Distant Voices (15 page)

Loyal party members have been suspended for actions which, at the time they took place, were not against the rules, and for misdemeanours for which they have already been punished. Disproportionate weight may be given to the submissions of those who support disciplinary action while others, even if they represent a large majority, are ignored or suppressed.

Ray Apps is a 62-year-old, working-class man. He is well known in Brighton for his support for what used to be known as ‘basic Labour Party principles'. This has earned him the respect even of his opponents. He joined the party in 1945 when Labour was ‘building Jerusalem', and has since held numerous senior positions in the local party, including
chairperson, election organiser and conference delegate. As a dedicated socialist, he sees no contradiction in his support for Militant and in maintaining an honourable tradition of dissent that refuses to recant in the face of established authority. As one who joined the party forty-seven years ago, he can hardly be accused of ‘entryism'.

Apps's trial took place on September 12 at the Old Ship Inn in Brighton. The defendant appeared to many who attended as the embodiment of the struggle of ordinary people during the past half-century. Speaking quietly, with some of the self-deprecation for which he is known, he said he had ‘always fought for reconciliation within the party'. Later he reflected, ‘It comes hard after a lifetime of work helping to build the Labour Party to have to face this. I can't deny there's a feeling of hurt and injustice. With other members of my generation, I worked for the party from the time we had only seven councillors, right through until Labour took control. It seems ironic that I am not wanted now.'

At Apps's trial one of his friends wept; and both ‘prosecutor' and ‘judges' looked decidedly uncomfortable. ‘But Ray,' said one of them, ‘we never suggested you had not worked hard for the party.' He was expelled.

The treatment of Ray Apps is part of a witchhunt that began in earnest in 1990, when Brighton Labour Party called for the reinstatement of six councillors who had been suspended from the Labour Group. In line with local party policy, the councillors had refused to support the use of the courts against poll tax non-payers. ‘We undertook', wrote Jean Calder to John Smith, ‘to stand alongside the 30,000 Brighton residents who could not afford to pay the tax. Though we expected punishment for breaking the Labour Group whip, we were unprepared for the draconian response of the party leadership. We were suspended indefinitely, and when the local party protested, it too was suspended for “investigation”. Small wonder that, with dissident councillors barred from standing for re-election, the Labour vote reduced
by 6,000 in 1991 and by a further 4,000 in 1992 with a loss of eight Labour seats.'

Of the twenty members suspended in Brighton, only six belong to Militant; and this is not untypical throughout the country. Jean Calder is a Christian Socialist. In her letter to John Smith, she reminded him of his own ‘dual allegiance, not just to socialist principles but to our faith as well'. She wrote, ‘A system has been set up which penalises honesty, and encourages sneaks, bureaucrats and informers. Aided by the ambitious, the corrupt and the naïve, they have taken over our party. Now the witchhunt has acquired a terrible life of its own. With the national membership scheme and the party's finances in crisis, recruitment is at an all-time low . . . and a climate of fear has been created. Last week I was shocked when a very elderly and frail member, who I had always thought supported the witchhunt, apologised to me, saying, “I should have done more to help you, but I was frightened I'd get on a list. I've been a member for years. I didn't want to get expelled too”.'
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Labour is said to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on its ‘investigations' and ‘trials'. To what end? The ‘modernisation' of the party has failed; Labour distinguished itself by being defeated in a general election at the depth of an economic depression.

If the aim of the witchhunters is to destroy the party of the rank and file, leaving a rump to provide for the new conservatism, they have not succeeded, not yet. There are still a great many people in the Labour Party who cling tenaciously to the reason they joined. In Blackpool next week their voices should be heard.

September 22, 1992

THIS WEEK, A
secret Labour Party report will admit that the party is dying as a mass movement. The report, by the finance working party, will tell the national executive that individual membership will fall below 200,000 and union-affiliated membership will drop by a million within the next four years, unless there is ‘a new spirit both to attract and retain members and to mobilise support in the community'. In many areas, says the report, ‘the party on the ground has deteriorated . . .'
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There is a call for ‘new ideas', one of which is a recruitment campaign that includes ‘new techniques' such as telephone canvassing and subscription fees linked to income. The irrelevance of this when set against the unstated causes of the ‘deterioration on the ground' is striking, though not surprising. There is no mention of the principal cause: that tens of thousands of Labour Party members and activists have been driven away from the party by years of executive thuggery and witchhunting and, above all, by the abandonment of the pretence of
opposing
the now rampant reactionary forces in Britain.

At the end of two extraordinary months in politics, during which the Conservative government has shown itself to be corrupt and run by liars – a government more deeply unpopular than any since the Second World War – Labour has proved itself to be an enfeebled component of a rotting system, further disenfranchising those millions of people who still look to it as the constituted opposition.

John Smith and his people are not wholly to blame. This
is an historic process at work, perhaps in its final stages. Modern labourism based its postwar credibility on the reforms of the Attlee Government. ‘Social justice' and ‘welfare rights' were not seen by the public as a new form of charity. They were at the core of a contract that made it possible for the powerless and the poor to consent to be governed. They made popular democracy
seem
possible, even though its premises – employment, state education, a national health service, decent housing – were always more tenuous than was widely realised. ‘Gentling the masses', rather than liberating them, was the aim of a ‘consensus' which masked the collusion between capital and the defenders of labour, between the imperial state and those claiming to speak for democracy.

In fairness to the Labour hierarchy, be it in the party or the Trades Union Congress, its history was there to be read. From the 1926 general strike to the 1984–85 miners' strike, the trend was an unerring one of surrender and collaboration. From the British occupation of Ireland to the slaughter in the Gulf, Labour's leaders have not been equivocal. ‘During the long period of collusive silence,' wrote Jeremy Seabrook a few years ago, ‘a majority of us became accustomed to what we had gained, so
dependent
upon it continuing that way, that we were prepared to accept all kinds of repugnant social by-products of so fortunate a state of affairs, as long as it seemed that nothing would impair our rising standards of living. This is how new forms of ugliness and violence came to be assimilated into our daily lives . . .'
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In Labour's municipal bastions a flatcappery that depended upon apathy condoned corruption and failed to root out slumlords. Margaret Thatcher may have spoken out about Britain being ‘swamped' by immigrants, but it was a Labour home secretary, James Callaghan, who introduced the most racist immigration bill more than a decade earlier. Attacks on the gains of the ‘consensus' – on the health service, education and welfare rights – began under Labour, not Thatcher. The doctrine of a ‘free market and a strong state' – with its high secrecy and ‘privateers' within the bureaucracy
– owes as much to Labour as it does to Thatcher. Thatcherism, it is fair to say, began under Labour.

The behaviour of the Labour leadership during most of the 1980s, as it tried to catch up with Thatcher, while witch-hunting those who were often Labour's most committed defenders, all but destroyed the party as a great popular movement; the collapsing membership now tells us that. Should further proof be required, I recommend the book
Defeat from the Jaws of Victory
, whose authors, the Labour historian Richard Heffernan and Mike Marqusee, editor of
Labour Briefing
, take us behind the closed doors of the ‘modernised' party to witness the Labour hierarchy in action. It is a chronicle of rigged voting, stage-managed meetings, patronage dispensed to favourites, score-settling and McCarthyism.
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‘By the end of Neil Kinnock's tenure as leader,' they write, ‘investigations of local parties and disciplinary action of one kind or another had directly affected party members in over 80 constituencies in all regions of the country.' Although Militant was singled out for attack, the real target was always wider; in many areas, the majority of members expelled had nothing to do with Militant. An official register of unaffiliated Labour Party groups was drawn up in 1982, leading to the expulsion of any group and anyone espousing ideas on the left – be they socialist, Christian, anti-war, whatever – who were deemed to ‘bring the party into disrepute'.

‘Violations of natural justice were legion,' write Heffernan and Marqusee. ‘The presumption of innocence was hopelessly subverted. Guilt by association became commonplace. Smears, innuendo and catch-all charges proliferated. Hearsay and other forms of uncorroborated evidence were uncritically accepted. Judgments were made on the basis of secret dossiers compiled by anonymous figures whom the accused could never confront . . .'

Although a special body, the national constituency committee, elected by party conference and independent of the NEC, was set up to adjudicate on expulsions, only one case was ever heard by the full NCC. This was the case of Sharon
Atkins, who had been removed as the candidate for Nottingham East before the 1987 general election because of remarks she had made at a black sections public meeting.

General Secretary Larry Whitty presented the NEC's case against Atkins, who was defended by Lord Gifford QC. As Heffernan and Marqusee show, Gifford tore Whitty's case to shreds, pointing out legal, logical and factual errors in charges he described as ‘fundamentally misconceived'. He expressed ‘utter astonishment that they are being seriously put forward'. The NCC was forced to recognise that no grounds could be found for expulsion.
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All other cases were heard by panels of three NCC members, the majority always on the right. The kangaroo ‘investigations' of Terry Fields and Dave Nellist are told in shaming detail. As the authors point out, one of the main reasons the Labour Party is now deeply in debt, with little hope of making up the losses, is the squandering of the party's finances on ‘discipline'.

The value of this book is that it helps to dispel myths. For example, the British people did not overwhelmingly support the Gulf slaughter, yet the Labour leadership was at times even more committed to war than the Government, even rejecting Edward Heath's attempts at a diplomatic solution. The
Sun
's evaluation of ordinary people became Labour's; the popular consciousness, according to Walworth Road, could never be raised above ignorant certainties.

This almost total failure of political imagination – if that is not being too charitable – ensured that the issue of the ‘peace dividend' remained outside the public arena. The enormous savings to be had from reducing Britain's defence spending to that of Germany were never mentioned. All discussion about Trident was suppressed.

To many people, the consequences of such ‘collusive silence' are now provided daily by the demolition of industry, training schemes, social services and of lives once remote from the fear of poverty. Today, the bodies of ‘redundant' people found on the railway lines wear cheap copies of designer jeans and trainers. Scan the reports of coroners'
inquests in the local press and you will get an idea of the number now taking their own lives. They are the victims of a revolution no modern Orwell has yet described.

Perhaps the real tragedy of the Labour Party is the time its wilful distractions have lost. The ‘market' revolution has begun and there is now the popular will to resist it; but where is the mass-movement banner? Soon, capital will no longer need living labour, except as minor disposable servants. With an entire workforce being de-skilled and their communities destroyed, the balance of dependency between capital and labour is being altered as never before – so much so that capital will soon be able to free itself of labour, while still holding labour captive. That is, unless people fight.

The lessons of how not to fight were demonstrated on December 9. The defenders of labour, led by Norman Willis, the staunch royalist, called a National Day of Recovery. This was the TUC's response to the two great demonstrations in October that followed the Government's proclamation that it was virtually closing down the coal industry. The TUC general council first sought the views of employers, while ‘ruling out a general strike'. In other words, all that the defenders of labour can offer is a call to working people to consummate a union of shop-floor, boardroom and government while their only power – their labour – is emasculated by their new conjugal partners.

Willis's successor, John Monks, has been rewarded for his modernist thinking with a promise of two confidential meetings a year with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kenneth Clarke. ‘I think', said Monks, ‘there is a recognition that things are going to go in a direction inimical to the traditional values that the prime minister claims to espouse, and that the world of work may be connected with this development.'
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Although the TUC denies it, the model appears to be the American system, where one in five of all workers, and nearly half of all young workers, earn poverty-line wages; where working hours are longer and holidays shorter than in most advanced industrial countries; where
the rate of accidents in the workplace doubled in the 1980s as a result of deregulation and imposed overtime.