Archive for the ‘Labour Government’ Category
Labour Briefing Ceases Publication.
The Labour Party Marxist writes in the latest Weekly Worker.
“The news that Labour Briefing has ceased publication, in both physical and online format, marks in many ways the end of an era for the Labour left.”
The most recent update on the Briefing site was September 2021.
FIGHT THE TORIES – NOT OUR MEMBERS!
Editorial September 20, 2021
The article was on the last tweet from the Briefing Twitter account:
‘James Harvey’ writes on the origins of the Briefing which was first published as London Labour Briefing 1980.,
The politics of this current grew out of Trotskyism – either in the form of organised groups such as the Chartist minority or various ex-members of the various groups
Christ Knight, one of the founders of the journal, had also been an editor of Chartist in the 1970s,
One of us had heard of a small group of revolutionary socialists in the Labour Party called Chartists. We did not like the politics of Militant which were extremely workerist, class reductionist and sectarian. ‘Chartist’ sounded more open. Plus, we liked the idea of connecting to the unfinished democratic revolution of our 19th century forebears. We applied to our local CLPs for membership. Mine was Hackney North and Stoke Newington, and we were duly accepted. The leading lights in Chartist in 1973 were Chris Knight, Graham Bash, Keith Veness and Al Richardson. Don Flynn and I met with Knight and Bash and felt they were open to new ideas. We were particularly keen to develop greater democracy in the trade unions and promote an anti-racist, pro feminist, internationalist politics in Labour.
….
Under Chris Knight’s editorship, the paper became increasingly adventurist and ultra-left, advocating preparation for revolution. An appeal for a Joint Revolutionary Command of Revolutionary groups was made in early 1974. Contact work had been undertaken with the armed forces to develop trade union rights and a Soldier’s Charter booklet was produced and distributed at Aldershot and other garrison towns
Anybody who has seen copies of Chartist under Knight’s editorship – the late Martin Cook bequeathed a set to the journal – would be reminded of the French groupuscule and journal, Vive la révolution, and Mao-spontex ideas, rather than even the most hard-line Trotskyism. Its is not surprising that MI5 developed an interest in Chartist activities, as cited in Smear!: Wilson and the Secret State. Stephen Dorril, Robin Ramsay 1991,
Mike Davis continues,
In reaction to this ‘insurrectionist’ politics, I was elected Editor in the spring of 1974, and have remained Editor ever since. A new Editorial Board was established with members from wider political backgrounds and we began to make a more determined effort to recruit women and black members.
By 1979 divisions within the group had deepened. At the AGM in 1980, a year after Margaret Thatcher’s Tory landslide, a split occurred. The majority saw the need to move away from forms of Leninist Trotskyism towards a more open, critical and reflective politics.
Despite this background London Labour Briefing, founded by the ‘Chartist minority’, became a force within the left during the 1980s, principally in London, although there were local groups, such as Labour Briefing Devon. It was not a democratic centralist Leninist group. Essentially Labour left activists of the Benn era, a constituency far beyond the original core, including by the end of the decade the International Socialist Group (the forerunners of the present day Socialist Resistance, Anti-capitalist Resistance) and on friendly terms with bodies like the Socialist Society. The Briefing was involved in local government politics, and – at the time I began contributing articles – with the Socialist, often known as the Chesterfield, Conferences headed by Tony Benn.
A feature of the journal was, as founding figure Graham Bash put it, that “Briefing is not controlled by any one tendency or group”. While “declaring war on the leaderships of the Labour Party and the trade unions (and peace has never been concluded) but we retained a commitment and loyalty to the mass organisations of the labour movement. We were not in the business if seeking to relace or compete with either the trade unions or the Constituency Labour parties.” (Twenty Years of (London) Labour (Left) Briefing.1990).
Under the legendary editorship of the author Mike Marqusee in the late 80s the journal was a pluralist forum for the left with many memorable contributions. He developed the critique of the Labour turn to the ‘modernising’ centre in Defeat from the Jaws of Victory: Inside Kinnock’s Labour Party,co-author with Richard Heffernan 1992). In a more colourful fashion the journal published “Class Traitor of the Month” highlighting the politics of individual Labour politicians. Steve French, who followed Mike as Editor, pursued this policy and, with his own roots in the London and international left, continued the fight against Labour’s turn from democratic socialism, and even moderate social democracy, during the years of Tony Blair’s leadership of the Labour Party. The claim to create a ‘Third Way’ between socialism and neo-liberalism and to find a governing response to globalisation was, for Briefing, a new dividing line with the left and class politics.
In the middle of the 1990s the Briefing played a role in forming the Grassroots Alliance,
The Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance’s founding groups were originally Labour Reform, a centre-left democratic group within the Party founded at a meeting in Birmingham in November 1995, and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, the left wing democratic grouping, who subsequently brought in other more left-wing groupings from within the Labour Party. Private talks with trades union representatives to build a broader base had failed on union demands and this initiated the inclusion of a much broader left group from the grassroots, including Labour Left Briefing [Liz Davies] and the then-Editor of Tribune, Mark Seddon. Prominent founding members also include Ann Black and Andy Howell.[2] Successful efforts were also made to include the Scottish Left.[3]
The election of Grassroots Candidates to Labour’s NC, including Ann Black and Liz Davis, marked an important moment when the left began to regroup and find a national voice again. A year after Tony Blair became PM in 1997 this happened, “THE REMARKABLE achievement of the centre-left slate, the Grassroots Alliance, in gaining four of the six places in elections to the constituency section of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) will have been applauded by all but the most hardened sectarians in the socialist movement.” Bob Pitt
The Labour Party Marxist has his own take on this histry,
“.. behind this ostensible pluralism Labour Briefing was tied body and soul to the Labour Party and thus left reformism, which continues to reflect the wider ‘common sense’ politics of important sections of the Labour left up to the present day.”
The Weekly Worker then outlines the history of Briefing’s relations with the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) and the transfer of the journal to the LRC, which resulted in a split and the creation of the Briefing ‘original’ co-operative (a ‘canal historique’). As the author says, the latter still exists and is associated with Christine Shawcroft. Somebody sent me a PDF of the February issue with an article by Jeremy Corbyn’s retired (long-standing) Agent Keith Veness and Larry O’Nutter, under his Pen Name of Larry O’Hara. It appears irregularly. The LRC Briefing was monthly until last year.
The LRC and Briefing were very happy to see Jeremy Corbyn elected in 2015 as Labour Leader, even others who felt much closer to the politics of John McDonnell. Briefing held a small meeting for activists in a community centre on an Estate near Russell Square, which was united in celebrating this victory and its support for Corbyn and hoped to build on this success.
This unity was soon put to the test. The issue of anti-Semitism, and specifically the position of Jackie Walker on the topic, and hard-line ‘anti-Zionism’, divided much of the left, including those around the Briefing. Collaboration with Labour Against the Witch-hunt, (formed in 2017) a body that included figures like Tony Greenstein, and people from the Weekly Worker, CPGB (Provisional Central Committee), was not universally appreciated.
Perhaps one can see the mistrust that Briefing supporters, and others on the left, feel by reading this statement from ‘James Harvey’.
It is not enough to simply note the passing of Labour Briefing and think of its demise as the end of a song. The type of politics it espoused and the illusions it fostered have deep roots in the workers’ movement: the closure of a journal does not liquidate the politics which it embodied. The left reformism of Labour Briefing and its like on the Labour left is a real barrier, which must be overcome if we are to develop a programme and build a party that can lead the working class to power.
Moreover, the spurious eclecticism and speculative discussion with which Labour Briefing identified itself are luxuries we cannot afford.
Whether Briefing has stopped publication because of a political impasse, the expulsion of Graham Bash from the Labour Party, or age and other factors, such as isolation from a layer of its former supporters, have played a part, we cannot be sure. What is clear that those created the journal and worked tirelessly to sustain it, as well as those who contributed, should be proud of their efforts to promote socialism.
See:
Labour Briefing- a complete run.
Rob M.
“a near complete 40 year run of Labour Briefing including the later 1980s / early 1990s tabloid newspaper version.”
Morning Star Urges Labour to Campaign for Brexit…
“Socialist state aid in the service of a planned economy….was for a few years a real prospect in Britain.”
Part Four of our much-loved Series, Things that never happened.
The Morning Star, independent of the Brexit ultras of the Communist Party of Britain and owned by the co-op, puts a marker down today.
Editorial: Labour must finally campaign for a Brexit that strengthens popular power
IT turns out that the self-imposed deadline for the conclusion of the Brexit talks dissolved as quickly as Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen’s after-dinner mints.
The wits of the Morning Star, who spurn bourgeois after-dinner mints, continue.
The issues at stake in the negotiations between the EU and our government are whether the substantial body of trade between the two entities will be conducted under Word Trade Organisation rules — which include constraints on the marketing and pricing strategies of both states and enterprises — or under a compromise formula which will include some of the constraints the EU itself places on market and pricing strategies.
Note John Rogan reminds us what the mass line of the CPB is,
They stated it clearly here — “ ‘Britain should leave the EU on WTO [World Trade Organisation] terms’, Communists propose.” (28 January 2019). A “WTOBrexit” is also known as “No Deal Brexit” as it is how we will trade with the EU if we leave without a deal on 31 October. The CPB have opposed all Article 50 extensions and continue to do so. Their vision of how the Irish border would operate after leaving the EU is on World Trade Organisation terms,”
This is the present state of play.
It is a negotiation and both actors have played endlessly with end times language. Nevertheless, in the end commerce will continue with countries in the EU and profits will unfailingly flow.
How true, the tendency for the rate of profit to decline, aside, the capitalists will be capitalists!
Innocent Remainers be warned!
Morning Star intern, Dave Spart, points out their errors,
the remorse of Remainers are a mirror image of the autarkic outrage of the barmy Brexit faction on the Tory fringes who thought Johnson really was one of them rather than an infinitely malleable instrument of ruling class consensus.
Should Labour oppose the Tory Brexit?
The Star gives the alternative view.
But the logic of Labour’s positioning — set out with clarity by Sir Keir Starmer — is that Labour will go along with whatever arrangement the EU and Britain arrive at.
This represents a missed opportunity to give a clear view of what kind of trading relationship would better serve the working people of Europe.
Which is to put the case for a socialist planned economy, the key issue at stake – for the Lexit mob and the Morning Star, though not for anybody else – when they lined up with Farage and Johnson to back Brexit.
Miliband would be better arguing the case for socialist state aid in the service of a planned economy that puts job security with high-skilled and well-paid work at the centre of a green industrial strategy. This was for a few years a real prospect in Britain.
That was and remains, the economic rationale for a break with the neoliberal logic of the EU that would begin a political challenge to privatisation and open the way to a common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
National neoliberalism, the actually existing Brexit can be wished away.
Labour in Parliament, no less than the working class and the labour movement, must find a way to channel the great desire for democratic decision-making and a break with privatisation and profit-seeking into practical proposals that transform the Brexit-to-be into an opening for popular power free of big business and the banks.
Brexit, it is well known in Star circles, was all about that. “great desire for democratic decision-making and a break with privatisation and profit-seeking” and nothing about xenophobia, racism, the project of an ‘anglosphere’ and the interests of that fraction of capital that funded the campaign to Leave and has now has its mouthpieces running the Cabinet.
Here’s a different take,
An Irish Marxist Blog
This means that the strategy of the British Labour Party of supporting Brexit through supporting or abstaining on the deal in Westminster will put it on the wrong side of history and make it joint owner of the disaster. The referendum and tortured path since have demonstrated again and again that Brexit is toxic. It will entail untold attacks on the working class, its rights and its standard of living. The Labour Party should not be looking to be a donkey that blame can be tagged on to.
The division of workers along national lines shows how reactionary Brexit has been by inevitably promoting division within the British working class itself. We can see this through the millions of workers opposed to Brexit and the rise of Scottish nationalism, nurtured by the idea that one variety of British nationalism is somehow qualitatively better than another. Already in England we see demands for some sort of autonomy for certain regions like the North of England, as if there was a geographical solution to a problem arising from the system that crosses all borders. It is as if nothing has been learned from the failure of proposing the fix of devolution for Scotland as the solution to austerity and decline.
On the Left, the so-called Trotskyists are saying it could all have been different when it couldn’t; while Stalinists wallow in their own nationalism, in their demand for national sovereignty and their own version of (nativist) identity politics.
Here’s one Beano to celebrate the Morning Star’s contribution to Brexit:
Enjoy!
Counterfire to Spearhead Fightback Against Labour’s Keir Starmer.
Fighting “Starmer’s rightward shift” “in the workplaces, the communities and on the streets”.
Last week the Convenor of the Stop the War Coalition (StWC), Lindsey German, asserted,
…there is no road to success for the left inside Labour.
The battle is on: and the left can’t win in Labour – weekly briefing
She observes,
Perhaps the most important reason for the failure of Corbynism was that there was none of the ruthlessness towards the right that we now see being used against the left.
We are informed that
Many Labour lefts backed Starmer despite the fairly obvious writing on the wall. This was for a variety of reasons: the shock and demoralisation of defeat and the call for ‘electability’; the continuing Brexit debate (where the People’s Vote campaign did real damage to the Corbyn left); the promises of Starmer that he would unite the party; the continuing rows over antisemitism.
These look pretty convincing reasons to have backed Starmer.
Most socialist internationalists (unlike Counterfire) opposed Brexit and saw no reason to go along with the pro-Brexit supporters around Corbyn.
Is anti-semitism within Labour, a hysterical ‘anti-Zionism’ with plenty of complotism around it that shades and indeed is, full of prejudice, an imaginary problem?
Most people think it is neither manufactured nor dreamt up.
The issue remains open as to what role the left can find within the Labour Party
But those who intend to make a hobby of “fighting” in the party have lost before starting.
Few wish to listen to them and their loud-mouthed insults.
So perhaps German is right to say that,
the fight is going to be outside of Labour, and organising inside will be an extremely pale shadow of that, with very high likelihood of failure on every major front.
The future is to go back to the left strategies of the early years of the new millenium,
We desperately need a mass socialist party in Britain, but Labour is not going to be it. At present there is no such party on the horizon, however there are hundreds of thousands who would identify with it. There are also major struggles ahead as we face unemployment, pandemic and attacks on workers. The building of such a party will most likely come from working in those campaigns and perhaps with an organised split from Labour (although this is unlikely to contain MPs). It has to be centred on those struggles and not on electoralism.
German has learnt a lesson from the massive electoral failures of previous efforts to create a “mass socialist party” outside of Labour: its inability to do well through “electoralism” – the ballot box.
Her comrades have plenty of experience in this area, one thinks of the prominent role Lindsey German and John Rees played in George Galloway’s Respect Party….
The piece ends, “whether you stay or go, the key thing is to fight.”
How many battalions do these people have?
Counterfire runs what remains of the People’s Assembly, and has an influential position within the Stop the War Coalition, now comments on the actuality of the Revolution.
It has now launched an appeal on the lines sketched by German.
Starmer takes Labour right: It’s time for an extra-parliamentary left
In a statement the groupuscule (around 100 members) states,
Counterfire energetically supported the Corbyn project while always pointing out the pitfalls and the limitations of a purely parliamentary strategy for change. It’s very important now that we are clear about the new situation. Starmer’s witch-hunting of the left, his positioning as a reasonable and loyal opponent of this calamitous government shows that the attempt to transform Labour has been defeated. But this doesn’t mean that the phase of popular opposition is over.
Pausing to note the Tories’ “arrogance and incompetence” and the Black Lives Matter protests, they state,
..the fight is on. But it’s not going to be fought in the Labour Party, it is going to take place in the workplaces, the communities and on the streets.
This leads them to assert,
We urge everyone who is sickened by Starmer’s rightward shift to get involved in this kind of mass politics – building workplace organisation, supporting the People’s Assembly, fighting every cutback and closure on the ground.
Counterfire urges the creation of working class movement.
Counterfire has been at the heart of the resistance since we launched just ten years ago. Our online support is growing daily, our website is read by tens of thousands every week, but we need active, participatory socialist organisation everywhere to create the kind of working-class movement that can win.
Counterfire is now committed to organising “a dynamic extra-parliamentary left in every part of the country.”
Extra-Parliamentary, that is, as an alternative to the Parliamentary Road to Socialism, the Labour Party.
Some might suggest that a major factor in this turn is that Lindsey German and John Rees – and their ex-(and present) Communist Party of Britain mates – no longer have the ear of a friendly Labour leader who put up with their enthusiasms, rages, and belief that politics is decided by street theatre.
Tendance Coatesy 