Tom Miller writes:
I have an interest in this as I’m running for
Brent Council in Willesden Green. But that means the public have an interest in
it too, so I’m dumping a quick thought here which outlines how I feel about
cuts. Might as well clear my chest at this early stage.
Firstly, the bottom line stuff. I am committed to
the Labour Party as once necessary vehicle for democratic socialism, and I will
follow its rules as decided by conference, including by following collective
group responsibility with any colleagues I am elected alongside at a local
Government level. I wouldn’t feel the same about being elected to Parliament
for a host of reasons, but they are long and irrelevant.
The flip side – though this gives me a duty to
support group decisions, it also gives me an obligation to fight for my own
values and for my local residents in campaigns, when candidates are selected
within the party, and then within the Labour group if I am elected as a
Councillor.
So there’s my caveat paragraphs. What are those
values and beliefs?
While I am prepared to admit that some cuts are
stupider than others, I am also fundamentally opposed to the economics of the
cuts, which are the right’s ideological project and economic solution all
wrapped up in one neat package. Firstly this package is unjust and misses why
we have economics at all – improving quality of life. Secondly, it is also a
package which has failed in its own terms repeatedly across Europe.
Ignored by campaigners: cuts are part of
a right-wing political project
But despite all this context, many local
anti-cuts campaigners are blaming their Councils for cuts which are centrally
decided and then deliberately and carefully outsourced to Labour Councils to
avoid accountability nationally. Local campaigners, understandably angry about
their own local losses, repeatedly take the bait.
While I support anti-cuts and have marched many
times with anti-cuts groups, I think there are several areas of strategic
weakness, and despite the encouraging start of the (poorly named) People’s Assembly, the movement
as a whole frustrates me.
Where the localised anti-cuts movement is
going wrong
It is fragmented, has poor language, has abysmal
understanding of the law & finance, and is content to abandon realism in
its strategy in the hope that setting a deficit budget in tooting will begin a
great global uprising against neoliberalism that is necessary to undo the cuts.
While I applaud their defensive work and awareness raising, the sense of
strategy is mind-numbingly parochial. It is also so distant from the scale and
depth of the task ahead that it is content to sit around biting the local veins
of one of the key organisations in overturning the consensus at a national
level, the Labour Party.
Why? Well, as stated above, taking losses locally
touches more than a nerve, and the Government have sorted the swaparoo in
finance so that Councils have to be the public face of the cuts they never
wanted.
But I also think as well as the good intentions,
it can all go a bit conspiracy theory at times, and the underlying current is
sometimes disingenuous – note, for example, how few local anti-cuts campaigners
are prepared to put their own solutions before the electorate either as Labour
candidates, or for other parties.
On the conspiracy point, hatred for Blairism
understandably runs deep throughout the left, parliamentary and external. I
know this – marching against Iraq and opposing various privatisations were some
of my earliest political actions, and I stand by them. But it’s not always
relevant or the way to decent strategy.
Some more radical parts of the left seem happy to
abandon materialism in favour of emotionalising this hatred, and apply it more
widely against Labour. They are waiting all the time for someone to step into
the betrayal zone, which rests on the assumption that nobody from the Labour
Party is in the same movement or moral universe as them. Actually, that’s
completely untrue.
I repeatedly see people who I know have made
quite left-wing decisions in private being heckled by people who barely know
them at meetings for being right-wing, or involved in some plot that the
accuser cant even put their finger on (but of course, if they have been elected
to an Executive Committee, there must be dastardly plots – one example of where
the paranoia creeps in, and people respond to it by shouting at someone
innocent, whilst lacking the guts to stand for their position themselves).
One recent manifestation was someone from the
left echoing the Tory line exactly by suggesting that Labour Councils were
cutting harder to ‘teach people not to vote Tory’. This involves some level of
self-deception, and can really only be based on an emotional refusal to give the
matter any actual thought.
It’s this that bothers me, because it stops
even the best within Labour and the wider left working well together.
Views on policy may or may not be legit, but the
style and underlying assumptions are empty and sectarian.
Let’s be sensible?
Labour Councillors that have been elected all
depend on Labour voters from last time round, not Tory ones. These people are
also disproportionately hit by cuts. It would be bizarre even for a careerist
to choose to hurt them in this way.
If you can’t see this and appreciate that it
means that Labour Councils are not necessarily in bad faith, I don’t think
there’s much point in me or anyone else trying to have a political conversation
with you, because logic on the points under debate is clearly not what matters.
My local Council has been told it has to find
tens of millions worth of spending to get rid of over the next year.
If it’s about showing anyone anything, it’s about
Labour Councils trying to find ways to avoid this costing lives, and using it
as an example. Tory Councils are not being cut, and won’t have to even bother
trying.
Focus: a ‘pragmatic’ left approach to
Labour locally
If I am elected as a Labour Councillor, I won’t
be promising a Poplar rates rebellion (a legal relic), or to hand over my
budget to DCLG (the legal present), which will hurt the vulnerable, but without
remotely stoking up any kind of dissent on a national level.
Instead, I will be pushing for Labour’s economic
policy nationally and internationally not to concede to the cuts agenda, and
pushing within the Labour Party for the Council to find ways of innovating out
of cuts (a similar strategy to that used by that pragmatist Ken Livingstone and
the GLC, rather than that pushed at the time by John McDonnell and Ted Knight).
I will undoubtedly take part in political
demonstrations and perhaps non-violent direct action.
I will push to build a national anti-cuts
movement.
I will fight at a community level so concerns
about priorities are born out and people are at least listened to, even if they
don’t get what they are after.
And to make all of that a relevant possibility, I
will be ignoring the poorly reasoned ‘Blairophobia’ and fighting for a Labour
government.
That’s better than letting former coalition
Minister Sarah Teather off the hook for voting for cuts to our Council budget,
which is something that in my view our scattered anti-cuts campaigners in my
Borough and others allow to happen far too easily.
Tony Blair is gone, and those of us to the left
of him have new challenges altogether to deal with. Let’s stem the bleed
locally, get this lot out nationally, and make sure we replace the whole lot
with something more participative, more democratic, more egalitarian, and more
sustainable.
If I want my Borough to look more like that, I
need a new government as an absolute minimum, and I see the fight against the
cuts in that context.
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