This is version 2.0 of this particular blog, and is inspired by a number of recent happenings. Most recently, a friend and political co-thinker told me that he was considering joining the Labour Party if and when Tony Blair resigned as PM. Before that, at the AGM of the British Youth Council, where I spoke in favour of their adopting a no platforms policy, a member of Coventry North-East Constituency Labour Party asked me, unawares, whether I was a Labour member because I “sounded like one.” And before that, just before the August NEC meeting, Wes Streeting had a light-hearted pop at me.

I was supporting a motion stating a commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and he thought that I should surely oppose said two-state solution because, as a Green, I should be opposed in principle to nation-states. Aside from the factual error, we got into a conversation about our respective political parties (for those somehow not aware, Mr. Streeting is a prominent and proud Labour Student), and I made reference to the fact that the Greens don’t accept donations from corporate bodies, to avoid compromising our principles. Wes’ retort was that this was fine, as it meant that we’d never win, unlike Labour and the generous donations they receive from Trade Unions.

These three things are not unrepresentative of the kinds of comment I receive as a Green with some political savvy, skills and success. Some people tell me that the Greens should form a distinct current within the Labour Party, a bit like the Socialist Environment and Resource Association (SERA). Others tell me that there’s more hope of making an electable Party green than making the Green Party electable. Still others tell me that, because of my values, I should simply “accept the truth” – that I am a Labour man.

I think it’s about time to explain why you shouldn’t ever confuse my sympathy with, and commitment to, the labour movement with support for the Labour Party. Yes, I’d rather we had a Labour Government than a Tory one, but that’s not exactly saying much. It’s also about time to make clear that those people who still think that the Greens are a bunch of howling sandal-wearing hippies with unkempt beards and bowls of lentil soup are wrong.

Basically, it is my belief that the Labour Party is compromised beyond repair, too riddled with neoliberal ideology to be worth saving. Not just because of the changes to Clause 4 in the mid-Nineties, although that’s a part of it. In fact, I don’t believe that the Labour Party has lived up to its name, values or principles with any consistency since its peak sixty years ago.

In my first proper blog I mentioned that I was loving this news story, which is headlined “Business wields more power over Labour than the unions ever did.” Looking back, that was a flippant and frankly ridiculous thing to say. The truth is, it scares the pants off me.

I’ve been concerned for a long time with the effect vast sums of cash can have on democracy; anyone else remember Chiquita (the banana company) donating huge sums to both the Republicans and Democrats in the 2000 US Presidential elections to ensure that, whoever won, Chiquita got their way on US intervention into EU import rules? The point is that money is without ideology, and corporations owned by shareholders are accountable only for the money they make. According to good old Milton Friedman, the father of neoliberalism and ideologue to Thatcher and Reagan, a corporation’s only moral or ethical duty is to maximise profit for its shareholders – and if that means subcontracting, outsourcing or downright mistreating employees then that’s fine. It’s why corporate social responsibility is a risk vs. reward exercise.

I’ll explain. Anyone else remember Fight Club? It’s a lot easier to illustrate with a quote.

“A new car built by my company leaves somewhere travelling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.”

Anyway, this is all tangential (albeit related). My point was to demonstrate how multinationals in particular, and shareholder-owned corporate bodies more generally, are accountable only for the bottom line. When they start to influence democratic processes then I start to get real itchy. See, politicians are people too, and Marcel Mauss explained really well that gifts come with obligations. “What’s that, multi-million pound campaign donor? You don’t want us to push through this legislation that will knock your profits? Well, OK, if you’re sure it’s nothing dodgy…”

So, I was worried by that news story, although it didn’t really tell anyone who was paying attention anything they hadn’t already worked out. No, what really freaked me out was my holiday reading, and what it told me about Labour Governments through the decades.

The first Labour Government, in 1923, was a coalition with the Liberals. For the entire eleven months of its time in office, they were passive. The Budget simply stated the status quo, and didn’t challenge it. Yes, John Wheatley introduced a solid piece of legislation to allow local authorities to build affordable housing for working people, but equally some of the problems that so beset the Labour Party today were around back then; Alexander Grant of McVitie’s fame offered PM Ramsay MacDonald £40,000 in shares and the use of a car and got a baronetcy two months later. The Labour Government was toppled in the wake of a letter later found to have been fabricated by MI5, of which more in another post.

Riding high on the introduction of universal suffrage, Labour came to Government again in 1929. The Great Crash of Wall Street totally undermined their attempts to tackle unemployment, but there was no political will in the Party to nationalise industry at this time. Despite the clear demonstration of the flaws of the capitalist system, the Labour Government stuck to orthodoxy. The widespread sale of sterling by bankers and speculators in 1931 led to the suggestion by a Government committee that public spending be slashed and unemployment benefit be cut; the Bank of England made clear that the Government ought to follow the recommendations lest widespread economic catastrophe occur. Despite TUC opposition, the Government chose to carry this forward, under the new guise of a “National” Government, in which most of the Labour Cabinet members were not included (to their credit).

Now, things were somewhat different in 1945; Labour won a huge majority and actually did some seriously radical stuff, like creating the National Health Service, nationalising coal production (albeit with huge compensation payments to the prior owners), introducing National Insurance and social security and so on. When Labour Party members talk about their proud history, this is generally the stuff they’re talking about. It’s important to note that these institutions, while definitely worthy of our respect, didn’t go as far as their original proponents had intended; they became bureaucratic rather than democratic, on the grounds that there was “not yet in Britain a large number of workers capable of taking over large enterprises.”

In 1947, however, things changed. The Labour Government had taken a loan from the US post-war, in exchange for deciding to make sterling “convertible” to dollars. This “convertibility” led to currency traders gambling on the value of sterling vs. the dollar, placing a huge drain on UK currency reserves. This was enough to get the Government to stop moving its manifesto forward and instead focus on “consolidation” – so there was no reform of the public schools system, for example, nor an abolition of the death penalty. In 1948 and 1949, when unofficial strikes paralysed the London docks, the Labour Government responded by using the Emergency Powers Act to denounce the strikers as Communists in broadcasts to the nation and threatened to prosecute them for sedition. Troops were moved in to break the strikes and the Government backed strike-breaking action until the day was carried.

After a General Election they won by 5 seats, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, drew up a Budget to fund support for the US’ military intervention in Korea, at a cost of some £4,700 million, paid for in part by introducing charges for items previously free on the NHS. They lost the next election by 17 seats.

Skip forward thirteen years, to 1964, and Labour are back in Government (albeit with a slender majority). Thanks to the previous Tory Chancellor, Labour came into power with an £800 million deficit, and so many of the election pledges had to be shelved in order to balance the books. The Governor of the Bank of England, a Tory appointee, demanded wage freezes, cuts in public spending, a rise in unemployment and a sharp rise in the bank rate. Another wave of the sale of sterling came at the same time, and so Labour decided to raise the bank rate. The PM, Harold Wilson, realised that the compulsion of economic power was able totally to override a democratic mandate.

So, behind the Cabinet’s back, an agreement was reached with the US. The States would help the pound and stave off British devaluation, and the British Government would deflate the home economy, initiate a statutory incomes policy, back the Vietnam War, and maintain a military force east of Suez, all in breach of Labour Party policy.

A short while later, things get very odd. The Labour-affiliated National Union of Seamen was involved in a pay dispute with the British shipping industry, and so called a strike. Once the effects worked their way to the City, the press started calling on the Government to break the strike, not least because of the incomes policy the Government had adopted previously, thanks to US intervention. The PM and the Minister of Labour explained that the workers’ fairly modest demands would basically undermine the incomes policy on which the Government depended.

Months after the seamen returned to work, more sterling sales hit the market and, on “Black Wednesday,” the PM slashed more than £500 million from public spending and announced a total wage freeze. When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were brought in after the devaluation of the pound, NHS prescription charges were restored and the proposed increase of the school leaving age was postponed. The IMF’s influence carried on way past that, though; a pledge to build 500,000 houses by 1970 was abandoned.

There’s other dubious stuff at this time, however. The Directors of Bristol Siddeley Engines stole £5 million from the Government by fabricating wage bills, and yet the MD wasn’t even fined. The contractors who built Ronan Point, a huge block of council flats for working-class tenants in East London that collapsed due to design failure were awarded the contract for the repairs! Perhaps worst of all, Barbara Castle produced a White Paper called “In Place Of Strife,” allowing the prosecution and imprisonment of striking workers, which eventually failed.

So, yes, this is the proud history of Labour Governments in the UK; a mishmash of some very cool stuff about sixty years ago, and a lot of being bullied around by people (let’s be honest: men) with money. And yet still, people say that someone with my values, my beliefs, my principles should join the Labour Party, help “restore it to its former glory.”

I wasn’t alive in 1945. Hell, my mum was less than a week old when Labour came to power after World War II. So why on earth are people so obsessed with this story-time past?

It’s easy to work out why. Humans, all of us, have a tendency to mythologise things from outside our experience. Britain under Thatcher and Major was grim, we think, so the “other side” must have been some sort of utopian dream. But think about it…there was a time when Thatcher seemed like a better choice than Labour. Even though the only public-sector pay rises she offered were to the armed forces (a tidy 14%, in fact), people voted Tory in droves back in ’79. Even after race riots, she was re-elected. Even after her own party ousted her in favour of the greyest man in politics, the Tories still won because Labour didn’t have the edge.

And then along came Tony and “fixed” everything. In moving the party to the “centre ground,” he also stripped it of its identity. Decrying the word “socialist” and seeking radically to change key policies to a nice lilac colour, his goal – no, his pledge -- was not the supremacy of Labour Party values but electoral success. And, yes, he delivered.

To paraphrase The Way Of The Gun, an awesome film by the guy who wrote The Usual Suspects, it’s like people want to be politicians more than they want to do politics. It’s not about ideas at the moment, it’s about conviction. It’s about staying on-message. It’s about lying sugar-coating things to make them easier to swallow.

So what’s the point of all this?

I am proud to be a member of a political party that does not let financial donors dictate policy. I am proud to be a member of a political party whose policy is decided democratically and openly. I am proud to be a member of a political party that takes a holistic view of both people and planet, and I am proud to be a member of the only political party in England and Wales that works hard, day in and day out, to empower people at the grass roots and get them involved in the issues that matter to them.

You can keep your big budgets. You can keep your mass media campaigns. You can certainly keep your mealy-mouthed pledges to whatever you think the voters want this week. We’re doing just fine, thank you. It won’t be any time soon, but there’ll be a Green Government within my lifetime, and it will be a Government focused on improving conditions across society, with an eye on making sure that said society has a future.

In all honestly, can you say the same?

As ever, if you’d like to discuss this or any other topic, please check out my contact details and get in touch. Oh, and you can join the Green Party here ;-)

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