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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the May 15, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Tories swept out

What next for British workers?

By Fred Goldstein

In the coming months all classes in Europe, not to mention on Wall Street, will be paying the closest attention to British developments in light of the extraordinary electoral sweep of the Labor Party.

The Labor Party won 419 seats, the Conservatives (Tories) 165 seats, the Liberal Democrats 46 seats, the Plaid Cymru (Welsh) four seats, and the Scottish Nationalist Party six seats. The Conservative Party captured not one new seat; it won no seats in Scotland or Wales. The swing of 10 percent of the voters from Conservative to Labor represented the biggest electoral rout in 175 years.

However, there are inherent contradictions behind these results that have yet to be played out.

On the one hand, the hated, rabidly anti-working-class Thatcherite Tories, who ravaged the workers and oppressed for 18 years, have been humiliated and driven out of office.

On the other hand, the Labor leadership of Tony Blair has won on a program that promises not to try to overturn the fundamentals of Thatcherite reaction.

Blair has shifted the political program of the Labor Party from a social-democratic line that masks its loyalty to capitalism with pro-working-class concessions and demagogy to an openly pro-capitalist orientation. It is a shift both in substance and ideology. This is undoubtedly the reason many workers stayed away from the polls. Voter turnout was the lowest since World War II--74.1 percent.

What the workers expect

In this election, both the working class and the ruling class are looking for solace. The bosses and bankers hope to see a smooth transition from the discredited Tories to a new, fresh leadership that will continue capitalist reaction with a slightly humanized facade.

The working class is expecting vast improvements after the nightmare of reaction. Blair may have changed the line of the Labor Party to the right, but this cannot dissipate the expectations of its working-class base, who could regard this sweep as a signal to fight.

The real effects of this election will ultimately be decided by the class struggle.

Blair has closely followed the Clinton model, declaring that he leads the "New Labor Party." He touts welfare "reform" and has proposed his own form of workfare for 250,000 young people under 25. He is talking about a tough-on-crime bill. He has pledged not to exceed Tory spending on social welfare for two years and not to raise taxes on the rich, which Thatcher lowered to 40 percent, for five years. He has pledged to accept the anti-union restrictions enacted by the Conservatives. These include outlawing secondary strikes and boycotts, with heavy fines for violators, and the closed shop.

To make these changes, Blair changed party rules before the campaign began. Stanley Greenberg, a pollster for both Clinton and Blair, wrote approvingly in a New York Times commentary on May 1 that Blair "changed the rules to end the unions' control of party affairs. Union leaders found themselves outnumbered when they were no longer able to cast votes for their millions of members in internal party matters."

Blair's program must appeal in some measure to progressivism. It includes a windfall profits tax on the privatization of government-owned industries-the proceeds to be used for job training for 250,000 workers. He has also discussed instituting a minimum wage, which was eliminated under Thatcher. He has pledged to reduce school class sizes and reduce the waiting list for what is left of the National Health Service. Since taking office, Blair has appointed five women, a sightless man and a gay man to his cabinet.

Figures show deep poverty

But none of this is adequate to alleviate the crisis faced by millions of workers. After 18 years of Conservative Party rule, Britain has the largest number of adults living below the poverty line of any European Union country. This is according to an unpublished report by Eurostat, the EU's statistics agency, cited in the May 2 issue of The New Worker.

In addition, the Child Poverty Action Group reports that one in three children in Britain live in poverty-the highest proportion in western Europe. The same report says that in the last 18 years the real income of the poorest tenth of the population fell by 13 percent while the income of the richest tenth rose 65 percent.

British workers are suffering from the evils of capitalist restructuring with a vengeance. British wage levels are the lowest in western Europe, save for Spain and Portugal. So much so that, according to a New York Times survey of April 29, "foreign banks and corporations have invaded the country. ... Attracted by low corporate taxes and a pool of skilled but relatively low-cost labor, hundreds of banks and legions of companies, including Compaq, Northern Telcom and Japanese auto makers, have landed here.

"While the national average portrays a booming economy," continues the survey, "there is a world of shuttered factories, chronic unemployment and unsolved welfare problems" as well as poverty-level wages.

"There is the notion everywhere that the Conservatives have callously shrugged off the anxieties of many Britons about the future of their jobs and questions about whether they can expect much from the government should they lose their jobs. And no matter what the official numbers say," continues the survey, "voters seem to believe that unemployment may be twice as high as the Conservatives say," which is 6.1 percent.

Britain and the Continent

While the capitalist world is putting on a confident front about the Blair sweep, they are all watching with the greatest concern. They know that the British working class is capable of militant upheavals. There was the general strike of 1926. After World War II, the workers unceremoniously ousted Winston Churchill and swept in the Labor Party, which opened up an era of reforms. The workers thought it was a genuine transition in the struggle for socialism, but the Labor Party leaders utilized their electoral victory over the Conservatives to stabilize capitalism.

Of course, much more was expected by the workers then. It was a period of working-class offensive in Europe, when the communist parties had a mass following and the prestige of the USSR was at its height after having defeated the Nazis. Today's world situation is much more unfavorable.

However, the bourgeoisie today is fearful that the British workers could become infected with the spirit of struggle against austerity that is now sweeping the Continent. The French working class has fought Jacques Chirac, and Alain Jupp‚, to a stalemate and stopped the cutbacks. The German workers stopped the Helmut Kohl government and the corporations from taking back sick pay. The Italian workers forced the collapse of the Berlusconi government in 1995 when it tried to enact its austerity program.

The ruling classes could suffer a severe blow should the British workers take the European road. Many in the ruling class want the integration of Europe on a bourgeois basis, but they don't want the workers of the different countries to unite in defense of their common interests.

After 18 years of suffering, the desires and expectations of the masses mixed with the exclusion of the trade unions from their former influence in the Labor Party can over the long run make a highly combustible formula when contained within the reactionary program thus far articulated by Tony Blair.

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