Trouble At Mill.

Rising Like Lions: Between the early-Nineteenth and late-Twentieth Century, wielding their two “unvanquishable” weapons: trade unionism and the franchise; working people lifted their incomes; improved their housing; obtained an education for their children; and secured ready access to medical advice and care. In the space of little more than a century, working people had secured for themselves both a standard of living and a degree of political power unparalleled in human history. How were these lions turned into lambs?

 

A FEW NIGHTS AGO, I watched “The Real Mill” on Sky’s History Channel. Fronted by the ubiquitous Tony Robinson, the series investigates the historical background to “The Mill” – a docudrama set in early-Nineteenth Century Cheshire. What struck me most forcefully in the programme was the way in which the factory workers of the period fought back against the oppressive conditions of their working lives.

 

Bear in mind that these were men, women and (in alarming numbers) children, who had just spent at least 12 hours operating the relentless (and often lethal) machinery of the new “manufactories” – as their workplaces were called. And yet, overcoming their fatigue, they found time to read and write pamphlets; gather together to hear speeches; and march in their tens-of-thousands to great outdoor rallies.

 

None of them could vote. Even after the passage of the momentous Representation of the People Act, in 1832, only one in five of the adult male population were free to participate in parliamentary elections. The remaining four-fifths of adult males – and all adult women – continued to be excluded from the franchise.

 

It would require another century of struggle by the working men and women of Great Britain before universal franchise was finally achieved. (Roughly one third of the British soldiers who fought and died in the trenches of World War I were not entitled to vote for the Members of Parliament who sent them there.)

 

Also worth bearing in mind is the fact that, prior to 1824, it was illegal to form and/or belong to a trade union. Even after the repeal of these “Combination Acts”, trade unionism remained a risky business – as the 1834 “transportation” to Australia of the so-called “Tolpuddle Martyrs” attests. It was not until the passage of the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act 1875 that the crucial right to mount a trade union picket was legally recognised.

 

So, what’s wrong with the working people of the early-Twenty-First Century? Like the mill-workers of two centuries ago, many of them are working long hours for scandalously low wages. Many of their employers utilise exactly the same employment strategies (sub-contracting, piece-work) that the mill-owners of the industrial revolution devised to depress the price of labour.

 

In sharp contrast to Nineteenth Century workers, however, the working people of today possess both the right to vote and the right to form trade unions, go on strike and picket their workplaces. The two decisive achievements of the working class’s long struggle for freedom and prosperity are both intact and available. How is it that these two mighty swords have rusted in their scabbards?

 

It was the romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelly, writing in the same period as “The Mill”, who in his incendiary poem, “The Masque of Anarchy”, incited the oppressed peoples of the British Isles to:

 

Rise, like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number!

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you:

Ye are many—they are few!

 

It was sentiments such as these which inspired the aristocrats and mill-owners of Britain (and many other countries) to resist extending the franchise to their tenants and workers for as long as they possibly could. If nothing else, the masters could count. Give an overwhelming majority of the population the right to vote, and very soon the laws of the land will reflect the needs and aspirations of an overwhelming majority of the population!

 

And so it proved – right up until the final quarter of the Twentieth Century. Wielding their two “unvanquishable” weapons: trade unionism and the franchise; working people lifted their incomes; improved their housing; obtained an education for their children; and secured ready access to medical advice and care. In the space of little more than a century, working people had secured for themselves both a standard of living and a degree of political power unparalleled in human history.

 

And then, quite suddenly, workers found themselves going backwards. In the late-1970s, the masters, fearing the “lions” were about to devour them entirely, launched a fierce counter-attack. Their behaviour, at least, was understandable. Less so, was the lions’ willingness to be restrained. The masters’ relentless propaganda: in which lions were portrayed as dangerous and selfish creatures which, for the public’s safety, simply had to be caged; proved to be astonishingly persuasive – not least to the lions themselves.

 

The legal restraints of Maggie Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Roger Douglas, Ruth Richardson and Bill Birch did not fall upon the working-class lions of the democratic West like dew while they slept. With a handful of honourable exceptions, like the British miners, the trade unions entered their masters’ cages voluntarily. An electorally decisive fraction of the working-class continues to vote for their chains.

 

Those Nineteenth Century mill-workers, marching beneath banners demanding trade union rights and the vote, would be appalled.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 29 November 2016.

Forgotten Lessons: Has Labour Just Chosen To Lose Hutt South?

Best Man Or Mandatory Woman? Are Labour’s compulsory gender quotas dictating the party’s candidate selection processes?

 

SOMETIMES IT FEELS LIKE THE LEFT is incapable of learning anything. Why leftists forget every lesson History teaches them – even those of the recent past – I simply do not know. Mistakes, it seems, are for repeating – endlessly.

 

Twenty-seven years ago the NewLabour Party, full of energy and idealism, decided to institute a gender quota. Half of its candidates had to be women. Had to be, you’ll note. None of this “strive to ensure an equal number of women candidates” malarkey. Fifty percent meant fifty percent. Sorry fellas.

 

The NLP women grinned and the NLP guys puffed out their chests. Theirs was a party of real democratic-socialists – completely unlike those devious traitors in the Old Labour Party. If the NLP leader, Jim Anderton, had reservations, then he kept them to himself. Or, maybe, he knew enough about working-class voters to let them do the talking for him.

 

And talk they did. Canvassing Dunedin’s working-class streets I was taken to task on doorstep-after-doorstep by a succession of narrow-eyed matrons as suspicious of my rounded middle-class vowels as they were contemptuous of the NLPs affirmative action policy.

 

“I don’t agree with quotas”, I was told over and over again. “You should pick the best person for the job.” With impressive prescience, these hard-bitten mothers and grandmothers demanded to know what the NLP would do “if your quota isn’t filled and you’ve got to choose between a really good man and an unsuitable woman? Are you really going to tell the best man to bugger off? Because if you are – then you needn’t bother coming around here asking for my vote.”

 

Not that anyone paid much attention. Even in the democratic-socialist NLP, the idea that the political leadership should be guided by the views of those whose votes they were seeking got precious little traction. If working-class women were sceptical (if not downright hostile) to the gender quota, then it was only because they had yet to throw off the dead weight of patriarchal thinking. Nothing that a little feminist consciousness-raising couldn’t fix.

 

Always assuming that those working-class women wanted their consciousness raised, which, by-and-large they didn’t. Or, at least, not by democratic-socialists so utterly unaware of how patronising they sounded. If the choice was between being talked down to by a middle-class feminist, or represented by a working-class bloke who’d grown up in the same neighbourhood as themselves, then the best man was always going to win.

 

With the NLP long since deposited on the ash-heap of history, you might assume that the Labour Party would be wary of repeating its mistakes. But, you’d be wrong. Feminism is one of the progressive traditions which Labour has never turned its back on. The support of the Women’s Council of the party thus remains indispensable to any attempt to re-write Labour’s rules. Or un-write them. As David “Man Ban” Shearer discovered when he attempted to attenuate the Women’s Council’s constitutional efforts to ensure gender balance.

 

Over the past three years, those efforts have been crowned with success. And now Labour’s mandatory gender quotas are dictating the party’s candidate selection processes in precisely the way those shrewd Dunedin working-class women foresaw nearly thirty years ago.

 

Last weekend, Labour members in the Hutt South electorate gathered to choose a successor to their long-serving MP, Trevor Mallard. The choice they faced was between a popular local lawyer and city councillor, Campbell Barry, and a well-connected party insider, Virginia (Ginny) Andersen. Barry, who attended Wainuiomata High School, easily won the support of the Hutt South members present at the meeting, but he failed to convince the selectors representing the party’s New Zealand Council. By a narrow majority (4-3) the selection panel voted to install Ginny Andersen.

 

Bear in mind that Mallard holds Hutt South by just 709 votes, and that in 2014 National won the Party Vote by a margin of 6,745 votes. National’s candidate, Chris Bishop, is a strong campaigner and will only be prevented from lifting the seat in 2017 by a Labour candidate capable of putting a large and enthusiastic team of volunteers in the field. That is very hard to do when the local membership believes “Head Office” has ignored their preferences and imposed an unwanted “outsider” on the electorate.

 

Once again, I’m recalling that doorstep dialogue of thirty years ago: “I don’t agree with quotas. You should pick the best person for the job. What do you do if your quota isn’t filled and you’ve got to choose between a really good man and an unsuitable woman? Are you really going to tell the best man to bugger off? Because if you are – then you needn’t bother coming around here asking for my vote.”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 31 October 2016.

The War Goes On: With Corbyn’s Re-Election, The Class Struggle In Labour Will Intensify.

The Unintended Consequence: It was to forever silence the intra-party remnants of working-class power that the Blairite Right brought in the “one-person-one-vote” rule. Not even in their worst nightmares did they apprehend that their cynical gesture towards ‘democratisation’ would produce a Jeremy Corbyn. 

 

JEREMY CORBYN’S RE-ELECTION should signal an outbreak of peace and unity in the British Labour Party. Especially given his support among Labour members has gone up, not down, since he was first elected in September 2015. Not a chance. His enemies in Labour’s parliamentary caucus simply will not relent. The war of attrition will go on until Corbyn is no longer leader. Why?

 

The answer is as bleak in its essence as it is in its implications. From its very inception, more than a century ago, the British Labour Party has been the product of two powerful political impulses: working-class unionism and middle-class reformism. Though they were not perceived to be so at the time the party was formed, these two impulses would, ultimately, prove contradictory.

 

No matter how modest the ambitions of Britain’s moderate trade union leaders, the pursuit of “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work” was always destined to run into the brute realities of capitalism’s zero-sum equations. And when that day came, as it did in the 1970s, the middle-class reformers of the Fabian Society were never going to align themselves with Labour’s working-class voters.

 

There was a reason for this reformist disdain. They simply did not believe that working-class people were capable of managing themselves. Working people, in the reformers’ opinion, lacked the experience, the education and, yes, the ‘breeding’ necessary for self-government. That being the case, Labour’s ultimate objective must be to erect a state-funded and administered system of social organisation and control, that would allow highly trained middle-class professionals will ‘look after’ and ‘improve’ the ‘labouring masses’.

 

Policies promising the public administration of health, education and housing services, and the public ownership of key industries, may have sounded like socialism, but in one vital respect they were deficient. The administrators and managers of this Brave New World would not be drawn from the ‘labouring classes’ in whose name they were being created, but from a middle class which saw itself as the meritocratic inheritors of Britain’s louche and incompetent aristocracy.

 

This dystopic game of bait-and-switch provides the theme for some of British literature’s most famous political fables. From “The Time Machine” and “Things To Come” by H. G. Wells’ (himself a hard-line eugenicist and prominent Fabian) to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984”. In British social-democracy, no less than on Animal Farm: “All animals are equal – but some are more equal than others.”

 

What the Fabian Society reformers were never game enough to ask themselves was: “What happens when publicly administered health, education and housing services raise up a generation of workers who are no longer content to let middle-class bureaucrats control their lives?”

 

When “The Who’s” famous invitation to “meet the new boss – same as the old boss” is rejected. When thousands of young shop-stewards finally work out what their corpulent union bosses have always been too frightened to admit: that “a fair day’s pay” is beyond the remit of even the most thoroughly reformed capitalist society. What happens then?

 

What happens then – as every member of both the British and New Zealand Labour Party who lived through it will confirm – is that class struggle begins to manifest itself not only in the workplace and on the picket line, but also in the ranks of the political party of the working-class. And when that party has allowed itself to become “professionalised”, especially at the parliamentary level, then the outcome of that class struggle is a forgone conclusion.

 

But history is not a clockwork mechanism, or, if it is, then there’s a ghost in the machine. Tony Blair may have filled the upper echelons of his government and party with a plethora of “pretty straight guys”, but within the shell of the professionalised Labour Party there still existed the perennially disruptive trade unions and constituency party organisations. It was to forever silence these working-class voices that Blair’s successors brought in the “one-person-one-vote” rule. Not even in their worst nightmares did they apprehend that their cynical gesture towards ‘democratisation’ would produce a Jeremy Corbyn.

 

So now they find themselves caught between a leader dedicated to creating precisely the sort of emancipatory labour movement that Blair and his professionalised predecessors worked so hard to destroy in the 1970s and 80s; and a fast-growing movement of citizens determined to seize control of their own future. Already the largest socialist organisation in Europe, the 600,000-strong British Labour Party threatens to become something much more dangerous than the ruling class’s second eleven. Corbyn is determined to turn Labour into a people’s movement for radical change. A project so impossibly horrific that it has united the entire British Establishment against him.

 

Only two things can stop Corbyn now. Either, his parliamentary caucus enemies will contrive some way to fundamentally constrain his power (by forcing him to accept an elected shadow cabinet, perhaps?) Or, the hidden hand of the “deep” British state will arrange for his removal “by other means”.

 

For the newly re-elected leader and his party the moment of maximum peril draws near. We must hope that the ghost in the machine continues to nudge history in Labour’s – and Jeremy Corbyn’s – direction.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 26 September 2016.

The Unions Are Finished: Neoliberalism's Most Important Lie.

Alive And Kicking: In spite of having to function in one of the most hostile legal environments in the OECD, New Zealand's trade unions continue to represent more than 360,000 Kiwi workers. Were its legal shackles to be struck off by a "true Left Wing government", that number would increase dramatically.

 

ORGANISED LABOUR lost its influence for two reasons, both of which are global in nature and unstoppable:

Firstly, automation vastly improved industrial efficiency and reduced the need for manual labour. This process continues unabated and will impact generations to come.

Secondly, when China opened up its economy it added 50% to the global workforce, undermining labour rates across the western world.

So if you're hoping for a change in local politics to halt the demise of union power, you’re deluding yourself. Even if we voted in a true Left Wing government tomorrow, any attempt by it to return to the golden days of union power would snap the economy like a twig. In short order we would become the Albania of the South Pacific.

 

The above comment came in anonymously (don’t they always!) but I thought it worth quoting at length. Only rarely are the precepts of neoliberalism advanced so succinctly, so eloquently, or, with such superficial plausibility.

 

That the comment homes-in on the condition of organised labour is no accident. Stripped of all its fine ideological plumage, Neoliberalism has always been about smashing unions.

 

No other institution has done as much to advance the interests of ordinary people than the trade union. Without the power of organised labour, the historic shifts in political and economic power which characterised the 1930s and 40s could not have happened.

 

It was the union movement which, by redirecting business profits from the shareholders’ dividends to the employees’ wage-packets, lifted the living-standards of the working-class across the post-war world. Wherever unions became a force to be reckoned with, the power and prestige of the ruling-class (or the “1 Percent”, as we prefer to call them these days) dwindled. The recovery of that lost power and prestige could not begin until the unions were first tamed – and then destroyed.

 

A Clear Correlation: This graph, from the NZ Council of Trade Unions, illustrates in the most dramatic fashion the inverse relationship between union strength and the economic power of the top 1 percent of income earners.

 

Look back over the history of neoliberalism – especially at the years in which its key elements were being set in place – and you will encounter a series of epic industrial struggles. All of these were deliberately fomented by neoliberal politicians, and all of them had but one objective: the disarming of the new regime’s most dangerous enemies. The crushing of PATCO by the newly-elected Reagan Administration. The defeat of the National Union of Miners by Margaret Thatcher. These set-piece confrontations were intended to – and did – overawe and demoralise the forces of organised labour.

 

With the unions safely shackled by draconian anti-union legislation, the neoliberals were free to proceed to the next stage of their programme: the destruction of the unions’ greatest achievement – the Welfare State. Everything that followed; from the privatisation of public assets; to the introduction of student loans; to the sell-off of social housing. The whole sad saga of the 1 Percent’s triumphant resurrection of the injustices and inequalities of a Gilded Age the Left believed to be long dead and buried, was predicated on the destruction of the trade unions.

 

And so, of course, the neoliberals’ over-riding mission, following the restoration of plutocratic power, was to convince succeeding generations that trade unionism’s demise was not the work of a ruling class whose authority it had challenged, but simply the result of  forces that were “global in nature and unstoppable”.

 

Our anonymous commentator singles out automation and the opening of China to capitalist investment as the two principal reasons for organised labour’s loss of influence. But, a moment’s historical reflection reveals both of these arguments to be false.

 

The entire Industrial Revolution was about little else but automation – the replacement of human energy and dexterity by machines. Far from reducing the total number of jobs, the wealth generated by mechanisation not only led very rapidly to the creation of more jobs but also new jobs – indeed, to whole new industries. This vast expansion in the demand for labour was what drove millions to emigrate from the impoverished agrarian societies of Southern and Eastern Europe to the Americas and Australasia. It was out of these new immigrant communities that the mass industrial unionism of the 20th Century emerged to challenge the overweening power of capital.

 

Far from being branded the gravediggers of organised labour, the latest wave of automation and the proletarianisation of the Chinese peasantry should be seen the harbingers of the next great surge of progressivism across the planet.

 

Of course, such an outcome is, quite literally, inconceivable to our anonymous commentator. In his eyes, any attempt to restore a modicum of justice and decency to the workplace, or pay working people a living wage, can only end in disaster:

 

Even if we voted in a true Left Wing government tomorrow, any attempt by it to return to the golden days of union power would snap the economy like a twig. In short order we would become the Albania of the South Pacific.

 

In progressive ears, however, those words sound very differently:

 

Only when we vote in a true Left Wing government, and the golden days of union power return, will the power of the 1 Percent be broken and ordinary working people recover the confidence to snap neoliberalism’s unjust and unequal society like a twig. In short order we will become again the Utopia of the South Pacific – and the envy of the World.

 

This essay was posted on The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Thursday, 19 March 2015.

Ghost Dancing?

Ghost Dancing circa 1890: With the buffalo effectively exterminated, the material basis for the Native American cultures of the Great Plains was destroyed. The Ghost Dance, it was believed, would reconstitute the basis for an independent indigenous existence. Has the removal of the material basis for a self-conscious industrial working-class similarly undermined the social base and cultural integrity of the New Zealand labour movement? Are the four contenders for the Labour Party leadership simply Ghost Dancing?

OF THE FOUR CONTENDERS for the leadership of the Labour Party, it is David Parker who pursues most consistently the “traditional” Labour member’s support. “Labour was formed by working people, for working people”, is one of Mr Parker’s favourite riffs. And lest any member of the party should doubt his commitment to Labour’s “core values”, he chose Labour Day as the time and the Savage Memorial as the place to launch his Auckland campaign.

 

But how much sense does it make to pursue the votes of Labour’s traditionalists when so little of the world that made them (and the Labour Party for that matter) still remains? Is it even possible to be a party of the New Zealand proletariat when the New Zealand proletariat (or, at least, the New Zealand proletariat as it was configured from 1935-1985) no longer exists?

 

Which is not to say that, globally-speaking, the industrial working-class, with all its vast potential for upsetting the applecart of industrial civilisation, has ceased to exist. Far from it. What should be said, however, is that if you’re looking for a mass of exploited toilers recognisable to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, then you’ve a much better chance of finding them in China than you have in the post-industrial societies of the West.

 

Over the past 40 years, western capitalists have solved the problem of having large and self-assertive working-classes in their own backyard by ruthlessly shipping their employees’ jobs overseas to places where unions, civil rights and most other democratic practices are conspicuous by their absence. If you want to see the equivalent of Henry Ford’s vast River Rouge car assembly plant nowadays, you’ll have to visit Shenzhen.

 

Think of the political economy of globalisation in terms of the fate of the American buffalo.

 

Before the great waves of European settlers washed over the American prairie, it was the preserve of Native American tribes and unimaginably large herds of buffalo. So long as the buffalo endured, settlers would not only have to contend with the indigenous peoples the great beasts supported, but they’d also find it impossible to transform the prairie into profitable farmland.

 

Obviously, both had to go. In the space of just 45 years the buffalo herds (the largest of which sometimes stretched from horizon to horizon) were reduced from more than 30 million to just a few hundred. And with the destruction of the buffalo the indigenous cultures of the prairies found themselves robbed of the very substance of their being. After a brief but doomed burst of resistance they were reduced to objects of anthropological curiosity and Hollywood fantasy.

 

The social-democratic welfare-states that grew up in the West in the 1930s and which reached their peak effectiveness in the early 1970s had the same relationship with factory-based production as the indigenous tribes of the prairie had with the buffalo. It was the factory-based process of mass production that underpinned the full-employment upon which the welfare state depended. Also dependent on the jobs of secondary industry were the trade unions – out of whose economic and political influence the social-democratic and labour parties of the West had emerged. Take away those jobs and in remarkably quick succession the unions, their parties and the welfare state itself would crumble and die.

 



Rust Belt Ruin: The continuing export of Western factory jobs has undermined the unions, their parties and the welfare state itself.

 

The mass slaughter of the buffalo came to an end in the mid-1880s submerging the tribes in existential despair. Five years later, however, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began to receive reports of a strange religious phenomenon sweeping the reservations – the “Ghost Dance”.

 

A Paiute shaman, Wovoka, prophesised that if the tribes danced the Ghost Dance, then the living and the dead would be reunited, the world re-made anew, and all its peoples could live in peace. Among the Lakota nation, however, the new religion took on a more millennial character. The dance would bring back the buffalo, said the Lakota chief, Kicking Bear, and by wearing “Ghost Shirts” warrior-dancers would be rendered impervious to bullets. On 29 December 1890, at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, this belief was put to the test – with tragic results.

 

Could David Parker be Labour’s Wovoka? Is his invocation of a political movement created “by working people, for working people” as tragic, in its way, as the Native Americans’ longing for the buffalos’ return? Could we be witnessing Labour’s Ghost Dance?

 

This essay was originally published by The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 October 2014.

God Save The People!

THE WORDS to When Wilt Thou Save The People? were written in 1827 by the "Corn Law Rhymer", Ebenezer Elliott. The refrain, "God Save the People!", is, of course, the radical working-class agitator's rejoinder to "God Save the King!"

Elliott's song became the anthem of the Chartist movement, the mass working-class movement for universal manhood suffrage and other political reforms that was active in the United Kingdom between 1838 and 1848.

I have been unable to locate on YouTube a performance of the song set to the music of Josiah Booth, which is quite beautiful. If anyone knows of such a  version capable of being uploaded to Bowalley Road - please get in touch. In the meantime here is Stephen Schwartz's adaptation of the song which he slipped into his 1971 musical "Godspell". Enjoy!

This posting is exclusive to the Bowalley Road blogsite.

Staying The Course: The Legacy Of Margaret Thatcher

Thatcher's Legacy: Margaret Thatcher tested the British Left - and found it wanting. The most pernicious of all her legacies is the damage she inflicted upon the ideological integrity of the British Labour Party. Rather than repudiate Thatcherism, Tony Blair's "New" Labour Party accepted it as an irreversible historical reality.

DE MORTUIS nil nisi bonum – of the dead speak only good – is a compassionate maxim. I’m not sure Margaret Thatcher would have followed it, but in writing about the late British Prime Minister, I will do my best.

 

Perhaps the kindest (and certainly the truest) observation I can offer about Baroness Thatcher is that she tested the British Left and found it wanting.

 

So absolute has “Thatcherism’s” ideological triumph been that few now remember how little prospect of success the British Conservative Party’s new leader was granted – even by her colleagues.

 

The 1970s represented the high-water mark of the Left’s success in the English-speaking world. Even as late as 1979 – the year in which Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime-minister – the ideology we know today as neoliberalism was dismissed as extremist folly by practically all “serious” public intellectuals (including a number on the Right). If the Keynesian economic policies that had underpinned thirty years of post-war prosperity no longer seemed to be working, the cure was generally supposed to lie in a shift to the Left – not in a lurch rightwards to the laissez-faire precepts of the Victorian era.

 

In this context, the election of the Margaret Thatcher-led Conservative Government was interpreted not as some sort of ideological sea-change, but as the British working-class’s angry response to the multiple economic and political failures of Jim Callaghan’s Labour government.

 

Under the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system, the Conservatives had (as always) benefited from the large number of votes cast for the Liberal Party. But the size of the Conservatives’ majority in the House of Commons by no means reflected the party’s share of the popular vote. With 13.6 million votes (43.9 percent) the Conservatives enjoyed a clear plurality, but the party’s tally was still well below that of the 15.8 million votes cast for their opponents – Labour and the Liberals.

 

Baroness Thatcher’s admirers may be loathe to admit it, but at no time in her eleven year reign did the Conservative Party’s neoliberal programme ever attract more than the 43.9 percent it received in 1979.
 

What she was able to do, however, was unite the Right's plurality and bind it ever-more-tightly to the Conservative Party’s radical economic and social programme. The middle-class voters who, under the hapless Ted Heath, had all but given up hope that the “lower orders” would ever be put back in their proper place, were both inspired and invigorated by the Tories’ “Iron Lady”.

 

This unity on the Right was not, however, answered by unity on the Left. The right of the Labour Party simply wasn’t willing to follow Tony Benn into the radical territory dictated by the party’s socialist ideology. Egged on by the right-wing British media (which needed no assistance in recognising an opportunity to divide and conquer when it saw one) the 15-17 million British voters who opposed Thatcherism fruitlessly divvied up their support between Labour, the Liberal Party and the Labour Right’s breakaway Social Democratic Party.
 

In sociological terms this splitting of the Left reflected the professional middle-classes’ political refusal to surrender either their status (or their taxes!) to working-class people. When the chips were down (and Thatcherism made damn sure the chips were always down) even these ostensibly “conscience-driven” members of the British bourgeoisie refused to recognise working-class Britons as their social and intellectual equals.

 

As Margaret Thatcher set about defeating the organised working-class in the mines and factories, their middle-class "comrades" were waging a parallel campaign of class warfare inside the Labour Party.

 

Thatcherism’s ultimate triumph, therefore, is not represented in Britain’s pulverised trade unions and privatised industries (unions can be rebuilt, industries can be renationalised) but in the person of Tony Blair and his ideologically de-fanged “New” Labour Party.

 

“You turn if you want to.” Margaret Thatcher famously told the 1980 Conservative Party Conference. “The Lady’s not for turning!”

 

If only the British Left had been equally determined to stay the course.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News. The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 12 April 2013.

From Thatcher's Britain To Key's New Zealand: The Song Remains The Same