Labour party: Going down with or without Brown

However, even with the economic situation worsening this autumn, it now seems unlikely that there will be a challenge at least in the immediate future – despite a number of calls at the Labour Party conference. Why is this?

Firstly, because Labour MPs don’t think it will make a difference to their individual electoral fortunes, the crucial determining factor for the vast majority of them when deciding their political strategy. All the polling evidence suggests that a new leader would make no difference, whoever it was. In particular, voting intentions with Miliband as leader indicate no material difference in a predicted outcome – a crushing defeat for the Labour Party at the general election!

Secondly, any decision to adopt a new leader would be likely to reduce the time needed to reverse the government’s appalling ratings. That’s because, with a new leader, an earlier than wanted election would have to be called. It would be very difficult to resist the clamour for a vote, given that it would be Labour’s third leader in this parliament.

For the large majority of MPs the only show in town remains Brown allied to a probably forlorn hope that things can be turned round in the next two years. However, this situation could change if things get worse.

After the completion of the conference season, Labour will face another potential disaster, in a by-election to be held in Glenrothes, a seat that shares a border with Brown’s own constituency. Another defeat by the SNP could very quickly dissipate any improvement in fortunes Brown may have gained on the back of the Labour Party conference and the introduction of economic measures to offset the effects of the credit crunch. A further period of economic woes through the winter, followed by more bad election results in the Euro elections next spring could result in new attempts to replace Brown.

The manoeuvrings and machinations at the end of July help us to see who the potential contenders may be and what they represent. Chief amongst these is David Miliband. He has already made it clear that he has leadership ambitions and stands ready to act.

His politics are also clear. Unlike Blair and Brown, he has no religious conviction, but he is New Labour through and through. At the time of the 1997 election, he was head of the policy unit in Tony Blair’s office. Alistair Campbell nicknamed him “Brains” after the Thunderbirds character.

He was responsible for many of the neoliberal wheezes adopted by New Labour. He became a Labour MP in 2001 and quickly took on a series of ministerial posts. He became Minister for Schools, then Local Government, which elevated him into the cabinet. When Brown became leader he was made Foreign Secretary, partly to keep him out of the way. There he has dutifully carried out the previous agenda of warmongering and kowtowing to the US – most recently with his bellicose calls for sanctions against Russia over Georgia.

When Brown became leader there were some ultra-Blairites who wanted Miliband to stand then. He declined. He knew he couldn’t win at that stage.

However it’s also true that if he does make a move in the near future, he will face a number of dilemmas. In particular, outside the New Labour coterie of MPs he has little support in the party. In the unions he has no real support and has yet to build a serious base in the constituencies – but then that was the case for Blair as well.

Doubtless, in coming months, he will seek to address these problems and win more allies in the party. There have already been some judicious leaks indicating that he was critical of the Iraq war and that he told Blair to criticise Israel’s attack on Lebanon.

However there has never been any public disavowal of New Labour policies. Even before he became a minister, his voting record was immaculately loyal. However, as befits his nickname, he’s not stupid and will attempt to portray himself as centre/left rather than exclusively New Labour. We should expect to hear some union-friendly noises the nearer any leadership challenge gets.

That is in the future, but for now the trade union leaders are stuck with Brown. After all it was they who endorsed him for leader whilst peddling a false schema that Brown would mark a significant shift away from Blairism. Even they realise that no such shift has transpired and so they resort once again to windy rhetoric against New Labour policies that are hammering rank and file activists, whether in pay freezes, privatisations or refusal to tax windfall profits.

Their current mantra is that policies must change, not leaders. In August, for example, Tony Woodley, Joint General Secretary of Unite, told the Observer that “with the wealth gap widening, job insecurity rife . . . and soaring fuel, energy and food prices, the Labour government desperately needed to get back to its roots and get a grip.” Fine words – except, when pressed on what the unions should do if Brown fails to act, there is no reply.

Clearly there is an abdication of responsibility by the trade union leaders to deal with the question of who leads the Labour Party which cannot be separated from policy implementation. Brown has no intention to shift away from his neoliberal policies and so must be removed and replaced.

The TUC conference in Brighton only confirmed this stance. Despite passing militant resolutions on pay, energy and trade union rights, no trade union leader was prepared to declare for a fight to challenge Brown’s leadership. Indeed, Derek Simpson suggested the way forward was for Brown to adopt a more radical stance, like Obama in the US! The trade union leaders are, for all their talk, still supporting Brown in an attempt to head off a Miliband challenge in the future.

At one point, when it looked as though Miliband might launch a leadership challenge this autumn, MPs from the soft left Compass group, in conjunction with Woodley et al, started to entertain the possibility of an alternative, a so-called “dream ticket” of Alan Johnson/Jon Crudass. This idea proved stillborn when the impeccably New Labour Johnson failed to give it house room, but it does reveal the lengths to which many on the Labour “left” and within the trade union bureaucracy are prepared to go in avoiding a real challenge to New Labour: in this case by enlisting a right winger in the cabinet just because of his previous trade union roots. 

In the next period, if Brown fails to turn things round, we are likely to see more opportunist plotting and subterfuge in the government and Labour Party, such as the co-ordinated attempt by ex-Labour Party vice-chair Joan Ryan and others to force a contest on the eve of conference.

That’s why we welcome renewed attempts to put forward John McDonnell’s name as a principled, alternative leadership candidate. We support these moves, representing as they do, the basis for an anti-neoliberal campaign of opposition to New Labour, whether in the form of Gordon Brown, Miliband, Johnson or whoever.

McDonnell has said that the Brownites-Blairites infighting is “like watching the crew having a punch-up on the deck of the Titanic” when in reality they have not “a single policy difference between them”, and he is absolutely right.

Certainly at the heart of any such campaign for the leadership by McDonnell must be a commitment to challenge and replace the existing trade union leaders who have been largely responsible for preventing or sabotaging any widespread action against Labour’s reactionary policies since 1997.

Wed 03, December 2008 @ 17:21