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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 182 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 182, January 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Time to go is probably the sentiment which best sums up attitudes to this government. Its performance last month was the most abysmal yet. Kenneth Clarke lost the vote to raise VAT on fuel to the full 17.5 percent.
This is the most serious parliamentary defeat of the government’s whole 15 year term. Major cannot depend on a parliamentary majority in passing future controversial legislation. The humiliating Tory defeat in the Dudley by-election underlined what has been apparent for two years if this government stood in a general election it would be wiped out in many parts of the country.
The defeat over VAT on fuel was at the hands of a Labour amendment, but its real importance is to show how divided the Tories are. The eight right wingers who had the whip removed over the vote on Europe, then went on to vote against the government on VAT.
The splits show a party rotting from within. During the 1980s Margaret Thatcher was able to overcome many internal divisions by successfully attacking an external enemy. Different groups of workers found themselves on the retreat. Thatcher’s ability to do this and her assault on areas such as education and health appeased her party. Economic growth in the second half of her term created a degree of prosperity which allowed her to reign unchallenged for some years.
But it became harder to sustain the attacks or to achieve victory. Even before the poll tax, which finished her off, the ambulance workers’ dispute proved not to be the pushover that the Tories expected. Linked with attacks on the NHS, it symbolised all that people were coming too hate about Thatcherism. Economic recession further dented government popularity.
Today things could not be more different from the mid-1980s. The signal workers were not defeated, Post Office privatisation was abandoned without a fight and the Tories are too frightened to introduce further attacks. Government popularity is at record lows as it blunders into confrontation and is then often forced to retreat.
Europe remains a putrid sore for the Tories. They are split between those who see the future of British capitalism as further integration into a European market, however much this confirms Britain’s role as a junior partner to the French and Germans; and those who believe that British capitalism can follow a more independent path.
But there are also divisions over issues closer to home. Should the Thatcher revolution continue with further attacks on the NHS, education, the welfare state, or should the government just sit tight and hope for the best?
Right wingers – of the sort who look to Michael Portillo as their spiritual leader – are in no doubt. Many of them developed politically during the Thatcher years, and they feel their revolution has not been carried through. They do not understand that Thatcherism did not bring about a permanent change. Rather it marked a brief and shallow revival which amounted to nothing more than a blip in the long decline of British society.
The Tory right wingers’ jingoism and anti-Europeanism reflects their belief in the underlying strength and superiority of British capitalism. But their ridiculous posturing against the French and Germans also reflects how little Britain counts in the European pecking order. Their increasingly fervent support for the monarchy, the House of Lords and the union with Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales is simply harking hack to a glorious past that no longer exists.
But while the Thatcherites have been undermined by events, so have their opponents in the Tory Party. Britain’s international weakness, the problems of the economy and the residual strength and pro-welfare sentiments of the British working class are all providing obstacles to a clear Tory strategy. Those on the party’s other wing have no clearer way forward or coherent set of ideas. Both sides see no alternative to trying to make workers pay for the crisis – but neither is united, strong or coherent enough to push their policies through.
John Major is a true product of this situation. His weakness reveals tensions which cannot be resolved and he is pulled first one way then the other. His latest hint that he will allow a referendum on Europe, when he has opposed such a move for years, shows that he sees no other way of resolving the splits.
So they will continue – and this effectively minority government will face more and more crises. It will try to hang on for its full term because it knows an election now would be a disaster.
At the same time, the effect of the Tory crisis has not been to push Blair’s Labour Party to the left. Instead, Labour is even more cautious. As the Tories get weaker, so the pressure is on not to rock the boat for Labour and to be totally uncritical of Tony Blair As the election nears that pressure can grow. Even quite left wing workers are so desperate to see the Tories out that they are willing to accept Blair, warts and all. Membership of the Labour Party has risen 76,000 in the past year, to over 300,000.
But there is disquiet at Blair’s policies at the same time as support for Labour. People will have all sorts of illusions in what Blair can deliver. But the gap between workers’ aspirations after 15 years of Tory rule and Blair’s caution are already causing contradictions.
The question asked by everyone as we enter a new year is, can Major survive? That will depend not so much on the parliamentary arithmetic, but on what happens in the wider world. The building of workers’ struggles and self confidence will be crucial to determining the manner in which Major goes and the room to manoeuvre of the government that replaces him.
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