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A PROBLEM OF POLICY
The problem for the CP arose out of the fact that the Broad Left had no programme to suggest as the agenda for the student movement, because the student movement, in the CP's perspective, had no purpose of its own. The only elements of a programme the CP could suggest were the figure to be set for the annual grants campaign, plus the defence of the 'autonomy' of student unions. But the Trots were as energetic as the CP in their defence of the 'autonomy' of student unions and liable to outbid the CP in militancy on the grants campaign. The fact that the student movement did not really exist and had no real agenda made it impossible for the Broad Left to defeat the Ultra-Left through reasoned political argument. It therefore sought to defeat it in two other ways, by counter-posing the politically inert majority of the student population to it and by organised bureaucratic manœuvre.
This state of affairs gave rise to the tendency for the rivalry between Broad Left and Ultra-Left to express itself in a rhetorical auction and the tendency for all and sundry to engage in relentless displacement activity. There being little of substance to discuss, what was really at issue between the CP and the IS (namely, in case you have forgotten, the class struggle in industry) was expressed obliquely through wrangles over student union constitutions and the clash of 'lines' on Chile, Northern Ireland, Poland, Portugal and so on, ad infinitum.
The tendency to engage in constitutional wrangles followed directly from the fact that, lacking either a serious programme or serious arguments, the Broad Left relied heavily on bureaucratic manœuvre to defend its position. That this should have provoked the Ultra-Left to challenge the existing organisational structures of the NUS and of student unions around the country was entirely natural. But this development had long-term implications. Because the politics of the Broad Left developed in opposition to the Ultra-Left, not in opposition to the Right, Broad Leftists – unlike the Labour Club activists of yesteryear – never learned how to out-argue the Right, there being no longer a Right to out-argue. The result was that a generation of both 'Broad-' and 'Ultra-' left-wing students became saturated with the idea that getting political power depended largely on manipulating constitutional structures if you could and subverting them if you couldn't manipulate them and, as that generation made its way up the Labour Party, the idea that power was gained by winning support in argument disappeared from the Party almost entirely.
The tendency to engage in displacement activity via arguments over foreign affairs and so forth also followed directly from the fact that there could be no serious argument about what student unions should be doing about their own agenda proper. The result was a catastrophic divorce in the minds of that generation between the notion of 'policy' and the notion of 'responsibility'.
It has become commonplace over the last decade for Labour-controlled Councils to have 'policies' on matters that do not concern them in the least (e.g. Nicaragua, Northern Ireland, the vanity of 'nuclear-free zones', etc. ad infinitum) while failing to have policies on matters that do; it is equally commonplace for Constituency Labour Parties and Ward Parties to have what they fondly describe as 'policies' which are not policies in the proper sense at all, and the same can be said of the Labour Party at the national level in recent years.
A policy is a thought-out commitment by a political party to do something specific about a particular issue as and when it is entrusted by the electorate with the responsibility for dealing with the issue in question. The Labour Party in Hackney (of which I have been a member since 1988) has responsibility for dealing with numerous issues in the borough. Its chronic and scandalous failure to discharge this responsibility properly is intimately connected with the fact that it does not have proper policies in respect of them. But its constituent ward parties have 'policies' galore.
My own ward party (North Defoe, in Stoke Newington) has a 'policy' of ensuring that at least 50 per cent of its delegates to the General Committee of Hackney North and Stoke Newington Constituency Labour Party (CLP) are women. This 'policy' is its own invention; there is nothing in the rules of the Labour Party at the national level to mandate or even authorise this. North Defoe Labour Party implements this 'policy' by operating a quota system, such that half of the delegate positions are reserved for women only, whether or not there are women candidates to fill them, the remaining positions being open to men and women alike. If there are not enough women candidates to fill the reserved posts, they may not be filled by male delegates, but remain unfilled as a matter of…policy. The result is that for most of the last six or seven years North Defoe has been chronically under-represented on the GC, and unable to do anything about the fact that the GC has been chronically inquorate, and the CLP has been chronically unable to function, and consequently unable to do anything about the fact that the performance of the Council has been an obscene farce.
The notion that North Defoe, which is the largest ward in the CLP, has a responsibility towards the CLP of which it is part to pull its full weight and enable the GC to carry out its responsibilities properly (including the responsibility of debating local issues seriously with a view to formulating effective policies on them and thereby assisting the Labour Group on the Council to discharge its responsibilities properly) is radically absent from the minds of ward party members. What matters to the people who run North Defoe Labour Party is their 'policy' - that is to say, their fetish. And because the manic indulgence of this and similar fetishes has had the effect of disconnecting North Defoe from the rest of the Labour Party, it eventually brought about a state of affairs by this time last year where the ward party, despite a membership of 150-odd, was no longer able to get a quorum at its own monthly meetings.
This is the sort of thing that the take-over of the Labour Party by student politics has meant at grass-roots level; it has owed nothing whatever to infiltration by Militant. On the contrary, the people who have behaved in this way in North Defoe have almost all been Broad Leftists and Kinnock supporters. Their behaviour and that of their counterparts in numerous other ward and constituency parties in London and elsewhere have been a cancer relentlessly destroying the Party, and not the slightest attempt has been made by the national leadership of the Party, under Broad Left management, to remedy this state of affairs.