11^th August 2016

Cllr Adrian Jones

A PERSONAL VIEW  Updated 11th August 2016

What is the PLP (majority faction’s) leadership challenge really about?  

Is their attempted coup d’ état truly only about the person of the most inclusively elected leader our Labour Party has ever had, as seems to be their claim? Is it truly their view that Jeremy Corbyn ‘lacks the leadership qualities’ to win an electoral beauty show?  

Can that be credible if, as they seem to imply, his fearfully chimeric aura can nevertheless seduce hundreds of thousands of new members into joining us?  And is it credible that an ever diminishing handful of ageing Trotskyists from the '60s and 80's are emerging  from their secret cells, taking hold of new, young, members - to "twist their arms" as strident plotters against the party Leader declare?

I don't see it happening.  

Most of the "Trotskyists" I encountered during the sixties, as a student in Wales, are long since retired or dead. I think it improbable that those who were active in Liverpool in the eighties are now, three decades later, about to emerge Gollum-like from misty caves to "twist innocent arms".  

Wouldn’t it be a miracle of near-Biblical proportions for this fearful "Corbyn-messiah", who the PLP plotters declare is naked of ‘leadership qualities’, to have succeeded so spectacularly where they failed - by dramatically reversing the decades of membership haemorrhage we experienced under the ‘New’ Labour era that Ed Miliband assured us is a closed chapter?

So how is the dramatic surge of new members to be explained?

As Nye Bevan famously counselled:

"Why gaze into a crystal ball when the pages of the book lie open before you?"  

Could it simply be a widespread awakening, among our natural supporters, that the gradual, almost imperceptible, drift from mainstream Labour’s core-values to Blue-Labour's neo-liberalism(1) following our defeat in the general election of 1992 is not where Labour should be?

Can it be that the armies of new members see in Corbyn the embodiment of mainstream Labour Party economic and social values?

Yesteryear's "Grandees" queue to offer wisdom.  After his leadership into our 1992 defeat (after leading us to our earlier defeat of 1987) was there perhaps some irony in Neil Kinnock’s recently voiced advice, following the attempted ‘coup d’état’ by the (majority wing) of the PLP – based on their assertion that the present leader has not the presentational qualities to lead Labour to victory?  But would Neil commend his own leadership style, in our 1987 and ‘92 defeats, as a template for success?

Those defeats left our country exposed to an economic and social stampede to full-blooded neo-liberalism under the Tory governments of Mrs Thatcher (whose popularity was so jingoistically buoyed by the Falklands war) and of John Major.

During the Thatcher-Major years the UK economy, and social fabric, faced the effects of uncontrolled outflow of investment capital, and rapid decline of UK heavy industry and consumer durables - leading to the absurd slogan of a ‘post-industrial economy’ accompanied by the extreme Tory notion of a 'managed decline' of the former industrial areas such as the North and the North West. Despite UK de-industrialisation, financial de-regulation and huge accumulations of over-borrowing (and therefore debt) the Western economies sailed on towards the inevitable rocks of 2008. The ‘orthodox’ economists of neo-liberalism, meanwhile lived in the hopeless dream of a never-ending economic upturn.

During the ‘New’ Labour years that followed Thatcherism our Party’s leadership drifted away from traditional values in the belief that:

‘… the old debates between Left and Right are no longer relevant in the new global economy of today’.

And a new generation of Labour MPs began to emerge (perhaps rather fewer than before from the blue-collar tradition of self-educated working men and women) and it is perhaps not to be wondered at that they were imbued with a new set of beliefs - beliefs that a New-Labour-New-Age was dawning after Margaret Thatcher’s disastrous years made Labour electable again.

But the wheels of New Labour's ‘new global economy of today’ were already falling off while neo-liberalism led the western world’s economies inexorably to the financial collapse of 2008.

‘New’ Labour seemed to believe the crash had come ‘like a thief in the night’, unseen and un-predictable. The world’s governments pleaded innocence of its inevitability. So did the IMF, the Bank of England, the UK Treasury mandarins, and many (by no means all) of our leading university academics.

Yet generations of mainstream Labour economists always understood that boom and slump is a permanent condition of unbridled market forces. Recession and slump is not the system ‘not working’ – it is how the system does work. US Professor Ravi Batra, Professor Miliband, and a host of mainstream Labour economists, had long expected another crash - warning that ‘… the Western economies have sailed to prosperity on a sea of debt’ and that the bubble would burst, just as in 1929.

With the decline of the prolonged post-war re-construction boom a further crash was predicted as long ago as the late ‘70s . (Batra had forseen the slump anticipating only that it would explode rather sooner than it did.  Even the extant lecture notes of mainstream academics in our own Wallasey Constituency Party still show the anticipation of a repeat of 1929.)

In short, generations of Labour Party thinkers and leaders always understood that the ‘commanding heights of the economy’ (Aneurin Bevan) could not be entrusted to the unbridled market forces of neo-liberalism. But our Party's leaders during the 'New' Labour period accepted the ‘new orthodoxy’ and for a while our eyes were closed.

So is this ‘hot contest’ between the PLP majority (which is a tiny fraction of the Party’s membership) and the vastly greater numbers of Labour Party constituency activists who keep them in Parliament, truly about the person of the elected leader?

Corbyn’s challengers seem, at least to the writer of these lines, unable to articulate original, robust, economic or social-policy alternatives to the anti-austerity policies on which Labour under Corbyn has consistently won by-elections, council seats, and significant Tory policy reversals in Parliament.  

So what else is the PLP objection about?  

The vague assertion that Corbyn ‘lacks leadership qualities’ is exquisitely unconvincing to the hundreds of thousands of new members who have flooded into the Labour Party since the unexpected defeat of 2015.

So what policy differences has the PLP to offer? Where are they?  Mr Smith has - since becoming a candidate - put together some 'policies' that seem to have largely been borrowed from Corbyn. 

Do they genuinely believe that they could defeat the Tories in an early general election on the basis of their ‘not-so-very-different’ neo-liberal policies of the past? Do they think they could retain the confidence of their constituencies, if the only really clear comment coming from them is that they want to evict the democratically, overwhelmingly, elected leader who has such a following preciselybecause he embodies the core economic and social-policy values of the Labour Movement?

Having diverted Labour so hopelessly from the fight against the most reactionary Tory government since Arthur Wellesley’s, (2) with their naïve ‘Bonapartist’ attempt at a coup d’ état, the PLP majority-faction seemed fortuitously to chance upon a kindred spirit with gold enough to try, through the law, to get what they could not through Labour Party democracy. But the legal challenge against Corbyn didn’t work either. How could it? Unless there was a leader there, to be challenged, there could be no challenge. But with the leader struck from the ballot paper the challenge would have been void. Anyway, the law wouldn’t have that further distraction.

The needless diversion of a further leadership ballot is (in my opinion) a self-inflicted indulgence painfully disloyal to the Party’s membership.

At a point when the Tories were in utter disarray our Party’s duty was surely to defend all of the nation’s people against our Tory opponents’ greed-driven dogma that wage depression and austerity for the neediest are legitimate tools to pay off a national debt precipitated by the world-wide financial crash of 2008.

Labour’s task is now to re-build, for all of the nation’s people, just as the mainstream Labour government of Attlee did after Hitler’s war and the mainstream Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan continued.

Mainstream Labour governments set about a massive house building programme, revolutionised health-care, equalities legislation, safety at work, employment rights, industrial investment, agriculture, transport, infrastructure, scientific development and, of course, education.

All of these great mainstream Labour achievements have been largely undermined, diluted, or dismantled (or have been passively atrophied through organisational incompetence and economic illiteracy) under the neo-liberal economic and social policies of successive Tory governments.

Those who peddle ludicrous slogans, claiming that hundreds of thousands of new members have been corralled into the Party by a few ‘Left extremists’ merely provide propaganda gifts to our opponents. They should study Labour history and read up, just a little, on the far, far, deeper understanding of political economy grasped by our founders.

Can it be that the political progeny of a (passing) co-habitation between Labour and Tory neo-liberalism are immovably captivated by what they thought ‘normal’ in their political infancy? And is that period of Labour’s flirtation with an alien ideology the genesis of their naïvely innocent grasp of our Party’s history, facilitating their erroneous re-labelling of ‘mainstream’ as ‘extreme’?

I have been a member of our Party for half of its entire existence.  I campaigned under Wilson and Callaghan and I see nothing in the economic or social-policy of our present leader that would have offended the Party under them, or under Attlee before them. 

Jeremy Corbyn has become the very embodiment of the mainstream Labour values that I have supported since I joined our Party during the 1959 general election. 

NOTES 

(1) Neo-liberalism relates to right-wing economic dogma in which austerity for the population in the interests of businesses, de-regulation of controls to allow businesses greater opportunities to exploit employees, unfettered “free-trade” with no governmental controls, cuts in government spending to bolster the private sector, and (in the more extreme neo-liberalism of the Tories) selling off state-owned industries, are believed to enhance growth. It is popular amongst wealthy share-holders as it makes little difference to them whether their shares are invested in UK industries or in low-wage economies abroad. It is sharply at odds with the Keynesian economics popular with (pre-Blair) past Labour governments (and, by the way, there was nothing “Left wing” about Keynes). It conflicts profoundly with the socialist economic principles enshrined in Clause Four of the Labour Party’s constitution – which was re-written under “New” Labour to remove its socialist content.

(2) Arthur Wellesley – AKA The Duke of Wellington – Tory Prime Minister who famously opposed the first great democratic reform act of 1832.

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THURSDAY 4th AUGUST 2016

I recall how bizarre media stories in a previous election proclaimed that a new "Left-extremist" Labour Party leader had been elected.  

No, not Jeremy Corbyn, this refers to the right-wing propaganda war against Harold Wilson in 1964!  This was the Tory-led clarion call to the public:

"IF THE BRITISH PUBLIC FALLS FOR THIS IT WILL BE STARK RAVING BONKERS!"

Read more about how mainstream Harold Wilson was accused of being extreme.  

De ja vu?

Just log onto the link below.

http://seacombelabour.org/because-seacombe-and-new-brighton-matters-/2015/12/04/

Does it resonate today?

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TUESDAY 2nd AUGUST 2016

 Meanwhile the Corbyn Supporters' rally in Liverpool on Monday filled St George's Plateau with between 5,000 and 7,000 people. 

Adrian's hat kept the rain off - others had hoods. But nothing dampened the crowd's enthusiasm.

 Huge support rally for Jeremy Corbyn's leadership

In a support rally that filled Liverpool's huge open space on 'St George's Plateau' many thousands of supporters (5,000 according to the lowest estimates, 7,000 according to others) demonstrated their will to maintain the democratically elected Leader of the Labour Party.  

A few days earlier Corbyn's only remaining rival, Smith, is said also to have had a rally of "mass" support: upwards of 100 - in a pub.

It is now well known that Jeremy Corbyn was elected in a massive re-affirmation of mainstream Labour values.  Unwilling to accept it (a majority element of) the Parliamentary Labour Party secured enough votes (from amongst themselves) to force a further leadership ballot less than a year after Jeremy was chosen as our leader, overwhelmingly, by the WHOLE Labour Party - as distinct from just the Labour MPs in Parliament.

The rest is history.  Just when the Parliamentary TORY Party is at its weakest, with Prime Minister Cameron resigning and the Tories at internal war with each other over the EU 'Brexit' result, Labour MPs should have been supporting the Party in the country by putting their loyalty behind Corbyn to build a general election "preparedness team" in readiness for the snap general election that new Tory Leader Theresa May might call this autumn.  

21st July 2016

 Is Theresa becoming just a bit "Left wing" for a Tory PM?

In her first public speech after becoming Tory Leader, Theresa May clearly signalled that tackling inequality, in its many forms, will be a key priority during her premiership. Has she been reading Ben Disraeli's thesis in his novels about "Two nations"?  Or has she grasped that Jeremy is more appealing to the electorate than her ill fated predecessors?

“Right now, if you’re born poor, you will die on average nine years earlier than others. If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white. If you’re a white, working-class boy, you’re less likely than anybody else to go to university.”  This is indeed heartening - that a leading Tory has said it out loud. But what plans have they to do anything about it?  

“If you’re at a state school, you’re less likely to reach the top professions than if you’re educated privately. If you’re a woman, you still earn less than a man. If you suffer from mental health problems, there’s too often not enough help to hand. If you’re young, you’ll find it harder than ever before to own your own home.”  Does this recognition mean there's going to be a new set of Tory policies to reverse austerity?

Meanwhile, will the hard-line "neo-liberal" element in the Parliamentary Tory Party (PTP) now orchestrate a leadership ballot (AKA Bonapartist coup d' etat) on this shift to what might be perceived as the "extreme left"?