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Socialist Review, July/August 1994

Notes of the Month

Labour leadership

All a blur

 

From Socialist Review, No. 177, July/August 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

Tony Blair, candidate of the media, the Tories and now even the CBI, looks unstoppable as the next Labour leader. He will be, as Campaign group MP Ken Livingstone put it recently, the most right wing Labour leader ever.

Blair is being sold as the man the Tories fear most and the candidate most likely to appeal to ‘southern voters’. Many Labour supporters may feel that the Tories’ lack of judgement over their own leader hardly equips them to decide who has the strongest leadership qualities for Labour, and that appealing to southern voters actually means choosing whoever the parliamentary journalists most favour.

But it is clear that Blair’s support is also coming from the grassroots. This is only partly because the new system of election – wrongly called one member one vote – is weighted massively towards the Labour MPs and MEPs who control in total a third of the votes in the electoral college. It is also because of a strongly held belief that most voters in the south are middle class who will only vote Labour if it is headed by Blair.

Their hopes are almost certainly misplaced. Blair looks, feels and is lightweight. He seems to be incapable of speaking in anything other than soundbites and there is no evidence that he can deal with any serious political problems. He has long been concerned to drag Labour away from its trade union roots. He has been careful to soft pedal on this issue in the current leadership fight, for fear that even right wingers would shy away from him.

But he has refused to state categorically that he will repeal the Tory anti-union laws if elected. And he uses every opportunity to make right wing statements about the need for more police and law and order.

Blair is hardly in a position to inspire either current or future Labour supporters with his pro-family views, middle class appearance and ‘Christian socialist’ philosophy.

Unlike in most previous election contests there is no obvious left wing candidate standing. Ken Livingstone wanted to stand for deputy but could not gain the necessary 34 nominations from fellow MPs. Therefore the choice – both for leader and deputy leader – for those who find Blair too right wing is between Margaret Beckett, the acting leader since John Smith’s death, and John Prescott.

Neither candidate can be regarded with much enthusiasm. Both have at various times put on a left face in order to win support, but both have also at times been motivated by opportunism. Beckett has some history of compromising in order to win positions, as when she took a junior minister’s place in the Callaghan government in 1977, replacing one who had resigned over spending cuts.

Prescott, on the other hand, was to the right of Beckett at last year’s Labour conference, when he delivered the present one-member one-vote system to John Smith against the opposition of the trade union leaders. It is clear that some of the leaders of the big trade unions still have not forgiven him.

Both candidates now stress their support for the unions, although neither has come out unequivocally in support of the rail signal workers’ strike for fear of alienating the ‘middle ground’.

Beckett’s nominations tend to be from the hard left Labour MPs, including the majority of the Campaign group. She also has the backing of the Transport and General Workers Union. She is portrayed in the press as the left wing candidate, with at least some of Blair’s supporters trying to stop her becoming deputy.

This is a campaign in which socialists can have little real enthusiasm for any candidate: none are genuinely left wing, all are capable of selling out. The main emphasis in the leadership campaign should be against Blair, rather than for either of the others. His election marks a further victory for the modernisers, and further attempts to weaken Labour’s union links.

In the campaign for deputy we should argue without enthusiasm for Beckett, as the candidate most identified with the left. But on current campaigning, none of them are talking in the kind of language which could win potential left wing supporters. Worse, if the sort of attitude shown round the rail strike or round John Major’s attack on beggars prevail, the Labour Party’s current lead in the elections could dissipate, since most workers will see little difference between Labour and the Tories.

Once again the Labour Party thinks it has learnt the lessons of the last election but one, but it still has no real idea how to fight the next one.


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