Defiance, if widespread and determined enough, would start to win concessions and victories. These will be worth in real ideas and in real votes a hundred times the lead in the opinion polls, and will lay some sort of foundation for a Labour victory which could mean something. Paul Foot, article June 1994, ‘Ship without a Keel’
1) Labour, which is linked to organised workers, is better at any time than the Tories, who are linked to organised capital.
2) ‘Without struggle there is no progress’: everything worth winning by the workers and the dispossessed has to be fought for.
3) The less Labour fights the Tories, the less it is likely to beat them at the polls or anywhere else.
4) The more Labour compromises and prevaricates, the more the fighting spirit of the people who vote Labour is dampened.
5) The more that fighting spirit is dampened, the stronger and more confident grow employers, racialists and reactionaries of every description.
6) The power of the elected parliament is all the time frustrated by the power of the undemocratic banks, corporations, judges and the media.
7) The more a Labour government tries to be fair to the banks, corporations, judges or media, the more it becomes their captive.
8) The more it becomes their captive, the more it attacks the people who vote Labour, thus ensuring a Labour defeat next time.
9) This vicious circle is written into the history of the whole century. Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson couldn’t avoid it. There’s no chance that Blair and Co, further to the right even than Attlee and Wilson, will avoid it either.
10) (Conclusion) Vote Labour, but keep up the fight down below to build the resistance into a force which is strong enough to dictate to the undemocratic elite at the top of society – and put an end to their interminable dictatorship. Paul Foot, article October 1994, ‘Ten Things Everyone Should Know about the Labour Party’
I remember polling day 1964 as if it were yesterday. In the evening after work I spent an hour or two canvassing for the Labour candidate at Hampstead, north London, and then went back home for a party to watch the results. What I remember most was the excitement, which had its roots in confidence. I was 26. For half my life there had been nothing but a Tory government. Now suddenly that government, despite its huge majority, seemed doomed. There was a mood for change, not just for a change of faces or style but a change of policy, a decisive step to the left.
We had grown used to full employment, to low inflation, to a welfare state and a big council house building programme. What was in prospect was a government which would shift the whole balance of society from rich to poor, from employer to worker, from (to use J K Galbraith’s famous phrase, which was highly popular at the time) private to public affluence.
One scene from the Labour campaign stuck in my memory. Harold Wilson, the Labour leader, carried out a whistlestop tour of London marginals. I followed him one afternoon to Clapham, where he spoke to a large and random crowd from the back of a lorry. He spoke without notes, almost inviting interruptions. The interruptions he got were all about race.
Race had played a big part in the election in the Midlands especially at Smethwick where the Tory campaign was supported with the slogan, ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.’ As a result, Labour trimmed its original opposition to Commonwealth immigration controls, and adopted a fudged compromise ...
The collapse came very swiftly, in the middle of the clear blue summer of 1966. First, the same Wilson who had in opposition championed the low paid and the trade unions, threw all the forces of his rhetoric against an official strike of seamen, some of the lowest paid workers in the country. When he finally beat the seamen by the most revolting witch hunt, he turned his bile, his office and his government against the entire working class movement. The same man who had derided Selwyn Lloyd, former Tory chancellor, for a ‘one sided pay pause’, now instituted a year-long total wage freeze, enforced by law and backed by savage cuts in the public spending programme he had advocated.
In 1967 he reimposed the health prescription charges he’d abolished. In 1968 he sanctioned another, even more racist, immigration act to keep out persecuted Asians from East Africa. In 1969 he proposed to ban unofficial strikes, the first plan for anti-union laws since the war. Throughout all this he supported the barbaric US invasion of Vietnam with a passion which inspired the US president Johnson to describe him as ‘another Churchill’ ...
Black Wednesday, July 1966 – the day of the cuts and the wage freeze – was named as such not by a revolutionary but by a mild mannered television journalist called John Morgan, who, like hundreds of thousands of others, had high hopes that the Labour government would lead the way to a new social order. This hope was widespread throughout the left, and it was the dashing of this hope by backsliding and grovelling to the rich and powerful which brought Wilson down so low in the eyes of so many of his former supporters. It follows that if Prime Minister Blair proceeds slower even than Wilson, if his ambitions are even more circumscribed than Wilson’s were, his downfall will be even more sudden, and even more calamitous. Paul Foot, article June 1995, ‘Pipe Dreams’
What does it prove? It proves that Tony Blair and his timeservers at Millbank have nothing but contempt, not just for the Labour movement – that has been obvious for some time – but for the whole system of representation and selection in that movement. He much prefers to have an ex-Tory millionaire in parliament than to allow the ordinary process of Labour local selection to take its course. Blair believes, moreover, that the Parliamentary Labour Party is his own fiefdom and that he can and must choose the right sort of people to sit under him in parliament. It is not simply that he wants an MP for St Helens who will vote for him in the lobbies. He wants an MP for St Helens who by his past record, his wealth, his photogenic wife and children, his stately home and everything else about him, will fit the image of New Labour – the image of the smooth talking plutocrat who represents patronage, privilege and undemocratic power. Paul Foot, article, ‘Election: Is This What Democracy Looks Like?’
New Labour’s ministers are unpopular not so much for what they say and do, but for what they don’t say and don’t do. The hallmark of the government is paralysis. It doesn’t say yes and it doesn’t say no. It doesn’t say stop and it doesn’t say go. Too nervous to climb, too frightened to fall, it bides its time and clings to the wall. In a society cut into classes, paralysis is not even neutrality. It leaves things as they are – in the exclusive hands of the rich who grow more and more confident that they will be able to hang on to their wealth and power. Paul Foot, article November 2000, ‘Labour’s Chances: Ghost of a Chance’
Socialist principles have been tossed aside with almost indecent cynicism and casualness. Racial discrimination in Britain has been condoned and strengthened. American butchery in Vietnam has been actively supported and encouraged. Social welfare and economic development in Britain have been sacrificed to carry out a reactionary economic programme at the behest of international finance capital. What of the Left leaders in Parliament? Tell them off on your fingers, comrades, and think of their words and deeds in recent months while the Labour movement has been sold down the river. It is a sad picture and I can personally neither see nor offer any excuses. Are we finished, we of the Labour Left? Malcolm Caldwell, letter to Tribune 20th August 1968
There is nothing socialist about the commanding heights now. For this Government is trying to create a power elite, more cohesive and omnipotent than any we have seen in recent British history ... This is the ultimate significance of the attempt to forge a consensus of opinion and action between the leaders of Government, industry and the unions. Alan Dawe, letter to Tribune on resigning from Labour Party
I have fought for and will continue to fight for a Labour government as a step to socialism; to repeal the pernicious 8-hours Act; to secure a Minimum Wage, adequate pensions at 60, nationalisation of the mines, minerals and by-products. A Labour government would bring new life and hope to the workers; it would increase faith in trade unionism and would lead us nearer to socialism. A J Cook
Apparently, nothing is going to ensue, because we have been informed that the Labour Party is not in favour of the use of force. Consequently, they have told the governing class that they will not have their property taken away. Nothing further will happen except a series of resolutions, and the governing class will say: ‘We will keep our capital in our pocket for nothing is going to occur.’ John Newbold, House of Commons capitalism debate 1923
But sign news came that fair raised a stir – a Labour government thrown out at last. And Ramsay MacDonald was in with the Tories, and they were fine. And then the wireless sets listened in and Ramsay came on with his holy voice and maa’hd like a sheep, but a holy like sheep, that the country needed to be saved and he would do it, aye he was a fine chap now that he had jumped onto the gentry side. Lewis Grassic Gibbon
The Labour Party’s election manifesto is the longest suicide note in history. Greg Knight
I know that the right kind of political leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine. Aneurin Bevan
The right-wing of the Labour Party would rather see it fall into perpetual decline than abide by its democratic decisions. Aneurin Bevan
The Labour Party has lost the last four elections. If they lose another, they get to keep the Liberal Party. Clive Anderson
The Labour Party owes more to Methodism than to Marxism. Morgan Philips
The trouble with the Labour Party is that they don’t really believe in Socialism, but they cannot wholeheartedly approve of private enterprise either. Joseph Grimond