Groucho Marxism

It should be clear to everyone by now that the UK Labour Party no longer represents the interests of working people. (They should really change the name.) This raises the question of whether the Labour Party has ever truly represented the interests of working people. It certainly represented the interests of working people in the past far more than it does now. In the aftermath of WWII, the Labour Party expanded the welfare state and set up the National Health Service, which was – and still is, in theory at least – committed to providing universal healthcare for all, free at the point of use. This was considered revolutionary at the time, and was part of the wider ‘post-war consensus’, the social model whereby all the major political parties in Britain tacitly agreed to treat workers a bit more humanely.

The reason they did this was not altruism, but the threat of communism. Difficult as it is to believe now, at that time the ruling class in the UK and other western European countries genuinely feared that communism might take hold in the west of Europe as it had done in the east. The Soviet Union was ascendant in the post-WWII era and in 1961 effectively won the space race when Yuri Gagarin became the first person to journey into outer space, much to the Americans’ chagrin. But the Americans got their own back on the Soviets by putting Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969, which was a huge propaganda coup for the West. This event can be seen as the beginning of the end of the communist threat and the beginning of the end of the post-war consensus in Britain.

The actual end came 10 years later with the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in 1979. Thatcher famously tore up the post-war consensus and ushered in the period of neoliberalism. The Labour Party initially responded by electing the socialist and anti-imperialist Michael Foot as leader, who led the party into the 1983 general election. This election did not go well for Labour: the party obtained its lowest share of the vote in 65 years and the fewest parliamentary seats since 1935. In response, the party turned to the centrist Neil Kinnock, an event which marked the beginning of Labour’s descent into neoliberalism. However, Kinnock lost both of the general elections he contested as leader, in 1987 and 1992. Defeat in the latter came as a surprise to many, as Labour had seemed on course to win.

Nonetheless, the party subsequently turbocharged its journey to neoliberalism by electing Tony Blair as leader in 1994. Labour’s general election victories in the 1997, 2001, and 2005 were seen by many as a vindication of this strategy, the argument being that these victories, along with the heavy defeat under the socialist Foot in 1983, demonstrated that ordinary British people just don’t want socialism. But this is a facile analysis which completely ignores the broader context. Labour didn’t lose in 1983 because it was too left wing; rather, the Conservatives won because of the Falklands War. This is clear from the opinion polls of the time, and Thatcher admitted as much in her memoirs. Blair understood this too, as he reportedly told Robin Cook: ‘The thing I learned … is that wars make prime ministers popular.’

Although the ‘Falklands factor’ would have been enough win the election for the Conservatives, their resounding victory was assured by the split of the anti-Tory vote. In 1981 Labour right-wingers, disgruntled at the election of Foot as leader, broke off to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP). The effect of the new party was to hand marginal constituencies to the Tories, who won 65 more seats despite receiving 700,000 fewer votes than they had secured in the previous election. If Labour’s left program really cost it the 1983 election, it must follow that the party would have won had it moved right. But Labour moved significantly rightwards for the 1987 election – and lost. It fought the 1992 election from a position still further to the right – and lost again!

It took until 1997 for the ‘modernizers’ to be ‘proved’ correct, and only once the Tories had been stripped of all credibility by endless scandals and infighting. Labour would go on to lose two more perfectly winnable elections standing on a right-wing platform, in 2010 and 2015. In fact it has lost just as many elections standing on a right-wing platform (1987, 1992, 2010, 2015) as it has won (1997, 2001, 2005, 2024). But the main flaw with the argument that moving to the right is popular with voters is that when Labour moves to the right, there is simply no possibility of a left-wing party winning a general election, as no mass left-wing party then exists. As a point of logic, therefore, it doesn’t make any sense to use Labour’s victories under Blair (or Starmer) as evidence that socialism is unpopular.

All of the above highlights the dire need for a genuinely left-wing party in the UK with widespread support, that puts the interests of workers front and centre. Thankfully, one is currently in the process of being set up – the still as-yet unnamed party provisionally referred to as Your Party. Unfortunately the launch of this party has been mired by infighting between its two figureheads, Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana, and their respective teams of advisers. But this infighting may actually be a blessing in disguise, as it demonstrates that the party must be built from the ground up rather than from the top down. It is imperative therefore that we socialists join this new party, work to build the party at a grassroots level, and fight to ensure that the party follows a genuinely left-wing program.