Council Election Defeat: How Much Longer Can Blair Survive?

Weeks of unremitting scandal, sleaze, and disaster for Blair’s government culminated in a humiliating defeat in last week’s local council elections. Labour lost 319 council seats and control of 18 councils, finishing third on 26 percent of the popular vote nationally, behind the Tories on 40 percent and the Liberal Democrats on 27 percent.

Labour lost control of Crawley, plus the London boroughs of Brent, Camden, Ealing, Lewisham, Bexley, Merton, Hounslow, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Croydon.

Blair and co’s defeat was most dramatic in London, accentuated by the fact that all the council seats in the capital were up for grabs, whereas most of the districts outside, and all of the other metropolitan councils, were electing only a third of their members. London accounted for 40% of the 4,361 seats contested across England. Twenty-three million people were entitled to vote, although turnout was estimated down three percentage points at a miserable 36%.

There were rare triumphs for Labour in the capital including retaking control of Lambeth in south London, previously a hung council, and gains in Islington. Lewisham's Labour mayor, Steve Bullock, clung on despite the party losing 15 council seats.

Blair’s problems were not confined to London, though. Labour lost seats and councils in the Midlands and the north. Derby, Stoke-on-Trent, Bury and Redditch slipped out of their grasp. Labour lost six seats in Barrow, five in Newcastle-under-Lyme and four in Warrington, and control of the council in all three. Labour also lost control of Plymouth in the south.

In Stoke the Labour council leader, Mick Salih, lost his seat and promptly resigned from the party, which he said was a "Tory party in disguise". "It is not the Labour Party I joined years ago," he added. Other defeated councillors blamed problems at Westminster - including the health service crisis, the foreign prisoners debacle, and John Prescott's affair - for their demise.

Of course none of these scandals are new. Much of the sleaze, corruption and incompetence of Blair’s government has been known for quite a while. The timing of their release onto the front pages of the newspapers, and the television news headlines is no accident. Having made ample use of Blair and co over the last nine years to implement privatisation and attacks on public services, the ruling class are now preparing to unceremoniously dump them like the empty husks they are. They are out for the return of their first eleven, the Tories, to office. They are concerned that the mounting militancy in the trade unions, and the revolts on Labour’s backbenches mean that Blair, Brown or any other successor will no longer have a stable enough base from which to launch the attacks upon the working class which their crisis ridden system requires.

Blair’s response to this shattering defeat and the deafening cries from all quarters for him to go was to sack one third of his cabinet in a woeful attempt to cling on a little longer. If Blair does not bow to the pressure to retire to his millionaires’ row mansion backbench MPs claim they will publish a letter, possibly by the end of next week, with as many as 75 signatures calling on him to agree ‘the transition’ (the hand over to Gordon Brown) or face a formal challenge.

Brown called the election result a "warning shot" that showed the party needed to renew itself in the same way as it had in the 80s. The truth is that there is no difference between Blair and Brown over policy. The idea that Brown once in office would even revert to ‘Old Labour’, i.e. old right reformism, let alone move significantly to the left is a fantasy. The only difference between Blair and Brown is over whose turn it is to be Prime Minister. There are very real, material differences between the Blairites and the Brownites, however. Both cliques are squabbling over who gets to bury their noses deepest in the trough. That explains the ferocity of briefing and counter-briefing from ‘aides’ and ‘sources’, not a political difference of principle, but a power struggle over privilege and position.

The threat from backbench MPs begins to resemble the slow revolt that eventually felled Margaret Thatcher. Once a process like this starts, it develops its own momentum; it can be impossible to stop. In seeking to emulate his idol Thatcher in longevity as well as in policy, Blair may well achieve the same fate.

Nothing about this latest reshuffle at the top suggested a prime minister preparing the ground for the "orderly transition" which he himself first proposed when he announced that he would not seek a fourth term, using the carrot of a promised departure to demand unity in votes in parliament. More importantly nothing in this reshuffle signaled an eventual handover to Brown at all.

On the contrary, Blair simply dug in, surrounding himself with ultra loyal supporters. The promotion of John Reid to Home Secretary, for example, the retention of Tessa Jowell, and even more provocatively the appointment of arch-Blairite Hazel Blears as party chairman. Like a motorway pile-up, the cabinet reshuffle took place at high speed amid great confusion and left the landscape covered in wreckage. It was certainly dramatic and bloody, in part designed to disguise the scale of Labour's defeat in the local elections, crudely diverting attention onto ministerial culling instead. But the nature of the changes, especially the exhausted quality of some of the ministers promoted, only emphasises the limited possibilities open to Blair. At once stale and erratic, they reek of decay, the last big reshuffle of the Blair era. There was little sign of rejuvenation or novelty, and little sign either of the orderly transition that both the chancellor and the prime minister say they want. This was simply a case of rearranging the deckchairs on the sinking Titanic.

What Blair has installed is a Final Days administration. It is a bunker cabinet.

After a weekend of calls from disgruntled Labour MPs, including allies of Gordon Brown, to name a date for his departure, Blair said he would fight any attempt to reverse the New Labour project, something which would, he said, return Labour to opposition. Any move against Blair will mean the return of the Tories, they intone. In terms of argument as well as personnel, the Blairites are now scraping the bottom of the barrel.

This is now a constant theme in the media. From where this threat to the New Labour project is supposed to come they do not enlighten us. Anyone reading these articles would be forced to conclude that there is some kind of left versus right struggle taking place at the top of the Labour Party. In reality the project to transform the Labour Party into a second capitalist party like the US Democrats failed some time ago. Admittedly it went a lot further than many of us thought it would in advance. Now Blair and co, and more importantly the ruling class, recognise that the end of Blair will mean the end of that project, and, for the time being at least, the end of the usefulness of the Labour Party to the capitalists in implementing their programmme for them. Not because Brown has any intention of moving to the left, but because behind Blair and Brown stand backbenchers ready to revolt: some out of principle having swallowed all they can, others out of self-preservation, fearful of losing their seats at the next election as Labour’s vote continues to hemorrhage. Worse still from the viewpoint of capitalism, over their shoulders can be seen the assembling ranks of workers preparing to fight back, their militancy growing, no longer held in check by the promises of a Labour government that has failed them.

Labour MP Clive Betts explained in a post-election interview: "I had people say on the doorstep to me... that they wouldn't vote Labour again while Tony Blair remained prime minister and that is an issue that we have to address."

The Labour Party’s former deputy leader Roy Hattersley wrote in The Guardian: “Last Friday, the government was reconstructed not to assemble an administration that will solve the nation's problems, but to demonstrate that Blair continues to put his hope of a decent political epitaph ahead of all other considerations. The interests of both party and country are ignored. There is no rational reason why Blair should remain in office until 2007 or 2008. And he knows it. So he plays charades to assert what he could not sustain in logical argument.

“There was a time when the prime minister believed in something. His vision of the good society was one which I did not share. But I accepted that he wanted more than power alone. Now he believes in nothing except hanging on, in the hope of regaining some of his lost reputation. Not even the present Labour party will tolerate that for long.” (Roy Hattersley, The Guardian, 08/05/06.)

Blair is deaf and blind to all such appeals, desperate to stay past the ten year mark at least, and as personally ambitious as ever to outlast his idol Margaret Thatcher’s tenure in office.

Ultimately it will not be up to him. There is a momentum now behind the campaign to oust him that may well come to a head at the Party’s national conference in the autumn. His support in the rank and file of the party and the trade union withered some time ago, now it has evaporated even inside the Parliamentary Labour Party. Events at home and abroad will decide his fate. An economic crisis beckons. Oil price rises are beginning to bite, unemployment is rising, and the next move for interest rates is likely to be up with dramatic consequences for consumer spending house prices, and the economy as a whole. The occupation of Iraq is a festering wound that is far from finished. In the weeks and months to come there will be yet more stories of sleaze and corruption. Blair will be lucky to survive another year, though he will strain hard to do so. All around the cabinet table he perceived enemies and threats to his continued rule who had to be removed and replaced by loyal supporters. Home Secretary Charles Clarke had to go replaced by Blair favourite John Reid. Next out of the door was Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

Despite the message of support sent by Condoleeza Rice to Straw, a former Bush speech writer claims that Blair “has removed the foreign minister who says military action against Iran is inconceivable and replaced him with someone who hasn’t said anything.” The new Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, is described by the media as ‘a safe pair of hands’. A more appropriate metaphor would be a glove puppet. In her first public statement on the developing crisis over Iran’s nuclear ambitions she stopped noticeably short of calling an attack on Iran "inconceivable".

Geoff (Buff) Hoon, Defence Secretary at the time of the invasion of Iraq was duped into believing his demotion from Leader of the House to minister for Europe was actually a promotion, with a big pay cut to boot.

The fate of deputy prime minister John Prescott illustrates the real meaning of the cabinet reshuffle. Prescott must have been unable to believe his luck. Despite the loss of his Whitehall departments – his responsibilities – he is to carry on as deputy prime minister; keep the ‘grace-and-favour’ homes at Admiralty Arch and Dorneywood; keep his fat salary of £135,000-a-year and his ministerial Jaguar. His ‘workload’ will be as special envoy to the Far East, sending him on endless junkets, but for none of this is he to be responsible to parliament. This is his ‘punishment’ for his role in the scandals of the last few weeks. Why is he to be paid for doing nothing (officially that is, as opposed to those other government ministers who at least have a job to do in name)? He is Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, if he were to resign and force an election, the idea of an election for a new leader at the same time would contain a logic that even Blair would find it hard to oppose.

Brown’s ambition to be prime minister is well known. However the insoluble conundrum facing him now is that if he takes over the reins soon plenty of time will remain for him to be exposed as nothing more than Blair Mark Two before the next election. If instead he is handed office shortly before that election the illusion that he might offer something radically different to Blair might be enough to prop up Labour’s vote. Yet by then that vote may have already collapsed to an irreparable level.

The Blairites it seems want Blair to stay on long enough for them to prepare a candidate to take on Brown. According to a ‘senior source’ quoted in the Sunday Times, “The strategy of those who work at No.10 is that if they can persuade Tony to go on and on, then someone else will emerge who will challenge Gordon Brown.” (Sunday Times, 07/05/06)

Such a candidate could never win, and would reinforce this bizarre and desperate illusion that Brown would somehow be to the left of Blair. Blairism has no support in the party rank and file nor in the trade unions. This myth that Brown is to the left of Blair is being peddled by the trade union leaders who would back Brown against any new Blairite candidate. Whilst there is no difference in practice between Blair and Brown, the desire to replace tweedle-dum with tweedle-dummer is a reflection of the desire for change inside the labour movement. That desire will not be satisfied by Brown’s leadership, but it will play a central role in the struggles to reclaim Labour in the next period, in the post Blair-era that now beckons.

The other Blairite candidate most likely to challenge Brown to succeed Blair is in fact David Cameron. The Tory leader has been desperately claiming the ‘centre ground’ in the last few months. This does not mean the Tories have moved to the left, indeed the so-called centre ground in British politics already stands a long way to the right of majority opinion. Instead their spin-doctored image in opposition will give way to a shift to the right once they were to win office. Beneath this Emperor’s New Clothes lies the same old naked Tory reaction.

He attempts to bolster his caring sharing image – in a clear attempt to win votes from the Liberals by promoting the Tories so-called concern for the environment. This is PR straight out of the Blair handbook, with the Tory leader filmed cycling to work and so on. It was inevitable that the Tories would recover over a period of time, not because of clever publicity or soundbites, but because at a certain stage the capitalist class would need to reinstall their main party into government, once Blair and co had done as much of their dirty work as they could.

The Tories were certainly the winners in these elections. They became the dominant force in London, taking six councils, mostly in the outer boroughs. Croydon, Bexley and Ealing were taken from Labour, and Harrow and Hillingdon were previously hung councils. In Bexley the Tories took 23 seats from Labour and in Ealing they took 20 seats, 19 of them from Labour.

Hammersmith and Fulham went from red to blue for the first time since 1968, when Cameron was one year old. Outside London, the Tories took Bassetlaw, Crawley and Mole Valley for the first time.

By taking Coventry, the Tories now control a majority of metropolitan councils in the West Midlands. Losses of Gosport, Harrogate and West Lindsey councils took some of the gloss off the success, but more serious was their failure to make inroads in the northern cities.

The Liberals, meanwhile, stood virtually unchanged, gaining a net increase of just two council seats across the whole country. Whilst their leaders tried to claim that this represented an ‘act of consolidation’, the truth is that the protest vote against Labour blew to the four winds but it did not land any more ballot papers on their pile. An overall share of the vote of 27% pushed Labour into third place but was below the 30% the Lib Dems achieved in 2004 and was the party's lowest share in local elections since 1999.

In a swings-and-roundabouts set of results, the Lib Dems took St Albans, Hertfordshire, and South Lakeland, Cumbria, winning 17 of the 18 seats up for election there. In the south-west London suburb of Richmond-upon-Thames, the party seized control by grabbing 16 seats from the Tories and one from independent.

They made significant gains in the London boroughs of Camden, Haringey, Brent and Lewisham. But they lost 12 seats and formal control of the council in Islington - though they may be able to hold on to power through the mayor's casting vote, fell away to Labour in Lambeth and lost four seats and control in Milton Keynes. They also lost three seats in Liverpool, which they continue to dominate, and one seat in Sheffield, where they had hoped to remove Labour's majority.

Now if they move left to try to pick up votes from Labour they will lose some to the Tories. However, if they move right to take votes from Cameron and co. they will encourage many to simply vote Tory. After all if you are going to vote for a Tory Party you had just as well vote for one that can actually win the election, and get rid of Blair.
It is the Liberals fate to be crushed between the main parties, and so it will be again at the next election. With the Tories standing every chance of winning, some will vote Labour to keep them out; others will vote Tory to get Blair out. The Liberals are as redundant as a fifth wheel in British politics. They will be crushed by the polarisation to left and right now taking place in British society.

The Tories scored 40 percent of the popular vote for the first time since 1992 (the last time they won a general election). The latest opinion poll conducted by Populus for The Times shows the Conservatives eight points ahead of Labour. The Tories are on 38%, up four, with Labour down six points, at 30%, and the Liberal Democrats down one on 20%. Half the public surveyed want the prime minister to step down by December and half agree that "the government's biggest problem is Tony Blair himself". But the poll finds that Mr Cameron's lead extends to 10 points when he goes head-to-head with Mr Brown.

The Daily Mail and co are now urging Cameron to shift to the right. It is no accident that the press played up the position of the BNP over the last few weeks. Endless polls were published demonstrating that whilst they had no truck with the BNP, “it cannot be denied that many share their concerns over immigration” and so on. This was not an attempt to promote the fascists vote, but to put pressure on Cameron and the Tories to move to the right where they believe enough additional votes can be found to win a general election. As leading old Tories have been at pains to explain, the ‘smiley’ image is all very well for publicity purposes, but in government the Tories will need to pursue a hardline on every front.

That coalition of racists, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, football hooligans, fascists and their apologists that can be abbreviated to the BNP scored headline grabbing success in their main target of Barking and Dagenham. The BNP gained 11 seats in east London, and picked up enough elsewhere to hold 46, more than doubling its previous drain on the public purse. It follows their 2002 local election successes in the North; a narrowly missed London Assembly bid; and a 4.9 per cent showing in the Euro elections in 2004. It took 7 per cent of votes cast in the 2005 London mayoral elections. For the first time, an openly racist party has sustained the support of more than one in 20 British voters over several contests. The BNP's share of the vote was 0.19 per cent in the 2001 general election.

These creatures do not pose a serious threat from the point of view of coming to power, even in a local council, let alone on a national scale. Yet they do pose a very real threat to local people and the local communities they poison with their racist filth. They need to be driven back under the stones from which they crawled. A concerted campaign by the labour and trade union movement can pull the rug from under them. However to do this requires a socialist programme which not only exposes their lies about immigration but also explains how enough houses can be built, and jobs created, for all. An example of this was to be seen in Barking and Dagenham where some Labour candidates fought and defeated their BNP opponents by conducting such a campaign. (A separate article on this will follow).

Several smaller parties and fringe groups thrived in the atmosphere of discontent and polarisation which defined these elections. In Oxford, Labour even lost a seat to the Independent Working Class Association. The Green Party increased their vote too, winning 20 seats, representing a net change of plus 14 across England. They contested a total of 1,294 seats.

George Galloway’s Respect made significant gains in Tower Hamlets, however one has to ask what exactly is the point of this party? They have 12 councillors in Tower Hamlets. However these councillors are not committed to a socialist programme. According to George Galloway:

[W]e're a coalition, and we don't bind a Muslim candidate in Yorkshire to the explicitly socialist parts of our programme…Many of them are small business people and wouldn't describe themselves as socialists and are not bound to accept it. And the same goes for other issues including tax." They are not a socialist party, nor are they an alternative workers’ party. They have gained a protest vote against Blair and particularly the profoundly unpopular occupation of Iraq. However, in the future, any shift to the left in the Labour Party will act as a strong pole of attraction for that discontent and completely undermine such protest candidates and groups.

From this vote we can conclude that there is an enormous volatility in society, reflecting the instability and insecurity that dominates life in Britain in 2006. This same trend is repeated across Europe, and further afield. It represents a growing polarisation in society, to the left and to the right, which flows from the mounting crisis of capitalism on an international scale.

Elections, even local ones like those described here, always provide us with a snapshot of opinion at a given moment. If we analyse them carefully, in the context of all other events, we can learn a great deal about what is happening in society. It is our task to uncover the processes of change at work beneath the thin veneer that generally covers the surface of British politics. The ruling class is increasingly split and divided over how to proceed, how best to defend its ailing system. The middle class feel a profound discontent with the war and the failures of the Labour government. There is a class polarisation of society, where previously blurred lines are daily being sharpened.

Blairism is finished. Blair will go soon, and despite the best efforts of his clique, or that of his successor, the attempt to transform Labour into a version of the US Democrats has reached its limits. The Labour government faces new crises on every front. Brown – or whoever – will inherit a party where the process that brought Blair to power in the first place is moving into reverse. He will inherit a divided group of MPs. The economy will not come to his rescue. On the contrary, the slide into recession will add to his woes.

At the same time all the conditions are being created for major class battles, even generalised struggles such as this country has not seen for 80 years. The combination of all these factors is preparing a new period of class struggle, of inner differentiation within the labour movement, big changes inside the trade unions and, as night follows day (though perhaps not quite as quickly) inside the Labour Party too.

The post Blair-era is approaching. In the context of major political and economic crises, the class polarisation of society will have a major impact within the labour movement. The Marxist tendency will find fertile ground for its ideas and its programme in those struggles to come.