By Frank Noakes
LONDON — As Prime Minister John Major celebrates two years in number 10 Downing Street, his government is beset by recurring crises. Not the least of these is an economy plunging towards depression, with the government doing little more than an impersonation of breathless spectator.
Major is saved only by virtue of there being no obvious replacement. Likewise the government. It is four years before the Tories have to face a demoralised British electorate.
North Sea oil wealth is drying up, and there will be little, if any, revenue from privatisation. British Coal is in confusion over the pit closure program. The proposed privatisation of British Rail has been delayed, and the nuclear power industry is unable to attract a buyer. The deepening recession has markedly reduced government revenue, forcing the government to borrow some 8% of GDP next year.
The Tories will inevitably seek to cut back further on public spending; already public sector employees, one in four of Britain's work force, are being forced to accept a pay ceiling of 1.5% for the next 12 months. The other option for the government is to raise taxes, which would be its biggest retreat from ideology.
The whole establishment received a shock when 250,000 people took to the streets in protest at the proposed coal mine closures. Further disquiet was expressed when the popularity of miners' union president Arthur Scargill exceeded that of John Major.
The government has no economic policy. The Tories won the election because people believed that they were the most competent economic managers — at least, that's what the press tell us. Nobody believes that today.
Yet few would confidently predict a Labour victory if an election were called tomorrow. Labour might be able to form a coalition government with the centrist Liberal Democrats, but not in its own right.
Why is Labour failing so miserably when everything should be going its way? The "quality" press, which backed Labour in April's general election, think Labour needs to move further to the right, drop the policy of universal social benefits and, in particular, sever its links with the union movement.
Financial Times columnist Joe Rogaly cautions, "If it is to win again, Labour must no longer be regarded as a party of the left".
In The Culture of Contentment, US liberal economist J.K. Galbraith concurs. The majority of people in the west are now contented, and appeals to ameliorate the lot of the poor will be rejected, he claims. Speaking here in November, Galbraith argued, "We are no longer in search of an alternative economic system. We are concerned with making more effective and more tolerant and equitable the economic system we have."
Left Labour MP Ken Livingstone sees it differently. The 1992 election "was a worse defeat than 1983 or 1987 ... Here we were at the tip of the worst recession since 1932, and we threw that election away. Electors didn't know what we stood for, nor did we. It was a mishmash of economic incompetence."
"On every key issue of international or domestic politics there is an effective coalition" between Tories and Labour, he says.
Livingstone made the point that more middle-class people than ever before, but fewer working-class people, voted Labour.
An annual survey, British Social Attitudes, highlights a marked shift away from free enterprise ideology and towards government intervention in the economy. Fewer than a third of Britons now believe that private enterprise is the optimum solution to economic problems.
This trend is confirmed by the Economist, which led in its November 14, 1992, issue with an article bemoaning the problems facing the philosophy of market economics: "Has market capitalism, the ideology that triumphed in the 1980s, had its day?"
But, it continues, and with much truth, "... the idea that the next few years will expunge what was learnt and achieved in the 1980s is wild exaggeration. The extent of the transformation wrought in the 1980s is best gauged by today's left-of-centre parties: all call for change, but none wants to return to the policies of the 1970s."
This is reflected in the Labour Party leadership's conference statement, Agenda for Change. This document shows clearly how much of the Thatcherite ideological baggage they now carry.
"The task for Labour is to identify itself with the individual — the consumer, the service user, the citizen — against entrenched interests." Things cannot go on as before, the glossy document trumpets, without specifying what needs to be changed or how.
Although the Labour leadership has failed to face up to its crisis, others on the left are beginning the task of finding a way forward.
Gregory Elliott, lecturer and writer on politics, says in the socialist newspaper: "For socialists, Labour's post-social democratic evolution is a mixed blessing in the absence of an alternative. But as regards that alternative, it is clear that any conceivable movement for socialism in Britain would need to be liberated from the chloroforming monopoly and fatal embrace of Her Majesty's Labour Party."
Freda Chapman, a member of the Green Party, wants a green-left realignment. "But the main problem facing green politics is not new; it is the absence of political analysis and strategy. There is a great degree of consensus about what the political issues are. There is no do about them.
"The task over the next five years will be to win green politics to radical socialism."
The Green Party has a membership of 8000 and is adopting a more radical profile. However, the socialist movement in Britain has yet to fully integrate the politics of the environment into its analysis.
It is a sign of the times that the left needs to work out a fairly sophisticated set of economic policies. Economics seemed less urgent in the '70s; the world economy was growing, seemingly without end. Today, with capitalism in prolonged crisis, economics is reasserting itself.
One person in the labour movement who has recognised this is Labour MP Ken Livingstone. He says Labour has to totally reassess its economic policies.
"No economy ... could finance the high military spending, foreign investment and bloated finance sector which Britain continues to try to maintain together with high domestic investment, modern manufacturing and high levels of government spending on infrastructure and social provision.
"Something will have to go.
"The government's plans are clear: to slash social spending, restrict public sector pay and use unemployment to hold down wages."
The Labour leaders are not addressing question of priorities, says Livingstone. As a result, they can't say how they will finance their program, except through threatening to tax the middle class or to deny them universal social benefits.
Livingstone proposes that defence spending needs to be cut to the west European average. Exchange controls are needed to direct investment into the domestic economy, and the government must intervene — including through public ownership — "to direct investment into infrastructure and the industrial base of the economy".
Speaking on a panel in Blackpool at the time of the 1992 Labour Party conference, left MP Tony Benn emphasised that the economic crisis was not caused by Chancellor Norman Lamont, but was a natural consequence of the capitalist system. Labour and union leaders accept capitalism as a principle and seek to manage it better, he said.
"If capitalism depended on the Tory MPs, it would be over by lunchtime tomorrow. Capitalism is based on enormous concentration of power and forces, of which we say nothing — and we have got to, if we're to be effective."
Local democracy, jobs for all, should be the left's catchcry, insists Benn. "It is at the local level that socialism began, and it's at the local level that we build it, concentrating on the practical questions: jobs, homes, schools, health and dignity for pensioners".
He believes that the Labour Party is still the way to go, but argues for a more decentralised party.
Perhaps the most exciting political movements in Britain today are the progressive nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales. Both the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales), are drawing mass support with their brand of left nationalism. Ultimately, if their campaigns are successful, they might change the face of British politics for the better.
In 1964, just prior to the general election, Benn wrote in his diary:
"I spent the day thinking about what to do if 1959 [defeat] is repeated. It will be necessary, I think, to launch a national programme of action, no individual membership, but the support of radical Liberals and de-Stalinised Communists who will bind themselves together for one election. It would destroy the terrible handicap of trade union leadership and the generally illiberal reputation of the Labour Party and provide something new and dynamic. Even to think such thoughts is treason, but we cannot go on as we are."
Though expressed in a purely electoralist framework, it is the general absence of this spirit today that prolongs the left's isolation and allows the right off the hook in Britain's continuing political crisis.