Labour Defeat Points to Stepup in Inner-Party Fight
International Viewpoint1980sPaul LawsonScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
Labour defeat points to stepup in inner-party fight
Paul LAWSON LONDON - On February 25, the Labour Party suffered one of its worst election defeats in post-war history at the by-election in the inner-London working class area of Bermondsey. A Labour stronghold since 1924, Bermondsey saw a massive 44 per cent swing to the Liberal-Social Democratic alliance, which beat Labour by 17,000 votes to 7,500.
The result has caused intense speculation that the resignation of Labour leader Michael Foot is now imminent. If Labour lose the forthcoming by-election in the northern industrial town Darlington, Foot's resignation is virtually assured.
The Bermondsey by-election had been precipitated by the resignation of the sitting Labour MP, right-winger Bob Mellish, in protest against the decision of the local party not to re-select him as their candidate, but instead to adopt left-winger Peter Tatchell.
The election was thus a deliberate attempt by Mellish and his local rightwing caucus to demonstrate the unpopularity of the new Labour left associated with Tony Benn. Mellish himself represents the worst type of old-style machine politician, controlling with his supporters the local council on "Tammany Hall' lines.
On the face of it Mellish's ploy seems to have worked brilliantly, even though the candidate which the Mellish caucus themselves put up was soundly defeated.
In fact the Bermondsey by-election was no simple test of the popularity of the Labour left. The Labour candidate Tatchell faced an overwhelming array of national political forces, that combined to defeat him. Foremost among them was the right wing of the Labour Party itself. Engineering the defeat of Tatchell was part and parcel of their campaign to remove Labour leader Michael Foot and replace him with right-wing deputy leader Denis Healey.
THE LABOUR RIGHT'S OFFENSIVE
Since 1980 the British Labour Party has been the site of the fiercest left-right battle of any mass workers party in Europe. This battle has already led to the split of a section of the right wing to form, in 1981, the Social Democratic Party, led by Roy Jenkins. The SDP has now formed an electoral bloc with the Liberals — the 'Alliance'. The experience of 11 years of right-wing Labour government since 1964 has created deep hostility to the Labour parliamentary leadership among Labour's grass-roots activists.
At the 1980 Labour conference this hostility - especially to the ritual dismissal by the leadership of lef-wing policies adopted by Labour conference - exploded into the open, through the adoption of a series of democratic reforms in party structures. These gave local activists more say in the selection of parliamentary candidates and the national leader.
The democratic reforms were followed up by a series of left-wing victories on policy questions, including a 35-hour week with no loss of pay, and in 1982 a two-thirds majority for unilateral nuclear disarmament. The swing to the left inside the party fuelled the campaign waged by left leader Tony Benn for the position of deputy leader in 1981 - a campaign which went deep into the unions, whose leaders are generally a bulwark of the Labour right.
In the event, Benn was not elected, thanks to the block votes of the trade union leaders and the votes of the MPs. But 80 per cent of the local party organisations voted for Benn. Benn's defeat -by just half of one per cent in the electoral college - was a crucial turning point. The swing to the left inside the party has since 1981 given way to a massive counter-offensive by the rightwing, spearheaded by the right-wing trade union bureaucracy and the Healey faction in parliament.
The counter-offensive took the form of the capture of Labour's National Executive Committee, previously dominated by the left, and the use of this power-base to witch hunt the left wing with red-baiting tactics. Adopting a 'salami-tactic' , the right wing first aimed their fire against the far-left Militant tendency in the party, which they allege is "Trotskyist'. (1) The day before the Bermondsey by-election the NEC expelled the five members of the editorial board of the newspaper Militant, including its founder Ted Grant, and foremost public spokesperspon Peter Taffe. The expulsion of the Militant editorial board is the prelude to a wider witch hunt of the whole 'Bennite' left.
The past year saw a sharp turnaround in the British political situation. Thatcher's war against Argentina over the Malvinas islands created a huge wave of national chauvinism, which Labour leader Micheal Foot did nothing to combat and indeed supported. Only a small minority of the Labour MPs, including Tony Benn, opposed the war. The result was a sharp shift of public support towards the Conservative Party, away from Labour and the SDP-Liberal Alliance. Despite 3.5 million unemployed and Britain's economic crisis, this shift has not been reversed.
### TORY DOMINANCE
If an election were held now it would result in a mammoth Tory victory, a fact which has thrown the Labour leadership into panic. In particular, Michael Foot is the most unpopular national leader of a political party since opinion polls began. Seeking to reconcile left and right his leadership is seen as transparently indecisive.
It was against this background of declining support for Labour that the Bermondsey by-election was called. Tatchell's candidacy had been an issue of intense controversy since Michael Foot denounced Tatchell in December 1981 and promised, in the British parliament, that he 'would never be a Labour candidate'
But in face of the intransigence of the Bermondsey local party, Foot eventually climbed down. However, for 15 months before the election the sensationalist bourgeois press has exposed Tatchell as 'Red Pete', conducting a smear campaign on the basis that he was gay and that before coming to Britain from Australia he had refused to fight in the Australian army in Vietnam. 'Queer' and 'draft dodger' were the least of the epithets thrown against him.
The start of the election campaign saw an extraordinary act of sabotage by the Labour bureaucracy. Tatchell's campaign leaflets were confiscated and his first press conference cancelled because the leaflets had been printed on the press of the Militant tendency. No one however objected to the contents of the leaflets! This only fuelled the speculation in the press that Tatchell was a supporter of Militant, which in fact he is very far 1. Militant is in fact a centrist political tendency originating in a split from the Fourth International in 1965. Its most characteristic feature is its extreme propagandism, notably its reduction of all political problems to the 'nationalisation of the 200 leading monopolies'. It is reckoned to have 2-3000 organised supporters.
from being. Tatchell's polities are in fact to the right of Tony Benn.
This act of sabotage was compounded by the expulsion of the Militant leaders on the day before the election - an action which reinforced the image of Labour as divided and hesitant.
Tatchell faced an unprecedented 15 opposition candidates including the candidate of the Mellish caucus ('Real Bermondsey Labour') and the SDP-Liberal alliance, the Conservatives, the fascist National Front, the Communist Party. All, with the exception of the CP, concentrated their fire on Tatchell.
At the beginning of the campaign, right-wing working class voters often supported 'Real Bermondsey Labour' candidate O'Grady. But an opinion poll published one week before the vote indicated that only the SDP-Liberal candidate had a chance of beating Tatchell. This provoked wide-spread tactical voting, with a large percentage of the traditional Conservative vote being mobilised behind the SDP-Liberals to 'keep Tatchell out'
Throughout the campaign the daily press conducted one of the most extraordinary campaigns of modern times. London's only evening paper The Standard carried front page attacks on Tatchell virtually every day, while Britain's notoriously sensational popular daily press (which is rivalled only by the more sordid publications of the Springer press in Germany) published millions of words of abuse. No candidate in post-war Britain has had to face such a campaign.
In the latter stages of the campaign, Michael Foot went out of his way to associate himself with Tatchell, the person he had denounced 15 months before in parliament. In this way he made the campaign an issue of the credibility of his leadership of the party. The result is a stinging rebuff.
Despite the strong mobilisation of Labour activists to help the campaign, Tatchell's tacties created major problems. In the face of the press hysteria, he chose to de-emphasise political issues, and waged a battle on the basis of class loyalty, stressing his loyalty to local working people and their immediate concerns. It is nonetheless true that even the most examplary campaign would have been defeated by the extraordinary mobilisation of the bourgeoisie against Tatchell.
The defeat is a bitter one for the Labour Party left wing. It appears to disprove the contention that Labour's left-wing policies have mass support.
Leading right-wing witch-hunter John Golding - nicknamed 'Labour's Jaruzelski' by the left — immediately declared that 'it is not the real Labour Party that has lost in Bermondsey'.
The efforts of the right wing will now be redoubled to remove Foot and replace him with Healey before the coming general election, almost certain to be in June or October of this year. For the
SDP-Liberal Alliance, the Bermondsey result is an important victory - the first seat they have won from Labour. But it is a freak result, one unlikely to be widely repeated in the very different conditions of a general election.
The replacement of Foot will however do nothing to solve the crisis of British Labourism. The Labour left includes tens of thousands of activists, appalled by their own party's betrayal of Tatchell and bitterly hostile to Healey.