Labour and the Livingston Campaign

Most of the balloting will be done by the time this magazine reaches its readers, though the result is not announced until 19 February. What has the campaign told us?

It has confirmed that there are still real links between Labour and the working-class bedrock organisations, the trade unions; that there is some life still inside the Labour Party; and that the Labour Party's individual members are very far from all being keen Blairites. Local Labour Parties and trade unions have organised hustings, or meetings for Livingstone alone, and typically drawn several hundred people to them. Livingstone has the clear majority in such meetings.

Summed up soberly, however, the facts unfortunately do not disprove the general assessment made by this magazine in recent years, that there has been a radical and drastic (though perhaps not yet quite final) closing-off of the channels of working-class political representation within the Labour Party. The New Labour machine was forced to let Livingstone into the selection contest not by working-class activists using the internal mechanisms of the Labour Party, but by the media.

For their own reasons, the media gave a platform to Livingstone's lampooning of the attempts to exclude him. Eventually the embarrassment became too much for Blair. That was a victory for the Labour and union rank and file, and it opened up valuable opportunities. Unfortunately it sets no precedent for ordinary working-class activists - with fewer, or no, contacts in the media - to get their say within New Labour.

Even while the Livingstone furore has been going on, New Labour has handpicked the Greater London Assembly candidates, Blairites every one. It has imposed its rigged electoral college for the selection. It has defied calls for Labour's London manifesto to be decided democratically rather than by top-level "consultation". The Millbank machine has been able to do all those things without any large kickback inside the party.

Hasn't the Livingstone campaign rallied forces, in the Labour Party and in the trade unions, who may be able to open up the party in the coming months and years, even if they can't do it now? Yes, to some extent. But to what extent? The meetings have been big. They have also, mostly, been quite tame. Livingstone, a skilful judge of mood, has played most of those meetings in his "95% Blairite" rather than his "Red Ken" persona. The questioning is not sharp. Sales of the left press (of all tendencies) at these meetings are surprisingly small. Outside a few freelance initiatives - for example by the Communication Workers' Broad Left - there is little open grassroots organisation round the Livingstone campaign. What organisation there is comes down from a website and Livingstone's personal office.

In sum: the Livingstone campaign has been an important opening for socialists, to be taken up with all suitable energy; but there are no grounds yet for supposing that it has radically changed the overall trends within the Labour Party.

After the ballot

And after the ballot? An opinion poll has shown a two-to-one majority among Labour Party members backing Livingstone in favour of him standing independently if it comes to that. And so he should. If London trade-unionists and Labour Party members have chosen Livingstone, and done so fundamentally on a clear class issue, opposing tube privatisation, why should they then defer to the Millbank mafia?

Here too, however, we need a balanced assessment. The idea, fairly common on the left, that it will be a great breakthrough if Livingstone stands as an independent, but a relatively tame business if he wins Labour's selection, is false. The best outcome for socialists is for Livingstone to win Labour's selection. Whatever Livingstone's protestations of "95%" loyalty to Blair - which will no doubt continue - that outcome will inescapably create more political space within the New Labour structure and stir up forces for a future working-class political alternative to Blair.

Livingstone as an independent, however, will build no working-class political alternative to Labour. His politics are, as he himself once put it, "the cynical soft-sell approach". His record, in many different movements, is not that of someone who works honestly and constructively with other forces on the left, but that of a shyster, concerned for his personal position and personal following (organised in secret or semi-secret cabals) rather than for the movement.

He certainly will not link up with the organised left slate contesting the GLA elections, the Socialist Alliance. The Independent and the Guardian have run stories about Livingstone organising his own independent GLA slate. If he does that, it is certain to be a rotten "Popular Front" affair, full of maverick Liberal-Democratic or even Tory types, rather than a labour movement effort. In fact, if Livingstone does run, he seems more likely to do so as an individual, standing "for London" rather than for labour, and relying on the media for his campaign rather than on any organised force. He may set some Labour supporters thinking about political alternatives, but he himself will point them in a different direction.

The precondition for anything positive for socialism coming out of the Livingstone campaign is a consistent and independent political presence of the working-class socialist left.

A workers' list

The Socialist Alliance, a joint committee of almost all the main left groups in London, has chosen its first five candidates for the Greater London Assembly elections.

The five are Janine Booth, a tubeworker and a member of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty; Greg Tucker, left candidate for general secretary of the RMT rail union and a member of the International Socialist Group; Kate Ford, a teacher trade unionist and a member of the Workers' Power group; and Paul Foot and Mark Steel of the SWP.

The "list" has 11 places, but the remaining places are deliberately been left open for now. The Socialist Alliance is discussing with a number of groups, activists and prominent figures outside the organised left factions about the possibility of them coming in on the list.

In addition to the 11 "list" places, elected by PR, there will be 14 "first past the post" places on the Greater London Assembly, elected in constituencies each of which covers two or three London boroughs. Socialist Alliance candidates for those constituencies will be chosen locally. There are other left or "alternative" slates, but the Socialist Alliance is the only one clearly counterposed to New Labour on a broad working-class basis. Its platform states: "By supporting the Socialist Alliance you can elect people to the Greater London Assembly who will speak up for workers, the jobless, pensioners and students, and against the bankers, the bosses and the profiteers. You can speak out against the way New Labour has abandoned many of those who elected it in 1997 in order to serve big business. And you can say you want a government that serves the working class as the Tories serve the rich".

The immediate task for the Socialist Alliance now, in the run-up to the election campaign proper in April, is to pull together activists and to raise funds for the campaign. At least £30,000 is needed for the all-London campaign, and additional funds for the constituency campaigns.

The renewed unity of the left is very welcome indeed. A similar alliance was brought together for the London Euro-elections in June 1999, but fell apart before campaigning started because the SWP decided to bail out and vote Socialist Labour Party instead. This time the cooperation seems solid. There are, of course, still considerable political differences and tensions within the Socialist Alliance. Fortunately, a rational approach to unity, which will allow each group to produce its own literature, and the vast field of operation in the GLA elections - five million voters to address, so socialists are hardly likely to be tripping over each other at the doorknocker - should help keep this problem manageable.

The SWP, the biggest group in the alliance, puts its stress on the idea of the list presenting "a socialist alternative to Blair". To our mind, that is a false way of drawing the lines. The proper main axis of the campaign is not contesting the claim to the rather battered and shopsoiled word "socialism", but class. Our message should not be: "Blair has one doctrine. We have another. Follow us, and we'll see you right" - but rather: "We're standing to give workers a chance to vote for candidates who will speak up for their interests against the government and the New Labour machine". We are for working-class political representation. We want workers to start agitating for their trade unions to take up that idea.

We uphold working-class interests on key immediate issues - a major theme of the Socialist Alliance campaign, by common consent, is defence of public services - and explain how the broad basic idea of socialism ties those issues together. However, the "socialist alternative" will not develop by left groups proclaiming themselves - though self-advertisement and recruitment are legitimate and necessary activities - but rather, by building working-class political representation and giving its logic a sharp and militant edge. The emancipation of the working class must be the task of the workers themselves!