About CfS
Aims
To promote Labour as a party committed to socialism on the basis of common ownership of the means of production, distribution & exchange.
To campaign within the party for a democratic, comprehensive and accountable public sector; full employment; socialised medicine, transport and education; common ownership of the public utilities and an extension of common ownership in the banking and financial institutions; a reinvigorated and devolved system of local government; a parliament in Scotland; and the elimination of poverty and injustice.
To determine socialist policies for Labour in government - socialist policies that will build the sound planned economy needed to ensure equality and social justice.
To act as an organisational focus for all those within the party and Labour movement who agree with the above aims, and wish to see them form the basis of the party's approach to policy making.
VINCE MILLS: Why do we need the Campaign for Socialism?
What is it about the politics of the current leadership that we feel needs to be countered?
After all we have had right wing leaderships a plenty and there has nevertheless been sufficient common ground, for example around the need to redistribute wealth via taxation policies, to feel that some objectives at least were shared by both left and right of the party. The current leadership has abandoned that common ground. It has removed itself from the tradition that the American socialist Michael Harrington describes as “visionary gradualism”.
The Economy
The core of this new form of right wing social democracy is economic strategy. Labour’s policy statement “A New Economic Future for Britain” 1995, which replaced “Meet the Challenge Make the Change” marks a significant shift in the Labour Party’s economic thinking. The latter document sought to create increased employment levels through export led growth. This required lower interest rates, an expansion in the money supply and an exchange rate which could be reduced to the level required to enable the economy to balance its trade while maintaining the highest possible levels of employment.“A New Economic Future for Britain” would instead leave much of the current macroeconomic framework in place. The emphasis is very much on supply side solutions such as increased training and investment. Writing in Tribune Dan Corry senior economist with Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) justifies this strategy:
“A Labour chancellor coming into office in 1997 is likely to need to maintain the tight fiscal/loose monetary policy for a while longer. This may sound dull - no obvious “left” macroeconomic policy to counterpoise to the Conservative one - but this simply reflects the limited power of macro economic policy in the modern world. There is no economic, let alone political case to be made for Labour claiming that it is going to be softer on inflation than the Tories in the name of some bastardised Keynesian theory.”A similar and perhaps even more unambiguous statement of the leadership’s thinking was offered by the Jim Stevens, an economist and Scottish Labour Executive member who supports Blair/Brown agenda. (This should give pause for thought for any Scottish Labour member who believes a Scottish parliament will necessarily be more radical than its Westminster counterpart.) Speaking at a Scotland On Sunday seminar he said:
“Labour will eschew traditional demand management policies and emphasise measures which will promote industrial competitiveness and raise the skills levels of the British people. There will be no orgy of spending on social programmes or public sector wages.”The consequences of this approach are clear. The demands of global capital for a flexible workforce will be satisfied by a supply side approach to the economy stressing education and training. But the absence of jobs will make training very unattractive especially for young people, hence the move by Gordon Brown to make such training, in effect, compulsory. The Labour leadership perhaps more than any other social democratic leadership is acutely conscious of the consequences of their economic strategy. It will not lead to an expanded economy and therefore the social ills which follow, in particular those of disaffected youngsters hanging about the streets, will be dealt with by authoritarian measures.
Education and training
In the Blair/Brown approach the emphasis on education and training not only becomes overwhelming but the leadership’s desire to make it effective in an economy where education and training will not deliver jobs, at least not in the short term and perhaps not in the long term either, means that working people will be coerced into making supply side remedies work.In November 1995 Brown launched his plans for under 25s. Young people will be offered four options in the private sector, full time education, the voluntary sector or in a newly created environmental task force. If they refuse these options they will be subject to a cut in benefits. Gordon Brown defended this approach in Tribune thus:
“I believe that young people will want to, and should accept reasonable offers of work. A deduction from benefit where reasonable high quality offers are refused was recommended by Beveridge, has been Labour’s position in government since and happens in every other major country.”In keeping with other measures the University of Industry according to a Radio 4 interview of Gordon Brown on January 18 will involve the setting up of individualised compulsory “learning accounts” which employees will then draw on to pay for training. Significantly this will exclude those most in need of training - the long term unemployed, and those who are in and out work and have difficulty accumulating “credit” in their “accounts”.
But it is not just young people who will find themselves obliged to make education work. Their parents too could be dragooned into the process. The Guardian reported that Professor Michael Barber a close advisor of Tony Blair is proposing that parents should be legally bound to attend school meetings to agree a learning contract with the school. David Blunket is reported to consider the ideas interesting and is studying them further. He has already made his own contribution to the authoritarian agenda by promising to close down unsuccessful schools, sack teachers considered inadequate and increase exclusion for disruptive pupils.
Welfare
Further indications of this type of thinking are reports that Blair is studying the “personal welfare state” systems of Chile and Singapore. Essentially these schemes involve compulsory savings by workers in order to replace state welfare schemes. Frank Field the MP considered a Labour expert on welfare issues has been arguing for a three-tier welfare system: a state guaranteed minimum, the compulsory purchase of a comprehensive policy covering all main social security needs and voluntary membership of additional insurance coverage.The flavour of the next Labour government becomes clearer: a shift from collective provision and a general increase in income levels to a paternalistic and more individualised approach to education and welfare where the social casualties of the low growth economy will be obliged to prioritise their limited resources in the way that the state directs.
This is not to say that the next Labour government is incapable of worthwhile reform. It has promised constitutional reform in the shape of a Scottish Parliament and will surely deliver. We are also promised reforms based on trade union rights, the minimum wage, and the regulation of public utilities. And despite cynicism about the likely minimal nature of these reforms, they are nonetheless welcome. However, in terms of the lives of working people, these reforms are likely to be peripheral. Joblessness and insecurity are the cancer undermining working peoples’ lives. The Labour Leadership has made it clear that it will not go for a Keynesian expansion in jobs and instead will insist on compulsory participation in the new lifelong learning society. This cannot be construed as anything other than a collusive approach to intensified exploitation of the working class by global capital. The left inside the Labour Party must make it clear that it will fight before and beyond a general election for a long term strategy which will transform the very basis of our society and in the interim work for an end to the misery of poverty caused by underemployment.
The Alternative Strategy
Faced with this we are in fact in need of strategy which will defend working people even if it is defending them from the very people we should look to, to help them.- In terms of the Labour Party we should campaign to retain the influence of participating members and Party Conference and not allow power to seep away to the media through passive membership ballots.
- We need to campaign for full employment in which the government intervenes to help create jobs
- We should campaign for universal benefits
- We should campaign to defend a comprehensive education service
- We should also campaign for a Britain where people are not coerced into education or training but choose it, because it is fulfilling and/or a passport to a job.