By Len McCluskey
We have a fight on our hands.
In fact, we have two. The conference season makes it clear that the left faces twin challenges.
First of all, to ensure that Labour is re-elected at next year’s general election and the Tories sent crashing to a well-merited fourth defeat.
Second, there is a need to push Labour to finally make a complete break with its neo-liberal hangover and got into that election fighting on policies which will really make a difference to working people.
In the light of the opinion polls, there is no doubt that the first task is difficult. And some might look at the experience of the last twelve years and argue that the second task is more like a dream utterly divorced from reality.
But I would argue that both can be achieved. What is for certain is that both must be attempted. Come polling day, it will be a stark choice – a Labour government or a return of the Tories.
Anyone ducking that hard choice is really retreating into a fantasy world. The great mass of our movement is not going to follow them there.
The fact is that we have six months to stop a Tory government which will slash and burn our public services, freeze public sector pay and make us all work longer – just in order to bail out their friends in the City, for whom it would swiftly be back to business-as-usual under Cameron and Osborne.
Of course, that hard fact does not on its own make Labour’s record look any better.
There is no doubt that gains for working people have been many during Labour’s time in office. And there have been many disappointments too.
It’s not so much a matter of “is the glass half full or half empty?” but more of “is the glass filling up or draining away?” I believe that recent months, including Labour conference, have shown a modest move away from neo-liberalism towards a more social democratic and interventionist strategy.
The 50p tax rate for high earners, the action to help the motor industry – limited though it is – the commitment to resume council house building and the resolve to keep spending to protect health and education all point in that direction.
However, most working people still remain to be convinced that the government is on their side . They see unemployment rising and factories closing, with the dreadful prospect of a ‘lost generation’ for young people, just like in the 1980s, hanging over families and communities.
Gordon Brown has said that laissez-faire is dead. He is right - or at least he ought to be right. But there are too many signs of the City going back to its old tricks, with obscene bonuses being handed out and regulation being watered down under pressure from the fat cats.
But the biggest problem is that we are now having the wrong economic debate. Instead of talking about market failure and how to put the excesses of neo-liberalism behind us for good we have let ourselves get dragged into a false debate about public spending.
Does anyone seriously believe that the public sector was the cause of the economic crisis last year? Or that it was nurses and paramedics, dinner ladies and refuse collectors, rather than greedy bankers who pushed the world economy to the brink of collapse
The Tories and their media allies have pulled off a masterstroke in diverting debate away from what they, their class, and their ideology is responsible for and making the issue public sector debt instead.
That in turn has been used as a gateway for the parties to outbid each other in their virility in slashing public spending.
We must say loud and clear that if there is a public debt problem that can’t be coped with through economic growth – and that is very much open to argument - then the blame lies with the bankers and the cost to the taxpayer of bailing them out.
It is not just economically wrong, it is politically immoral that we should be talking of public spending cuts because of the burden of solving capitalism’s excesses.
If we let this argument go unchecked, we will see the obscenity of teachers and doctors being sacked to pay for the crisis made in the City while the villains go back to paying themselves mega-bonuses.
We should say “no cuts to jobs; no pay freezes; no cuts to pensions and no cuts to services.”
If we want to cut debt, then there is another way to do it. Dump the Identity Card Scheme completely, tax the spivs and speculators and the rich elite, close the loopholes that cost £35 billion per year in tax avoidance and stop the wars of intervention and get out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The economic debate should now be returned to two themes: How we save jobs in the here and now; and how we develop an economic plan to make sure the crisis of last year is never repeated.
On the first point, I have a few concrete suggestions:
n Use Government Procurement - £175 billion annually – to boost British industry and in particular guarantee apprenticeships as a condition of public sector contracts.
n Work out a real strategy backed by cash – as the French and German governments are doing – to protect skilled jobs in key industries like motors and construction.
n Place a windfall tax on the energy companies, which are ripping off the consumers.
n Turn the house-building plan into action now. Let people see the new homes going up around them before polling day.
The movement also needs a narrative for the future. If laissez faire is indeed dead, what is Labour putting in its place?
I think we need to be proud of our values once more - of the State intervening through control and where necessary ownership to ensure a balanced economy, of action to curb the inequality which is the inevitable result of the free market, of putting peoples interests before those of the City, of saying that making the goods and services we need is more important than making money for a few.
Those policies and values are the policies and values which can still produce a Labour victory.
Let’s use every day of the next six months to get that message first to the Government and then to working people that there is nothing inevitable about a Tory victory, if our Party can find the courage to change.
Len McCluskey is Assistant General Secretary of Unite and the candidate adopted by the left in the union as candidate for General Secretary of the union in next year’s election for the post.
The next national supporters meeting of the United left is being held on Saturday, December 5 at 12 noon. The venue is the University of London Union (Room 3E), Malet Street, London WC1E 7HY. The nearesr tube stations are Euston, Euston Square, and Goodge Street - all within a ten minute walk.
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