A Bitter Harvest: Blairism’s Long Shadow and the Failed Coup
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
Saturday’s botched attempt to remove Deputy Leader Tom Watson - seen by many members as a right-wing snake-in-the-grass - throws the current disposition of factional politics within our organisation into sharp relief. It casts light onto the ongoing battle for the soul of the Labour Party, deeply enmeshed with the rearguard actions fought by the founts of established wisdom within society at large against a new generation of questioning, determined young people who remain unburdered by the defeats of the past decades.
The Labour Left - led by John Lansman and his increasingly tamed Momentum grassroots organisation - are reaping a bitter harvest borne of their refusal to push for fundamental democratic reforms such as the mandatory reselection of MPs, greater measures of accountability for senior figures, and putting Constituency Labour Parties at the heart of candidate selection. If these reforms had been implemented years ago, on the back of Corbyn’s crushing re-election as Party Leader, Labour activists could have used the time afforded by the May Government’s utter paralysis to get their house in order: prosecuting a ruthless internal civil war against the minority of Blairites who have constantly sought to undermine the leadership through any means both democratic and undemocratic, reclaiming the Party for its members from the petty bureaucrats and wonks installed by Kinnock and Blair’s reforms.
But this was not done. Lansman and the Left leadership were ultimately too distrustful of the enthusiastic mass of 300,000 fresh Labour converts attracted to Corbyn’s radical zeal. Thus, rather than being conducted in the open in democratic, honest, open forums, the belated push to clean house before the inevitable Fall of the House of Boris is being undertaken not only behind closed doors by committee, but also with spectacular ineptitude. The ground had clearly not been effectively prepared, and the coup attempt fell apart earlier today when Corbyn brokered a peace with the irreconcilable Blairites, convincing Lansman to withdraw a motion to the Party Congress in return for the promise of a ‘review’ of Watson’s position.
This is not all happening in isolation; the stakes of this bureaucratic game could not be higher. Beneath the turbulent surface currents of Brexit, deeper shifts amongst the ruling-class is evident: earlier in the month, several City bankers positively gushed to the Telegraph about how Corbyn’s Labour was an appealing ‘safe pair of hands’ amidst the storm, and the Financial Times’s ‘Capitalism: Time for a Reset’ brand launch has placed Labour’s socialistic economic policy front and centre. This intense interest is not because strident socialist politics have miraculously become de rigeur amongst the plutocratic elite, but precisely because the legacy of Blairism still haunts Labour in the form of Watson and the Labour Right. An ITV journalist reported that the material fact which convinced Corbyn to kill Lansman’s motion was the intervention of Gordon Brown, who threatened every prominant former Labour figure going to the press to brief against Corbyn - a fact which could not illustrate more clearly the determination of the old guard to wield power from beyond the grave. It is this influence - which Corbyn is apparently unwilling to mobilise the vast mass of Labour members to resist - which the banking aristocracy see as Labour’s saving grace: a strongly social-democratic government providing a Keynesian shot in the arm for ailing British capital, but with its pro-working-class urges constantly restrained and moderated by a vampire-clique of right-wingers able to tug at the Prime Minister’s pressure points.
Marx has it that ‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’ - rarely is that influence suffered to claw itself from the cold earth to trouble us in corporeal form. The ideas represented by Tom Watson et al. have not been electorally successful since the Spice Girls were cool. They resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Afghans and a million Iraqis in two illegal wars. They wrote the legacy of Thatcher’s anti-union laws into stone. They began the slow process of creeping privatisation in the NHS with the introduction of private finance initiatives. And they enthusiastically bought into the Cameronite lie that ConDem austerity - which has been linked to 120,000 deaths in the UK - was a just and rational response to the Financial Crisis of 2008. Unity with the Devil is not a deal of give-and-take between equals, but a Faustian pact of the lowest common denominator which damns our class to continued torment.
The Labour Right, it is clear, has its ways and means of seeking to dictate the political agenda: by spreading rumours to the sympathetic gutter press (just this morning Corbyn was forced to defend himself from anonymous sources who predict his imminent retirement), by indulging in internal bureaucratic manoeuvres (when, for example, a certain Tom Watson was forced to resign in disgrace in 2013 for his role in the Falkirk debacle), and by exercising Parliamentary shenanigans to humiliate the leadership. The idea that the weekend’s failed coup ‘reopened’ the civil war within the Party is an absursidity; the civil war has been ceaselessly waged by the Labour Right by these means since the moment Corbyn took office (cf. Chuka Umunna’s ‘The Resistance’ project) - what has changed is that some on the Left have finally woken up to the truth that it will continue to be waged whether the Left fights back or not. In response to this brute fact, we must develop our own means of controlling the political narrative: the Labour Left, along with our trade union comrades, must dive wholesale into developing our class’s capacity for protest, civil disobedience, strike action, occuption - backed up by alternative sources of citizen journalism, by public meetings and a rebuilt civic communitarianism.
The politics which will define the struggles of the coming decade hang upon a knife-edge: Brexit, the yawning chasm of social inequality and climate change will dominate the agenda, for certain - but will it be dictated by a counter-revolution led by dispossesed Blairites, or by a renewed grassroots democracy anchored by an engaged and activist working-class? The Left threw away one of its very few chances on Saturday - next time may be our last time for a generation, and we cannot miss.
