The right wing were puffed up with their success. Blair immediately promised that following this victory “change and modernisation” would continue unabated. The abolition of Clause Four was just the beginning. In his eagerness to press on with his hidden agenda, Blair went a bit too far and blurted out what his real intentions were: “My vision for New Labour”, Blair stated, “is to become as the Liberal Party was in the nineteenth century.” The cat was out of the bag: Blair’s plan was to destroy the Labour Party and turn it into an openly capitalist Party, like the Liberals. The elimination of its trade union base would prepare the way for a fusion with the Liberal Democrats and “left” Tories to create something on the model of the US Democratic Party:
“I want a situation more like the Democrats and the Republicans in the US”, stated Tony Blair openly. “People don’t even question for a single moment that the Democrats are a pro-business Party. They should not be asking the question about New Labour.”[5]
In other words, Blair wanted to liquidate the Labour Party and turn the clock back more than one hundred years. While the bosses were busy destroying and undermining workers’ rights, wages, hours, pensions, trade union rights, Blair wanted to return to Victorian times where there was no independent mass Party of labour, only the Tories and Liberals. Tony Blair thus has the dubious privilege of being the only leader of the Labour Party in history who believes that the Party should not have been created! So indistinguishable had he become from the Tories that even the capitalist press referred to him as “Tory Blair”. More recently he was accused of being “more Thatcherite than Thatcher” by the TGWU after his decision to privatise the defence yards at Faslane, Rosyth and Devonport.
This Blair “Project” to destroy the Labour Party has gone quite far. Clause Four was ditched. All left policies were jettisoned. The structures of the Party were changed, downgrading the annual conference and National Executive, and undermining the accountability of the leadership. The warriors of New Labour did not attempt to conceal their contempt for democracy and the rank and file. There must be “the systematic move away from resolution-based conferences…” stated Tom Sawyer.[6] “The Party conference no longer has the role it played in the past as a vehicle for making policy… the old notion that the conference should be sovereign was already out of date when Labour leaders regularly ignored defeats from the floor”, concurred former “Left” Margaret Hodge MP, soon to become a loyal education minister in the Blair government.[7] In place of Party democracy a semi-Stalinist centralised regime of “control freakery” was introduced. In order to sideline the Conference, so-called Policy Forums were established which were subject to manipulation by the Blair machine and dominated by Cabinet ministers. The Blairites set about purging the Party of left elements from all spheres of influence.
Of course, the right-wing trade union leaders, particularly in the AEEU, supported the Blairite counter-revolution every inch of the way, even voting to reduce the trade union vote at conference from ninety to fifty per cent. Tom Sawyer, the former “Left” and deputy general secretary of NUPE, quickly shifted his allegiances to become a Blairite loyalist and the general secretary of the Labour Party. He was instrumental in carrying through the destruction of Party democracy, and was suitably rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords, becoming Lord Sawyer, to join such other worthies as Lords Murray, Scanlon, Chapple and others of that ilk who deserted the Labour movement to rub shoulders with the ermine-clad Lords and Ladies of the Realm. One of the biggest frauds perpetrated by Blair and co. was the so-called reform of the House of Lords, which he hopes to staff with his cronies. The first task of a genuine socialist Labour government would be to immediately abolish this reactionary institution, along with the monarchy and the other rubbish left over from feudalism.
Blair in effect has stolen the Tories’ clothes. He has dragged the Labour Party politically far to the right – something that the present leadership is very proud of:
“The Labour Party is more pro-business, pro-wealth creation, pro-competition than ever before,” bragged Chancellor Gordon Brown. “I want to be quite blunt with you about the modern relationship between today’s Labour Party and the trade unions”, stated Blair to the TGWU conference in July 1995. “There was a time when a large trade union would pass a policy and then it was assumed Labour would follow suit. Demands were made. Labour responded and negotiated. Those days are over. Gone. They are not coming back… Persuasion is in. Demands are out.”[8]
The commitment to capitalism of these people could not be more slavish.
Ever since “Black Wednesday” in October 1992, the Tories had been trailing badly in the opinion polls. The whole Tory government was teetering on the edge, buffeted along from one crisis to another. Consumed by scandals and rocked by sleaze and corruption, John Major was like a drowning man clutching at straws. He had already become the most unpopular Prime Minister since records began. The Tory Party was facing the worst crisis in living memory. By 1997, after a string of electoral defeats, the government was struggling to survive. After 18 years of Conservative rule, the bulk of the population were overwhelmingly opposed to the Tories and all they stood for: the privatisations, the cuts, the support of the rich and all the corruption that went with it. Thus, the political pendulum had swung back towards Labour. The working class had turned their attention en masse towards the political field as a solution to their problems. Those who had written off the Labour Party as unable to win another election, so vocal in the past, were shown to be completely wrong.
At the general election in May 1997, Labour scored a historic landslide victory gaining a majority of 179 seats – the biggest in the history of the Party. It was a fundamental turning point. It represented the end of an era, where the Tory Party had dominated the political landscape for 18 long years, and had four successive general election victories under their belt. Now all that was finished. The house of cards had come crashing down. The Tories experienced their greatest defeat since 1832, and the birth of modern Conservatism. They had been cast out into the political wilderness. Such was the extent of the blow that they have not fully recovered even to this day. It was a just reward for the crimes of Thatcherism.
The size of Labour’s majority was a graphic expression of the fundamental change of mood throughout British society, and especially in the working class. Contrary to the myth that has been assiduously peddled by New Labour with the active connivance of the press, the election was not won by Blair, but rather in spite of him. Under John Smith Labour would have won just as big a majority, if not bigger. The explanation is not to be found in the “cleverness” of the Labour leaders (they are really not so clever) but in a change in the mood of society.