Blair retreats on 21st Century Party

New Labour's "21st Century Party" proposal, which among other things proposed the abolition of General Committees in Constituency Labour Parties, has now reached the end of the membership consultation exercise. The report presented to Labour's National Executive now stops short of proposing the immediate abolition of General Committees, although it leaves the possibility open for the future. It is also telling that the results of the membership consultation have not been produced in full - even to the National Executive - suggesting that the responses were hostile.

As the revolt around Ken Livingstone in the London Labour Party also shows, the Labour Party membership is by no means 100% "on message".

Grassroots Alliance candidates continue to score well in the elections for the constituency section of the National Executive. However, their percentage of the total vote has dropped a bit - 40% this year, 48% last year, and 46% in 1998 - and, perhaps more importantly, the turnout for the ballot has dropped dramatically.

There has been an exodus of Party activists fairly consistently since the 1997 General Election. All over the country, ward and constituency level organisation is falling apart. The Government's huge majority may enable New Labour not to bother about rebuilding their activist base for the coming General Election, but even the Blairites have acknowledged that this is a big problem for the future.

Resigning from local party positions or tearing up your Party card is a protest action that only weakens opposition inside the Party. It is an attack on the position of the Blairites, but not one that serves the interests of the working class, nor its need for a voice in politics. But it is from the unions that any serious challenge to the Blair machine will now have to come. In all previous recent challenges to right wing projects inside the Party, the CLP activists provided the spark of the campaign, vital though union support undoubtedly was. Now the changes in Party structure and the state of the CLPs changes things.

Anyone can point to half a dozen different issues over which the unions could have challenged the Government: Tube privatisation, the level of the minimum wage, NHS pay, the provisions of the Employment Relations Act and so on. But the union leaders have been bending over backwards to prevent any confrontation. The excuses for this kind of behaviour have changed in recent months, away from the stock "you can't expect things to change quickly" into a range of more subtle and varied excuses.

Among them is the claim now being made now by trade union leaders that they are fighting inside the Labour Party structures for the unions' policies - it's just that they're doing it behind closed doors so that the media can't catch them at it (and their members can't hold them to account for doing it so poorly).

The lie is unfortunately revealed by their actions. At this summer's National Policy Forum an amendment opposed to the Public-Private Partnership initiative on London Underground narrowly failed to get enough support to enable it to be presented to Labour Party Conference even as a minority position. This was directly as a result of both UNISON and the TGWU voting against their own policy and in defence of the Blairites.

When fighting to call the union leaders to account serious socialists face an obstacle in the sectarianism and short-sightedness of much of the left. Too often union left-wings are ceding the whole terrain of Labour Party politics to the Blairites and are either not discussing it at all, or, worse, actively arguing for trade unionists to withdraw from the Party processes.

The working class can and must fight the Blairites politically on two fronts: both electorally (using the Socialist Alliances and so on) and organisationally (by forcing our trade union delegates to Labour Party bodies - from General Committees up to the NEC itself, and also union-backed MPs - to follow the mandates issued to them by the democratic structures of the union movement). Anything else is a strategy for even greater defeat, unless you believe that from the jaws of a political defeat in our own movement our class can steal victory on the back of a Socialist Alliance-type challenge in the next General Election. But sectarianism is rife among union left-wingers, and having right-wing union leaders "in the pocket of Tony Blair" is actually quite useful if your project is presenting yourself as the "socialist alternative" for potential recruits rather than actually mobilising the mass labour movement in a revolt against our suppression.

We must start by explaining the need for workers' political representation and raising the demand for it - by any means necessary. It is an argument that has some resonance amongst ordinary workers who are fighting in a small, localised way against the myriad attacks on the working class. But it requires us to reach out beyond the ranks of the organised trade union left, and the now shrivelled left inside the Labour Party. That is by no means an easy task, and yet it provides us with the only opportunity to effectively challenge the Blairite grip on our movement.