Distant Voices (14 page)

Simply being aware of this can be almost as effective as opposing it. For once awareness spreads, it becomes an antidote to propaganda that seeks to make invisible the lives and culture, and fate, of millions. Without awareness, there can be no understanding, and no resistance. Some things never change.

March 12, 1993

THERE IS TALK
in the press, following the Labour Party's defeat in a general election it ought to have won, about a ‘struggle' for the party leadership. Candidates are said to be ‘embittered' at a ‘stitch-up' and one of them, Bryan Gould, is reported to have ‘unleashed his pent-up fury'. Such passion between those whose political differences are about as wide as this page provides the final post-election Mogadon.

Some people apparently believe this is ‘politics'. Swathes of newspaper are devoted to it and to similar institutional games, whose rules insist that journalists, politicians and assorted ‘experts' promote each other's agendas. This is known as the ‘mainstream'.

Anything that intrudes from outside this ‘mainstream' is likely to be blocked or suppressed. Take the sacred cow of ‘defence'. To my knowledge, only one newspaper commentator (Ian Aitken) pointed out that John Smith's tax proposals could have been funded from Britain's annual military budget of £24 billion, without dismantling the country's defences or frightening away voters. Aitken's revelation was published
after
the election.

The election ‘image' over which Labour's general secretary agonised last week was, in fact, just right. The party looked and sounded conservative in every way. The language was right, too. ‘Modernising' and ‘choice' and other Tory euphemisms so limited the national political debate that the perversity of their impact was minimal. Moreover, during the election campaign, it was widely agreed that ‘convergence' had taken place between the principal policies of the
parties. These policies reaffirmed the elevation of profit above people in almost all areas of life and derided the notion of common obligation as heresy. Labour differed from the official Conservatives only in tone. There was no suggestion that a Labour government would take away from the politicised bureaucracy its incentives to undermine the premises upon which a modest civilisation is based.

For example, it was made clear that pay beds in National Health Service hospitals were no longer a Labour concern; and there was no commitment to repeal the NHS and Community Care Act (1990) whose ‘reforms' are privatisation by another name. Labour's manifesto referred to ‘incentives to improve performance', which is the language of the Tories. In education, Labour said it would ‘modernise', not throw out, the hated national curriculum and that schools would be ‘free to manage their day to day budgets', which the government has already decreed and which had driven out teachers and brought schools close to bankruptcy.

The success of Labour's emergence as a conservative party has been much lauded. To date, this success has been expressed not at the polls, but in stirring victories over dissenters within the party. Something called ‘electability', which Labour's leading conservatives maintained would be the party's reward for its conversion, has not materialised. Not surprisingly, the voters prefer the original, true blue to a paler shade.

Those who still mourn Labour's defeat might consider their degree of disillusionment had Labour won. I recommend they cast an eye over the experience of the ‘modernised' Australian Labor Party, which, in many ways, provides a model. Within days of taking office in 1983, Labor embraced a version of the City, known locally as ‘the big end of town'. Its complete conversion took about six months. Thereafter the Hawke Government oversaw the most dramatic redistribution of wealth in the nation's history (from the wage-earning majority to a new group of rich spivs), the highest unemployment since 1930, the greatest number of bankruptcies since
records were kept and the establishment of the most monopolised press in the democratic world.

Because Labour in this country has abandoned the policies that distinguished it, good political sense dictates that it, too, should be abandoned by those who last April gave it ‘one last chance'. This is not negativism. It is Labour that is negative. It is Labour that has given up trying to persuade, while moulding itself to what the opinion polls tell it. It is Labour that declares in effect that society is static and people's consciousness cannot be raised. The party's claim on many people's loyalty is no longer tenable; for it is no longer a great mass movement, but a force of reaction that muffles any tentative suggestion of mass resistance. It is almost as if, by its very institutional aspirations, Labour exists to blunt people's radical instincts.

There is a striking parallel with America in the 1950s. The great unspoken among the Labour leadership is its terror of the media. For all its sport with the Windsor family and the ‘morals' of Tory ministers, the media lie in wait for Labour to deviate from its role as a reconstituted SDP. In America forty years ago, the media's reaction to Franklin Roosevelt's limited social reforms – which introduced measures hitherto unheard of in a capitalist society: graduated income tax, wealth tax, public housing and a welfare state – was almost uniform. The equivalent reforms in Britain – those of the Attlee Government – produced a more delayed, though similar, reaction, in the 1980s and today.

Both the Roosevelt and Attlee ‘new deals' were at the core of an historic contract that allowed the powerless to consent to be governed. Of course, the deception that
radical
change was on the way was smothered in what became known in Britain as ‘consensus', and which made genuine, popular democracy
seem
possible. In America in the 1950s, those who supported the legacy of the Roosevelt reforms were ostracised as dogmatists, sometimes as ‘communists'. Civil servants, teachers, broadcasters, trade unionists and others were cast aside. The media – newspapers and radio – became
the means of hijacking ‘freedom' on behalf of those who would suppress it.

This is broadly the pattern of events in Britain today. T. S. Eliot's truth, that ‘the historical truth involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence', has no place among the ‘modernists' of the Labour Party. For them, there is no struggle to continue, no gains to be defended. Like Henry Ford, they believe history is ‘bunk'.

Fortunately, Henry Ford was wrong. And by letting Labour go its conservative way, and by ending the ambivalence and guilt that ties many to Labour, the great constituency of political activism in Britain is released to build upon the historic successes it has already achieved
outside
Parliament.

The point is people should not lose heart, or be defensive. It was the peace movement in Britain and Germany that made universal the principle that the nuclear arms race could be stopped only by bold unilateral acts. Mikhail Gorbachev embraced the principle. That Labour should lack the political and moral imagination to make capital of such an achievement, even to disavow it, says much about its new values. As we are entering a period of re-armament, the same movement is needed urgently.

Another popular force outside Parliament and the Labour Party was that which defeated the poll tax. In the field of criminal justice, a small, informed, vociferous coalition exposed a corrupt system. Some 800 miscarriages of justice have been brought to the surface. Independent journalists and lawyers, MPs and tenacious public committees have done this. The state honoured Terry Waite and the Beirut hostages for their undoubted courage in captivity, while the resistance of Mark Braithwaite, Engin Raghip, the Maguires and the Birmingham Six – victims closer to home – went unrecognised. They, and those who fought for them, ought to be among our heroes.

Addressing other issues of little interest to the ‘mainstream' – poverty and race attacks – is a movement comprising those who have demonstrated their power to be heard, despite the media's echo chamber. One thinks of battles waged with
the analytical weaponry of the Child Poverty Action Group, the Runnymede Trust and the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism.

It is true that many people remain isolated and immobilised by the lack of a
mass
opposition. But as social Darwinism becomes government policy, resistance will grow. Nothing is surer. The riots in Los Angeles were distant gunfire in Britain. Before the next millennium, the noise will grow louder here and all over the world. Shortly after he left the Labour Party recently, the veteran black socialist Ben Bousquet said, ‘Ideas don't die. What happens is that people corrupt the ideas, but sooner or later those people go and we have to start to rebuild all over again.'

June 1992 – February 1993

IN RECENT WEEKS,
a BBC series,
The Un-Americans,
has provided reminders of how Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee witchhunted thousands of Americans for their political views or because they were ‘suspect'. I hope those who run the Labour Party were watching and heard the echo of their own actions.

Witchhunting is not on the agenda of next week's party conference, though it ought to be. Of course, there is not the hysteria of the McCarthy period. This is Britain; the witchhunting is muted and conducted by the kind of sub-managerial apparatchik who now polices the party's ‘modern', sub-managerial values. But the parallels are there. Guilt by suspicion and association are pronounced upon or implied, denying natural justice with a shabbiness reminiscent of the demagoguery of the McCarthy inquisitors who demanded, ‘Are you or have you ever been a member of . . .?'

Some of those who come before the ‘court' of the modern Labour Party are asked such a direct question. Their offence may be ‘evidenced by' . . . ‘involvement in anti-poll tax unions' or links with Militant, which is proscribed, or with other organisations that are not. Others are less certain of their ‘crime' and find themselves facing a catch-all charge of ‘bringing the party into disrepute evidenced by involvement in public activity designed to discredit the party'.
¹

Absurdity is, of course, close at hand. Dave Boardman was suspended from the party more than a year ago. The ‘evidence' against him included an informer's statement that he was seen in a pub in Walton, near Liverpool, where a Militant
candidate was standing. He was not canvassing; he was there with a team of youngsters to play football. His local party, Oldham, conducted an enquiry and cleared him. However, the ‘allegation' was apparently enough for Labour headquarters in Walworth Road, London, which sent him a one-sentence letter suspending him and effectively ending his membership.

This is not uncommon. In Coventry, 127 members have been suspended, many of them for their ‘suspected support' of Dave Nellist MP. No more than a dozen are, incidentally, Militant members. In Manchester, two councillors were suspended for visiting a friend jailed for poll tax non-payment. In Lambeth, thirteen councillors have been suspended for opposing the poll tax and the Gulf war. In Bedford, several councillors have been threatened with expulsion for opposing a pact with the Liberal Democrats.

These are but random examples. When I telephoned the Labour Party and asked if there was a nationwide figure for suspensions, I was told there was none. This seems strange in such a bureaucracy. What is clear is that many local party branches are falling apart as the most energetic activists face discipline from Walworth Road, and entire constituency parties are being suspended for years on end.

For those members brought to ‘trial', a Kafka quality is present. First, there is the preliminary ‘investigation' conducted by the party's Directorate of Organisation – a name with unfortunate overtones of Big Brother. The potential ‘defendant' often has no idea of what he or she may be accused of, and is therefore ill-prepared to respond and likely to make incriminating statements. Questions to the ‘investigator' often bring forth the reply, ‘I am only here to listen to you.'

A former Brighton councillor, Jean Calder, herself awaiting ‘trial', described the process of investigation in a letter to John Smith. ‘There are no sworn statements,' she wrote, ‘and unsupported hearsay evidence and rumours are accepted and “secret” evidence is made available to the “prosecution” which the defence is not permitted to see.'
²

A ‘trial' is run by a ‘prosecutor' from Walworth Road, with the ‘judges' drawn from Labour's Constitutional Committee. The committee was given extraordinary and secretive powers in the early 1980s when the Labour leadership decided to reactivate proscription, which had been abandoned in 1974.

The ‘judges' have virtually limitless powers, thanks to an amendment to the party's constitution that reads, ‘Where appropriate, the NEC shall have regard to involvement in financial support for and/or the organisation of and/or the activities of any organisation declared ineligible for affiliation'. In other words, membership of
any
political group can be called a crime against the party. These include broad-based organisations and the newspaper
Labour Briefing
, as well as local support groups such as the Friends of the Brighton Labour Party.
³

During the ‘trial', the prosecutor can call witnesses without forewarning the defendant, yet rules require that the defendant give two weeks' notice if he or she intends to do the same. A subsequent report to the NEC – described as ‘about half the size of a telephone book' – is marked ‘confidential'. The defendant has no right of access to it and no guarantee that the information it contains is accurate, or that it is not held on computer in contravention of the Data Protection Act.