump industrial production has only risen by 2.2% per year. In early 1986 manufacturing output is still 7% below 1979 levels. Only by mid-1985 had profits risen to their 1979 level in real terms, and then only because of the enormous contribution’ of North Sea Oil. Net employment stopped falling in the first Quarter of 1983, though unemployment continued to rise through the natural increase in the potential workforce.
But all of the increase in employment was in the service sector and a majority of this part-time or casual. Indeed the fall in the numbers employed in manufacturing has only been slowed down by the recovery, not halted. Today, there are less than five and a half million employed in manufacturing compared to 7.1 million in 1979. The drop in manufacturing as a share of GDP is a long term trend – 37% in 1955, 34% in 1965, 29% in 1975. The Economist estimates figures for 1985 will show a figure of 24%,
The great shake out of labour, the destruction of capital involved in widespread factory closures and bankruptcies did restore profit margins, output and exports during the period of recovery. British manufacturers’ exports rose at an annual rate of 10% during 1984 and the first half of 1985. Output per worker hour rose at a rate of 5% a year between 1981 and early 1985 after seven years in which it had never shown more than a 1% rise a year. But there are few signs of gloating optimism in the ranks of the British boss class. All of the signs suggest the recovery is past its peak and that the British economy during 1986, along with the major capitalist economies, is now heading towards a recessionary phase in the cycle.
Equally important, there is mounting alarm that despite long dole queues and tough anti-union laws the Thatcherite recovery has not resulted in the erosion in real wage levels vital to push up profit rates to a degree sufficient for British capitalism.
In Permanent Revolution No. 1 (Summer 1983) we wrote:
“If Thatcher is really to succeed in the task the bosses have set her she needs above all to bring about drastic cuts in real wage levels.”
The Economist in 1983 was calling for 40% cuts in young workers’ wages and for Reaganite “give back” wage cutting deals. In reality not only has such a wage cutting offensive not taken place yet, there have also been important factors working to delay that offensive.
Wage settlements for those in permanent employment have failed to mollify the Thatcherites. In 1983 earnings grew on average by 4%. At present they are growing at between 8.5% and 9.5%. The London Business School’s Centre for Economic Forecasting is glumly predicting an average 7.5% growth for 1986–88 unless present trends can be reversed. Whereas in 1984 one quarter of US workers negotiated contracts involving a wage freeze or actual ‘give backs’ the June 1985 OECD report observed of Britain that employers had “encountered strong real wage resistance, despite very high unemployment and comparatively stable inflation”.
The reason for full-time workers’ wages on average keeping pace with inflation is partly a direct consequence of Thatcher’s boom. Employers have been reluctant to risk disrupting production through confrontation at a time when they have been benefiting from a boom in the export of manufactured goods – 13.5% of the volume of British manufactured goods were exported in 1984. This itself was intensified by the fall of sterling against the dollar. Another vital factor was the miners’ strike itself. In order to isolate and defeat the NUM the bosses were forced to buy off sector after sector to keep them off the battlefield alongside the miners. Finally, there is the traditional rigidity in the labour market whereby skilled or semi-skilled workers are relatively immune from the pressures of the dole queue.
With recession looming the employers must now make a serious drive to reduce real wages in order to increase profits, hence, the “nowt for nowt” theme of the 1985 CBI conference which urged industrialists to strictly limit wage increases to comparable increases in productivity. Their victory over the miners will make it all the more vital for the capitalists to attempt to reap the fruits of their victory. Despite their gains under Thatcher, Britain’s capitalists are acutely aware that their labour costs are too high and labour productivity low compared with their rivals. Labour productivity is 50% higher in France and West Germany and 100% higher in the US and Japan. Labour costs in France, for example, are 20% lower on average than those of the British capitalists.
Curbs on the public sector
If the bosses must attempt to push forward their class interests more vigorously on the wages front so too do they have little room for complacency in their attempt to dramatically prune public spending. The social security budget has soared as the dole queues have lengthened. It has risen 30% since 1979 reaching £40 billion in 1985. Law and order and defence spending have increased by 27% and 25% respectively. Health spending has grown in real terms but not sufficient to keep pace with the increased needs of the growing number of the il! and the elderly.
The miners’ strike forced a £3 billion overshoot in the government’s 1984/85 public borrowing requirement. Local government spending remains stubbornly above 20% of all public expenditure. If the Tories are to cut public spending and pave the way for £1.5 billion worth of electioneering tax cuts they have little room for manoeuvre. They must attack public sector workers whose wages account for 70% of all public spending. Having failed to save desperately needed funds by abolishing the State Earnings- Related Pension Scheme (SERPS), reforming the rating system or abolishing student grants, they must target loca! government spending for a further round of attacks.
Hanging over the Tories is also the cloud of mounting economic uncertainty. Not only is a recession looming but leading sectors of industry feel increasingly squeezed by high interest rates and the consequent strong pound which benefits financial capital considerably. They object to the tendency for such high interest rates to stimulate the growth of short term speculative investment rather than investment in manufacturing industry. They see the “strong pound” as a major threat to their recent advances into export markets.
Crucially, 1985 was the peak year for Britain’s North Sea Oil revenue. Moreover, a new oil price war threatens in 1986. The collapse of oil prices would have far-reaching implications for the British economy. In the 1980s profits from North Sea Oil have propped up the sagging profits in the rest of the economy. Oil exports have compensated for the decline in manufacturing exports. Further deterioration therefore means a substantial fall in profits, a shortfall in government revenues (thus reducing the scope for tax cuts) and a crisis of confidence in sterling. Taken all together we can say that in 1986 no economic miracles will come to the aid of Thatcher’s government. Only political manoeuvres on her part, and political weaknesses on the part of our class can hope to save her.
The Labour Party’s pathetic hope is that disillusionment will lead part of industry’s captains to break with Thatcher and the City. This is a utopia. There is little evidence that important sections of the top industrialists will break with the Thatcherites in the immediate period ahead. As Lenin pointed out finance capital is a “fusion” of banking with industrial monopoly capitalism. Léading manufacturers act as banks or finance houses themselves with both British Petroleum (BP) and ICI recently creating formal banks competing openly on the money markets. —
Of course, the weakening of its domestic industrial base will cause the British bourgeoisie pangs of distress. But the fact is that a higher rate of profit can be earned abroad as the figures for the outflow of capital testify.
Bosses press ahead
The bosses will continue to press ahead with their attacks on the working class, building on their successes of the last few years. Central to their strategy has been, and will continue to be, the restructuring of the labour force. Unemployment has now trebled since 1979. The army of unemployed has over three million in its ranks even according to official figures, which are doctored to exclude school leavers and those on dead end YTS schemes.
In turn rising unemployment has been accompanied by major restructuring of patterns of employment. Part-time working has been growing rapidly. In 1980, 20% of those employed were part-time workers. On present trends that figure could reach 25% by 1990 with 2.5 million more full-time jobs disappearing. This has also meant an increase in the number of employed women workers – both relatively and absolutely. Between 1979 and 1983 there was a 1% drop in the number of women joining the workforce. That tendency has been reversed between 1983 and 1985. This is overwhelmingly accounted for by the rise in part-time working,
The rise in part-time working is only one element in the development of what the employers’ own ideologues brazenly like to call the bifurcation of the labour force between ‘core’ workers (skilled, permanently employed) and ‘peripheral’’ workers (unskilled, easily hired and fired, low-waged).
The bosses own press is making no secret of its intentions. The Financial Times reported on 21 August that:
“Companies are re-organising their workers in novel ways to increase the flexibility of their labour force, according to a report commissioned by the Employment Department to be published soon. The report … shows how companies are moving to what it calls a ‘dual labour market’ – a core of secure workers separated from a periphery of workers on temporary contracts, working part-time or employed by sub-contractors.”
Paul Roots, Ford’s Industrial Relations Director, has gone to print advocating:
“a split in the workforce between those workers who have marketable skills, predominantly in the more secure jobs with fringe benefits of pensions, sick-pay and all the rest of it, and the other half who are hewers of wood and drawers of water”.
Alongside the reserve army of unemployed labour the bourgeoisie is out to create a pool of expendable, disposable, low-paid and non-unionised de-skilled labour. This will serve to cut labour costs and dampen the wage demands of core workers whose fear of redundancy, ‘pricing themselves out of a job’ and thus falling into the pit of peripheral insecurity is supposed to make them see it the bosses way.
To this extent we are experiencing a deliberate and sustained drive to increase differentials and erode demarcation and craft distinctions outside the ranks of a privileged labour aristocratic few. The Tories are actively encouraging this process.:
The time required in employment before unfair dismissal claims can be made has been extended from one to two full-time years. We know all too well how toothless the procedures are. However it is now the case that 25% of full-time male workers and 33% of full-time women workers fall into the unprotected category. No part-time workers qualify.
Protection for low-paid workers has also been removed by the government’s attack on wages councils. Spurred on by the Institute of Directors the government has removed half a million young workers from the wages council system that covers the pay of 2.75 million low-paid workers. This has led to the relative decline of the real wages of low-paid workers and, particularly, young workers. It has led to an increase in the number of low-paid short-term contracted workers. The government hopes to speed up this process when the budget’s new National Insurance Agreements come into force. They give the incentives to bosses to employ at low rates of pay (under £90 per week) and replace full-time with part-time workers.
The employers have secured major achievements in these directions. As we have seen, since 1979 skilled manual workers have seen their real wages increase however marginally. In comparison the real income of the unemployed has fallen by 18% and the number of male manual workers falling into the official low-paid category has increased from 10% to 20%. 80% of women workers fall into the low-paid category in 1985 compared with 65% in 1979,
Young workers have borne the heaviest burden both of unemployment and the creation of a poverty line workforce. Under the Tories young male manual workers between 18 and 20 have suffered a 3% cut in real wages while their class sisters have seen a 2% cut. On the whole, young manual workers under the age of 18 have lost 6%. Official unemployment figures for 18–19-year-olds (despite the falsification systems) have stood steadily at or over 25% since 1982. For those aged between 20 and 24 it has stood consistently at around 20%. The bosses want to drive down the real living standards of those who have managed to secure employment and cut into the meagre provisions afforded to the young unemployed.
Labour movement response
It is in this context that it is necessary to coldly examine the response of the labour movement to the Thatcher offensive and the state of the organised working class in the aftermath of the miners’ defeat.
Under Thatcher, while the official leadership has retreated at every stage in the face of attacks, the organised workforce has mounted serious resistance. 1984 saw the largest number of working days lost to the bosses since 1979. This shows quite how absurd the SWP’s downturn theory has been over the past years. Doubtless the SWP would claim those figures were artificially inflated by the miners but they forget that in most major class struggle years, strike figures are heavily coloured by particular major strikes – the engineers accounted for 54% of 1979 strike days, steel workers accounted for 74% In 1980 and health workers 42% in 1982. The miners accounted for 82% of an exceptionally high register of stoppages. All the signs however now indicate that the defeat of the miners has served eventually to dampen the combativity of organised workers.
The scale of the miners’ defeat must be squarely faced up to. As a result of the defeat, the NCB have been able to tighten the managerial screw and trample on customary review and negotiation procedures. They are now set on a two-year offensive which, if successful, will slash the workforce in half and close entire coalfields. The scab UDM has considerably strengthened the hand of the NCB. There is widespread demoralisation amongst the crack troops of the British working class. No amount of official optimism from Arthur Scargill can obscure that fact.
The leadership forces in the NUM who recognise the reality of the defeat have drawn all the wrong lessons from that defeat. The miners lost because their strike ‘remained isolated and did not become the spearhead of a generalised class offensive to break Thatcher. Arthur Scargill remained wedded to that recipe for the miners’ strike as did the NUM executive itself. The treachery of the TUC only served to strengthen that course. The ‘soft left’ on the NUM executive see things differently. Aided and abetted by the CP and Kinnock they have set their sights on never repeating such militancy again. That ‘soft left’ now dominate the NUM’s executive. Unless they are stopped the scabs and the NCB will be appeased and ‘Scargillism’ (i.e. militancy) denigrated.
Scargill is now trapped by the logic of his own bureaucratic politics. Rounded on by his erstwhile allies in the Broad Left he cannot break out of the charmed bureaucratic circle and organise the militants to resist the retreat. The militants belief in Scargill fixing it for them is undermining their independent vigilance and action. In the NUM it is crucial that the militants are politically organised to resist both the NCB’s post-strike offensive and those in the leadership who would retreat before it.
The election of Des Dutfield against a Kinnockite for President of the South Wales area shows that there are still thousands of miners who know they must fight again. Unless they can reverse the course of the union the advanced guard of British workers will have been effectively silenced as a decisive political and industrial force. Nothing less is at stake in the coalfields today.
Bureaucrats are ascendant
Such was the fatal isolation of the miners’ strike that its defeat did not have the immediate effect of dampening down the class struggle. In the months following the miners’ strike there were major battles on the part of. Post Office workers, teachers, railworkers and shipbuilders. Yet by the end of 1985 the strike figures had fallen dramatically as the bosses notched up new victories in the Post Office and on the railways. The militant minority in the unions is becoming increasingly isolated as the TUC prepares to abandon its formal commitment to oppose the anti-union laws and is increasingly using the ballot weapon to isolate the militant activists,
There is no doubt that the trade union bureaucracy has capitalised to the full on the defeat of the miners and the resulting demoralisation in the rank and file of the trade unions.
In the face of massive job cuts and successive – rounds of anti-union legislation the trade union bureaucracy has consistently run scared on any confrontation with the law and the government. The Wembley Conference posturings of 1981 against the anti-union laws were exposed as the NGA, the NUM and the TGWU were all left to bear the savage burden of the new laws. Subsequent left talk against the brazen ‘New Realists’ like Graham has been shown up as a sham by the reality of official trade unionism in all key battles, in the face of the laws and ~ in direct relation with the employers themselves. 5
Every major union is now complying with ballots under the Tories’ anti-union laws. The bureaucracy has done so not only because it does not want a showdown with Thatcher but also, crucially because it itself has discovered the delights of the ballot as a means of tightening its grip on its own membership. It provides the officials with the perfect means of isolating the militants while giving betrayal a democratic mantle, Jimmy Knapp’s performance on the railways is one that the trade union bureaucracy in general would like to emulate – action; in response to blatant intimidation was held back pending a ballot which in due course gave him the desired mandate to climb down.
It is not simply a matter of the TUC chiefs complying – with the law and the bosses’ terms at a national governmental level. Such cringeing has gone hand in hand with an increasing epidemic of sweetheart deals between individual employers and unions. This has not been the sole prerogative of the EETPU, but it has set the pace. Since its 1984 no-strike deal with Hitachi the EETPU has made similar deals with Toshiba and Sanyo and is now set to make one-union non-strike deals in the print industry, thus excluding the traditional print unions from the plants.:
The other major unions are following suit. The AUEW joined the EETPU in accepting government funding for ballots, Both the TGWU and GMBATU competed with the EETPU over the Nissan deal. Both have signed an agreement with Nabisco that all action will be banned unless there has been a secret ballot of the entire workforce. The TGWU has balloted the Heinz workforce on the closed shop in compliance with the law. Despite its criticisms of others the TGWU has struck its own deals similar to the EETPU on the docks and ferries and has its own in-house understanding with the Welsh Development Agency to have first option on offering harmonious and strife-free industrial relations to new employers. Ken Gill’s TASS has been circulating high tech companies with invitations to joint seminars on “good in-company communication in industrial relations” that require “the effective management of change”. Faced with EETPU’s. deal with Shah, Dubbins of the NGA ‘has said that either they must strengthen their links with the TGWU or come to terms with the new realism of sweetheart unionism.
Vauxhall has succeeded in securing a deal that guarantees management the right to automatically replace any striking section of the workforce. At the traditionally – well organised Shell Carrington plant the employers have gained the union’s consent for the abolition of all existing demarcation and grading agreements, thus giving management virtually complete flexibility of labour even between white collar and manual tasks. While the officials clutch at such deals as their lifeline, shop steward organisation has been dramatically eroded amongst the traditionally organised sectors of the manual industrial working class.
The right shift at the top of the unions had its pace set by the right-wing bureaucrats in the EETPU and also in the AUEW who wanted to secure their base by closer collaboration with the employers and by avoiding conflict with the government. The EETPU is quite prepared to split with the TUC rather than alter its course of consolidating itself as a yellow ‘union and nurturing all projects to create similar unions. The AUEW is more reluctant to lose the protection of Bridlington that TUC membership affords it. Hence its mild criticisms of EETPU’s poaching in the print.
EETPU and the AUEW have been allowed to brazenly flout any and every decision of the TUC they happened to disagree with. They did so on union laws, they stabbed the miners in the back and chose to take Tory gold for their ballots. The ‘left’ and so-called ‘centre’ allowed them to do this. The TUC have reached a fudge on Tory cash that will allow the right to continue to take money and the rest of the bureaucracy time to either come round to their way of thinking or avert a showdown with them.
For class-struggle unions
It is the treachery of the ‘left’ leaders that has allowed them to do this. In the face of the hard nosed Tories it is they who have become the most pernicious purveyors of the view that nothing can be done except to accept management’s demands and thus “keep one’s powder dry” waiting for a Labour government to come to the rescue. The Broad Left machines that secured office for these ‘lefts’ have proved powerless to challenge or control them..
In the CPSA, an executive majority has been handed to Graham by the split in the Broad Left between the CP’s Broad Left ’84 and a distinct Militant-led Broad Left. In NUPE the Broad Left based leadership has no appetite for a further round of national struggle. It can conceive of no major defence or improvement of its membership’s conditions or standards outside the return of a Labour government. [In tow to Kinnock, their conference too contained attacks on Militant and an attempt to turn NUPE into a campaigning body for the election of a Labour government..
Ron Todd of the TGWU has been similarly creating ample room for himself to manoeuvre the TGWU into backing Kinnock’s demands in the run up to the election. As he put it recently “we do not want statutory or enforced wage restraint. But equally we do not want to be restrained in the subjects we discuss”.
The drive of the bureaucracy to tighten their grip on their members fits in with its desire to present its bureaucratic self as a force with the power to deliver a bargain should the bosses agree to do one with them.
Tuffin of the UCW is a good example here. He hijacked his own conference by presenting it with the fait accompli of mechanisation deals struck with management and secured reversal of union policy so as to allow him –to co-operate with the Post Office’s plans for a major shift towards the employment of part-time labour.
For Tuffin and co the threat posed by the AUEW and EETPU was not their scabby and treacherous actions. He showed that all too well at the 1985 UCW conference. What upset him and his like was that in breaking ranks the AUEW and EETPU were undermining the TUC’s collective credibility. As he put it himself:
“My worry over the AUEW matter is that we lose credibility. Then, when we make an agreement with a Labour government and people start breaking ranks, pleading special cases on pay, what can we do? If we say to Labour – that’s a deal – people will say: ‘Can we believe that? Can we deliver? They didn’t before’.”
In periods of acute capitalist instability and a hard-nosed bosses’ offensive the forces of class collaborationist trade unionism inevitably become more brazen just as the fake left leaders behave all the more feebly. It should come as no surprise therefore that the pressure for splits and scab unions should have become more acute in the trade union movement. On the road to working class power the TUC and its component unions will surely divide between forces set on class collaboration at any price and those prepared to wage the class struggle. Communists must not flinch from that split.
That is why we are for the expulsion of unions that betray or destroy the fighting unity of the working class, Most specifically at the present time it is necessary to fight for the EETPU and its associates to be driven out of the TUC. The TUC and Labour Party leaders fear such a clash like the plague. Kinnock dreads having to make an open choice between a Hammond/Lynk tame-cat outfit and a TUC that has Scargill’s NUM in its ranks.
Rally the militant minority
The period between now and the next general election will be a difficult one for the rank and file militants in the unions. Kinnock and the union chiefs will be keen to prevent ‘labour troubles’ disrupting Kinnock’s electoral strategy.
Nevertheless, struggles will erupt in resistance to the bosses attacks. But given the recent defeats it is likely that resistance to these attacks will be fragmented. In the public sector the privatisation offensive and attack on the CPSA have so far been difficult to resist in a generalised fashion. Divisions between the unions in the print industry coupled with the labour-aristocratic position of the Fleet Street workforce will both weaken the’ resistance and undermine the potential for securing the kind of support and sympathy the miners received from rank and file workers.
The bureaucracy will be able to tighten its grip so long as that fragmentation continues. Militants will have to pose sharp political alternatives to the bureaucracy and Kinnock and will be less and less likely to find that appeals to traditional trade union principles are sufficient to make the members fight when the leaders are ordering a retreat.
This isolation of the militants, the impact of the miners’ defeat and the pressure to shut up so as to get Kinnock to power is likely to sharpen divisions within the Broad Lefts. In general the Stalinists and Labour lefts will try to drag them even further to the right. This is likely to lead to a certain: strengthening of pockets of rank and file-ism. There are some signs of unofficial cross-union links being forged on Fleet Street as SOGAT and the NGA announced they were prepared to co-operate with the bosses. While the fight to build a national cross-union rank and file movement committed to stopping the retreat is vital it must be based on a sound political alternative to the traditional lefts.
The danger is always that such important flickers of minority organisation will lack any meaningful or distinct political alternative to the verbiage of traditional Broad Left or militant trade unionism, In this case they can become a recruiting ground for a refurbished left in the trade unions as the most able are whisked away to schools and courses for budding left bureaucrats. They could also serve as little more than communication lines between isolated militants, keeping them warm but not breaking their isolation where it really counts through direct political struggle against the union bureaucracy.
There are no signs of the government softening its approach to the unions. Employment Secretary Young’s offer to talk to the unions about jobs is a bid to improve the Tory’s public image and comes after Thatcher was suitably impressed by the TUC’s fawning at the close of the miners’ strike. Yet the TUC’s reward will simply be a Thatcherite package to hold down wage increases and encourage job flexibility in the interests of ‘boosting’ employment prospects.
The TUC can no more afford to accept Young and Thatcher’s terms than it can dare lead a fight against them. To accept them is to hand the Tories an important victory as the union tamers. To refuse them risks the TUC being branded as the force that resisted the flexible work practices in the interests of the skilled, selfish and employed few. Either way round the Tories have nothing to lose by offering talks.
The Tories have another important bargaining counter with the TUC chiefs who want to come in from the cold. That is the threat of a further round of anti-union legislation. The Tories have maintained a bi-annual stream of punitive legislation. At every stage ‘wets’ in their ranks have said enough was enough and gone down to defeat. Thatcher and her closest associates would doubtless want to crown their second government with laws making it necessary to opt in, rather tnan out, of the political tevy.
They want – in concert with the SDP – to replace workplace or union branch secret ballots (of the sort that produced Ron Todd and thumping majorities for the political levies) with the even more indirect, atomised and long drawn out process of postal balloting. They want to outlaw strikes in key service industries. Their earnest here was shown by their refusal to budge on GCHQ, We should presume the Tories still have their sights set on such gains for their class and that, at the very least, the threat of such legislation (at present those close to the government describe it as ‘not ruled out’) will ‘be used to cajole the TUC into collaboration. ¥
The situation in the Labour Party
Ever since the 1983 election the Labour Party has been moving sharply to the right. Important shibboleths of the left – outright opposition to the Common Market, commitments to unilateral disarmament and abandonment of “Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent”, have been trashed by a series of policy statements or declarations ‘ by Kinnock on what a Labour government would or would not implement. –
Via the TUC – Labour Party Liaison Committee (which represents the Shadow Cabinet, the NEC of the LP and the General Council of the TUC) the idea of a new incomes policy (at present named ‘The National Economic Agreement’) was cautiously put into place. Hattersley wants such a commitment firmed up before the next general election. The central idea is for corporate ‘discussion’ between the state, the employers and the unions to set ‘norms’ or targets for wages, prices and investment levels.
The Economist has cruelly but accurately referred to it as ‘Old Hat’. The idea of incomes policy is still not acceptable to the decisive sectors of the ruling class. Neither the CBI, the Institute of Directors nor obviously any major figures in the City have issued any calls for anything approaching it. They are opposed to any extra-economic or non-business pressures being brought to bear on their investment decisions. Nor are they willing to allow any interference in their pricing policies.
The Labour left’s influence on economic policy is at an all time low. Planning, state ownership, intervention _let alone nationalisation are all on the way out. Even the re-nationalisation that is envisaged is extremely partial. Labour’s promises with respect to unemployment are minimal. Hattersley has brazenly rejected ‘full employment’ as no longer possible, Labour’s promise in 1983 to cut the dole queue by two million over five years is now rubbished as wild utopianism.
When it comes to repeal of the Tories’ vicious anti-union laws Kinnock and Hattersley are equally evasive. Whilst they promise to repeal them they relate this to discussions with the union leaders on “the whole range of issues”. This is a veiled condition – agree to the NEA, agree to accept compulsory balloting perhaps, and we will replace the Tory anti-union laws. The only difference will be that the Tories’ laws embroil the bureaucracy whereas Labour’s will doubtless let them off the hook in return for a double strait-jacket on the militants.
The whole trajectory of the Kinnockites is to move Labour dramatically to the Right under cover of a smoke screen of ‘caring, sharing’ windbaggery. Yet despite all this Labour hovers around the 30-35% mark in the opinion polls. Labour is unlikely to benefit from the Tories’ unpopularity and decline if the labour movement is itself a cowed and spent force either in terms of trade union struggle or in terms of Labour local authorities putting up a fight.
To have a hope in hell of carrying out his policies Kinnock must crush the Left within the base of the party and then crush and discredit the left within the unions, The weakness and half-heartedness of the Bennite left has given him victory after victory. They failed to go all out to oust Callaghan, Healey and the right. The electoral cretinism and dyed-in-the-wool opportunism of the Bennites led them to cease their offensive and to surrender vital elements of the democracy and accountability necessary to stop the right repeating the record of Wilson and Callaghan.
As we said at the time of the 1979-81 democratic reforms, only the subordination of the PLP, leader, Shadow cabinet and MPs to the instructions of conference and the NEC would allow for significant accountability and control. And democracy – the rule of the majority of a conscious and informed membership – would only be possible if the block vote was taken from the hands of the bureaucrats into the rank and file of the unions’ affiliated members.
The left reformists failed to secure the most damaging of these reforms to the parliamentary mandarins – control by conference of the manifesto. The PLP can now spurn conference decisions with thinly disguised contempt. Kinnock has arrogated to himself more personal power than any previous Labour leader. In the coming two years he will use it with a vengeance.
He has launched the beginnings of a massive purge, at the Bournemouth Conference and with the enquiry into the Liverpool! District Party. Utilising Militant’s hopeless tactical fiasco – the sending out of notices of dismissal to the council’s employees – he has given the signal for re-launching the attack to oust them from the party. He is being aided by ex-left-wingers and by the numerous forces that Militant’s tactics have alienated.
Militant are further playing into the right’s hands by attempting to oppose the Kinnockites with a ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ defensive posture. They whine about unity and ruining Labour’s electoral chances. This small-change of reformism can always be outbid by Kinnock with his MPs and the media circus. If winning the next election and unity is the prime goal to which everything must be sacrificed, then LP members and TU affiliates will eventually conclude that even sacrificing 4,000 Militants and perhaps 2,000 ‘Bennites’ (genuine left-reformists, pseudo or crypto-Trotskyists, etc) is a smaller price to pay than causing another SDP-style split with the House of Commons prima-donnas.
A key element in any serious resistance to the right is the attitude to Kinnock’s leadership. Heffer, Benn, Scargill and Derek Hatton have all declared their deterMination to put him into Number 10. This is integrally linked to the belief that ‘we must have a Labour government at all costs’, or that ‘any Labour government would be better than the Tories’. Nearly all the centrists try to combine support for ongoing struggles (rate-capped councils or the miners) with electoral success, by claiming that the former is the best: way to the latter. This is unconvincing rubbish. We have to be clear, support for working class struggles and working class interests stand higher than electoral success. There must be no holding back to install an anti-working class Labour government.
As for Kinnock and Hattersley, they should not be the next PM and Chancellor of the Exchequer. They should have been challenged in 1984 for their scabbing on the miners and, certainly again in 1985. The failure of the ‘lefts’ to censure and condemn their record and stand against them opened them up to Kinnock’s offensive. To accept Kinnock as party leader is to fight with both hands tied behind their back.
It is now clear that the defeat of the NUM has enormously strengthened Kinnock and the Labour right in the party and the unions. Kinnock played a cowardly, treacherous but necessarily secondary role in the strike. Now he has taken the lead in attacking the NUM and trade union militancy in general. His attack stems from the very essence of reformism. It says “we: will rule within the framework of the capitalist state and its legality”, we will expect the law to work for us then and must therefore abide by it when it works against us now. It is an argument Benn and Scargill have no answer to. Neither have the militant municipal councils who fell to Thatcher one by one.
On what basis can resistance be mounted to the right’s attack? Firstly, there can be no separation between the fight for democratic rights and the fight against Kinnock’s political objectives. These objectives are to extinguish the flames of class struggle resistance to Thatcher and consolidate the Labour Party as a fire brigade of legalism and social-pacifism. He wants to prune from Labour’s programme all those demands that represent, however inadequately, pressing working class needs that clash sharply with what the bosses are ready and willing to concede. He hopes for electoral success on the basis of a wage restraining ‘incomes policy’. This can be presented to the working class as ‘fair shares’ and as helping the ‘low-paid’ whilst recommending itself to the bosses for what it always has been and always will be – a system for cutting real wages.
Last but not least, should a massive renewed economic crisis coincide with an indecisive election Kinnock wants to make sure that the PLP (in consultation with the TUC) has the room to manoeuvre to enter a National Government or an anti-Thatcher coalition. It would be suicidal for him to admit this openly or in advance of an election. He and the TUC must emphasise their unique position. – from which they can control the working class and assure the bosses a peaceful and orderly surrender. They must prove that no government excluding organised labour could carry out the austerity measures that a new deepening of the crisis of British capitalism will bring with it.
None of this stands in contradiction to holding out for an independent Labour government and denouncing coalitions. It is the old game of playing hard to get. But if Labour’s ‘realistic programme’ is only a whisker’s breadth from the Alliance’s then when the time for talking coalition starts, it will be relatively easy for Kinnock to persuade a_ special conference to ‘unite’ against Thatcher. The ground is being well prepared within the Labour Movement by the ‘Broad Democratic Alliance’ Euro-communists.
Two political tasks face revolutionaries within the Labour Party. One of them is to fight to form a united front of all those forces willing to fight the witch-hunts, the expulsions, all attacks on LP democracy; to support wholeheartedly and in practice every section of workers in struggle against the Tories, whether it be legal or illegal; to fight Kinnock’s programme of class collaboration and surrender of working class gains; and to struggle for uncompromising internationalism and anti-racism at home and abroad.
We earlier commented that the key to the Thatcher government’s future lay in its ability to politically manoeuvre. There are no signs that the economy will come to her rescue between now and the general election, The 1981 riots, the miners’ strike and the 1985 riots all testify to the massive well-spring of hatred for this government that exists amongst black and white youth and amongst white trade unionists. Faced with declining electoral fortunes Thatcher will increasingly resort to playing the law and order card and could well play the openly racist card if her situation becomes desperate.
In order to shore up her government and hold down those that it offers only the misery of the dole queue Thatcher has created a centralised national police force armed to the teeth to bust pickets and urban riots. While the 1981 riots produced a liberal response in the form of Scarman’s recommendations the liberal pretences of community policing and beefing up the race relations industry ran aground in the face of accumulating social misery and Thatcher’s anti-street crime orders to the police.
All of this makes the need to combat racism and to forge bonds of solidarity between organised workers and every manifestation of resistance by the black community all the more urgent. The alternative is yet another round of increased violence and intimidation against the most oppressed and impoverished victims of Thatcher’s Britain. In her dealings with the Ulster Loyalists Thatcher is 1 also seeking to provide another triumph for the Iron – Lady, one that adds Ian Paisley’s head to that of General; Galtieri and Arthur Scargill. The aim of the Anglo-Irish – accord was to help isolate the electorally buoyant Sinn Fein, pave the way for a new round of repression against them and prop up the most reliable allies in the thirty-two-county state. Predictably the Official Unionists and ‘ Orange Order could be guaranteed to respond with marches and street confrontations with the RUC, It remains unlikely, this will reach the proportions of the Ulster Workers’ Strike. Yet Thatcher hopes to claim the victor’s laurels and thus pep up her declining electoral fortunes.: There are mounting signs that Thatcher’s forays into international diplomacy are attracting unfavourable responses from within the ranks of the ruling class, She has little support for her refusal to talk to Alfonsin. She has even been criticised by The Economist for her intransigence on South African sanctions. Her expulsion of Soviet ‘spies’ was a shoot-out that Gorbachev clearly won. The British bourgeoisie looks set to do badly out of contracts to modernise the technological base of Soviet industry.
Thatcher’s political blunders are increasingly distancing sections of her traditionally closest allies from her political record. Heseltine’s departure and the whole Westland affair underlined that reality most clearly. In its turn the elder statesmen of the ruling class through the Lords, the Church and the CBI are expressing deep fears about the economic and social disorder that Thatcher’s policies have produced.
The ruling class is having to seriously consider the options should ‘their’ Tory Party fall to secure a majority at the next elections. Every serious indication points to the fact that if the Tories’ base continues to crumble it will be the Alliance Parties that will present the only means for the bourgeoisie avoiding a Labour government.
The Alliance can now rival the Tories and Labour. This means that serious changes have occurred in the class alignment of voting during the period of economic and social crises that opened in the early 1970s. Not only will this not end it will be intensified in the late 1980s and consequently we can expect great political changes. It is wrong to imagine that the ruling class can regulate its own political representation, just as it wishes. It has to steer a course through its own internal differences and contradictions as a class and direct other classes and sections of classes into blocking behind its chosen political instrument,
The Tories know their electoral situation is a serious one. The Alliance are now pressing the Tories hard in the salaried middle class and also pressuring the Labour Party where the latter has little chance or where scab unions are strong as in Nottinghamshire.
The weakness of the Alliance remains the fact that its policies are amorphous and fluctuating; a bit of Toryism wherever it is anti-union (Owen and Steel were fierce urgers-on of Thatcher against the miners); a bit of right-wing Labourism when it comes to mixing welfarism with an incomes policy. An Alliance government would aim at a return to late Heath style Toryism. In reality the crisis will drive it against the working class with renewed vigour because of the social forces it had mobilised against the working class. The strong man of the Alliance is David Owen, who drew the compliments of Walter Goldsmith (head of the Institute of Directors), “Mrs Thatcher risks being outflanked on the right” and recommended that both him and Tebbit could ably be “the next Conservative prime minister”, So far to the right is he that Roy Jenkins is now in opposition to him from the left.
The Alliance’s electoral strategy necessitates them keeping mum about which party they would form an alliance with if they succeed in ‘hanging’ Parliament. Owen would obviously prefer the Tories plus or minus Thatcher. The Liberal’s would probably prefer a chastened Labour Party with a house trained TUC thrown in for good measure, since incomes policy is a central strategy for them,
Over the next two years – if it runs that far – Thatcher’s government will be driven to harsher, more crude and repressive measures to maintain itself against a population which increasingly despises it. The depth of the coming recession will be a critical factor in relation both to splits and divisions within the ruling class and the tempo of the class struggle.
At the moment the weight of the miners’ defeat is being felt to the full and we are still only at the plateau of the boom. The descent into slump is normally a sparking point for serious resistance struggles. These will be discouraged by the defeat of the miners but encouraged by the government’s unpopularity and difficulties. If the fightback does not take place the new slump will throw hundreds of thousands or even millions more on the dole.
The only certainty is that a new revolutionary vanguard party must be built by assembling the best learners of the lessons of defeat, those who are not demoralised by setbacks and difficulties. The class struggle is not a relentless and inevitable, peaceful “forward march of labour” but a series of bloody battles, defeats and re-groupments until the forces are assembled for a decisive victory. Communists have little in common with the would-be peaceful world of the trade union secretary or the parliamentarian, We have to be able to chart our course through the storms of a society in convulsions. The lack of a Labour government or even the splitting of time-honoured trade unions cannot be cause for us to despair.
Neither can the convulsive crisis that has hit the ‘far left’ give us any cause for despondency. The splits in the CPGB, the WRP, and in the British Section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI) are all indications that the accelerated period of crisis and conflict is destroying the credibility of the degenerate and bankrupt traditions of the left. In their own way they too show that we are moving relentlessly from a period of social peace towards one of social revolution, And here we are optimists about our own class: we believe it can learn the lessons and forge the revolutionary party in time. We believe it will win.
First published in Permanent Revolution, No. 3 (Spring 1986).
