| The Need for a New Left Wing Party 1 The Demise of the Labour Party as a party to represent the less well off. Since its beginnings the Labour Party has drifted towards middle class control, and then towards representing the interests of the middle classes above those of the working classes. Already by the time of Wilson, they failed to support the attempts of the unions to get a larger slice of the pie for the working classes. That very same thing, at that same time, was achieved in other countries, such as Sweden, that now have effectively, no poverty. That was one chance that was missed. The next chance was in 1997 when Labour had a huge majority and significant change was easily within their grasp. Inexplicably they showed very little inclination to help the low paid except by hand-outs; the middle classes got richer and the working classes sank back to a level worse than 1971. During that period the nature of the Labour Party was radically transformed , into a non conservative middle class party, and now the process is pretty well complete. A Labour manifesto in 2015, that did very little in the way of offering to get rid of poverty or raise low wages, was condemned after its failure by senior Labour leaders for its radicalism, and for discarding the Blair heritage. They urged a more “aspirational” approach. It seems that the future of the Labour party is to be further to the right than even Ed Milliband's tentative leadership took it. Influential party members regard anything else as likely to lead to electoral defeat. They are thinking of the 1980s and their perspective belongs to that era, which has now passed. They are sadly not mindful of the dissatisfaction and frustration of a large number of people in Britain, largely those at the bottom end of society, whose views you would have expected a left wing party to recognise and want to express and represent, a natural body of support for a radical policy aimed at getting rid of poverty once and for all by the relatively simple means of putting up low wages { to around the level of the lower middle classes, say £19,500 pa (based on 2013 prices)}A larger slice of the pie for the less well off. The consequences of poverty have now been festering like a wound or a disease for a few more generations, Britain is that much more consumed and destroyed at its core by it's fallout, our national life is that much more undermined, economically, socially, morally, intellectually. Our confidence in democracy itself is dangerously waning. And yet, the middle class led Labour party either have no particular interest in solving the problem of poverty, or they don't feel confident that they could win an election on such a programme, and instead peg their policies just barely to the left of the Conservative Party. They may be right. But they might at least be able to compute that if they were to get the votes of the 8 million low paid plus 3 million unemployed, as well as a reasonable number of their traditional voters, including some of the middle-class left , they would be in with a pretty good chance, and likely do a lot better than they did in the last election with no particular programme. It would surely be a risk worth taking, as it would bring within sight a goal that would be the culmination of a long working class struggle of which that party has been a part, and would arguably benefit the whole country and its economy. {That argument will be given later.} This missed chance tells us something about the Labour party that the left cannot ignore, that the Labour Party far from being a leading force in the effort to improve the lives of the poor, is now an obstruction. If the Labour party didn't exist we would have invented , recently, a far better one. The time is ripe for a new move to finally end the stark inequalities that degrade our country and harm the economy and the social life of the nation. People can see that it is necessary, people can see that it has gone on far longer that it should have or needs to have, people can see that it wouldn't require much to change it. The Labour party ought to be a source of leadership and a focus for expression of the desire for change. This is the big opportunity. It ought to provide a programme for how it should be achieved.. But it doesn't. Instead it seems not to have even noticed that there is a problem that must be solved, even though it is the problem that party was formed to solve; it doesn’t seem to notice that the rest of the nation is willing to hear proposals for it. It is time for the Labour Party to move out of the way. It is time for a new party to represent the less well off. Gregory Motton © 2015 |