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Tales of penthouse suites, designer clothes and freebie specs have embarrassed Starmer & Co –much to the delight of the Tory press. Health Secretary Wes Streeting says he’s “proud of people who want to contribute, not just their time and volunteering, but their money to our politics. It is a noble pursuit just like giving to charity and we don’t recognise that enough. The alternative is we ask taxpayers to fund our politics. I’d think they’d rather their taxes went into the NHS and our schools or stayed in their own pockets”. Whether Lord Alli, whose generosity stretched for funding £5,000 worth of clothes for Starmer’s wife, really is an altruistic philanthropist remains a matter of opinion but it certainly provided an amusing diversion from the dreary spectacle of Labour Party conference in Liverpool.
The Labour Party was founded by the trade unions to give the working class its own voice within Parliament but the Parliamentary Party leadership has been dominated by the middle class intelligentsia since the days of Ramsay McDonald. Labour has always been a mass party encompassing a very wide political spectrum though its agenda has historically bee largely set by right‑wing social-democratic factions. In the old days left factions were tolerated, though every now and again it would purge those of a Trotskyist persuasion if they strayed beyond the consensus of the senior Labour politicians and union leaders who led the movement. These days anyone who departs from the bourgeois norm can be hounded out.
While Labour Party conference is formally the supreme decision-making body of the party
its decisions have never been binding on the Labour leadership. Hugh Gaitskell, the right-winger who led Labour from 1955 to 1963, bitterly clashed with Conference over unilateral nuclear disarmament. His attempt to dump Clause IV of the Labour Party Constitution, which committed Labour to nationalisation of all the means of production, failed though it was eventually carried out during the Blair era.
Starmer talks about “Changed Labour”. He made his keynote speech promising that there is “light at the end of this tunnel” while making it clear that we can expect no change from him on austerity.
Once upon a time the grandees saw the need to allow the rank-and-file some space for genuine debate. Nowadays conference has largely been reduced to a leadership rally with set piece top-table speeches and stage-managed standing ovations from the delegates in the hall.
Sure delegates defied the Starmer leadership when they voted for a motion calling for the party to reverse winter fuel allowance cuts, impose a wealth tax and revise fiscal rules. But it hardly matters as nothing will come of it anyway.
Labour is meaningless unless it reflects the wishes of the millions of its affiliated union members. That’s real democracy. But Labour will never be truly democratic if it’s not controlled by its affiliates. That’s what it was set up for in the first place. And a Labour Party whose policies reflect those of a democratic union movement would become a powerful instrument for progressive reforms that would strengthen organised labour and benefit the working class.
Workers are taking industrial action across the public and private sectors, in response to 12 years of falling pay and an environment that has repeatedly asked workers to pay the price while dividends and executive pay have soared.
For months and months the Tory government has refused to open serious negotiations with the unions. While energy prices soar and inflation rises the Tories smear the unions with talk about “Reds” and “wreckers”. While the Tories bleat on about the “economy” they can still find plenty to give the Western puppet regime fight the Russians in Ukraine. And there’s still plenty of tax breaks to ensure that the ruling class can continued to live their lives of ease while millions of out-of-work or poorly paid workers turn to food banks to survive.
The bourgeois media have done their best to sway public opinion against the unions. But no-one believes them any more. Support for the workers remains high in the opinion polls and more importantly, on the street. The public want an end to the austerity regime and this is why Labour, if the opinion polls are to be believed, still has an astronomical 25 point lead over the Tories.
The Sunak government can be forced back to the negotiating table. The new anti-strike laws can be defeated. But only through mass pressure and mass protests. This week’s strike could be the spark that ignites a movement to end austerity once and for all.
rotten to the core
Why it took two weeks for Rishi Sunak to get rid of Nadhim Zahawi is a mystery in itself. The Tory press has been full of stories about to the now disgraced former Tory party Chairman’s breach of ministerial rules in an attempt to cover up the fact he was facing a probe into his tax affairs.
Now the Sunak camp is saying that this all goes back to the Johnson era and it has nothing to do with the new premier – which is at best slightly misleading as Sunak was, afterall, the most senior minister in Johnson’s Cabinet.
Though Zahawi seems surprised at the furore in the media that may have ended his political career for ever nothing should surprise us about his antics. Tory politicians, like most of them on both sides of the House, are just in it for themselves. One goes. Another takes his place.
As waves of strikes sweep through Britain the Tory government responds in the only way it knows how – repression. The Sunak government is moving anti-union legislation to curb industrial action in key public sectors to ensure that essential public services are maintained during industrial action.
Rishi Sunak likes to pose as a pragmatist and a liberal conservative, and he was certainly opposed to the sham, empty popularism of Boris Johnson and the crude neo-liberalism of Liz Truss. But while he can rely on their support he’s not a member of the Tory “One Nation” faction in parliament and he clearly doesn’t want to burn all his bridges with the Neanderthal element that is clamouring for more and more anti-union laws to ban industrial action in more and more areas of the public and private sector.
If this new legislation gets off the ground it could easily be used to crush all independent union action by allowing employers to sack strikers out of hand if they walk out and take unions to court for compensation if they do. Reducing unions to impotent staff associations that existed in some sections of the old, and now long gone, public sector or the “company unions” set up by employers specifically to keep independent unions out of their factories has always been the dream of some in the Tory camp. It is after-all what the “Victorian values” the Tories used to drone on and on about actually means.
But we’re not going back to the days when workers eked out a miserable existence working round the clock on pittance pay while kids crawled up chimneys for pennies to stave off starvation.
We get the usual weasel words from Labour’s leaders vowing to repeal any new anti-union legislation. We see the TUC called on its members to come together to agree on a collective response to the new threat to their existence. But what we need is total defiance – enough to kill this proposal stone dead.
On the unity of the movement
It is amusing to note that calls for a new Communist International often come from the most sectarian elements of the world movement. But world-wide contacts between communist parties can only strengthen the communist cause.
Nevertheless a new international can only succeed, firstly if it includes and has the agreement of the ruling parties of People's China, Cuba, Democratic Korea, Laos and Vietnam. It should be based on Marxism-Leninism and the principle of equality between big parties and small parties. It must recognise the principle of a collective secretariat which reflects the views of the co-operating parties and not that of one big party. And it must recognise that in countries where there is more than one communist party -- the case in most countries these days -- the differences between them are a matter for those parties alone to resolve.
The New Communist Party has supported many of the efforts taken since the collapse of the Soviet Union to encourage co-operation and the exchange of views between communist and workers parties throughout the world. Though the Brussels May Day festival and seminar programme organised by the Belgian Workers Party (PTB) has been dissolved the annual Solidnet conferences that began in 1998 are still going – but even that forum is now being undermined by sectarians who refuse to recognise the principled stand of the Russian, Donbas and Ukrainian communists and equates the prime mover – US-led imperialism – with the major victims; the Russians and the people of the Donbas.
Now, more than ever, is the time for a clear call from the world communist movement for an end to the fighting and a just and lasting peace in eastern Europe. This can only come with a neutral and de-Nazified Ukraine that recognises the rights of the Donbas republics and the Crimea to join the Russian Federation and equal rights for all the people of the regions of the Ukraine.
