Labour's forward march restarted?
Socialist Outlook magazine1980sPhil HearseTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
PHIL HEARSE argues that close analysis of the shifts in voting and of Labour's one million increase reveal what future campaigning priorities should be. Labour must fight for the most oppressed both inside and outside parliament if the Tories are to be finally defeated.
FOR THOUSANDS of socialists attending Labour Party socials on election night, a profound disappointment and sense of gloom descended as soon as the results started to come in. Within half an hour of the first result, it was clear that Thatcher was headed for another runaway victory. Not that many had been expecting a Labour victory — none of the polls gave reason for that. But there did seem a possibility of a hung parliament, or at the very least a small overall Tory majority which would have led to an embattled and weakened new Tory government. In order to pick up the pieces after the severe electoral defeat and resume the fight, the left needs to analyse what happened and why.
The result is, of course, a major blow to the working class and the oppressed. The Tory victory, albeit with a slightly reduced majority, was the result which the ruling class had pulled out all the stops to achieve. Immediately there is a sense of demoralisation in the labour movement which will make it temporarily more difficult to generate working class resistance to the attacks of the Tory government and the employers. However, the arithmetic of seats lost and gained — Labour won an additional 20 seats — obscures the real meaning of the election results in terms of the shifts that have taken place.
The result represents, above all else, a class polarisation, which benefited both the Labour Party and the Tories at the expense of the SDP/Liberal Alliance. This class polarisation, however, has occured in an uneven way. While Labour piled up votes among the most oppressed sectors of the population and the most deprived regions, Thatcher was able to consolidate the Tory vote in an important sector of the working class, especially in the south east, south west and east Anglia.
The regional significance of the result is very marked. While Labour lost three seats in London (despite an overall increase of one per cent in its vote there), the Tories were wiped out in major cities like Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool and Leicester, and suffered a complete rebuff in Wales and especially, Scotland. Seventy four per cent of Labour MPs now come from constituencies north of the Midlands, as opposed to only 21 per cent of Tory MPs. This regional divide will itself have important political consequences, which we can discuss below.
As compared with 1983, Labour won an extra 1½ million votes, with its percentage of the vote going up from just over 27 per cent to around 31 per cent. The important question to answer however is why Thatcher and the Tories were able to limit Labour's advance, and to maintain their own vote in sectors of the working class. The answer to this is twofold. First, Thatcher was able to convince a section of employed workers in areas of relative affluence that security and future prosperity lay with the Conservatives. During the last two years, despite the rise in unemployment and the overall bleak economic outlook, some sections of the working class have maintained and even increased their living standards. Income tax reductions (from 33 per cent to 27 per cent since Thatcher came to power) have been popular among important groups of workers. The Tory policy of giving tax incentives to home owners secured Thatcher's support in this sector.
Overall, the Tories won the argument on the economy. They managed successfully to portray Labour as a party that would increase taxes and let inflation rip. Labour's own election campaign seemed to be arguing the case for increased taxes on employed workers to help the unemployed and boost the health service and other social services. Thus while Kinnock won the high moral ground of 'compassion' and generosity to 'less fortunate neighbours', which of course won support among many of the most oppressed, many employed workers were not convinced that this could be put into practice without a reduction in their own living standards. Second, as we discuss below, Labour's right-wing campaign failed to maximise its potential vote.
At first sight it seems paradoxical, and in some sections of the left even very unpopular, to say that in a time of acute capitalist crisis millions of workers voted Tory because they believed that their living standards would continue to increase under Thatcher. But the regional pattern of vote makes such a conclusion inescapable. If the working class votes for the Tories were explicable merely by ideological factors, and not by material ones as well, then the rebuff for the Tories in the areas of high unemployment, and its relative success in the more prosperous south would be inexplicable.
It is worth remembering in this context that something like 30 per cent of the working class have voted Tory throughout the twentieth century. Thatcher in this election was able to limit Labour's inroads by deepening divisions inside the working class — a process which the Labour campaign was unable to overcome.
Labour's election campaign was a culmination of the last four years in which Labour and TUC leaders have consistently opposed any working class challenge to Thatcherism. According to 'new realism', strikes and mass action are seen as a threat rather than the mainstay of resistance.
Margaret Thatcher had set out through conscious action between elections to consolidate a material base of support among the middle class and some employed workers; Labour's leaders had no comparable strategy to mobilise and organise the most oppressed.
THE ELECTION'S biggest losers are the Alliance, whose seats were reduced from 26 to 22, with the SDP reduced to a rump of only five seats in parliament. Only one of the original 'gang of four' — David Owen — is still in parliament. The main architect of the SDP split from Labour, Roy Jenkins, was soundly defeated in Glasgow Hillhead and will not stand for parliament again. For an alliance which sought to hold the balance of power in a hung parliament, which had equal television time with the other two main parties, and which proclaimed that 'the time has come', it is a massive defeat that puts in question their whole political future. Why did this defeat occur?
The Alliance were victims of the class polarisation. Before the election the ruling class cranked up an enormous reactionary offensive, and put its resources into securing a Conservative victory at any cost. Despite the Labour leadership's shift of policy to the right and its attempt to present itself as a 'respectable' alternative government, nonetheless no section of ruling class opinion favoured a Labour government. The reasons for this are obvious. Vital sections of the capitalist class, especially those involved in finance and banking, have been doing well under the Tories. Industrial productivity has increased from its low point in 1981-2, as the rate of exploitation of the working class has risen.
Labour is still tainted, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, by the recent experience of Bennism, by its anti-nuclear policy and by the overall impression of the strength of the Labour left. No serious bourgeois commentator will back a party which puts in question Britain's nuclear deterrent, a central part of British capitalism's foreign policy and world status. Most of all, in a period of economic and social instability, the ruling class wants a stable and reliable government — and that means Thatcher's Tories.
Such was the scale of the reactionary offensive, that a substantial part of the Alliance vote shifted to the Tories. On the other hand, Labour was able to present itself, successfully, as the only credible alternative government. In hundreds of seats there was a swing away from the Alliance either to the Tories or Labour, depending on the region and the previous character of the Alliance vote. This election disproved, however, the thesis that the Alliance vote was basically an 'anti-Tory' or 'left of centre' vote — the thesis employed by pro-coalitionist advocates of 'tactical voting'. On the contrary, in many places where the Alliance vote declined, it went disproportionately to the Tories. There are real grounds for doubting, therefore, that Labour might have won the election had there been a straight run-off with the Tories.
There will now be a wide debate about the future of the Alliance. In the Alliance itself, the debate is centering on whether the SDP and the Liberals should fuse into one party. For the ruling class, the debate is more fundamental. The huge media 'hype' and tactical support to the Alliance when it was formed in 1982 reflected its function for the ruling class: the Alliance was at the same time a mechanism for keeping Labour out of power and pressuring the Labour leadership to move to the right. The similarity of many Alliance policies to those in Labour's election manifesto has received much comment. Has the Alliance, or rather the SDP component, now fulfilled its purpose? After all, a fused party of the SDP/Liberals would be organisationally dominated by the Liberals, who are stronger both in parliament and on the ground. Would a fusion result simply in a return to the position of the Liberals as a small third party?
David Owen observed before the election that if Labour had ditched unilateralism and thoroughly purged the 'hard left', it would have won the election comfortably. This pressure is, of course, exactly the project of the ruling class in relation to the Labour Party. If this project were to be successful, then the possibility for the ruling class of ditching the Alliance and returning to a stable two-party system would be posed. That prospect remains a long way off. However, the political polarisation of the election dealt such a heavy blow to the Alliance that a destablisation of its strategy to become a major third party seems inevitable.
THE DISPARITY between the overall increase in the Labour vote of a million-plus, and the increase of only 20 parliamentary seats, reflects the fact that Labour piled up votes in the most deprived areas where it was already strong. Increased majorities in dozens of seats in the north did not yield extra seats, but the crushing of the Tories in northern industrial towns was remarkable; there are now no Tory MPs at all in Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Liverpool and Leicester. The results in Liverpool, where the anti-Militant crusade had been enormous, were striking. Militant MP Terry Fields substantially increased his majority in Broad Green. Pat Wall won Bradford North from the Tories, despite his association with Militant. Eric Heffer, defeated in last year's elections to the Labour NEC, had a nine per cent swing in his favour in Liverpool Walton, taking nearly 65 per cent of the vote.
In the mining areas the Labour majorities were substantially increased, and Alan Meale even won in Mansfield, where the Nottinghamshire-based UDM advised its members to vote against Labour. In the Midlands the results were more mixed, and the negative effects of a right-wing Labour council were certainly felt in Birmingham. But in Coventry there was a substantial swing to Labour, the biggest being in the constituency of Militant MP Dave Nellist.
All these results of course represent a working-class swing to Labour in areas of high unemployment and social deprivation. But perhaps the most remarkable results came in Scotland. Of 72 Scottish MPs, 50 are now Labour, and only 10 are Tories. In this election the SNP were not the beneficiaries of the anti-Tory tide, losing three seats to Labour and gaining two from the Tories. The result of this of course will be a widespread feeling in Scotland that the governmental question in Scotland is likely to come to the fore, and the campaign for a Scottish assembly, with powers to raise its own taxes and implement its own laws, will become a focus of opposition to the Tories.
In these areas at least the Labour campaign was able to mobilise an enormous rejection of Thatcherism. However, in some of the London inner-city constituencies, like Peckham and both Hackney constituencies, the voter turnout was only in the region of 55 per cent, as opposed to a very uniform national rate of around 75 per cent. This was repeated in inner-Birmingham constituencies. It shows that some of the poorest sections of the working class, especially black youth, were disaffected with the whole electoral process and saw the election as irrelevant to their interests. That itself is an indictment of weaknesses in Labour's campaign.
YOUTH BETWEEN the ages of 18 and 25 were the only age group in which Labour beat the Tories. Overall Labour won about 39 per cent of the youth vote as opposed to 36 per cent for the Tories. But here there is a sexual disparity. While more young men voted Tory than Labour (42 as opposed to 37 per cent), among young women under 25 the Labour lead was remarkable — 42 per cent for Labour as against only 31 per cent for the Tories. On a sex/age basis, young women were the only social category in which Labour beat the Tories. This Labour lead among the youth of course reflects both youth unemployment and the fact that the Tory proportion of the vote increases the higher you go up in the age range (with a slight decrease among pensioners). But it seems unlikely that the sexual disparity simply reflects the addition of the categories 'youth' and 'women'. It seems to reflect a specific radicalisation of young women around a wide range of social issues.
Labour's overall gain among women was 4.5 per cent, as opposed to only two per cent among men. But despite this gain, the Labour campaign fell down badly in attracting the maximum number of women's votes. In fact, the Alliance made the theme of women's rights more prominent in their campaign than did Labour. The Alliance had more women candidates than the Labour Party (although of course a lot fewer elected); made specific proposals to boost women's rights — for example they proposed that all public bodies should have 50 per cent women on them within ten years; and held one of their morning election press conferences around the theme of a better deal for women. The spectacle of David Owen proclaiming a better deal for women may have been less than credible to some of us, but it did expose the lack of campaigning on this issue by the Labour leadership — a failure which undoubtedly cost many votes.
The election campaign waged by the Labour leadership was undoubtedly the slickest and most 'professional' campaign waged by the Labour leadership for decades. Concentrating on TV presentation and the presidential-style build up of Kinnock as a credible leader, it owed its inspiration not to socialism but to American-style packaged politics. Radical it wasn't. The 'high' point of the celebrated party political broadcast which concentrated on Kinnock and his family, was the conference speech excommunicating Militant and the hard left.
It is not true to say, as did Ken Livingstone, that the Labour manifesto was the 'most radical since 1945'. It was less radical than that in 1983, or indeed in 1974 when Labour promised a 'fundamental shift in power and wealth to working people and their families'. It was a campaign that not only had no anti-capitalist content but also failed to convince many workers that Labour would increase living standards. In addition the campaign was undemocratic in the way it was controlled from the top, as Scargill's revelations about being kept off Labour platforms demonstrates.
The 'moderate' and right-wing character of the campaign disarmed Labour in the face of Tory attacks, and was a material factor in Labour's defeat. Defence is a good example. Kinnock adopted the strategy of saying as little as possible about it, while the Tories hammered the theme that Labour would 'leave Britain defenceless'. But where was the Labour attack on wasting £15 billion on the Trident missile system? Where was the attempt to mobilise popular outrage against spending billions each year on defending the sheep in the Malvinas? Where was the attempt to show that resources wasted on useless military hardware could be used on socially useful projects? Of course, there could be no such attempt, because Labour had promised to spend all money saved on nuclear weapons on conventional defence!
But despite the banishment of radicalism, or any reference to socialism or real anti-capitalist measures, there is no doubt that this campaign strengthened the authority of Kinnock as leader of the Labour Party, to such an extent that he is less vulnerable as leader of the Labour Party than Thatcher is as leader of the Tories — at least for the time being. No matter what criticisms the left makes of the campaign, the conclusion that many in the Labour movement will draw is that, within limits, it worked and was credible. After all the Labour vote went up; more seats were won. It is easy for the Labour leadership to present the outcome as the 'first step' in the defeat of the Tories, which will be rounded off with a resounding victory at the next election. This is going to lead to a very difficult situation for the left in the Labour Party.
The balance sheet that the right wing will draw is that the campaign was on the right lines, but that Labour was still too much hampered by the 'loony left' image, especially in London, and by a non-nuclear defence policy which cost several percentage points of the votes. Roy Hattersley has within days of the election already drawn this conclusion. It seems inevitable therefore that the outcome of the election — a Tory victory plus strengthened authority for Kinnock's leadership — will lead to new attempts to shift the policy of the party further to the right and to further marginalise, and even drive out, the 'hard left'.
A first stage of this will be a campaign to reverse the constitutional gains made inside the party in the early 1980s. Selection of parliamentary candidates by a postal ballot of all Labour Party members, rather than by local GCs, seems likely to be the first move. In the longer term, some alteration in the non-nuclear defence policy is likely, but this will take time. The witch hunt against the left will not, however, be slow in coming. The Kinnock leadership will use every bit of its authority to attack the left.
One paradox of the inner-party situation is however a new influx of left-wing Labour MPs. A small group of these, like Pat Wall, Alan Meale and Mildred Gordon, can truly be said to be of the hard left, while another much bigger group is soft left of one kind or another. The election of Ken Livingstone, and to a much lesser extent David Blunkett, creates a new situation inside the parliamentary Labour Party.
Livingstone will undoubtedly present himself as the new leader of the Labour left, as well as pushing forward his project for breaking down the divisions between the 'soft' and the 'hard' left. Of course greater unity on the Labour left is desirable in itself, but the question is whether it can be achieved on the basis of class struggle politics, without the hard left tamely tucking in behind a new accommodation to Kinnock.
THE LABOUR right will no doubt try to exploit the fact that the Labour vote only went up by one per cent in London, and that three London seats were lost. This result came after a ceaseless campaign of vilification against the London left, and a huge Alliance challenge. Where Labour lost seats, there were particular local factors. In Waltham Forest the disastrously high rate rise imposed by a Labour council certainly lost the seat. In Battersea and Fulham, the lost seats could well be due to social changes in these constituencies — a result of gentrification and an influx of 'yuppies'.
Despite the attacks on them, left-wing MPs in London were not defeated. In areas where there are left Labour councils, the Labour vote held up — with the exceptions of Waltham Forest and Ealing, Hilary Benn being hammered in Ealing North because of another giant rates increase. In Camden, there were swings to Labour in both the local constituences, as there were in several other left-wing boroughs.
The point remains, however, that London, although having areas of great prosperity, also has the highest number of unemployed people of any city in Europe. Labour should have done better and the fact that it didn't must be partly due to Labour's failure to counteract the savage media campaign against the 'loony left'.
The main responsibility for this lies with the Labour leadership, which not only failed to defend left wing councils against a barrage of press lies and distortions, but on numerous occasions joined in with their own reactionary attacks.