LONDON-The decisions of the British Labour Party conference, held in Blackpool in early October, marked a change in the political climate in Britain. A major left-wing advance there sent Labour's right wing and the Tory press into paroxysms of fury. As the mass-circulation Daily Mirror headlined: "Fury as Benn and the left take over." [Tony Benn is the most prominent leader of the left wing in the Labour Party. See accompanying interview.]
It is somewhat of an exaggeration to say that the left wing took over the party. But the conference decision requiring members of Parliament to be reselected by the party before each election, and the decision to widen the franchise for electing the leader of the party, do raise the possibility of the left program that was adopted being implemented by a future Labour government.
Tony Benn accurately summed up these victories as "the rank and file beginning to control the party as opposed to the parliamentary leadership controlling the rank and file."
Left Program Endorsed
Decisions of a far-ranging character were adopted. The conference voted:
• To campaign for a thirty-five hour workweek with no loss of pay, and to resist all plant closures.
• To nationalize important components of British industry, and to renationalize any state-owned firms sold off by the Tories to private enterprises.
• To withdraw completely from the European Economic Community (EEC), the Common Market.
• To abolish the House of Lords, the unelected upper chamber of the British Parliament.
• To demand a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament and a massive cut in military spending.
What added to the meaning of this radical program was the accompanying constitutional changes. Although the attempt to get the writing of the Labour election manifesto taken out of the hands of the party leader was defeated, and adoption of a new procedure for electing the party leader was blocked by the rightwing trade-union leaders, the best that the right could come up with was another conference in January. This will be the third party conference in nine months. The debate in the unions, which had already been widespread before the latest conference, will now explode.
The decisions taken at the Labour Party conference will be seen by militants as a signal to fight back against the twin scourges of massive unemployment and galloping inflation that have been foisted on the working class by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Tory government. Militant workers will now expect significant backing from the Labour left and will see a good chance of imposing their demands on a future Labour government. A fightback on a broad scale now emerges as a real possibility.
The working class was initially stunned by the Tory onslaught, especially by the dramatic increase in unemployment. The number of jobless surpassed 2 million in August, for the first time since the 1930s. This was an increase of more than 20 percent in three months.
Major sectors of the work force, as in cars and steel, have been unable to overcome the misleadership of the trade-union tops and have been unable to fight back effectively against job cutbacks, closures, and short working time. Wage increases for major sectors of the working class have been held to less than half the current rate of inflation.
But it is now clear that the unemployment weapon has failed to break the combativity of the working class. A new mood of resistance is developing. That is what this Labour Party conference expressed and will tend to reinforce.
The Trades Union Congress (TUC-the central labour federation) had met a month before the Labour Party conference and adopted a similar radical program. But on crucial questions it managed to look both ways. It took a position both for and against wage restraints under a future Labour government. This wait-and-see attitude reflected the uncertainty of the TUC bureaucracy as to whether Thatcher's 2 million unemployed had seriously weakened union organization and combativity in the plants.
The TUC leaders remember how former Labour Party Prime Minister James Callaghan lost office in 1979 as a result of massive trade-union action against his austerity program, and they were not about to back Callaghan and the Labour Party right wing if the combativity of the workers was intact. The fight over demosracy in the Labour Party reflected the refusal of the workers to tolerate another five years of austerity imposed by a Labour government.
The indecision of the trade-union tops, the tactical blunders of the Labour right (threatening to split the party, refusing to attend leadership meetings because of the dominance of the left, etc.), and the greater rank-and-file participation in the Labour Party conference as opposed to the TUC meeting, enabled the real feelings of the working class to be expressed.
Working-Class Victories
A number of developments have shown that the working class, when given a correct lead, is not only prepared to fight, but also can win.
The first indication of this has been the victory over the proposal of the bosses to sack 178 dockers-the first step in attacking thousands of additional jobs. The bosses wanted to tear up a 1972 agreement under which they had been able to cut several thousand jobs in return for a guarantee of permanent employment for the remaining work force.
But in face of this aggressive action by the bosses, a national docks delegate conference was convened. It decided upon allout national strike action, and forced the bosses to back down.
A less clear-cut but nonetheless important victory was also won by British Oxygen Company (BOC) workers. BOC has a near monopoly on supplying industrial gases to British industry. Faced with a threat of major redundancies at the Hackney plant in east London, which is known for its militancy, BOC workers put out a national strike call. Again the bosses retreated.
Two other struggles should be mentioned. The occupation by the work force of Gardner's, the second largest engineering plant in Manchester in the industrial Northwest of the country, against the redundancy threat to 590 workers has been decided upon. This could become a focus and inspiration to other factories faced with redundancies and closures.
In a second struggle, "laggers" (thermal insulaters) have been engaged in a fourteen-month strike at the Isle of Grain power station over a vicious wage-cutting attack by the bosses. The "laggers" have led a determined struggle and have spread their fight to other disputed sites through the use of flying pickets. These current actions are in defiance of the new Tory antiunion laws that outlaw flying and mass pickets. The laggers have now determined on a national strike if the dispute is not soon resolved.
Developing Crisis for Tories
This new mood inside the working class is causing big political problems for the Tory government. The Tories have deliberately made the economic crisis worse. The bosses have vigorously backed this policy, which has begun to hurt them, on the understanding of the need to rapidly create large-scale unemployment as a way of decisively breaking the organization of the workers in the plants.
The other element of the Tory strategy had not been successful either. This was the determination to make an example of the steelworkers. A crushing defeat of this carefully chosen target, they reasoned, would be ideal preparation for taking on more organized sections of the working class-notably the miners.
But a crushing victory was not achieved. Instead, this previously non-militant group of workers struck solidly for thirteen weeks and, although not achieving their full demands, settled for a 16 percent rise. The initial offer had been 2 percent.
Accordingly, the Tories have been forced to back off from any head-on confrontation with key sectors of the working class. Thus the massive 30 percent-plus wage claim of the miners is likely to be granted in large measure.
This has encouraged the miners to mobilize against any attempt to pursue the threat of pit closures. In South Wales, the area most effected, miners leaders have been touring the pits generating support for all-out strike action in the eventuality of any closures. Other groups of workers are watching this development closely.
This weakness of the Tory government is what Thatcher has been trying to overcome with the unemployment weapon. But this seems not to be working, and calls for a U-turn are being heard from all quarters.
A recent opinion poll conducted by the National Opinion Polls revealed that 51 percent of respondents thought that unemployment, not inflation, was the key issue facing Britain. But the government has sought to justify its policies by insisting on the need to fight inflation as the main priority.
A whopping 65 percent of those polled thought the Tories "were doing a bad job in tackling unemployment." Labour now holds an 11 percent lead over the Tories in the opinion polls-enough to give a landslide 150-seat majority to Labour in a general election.
Any serious fightback against the Tory attacks will throw the Thatcher government into complete crisis and open up the way to a major advance in the British class struggle. Such a possibility was reinforced by the Labour Party conference.
Emergence of Left-Wing Alternative
The significance of the Labour Party conference was heightened by the emergence of a left-wing alternative to Callaghan that coalesced around the figure of Tony Benn.
Benn was a member of the Callaghan cabinet in the last Labour government, which presided over a tripling of unemployment to 1.5 million and cuts of more than £8,000 million in welfare services. However, after leading the fight for constitutional change at the Labour Party conference in 1979, Benn has steadily distanced himself from the record and policies of the last government.
Prior to this year's conference, Benn publicly campaigned for the changes that the conference adopted, and he coupled them with a left program-the so-called Alternative Economic Strategy (AES). This program was adopted in its essentials this year by the TUC and then by the Labour Party Conference. It was Benn who moved the party's National Executive Committee proposals that were summed up at the beginning of this article.
Benn has actively sought support in the unions. His most enthusiastic supporter is Arthur Scargill, left-wing leader of the militant Yorkshire miners, recently elected to the TUC General Council, and almost certain to be the next national leader of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Scargill has accompanied Benn at a number of major rallies.
In addition, Benn has spent a year meeting with regional committees and district officials of the 1.2-million-strong Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers (AUEW). This has culminated in his participation in rallies with the leftwing presidential candidate in the AUEW, Bob Wright.
Benn, moreover, is the undisputed choice of the constituency parties-the local branches of the Labour Party that are based on individual membership and that are dominated by the left.
As a supporter of abortion rights for women, Benn played a prominent role in the successful campaign to defeat restrictive legislation earlier this year. At the Labour Party conference, Benn came out in favor of self-determination for the Irish people and a "policy of withdrawal" of British troops.
Benn's strategy appears to be to capture all the activists committed to extraparliamentary actions as part of his battle to win union backing for his leadership bid. Such a bid now becomes a serious option with the decision to extend the franchise beyond the narrow confines of the Parlia mentary Labour Party.
The direction in which Benn will be able to take this left wing depends on the evolution of the class struggle. Benn is by no means committed to mass action and is not prepared to contemplate anything other than parliamentary methods to bring down the Thatcher government. His whole perspective is based on a program that will be implemented by the next Labour government after the Tories have been allowed to run their natural course.
Indeed, at the very heart of the AES is the class-collaborationist proposal for solving unemployment through import controls. The whole thrust of his politics is to "save Britain from the Tory wreckers."
Such an approach is inimical to the independent mobilization of the working class.
But a fight alongside the Benn supporters is the best policy for socialists to adopt today. For the decisions of the Labour Party conference will help to blow Benn's strategy to smithereens.
The call for unilateral nuclear disarmament has been made in the context of a developing mass action campaign to prevent the basing of U.S. cruise missiles in Britain. A mass demonstration and lobby marched to the Labour Party conference as a way of influencing the deliberations of its National Executive Committee.
The issue of nuclear weapons is wracking the industrial unions and is becoming decisive in the division between left and right. Tens of thousands of demonstrators are expected to take to the streets against nuclear weapons on October 26.
Similarly, the vote of the Labour Party conference to campaign for a thirty-five-hour workweek and to resist all plant closures also comes in the context of real struggles on this issue.
Trade-union demonstrators will rally outside the Tory Party conference on October 10 demanding the "right to work." The construction section of the 2 million-strong Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) has called a one-hour strike at building sites to coincide with this protest.
A national demonstration against unemployment has been called by the Labour Party for the northern industrial city of Liverpool on November 29. Meanwhile, the TUC is calling a series of regional conferences to discuss action against unemployment. It is in this context that the Gardner occupation is taking place.
Mass action against the government's welfare cuts is also developing. A national conference has been called by the Labour-led London Borough of Lambeth for November 1. This is likely to attract several thousand delegates from the Labour and trade-union movement. The platform motion is for complete resistance to the Tory cuts, including through industrial action and civil disobedience.
The main leader of this movement, Lambeth Council leader Ted Knight, received a standing ovation for his call to action at the Labour Party conference. The delegates backed Knight against attempts by the Labour conference leadership to reject support for the Lambeth conference. When the delegates were given the opportunity to back mass action, the will was clearly there.
Finally, support for women's rights is growing in the unions and the Labour Party. Last year the TUC, in an unprecedented action, gave its support to the struggle against attempts to restrict the right of women to abortion. It sponsored a demonstration of 40,000 in London in October 1979. Now, the TUC has decided to call a conference for November to discuss the fight for affirmative action.
It is in this context of growing joint action against the Tories by the Labour Party and the trade unions that Benn has made his move. This opens tremendous opportunities for socialists who place the fight for such united action in the center of their activity. This is the best way to ensure that the Tory attacks-which will intensify in the next period-are answered, and to prevent continuous retreats from eventually taking their toll on the combativity of the working class.
October 9, 1980