The crushing of municipal socialism
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPaul LawsonTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
LOCAL GOVERNMENT was at the heart of the Tories' attacks on the 'nanny state'. When Thatcher came to power in 1979 local councils wielded considerable financial clout.
By definition, they were bastions of non-Tory local power in many areas. But what set the Tories on their crusade against local jobs and services was the growth of the local government left – 'municipal socialism'.
In the early '80s, the GLC under Ken Livingstone and other metropolitan councils like Sheffield, putting forward progressive policies aimed at helping working class communities, occupied centre stage.
Infuriated at the ability of local authorities to buck the Westminster monetarist directives, Thatcher devised two major proposals which would ditch the municipal socialists – rate capping to curb local financial power, and the abolition of the Metropolitan councils, which would conveniently scrap the GLC.
Abolition of the Metropolitan councils was difficult to resist. But rate capping could, potentially, be resisted by refusing to set rate-capped budget levels, and by mobilising workers and the local communities in defence of social needs.
The struggle over rate capping emerged simultaneously with the miners' strike in 1984-5. To be effective it required co-ordinated resistance of a swathe of Labour councils, prepared to go into illegality and face disqualification.
Brave words however did not bring forth such brave actions as council by council the determination of the local government Labour left was tested. A crunch point came with the GLC.
Livingstone's decision to fold up the rate capping struggle, against the resistance of John McDonell and others, gave the green light to dozens of Labour councils to shoulder arms. In the end, half way through 1985, the Camdens, Greenwichs and Islingtons had fallen by the wayside. But the struggle was valiantly fought by Liverpool, under Militant leadership and by Lambeth.
But in the end resistance could not be sustained by just two councils. After the imposition of abolition and rate capping the Tories stormed forward to hit local government with privatisation – 'compulsory competitive tendering'.
The local government unions, willingly in the case of NUPE and the GMB, issuing unmet threats of resistance by NALGO, largely conceded – at least at national level. As the tide of redundancies grew in the late 1980s, local branches were generally left to fight off cuts and redundancies piecemeal, suffering numerous defeats. And then came the poll tax.
The poll tax was a bridge too far for Thatcher. It ran into trouble because of its blatant injustice and because it hit too broad a section of the population, including Tory supporters. And it ran into trouble because a resistance campaign was constructed which did not rely on the support of national unions, elected authorities or Labour leaders.
Poll tax non-payment and the mass campaign it engendered escaped the control of the Labour and union bureaucracy; unusually, it could build mass support without winning inside the official labour movement structures. That was the key to its success. The bureaucracy could not derail it.
In March 1990 200,000 people marched against the tax. The calculated police assault on the demonstration failed to discredit opposition to the poll tax; rather it just highlighted and reinforced that opposition.
The poll tax is gone but Thatcher's local government legacy lives on. Underfunding is still leading to massive cuts and job losses. And municipal socialism is all but dead and buried, its partisans largely having ceased council activity or moved sharply to the right. Whoever wins the elections a massive fight to defend and rebuild local services will be needed.