Cutbacks are the last thing we need
September 29, 2009
All conferences are slightly delusional and the disconnect between reality and rhetoric has never been greater than in Brighton this week.
The media gleefully reported on Monday that the new Labour project was complete - the party had finally learned to love Peter Mandelson. Correspondents were falling over themselves to praise Mandelson, even on the London train later that night.
My experience was slightly different. On entering the hall I was surrounded by men in suits watching the great man on the big screen. At that moment he was happily telling the world that universities and higher education were the cornerstone of his department - places were increasing, participation was increasing and we were all for tertiary education.
At 5pm today I will be at a demonstration outside London Metropolitan University in support of unions which are strenuously opposing 500 redundancies and cuts in student numbers of 5,000 per year. Discrepancies surrounding student numbers and course completion allowed the Higher Education Funding Council for England to impose savage cuts. It has demanded a repayment of over £35 million and imposed funding cuts of £10 million a year. Mandelson, the secretary of state responsible, and minister David Lamy have refused to intervene.
Elsewhere postal workers are being balloted on a national strike to defend the service against job losses and privatisation. And MG Rover workers have already lost their jobs, the factory has closed and venture capitalists have walked off with millions of pounds.
One common thread links these three stories. Mandelson - the market-orientated policies of his enormous department and his philosophy as the EU trade commissioner.
New Labour pretends the problems the people of Britain and the government now face have nothing to do with its policies. It is almost surreal.
The current job losses, insecurity and rising poverty are born directly out of the greed-is-best years of the 1980s and ’90s, which ushered in banking deregulation and a rampant financial services sector. New Labour followed a path already laid down by the Tories and we are now paying the multibillion-pound price.
In only eight months there will be an election. It is already obvious how the Tories and Lib Dems propose to pay off this debt. David Cameron and George Osborne know what they want from a putative Tory government. They may have shed the anti-social, anti-people image of the Thatcher era but they still preach the same economic message - cut taxes at the top, finance it through reduced social spending and mass means testing and leave the rest of the country to get by on the alleged trickle-down benefits.
As for the Liberal Democrats, they seem to have decided that their future lies in out-nastying the Tories on spending cuts. Anyone harbouring any illusions about the Lib Dems should read the excellent article by Colin Burgon in Monday’s Morning Star in support of Leeds refuse workers threatened with enormous pay cuts by the Lib Dem-led council.
Labour must now decide its own direction.
Governments have a choice in a recession. John McDonnell pointed this out at the Labour Representation Committee rally on Monday night. They can either cut public spending and blame the poor or they can invest.
In the 1931 recession, Ramsay MacDonald joined the Tories in cutting the meagre unemployment benefit. In the economic crisis of the 1970s, Callaghan tied the government to the infamous International Monetary Fund package which forced public spending cuts and provoked the strikes of 1978-9. Labour lost subsequent elections in both cases. However, the 1945 Labour government invested in health, welfare, housing and education and is rightly well remembered for laying the foundations of the welfare state.
Our society can ill afford a fresh regime of brutal cuts. Support for far-right politics is growing all over Europe. It reflects a wail of despair - inadequate housing, unemployment and hopelessness are driving people to blame the nearest equally unfortunate person. The BNP will not be defeated by debate. The answer lies in mass action and the promotion of an alternative vision for society that conquers inequality by uniting people. On the fringes of the Brighton conference there has been intense, healthy discussion, but to smaller audiences than in the past.
Public spending cuts and tax rises for the majority won’t defeat the Tories. Tackling inequality, making the publicly owned banks accountable, building homes and protecting jobs could. And consigning Trident and wars abroad to history would fund it.
Labour was founded from a coalition of progressive forces. That coalition is the essential ingredient of electoral success.
