THE LEFT in the unions and the Labour Party faces a very hard battle. The right wing leaders are in full scale retreat before the Tories, as evidenced by the TUC and the statements of Hattersley, Shore and company in the Labour Party.
But the left has still not organised itself in an effective way to defeat the right and has let the ight get away with political larceny'. BOB PENNINGTON ooks at the tasks Facing the left and argues for building › mass-based nitea front inside he unions and the abour Party.
In another article he explains how the left organised in the lays of the National LeftWing Movement, ind ALAN ow the right have Iways used the nethod of the itch hunt against my threat from he left.
deputy. less a formality.
previous left wing varying degrees of smashed hunts.
The first, powerful organised left and was made Minority unions, which grew out leaders sold out during the war. Communist the Labour Party Labour Party Bodies like the own structure.
members of the Labour Party at all.
BUIL its influence, Minority Movement, local Labour Parties.
tion, so that to conference.
Socialist Action 23 September 1983 TWO YEARS ago Tony Benn and Denis Healey were racing neck and neck in a photo-finish style race for the Deputy Leadership. Things seemed set fair for the left. It had stored up a number of important victories. At the special Wembley conference it had won the vote on the election of the leader and Mandatory геselection was in the bag. The party was committed to leaving the EEC and the two thirds vote needed for unilateralism was more or The signs pointed to the return THE LABOUR PARTY has had three influence in the working class. In each case they were up and defeated. political debate but by organisational measures agalls lem, namely witch gave all probably most wing in the Labour Party grew up between 1922 and 1926, in the run up to the General up of Labour Parties sympathetic to the ideas of the young Communist Party, and to. the Movement the of the shop stewards movement and the general The disgust at the way the right wing union The after some argu- proportion ment, decided to apply for affiliation to — not at that time such an unusual proposal, because the had a federal structure.
Independent Labour Party were affiliated but retained their Indeed, until after the 1914-18 war there were no individual The 1922 Edinburgh conference of the Labour Party rejected the Communist Party's request for affiliation.
that of the continued to grow because the unions were becoming more and more radical. Indeed two 'Communist Labour' MPs were returned in 1922 having been selected by their •So the Labour leaders set about changing the constituCommunists could not even be sent as delegates by their unions number of left wing policies. By the early summer of the next year events had taken a very different turn and the expectations and hopes of the Jett had taken something of a hammering. The Falklands factor had hit politics.
Maggie Thatcher was able to exploit the war in the Malvinas and ride to the top of the opinion polls on a wave of patriotism. Her exploitation of this issue was helped by the Labour leaders who endors ed Britain's war aims and in so doing handed things to her on a plate.
Unfortunately, with honourable exceptions, the MPs and union leaders either went along with Thatcher's imperialist aims or stayed Silent on sidelines.
As the recession ravaged Industry the TUC and the union leaders did almost nothing to organise resistance to The growing influence of the left really scared the Labour leaders who looked over their shoulders at the rul ing class whom they were terrified of offending. Philip Snowden, then an important leader in the Labour Party, to the right-wing Morning Post. which was designed to put the capitalist class at their ease.
Snowden said, 'No Labour governmell would ever be the government merely of the manual labouring classes.
present constitution Parliamentary answer to that fear. A considerable of the members belong to the middle classes. It contains lawyers, doctors, university professors, teachers, ministers of religion, consulting engineers, manufacturers, journalists, and even landed proprietors. A Labour government would certainly contain many men of this type.
Now the right claims that they want to 'return the Labour Party to its working class roots'. At the same time they are preparing to cut its links from the unions. In the 1920s the organisational attacks were designed to limit working class influence in the party. The common link between all witch hunts was the desire to prevent the organisation of minorities whose views threatened create a mass movement which could unscal mic power or mme one cra leadership of both unions and party. The right wing always responded to political arguments, which it could not defeat, with the suppression of ideas, orkansators dreamervenes iemployment._ take action they either got no support or were sold out by the bureaucracy. Last year's health dispute enjoyed the support of millions of people outside the NHS, and provided a real chance of defeating the government and turning British the tide against the Tories. But in a display of almost unbelievable cowardice the TUC managed to make sure the strike was lost. Their actions did not just lose a strike, they also placed in jeopardy the very future of the health service itself. Dispute few left ment, in the railworker's dispute over flexible rostering and in the NHS pay claim whilst the left MPs and union leaders were sympathetic, and in some the instances turned out on the picket lines, the sad fact is that as a group they did nothing to organise a mass alternative to the inaction and betrayals of the right wing.
The departure of the Independent Labour Party after MacDonald, Snowden and company in 1931, left a void inside the Labour ParThis was tilled be the League an left reformists and Marxists was formed on the eve of the 1932 party The collapse of the Labour govern ment the brought to bear on that government raised tor the tirst time in wide lef reformist circles a discussion about constituționalism and whether or not aims through normal methods.
In January 1937 at a special delegate the adopted a manifesto by 56 votes to 38 for the launching of a Unity Campaign WILl Te Communist ILP.
The campaign was launched at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 24 January and on 27 January the Socialist League was disaffiliated Labour Party. The right was determined that no left movement was going to build a base movement and so the Socialist League had to go.
When workers did In the struggles against unemployBevan with Harold Wilson to his left and Mikardo, the betrayals of - an organisation made up of • which tracted the number be realised parliamentary 1 ne Socialist League meetings attacking the wide labour Morecambe The pay-off came with clection. From the very be right wing sabotaged the can Ing a very grateful media t clear that they had no time for Labour's policies and presented age of a party that was divided and no idea where it was going. But whe really lay at the root of Labour's failure to win mass support for its polices of unilateralism, getting out of the EEC combatting unemployment and defending the welfare state was Labour's prior failure to build mass campaigns around these issues.
Even during the general election when the People's March for Jobs took place the union bureaucracy did everything in its power to make it *nonpolitical', and the Labour Party never put it right at the centre of its election On such unilateralism and unemployment H-is not enough to carry resolutions at con ference. These policies have to be takes into the population at large whict means building CND, putting all t Driberg and Barbara Castle -After the return of the Labour government in 1945 the activities of the left were restricter lo a very smallminority in the parliamentary party. It was not until 1951 when Labour made the first cut backs in the NHS that a new and broadly based left emerged.
was led by Nye Bevan and atsupport of a significant of Labour MPs and some leading lights in the unions.
The Bevanites soon began to have an impact in the Labour Party and got some influence in the unions. This led to a witch hunt around the accusation, Chronicle, that the Bevanites had set up a Party within a Bevanites hold regular to decide their hine quite independently of official party meetings... they have a travelling circus tours the crusading for the Bevanite slogans and the official leadership Their ready made propaganda organ is Tribune which circulates at special rates inside Constituency Labour Parties.' The right wing's fears were the same as in the 1920s, that the left was gaining in influence in the party ranks At the CONC CIC 1952 the Bevanites took six out of seven consti- ORGANISE
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of a Labour government which would be bound to implement a always the first recourse against a left wing