It looks like a Tory, or Tory-led, government. The talk it will hear from its friends and financiers in the City was crisply summed up by Merryn Somerset Webb in the Financial Times on 30 April: “If you don’t see the slash-and-burn coming within weeks of the election, you might want to move spare cash out of pounds”.
There are big challenges ahead, also bringing opportunities for those who are determined to act on the truth that, as Marx put it, “It is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by providing a struggle”.
We face drastic cuts.
The cuts will come in a situation where capitalist profits and revenues are soaring again, and prices may be rising rapidly. If it’s not like that, they will be cuts in a “double-dip” recession, and people’s patience about “sitting out” the first “dip” will wear thinner by the second “dip”. The prospects for resistance are greater than in the dull semi-boom period of 1992-2007, or the stunned financial-collapse period of 2008-9.
When Nick Clegg warned the ruling class of “Greek-style unrest” or “serious social strife”, he was right.
We already face a now-established judges’ interpretation of the anti-union laws which means that employers like BA or Network Rail can halt almost any big strike by going to court and saying there has been this or that blemish in the ballot.
We may face new anti-union laws, giving the government power to ban any strike in public services and impose binding arbitration instead. (Such laws are Lib Dem policy, and Vince Cable repeated the message during the election campaign).
We may face measures to complete the process of converting politics into a segment of state and media bureaucratism. The Tories want to stop unions making serious financial contributions to political parties – i.e. to stop unions having a large say in political parties, even potentially or nominally – and introduce state funding of political parties.
We face a period of ferment and disarray as the labour movement discusses the debacle of New Labour.
Socialist voices in the labour movement are weak. We have to make them as loud as our throats allow. The New-Labourites will have their “story”, claiming that the wretched end of New Labour government somehow proves that we should “modernise” away any concern with working-class interests even more. And nonsense can gain the day if sense is silent.
We have an opening, because at the 2009 Labour Party conference the Labour leaders had to promise restoration in 2010 of motions to conference, and a comprehensive review in 2010-11 of all the undemocratic structures imposed on Labour in 1997.
The left is not prepared and mobilised for that review, and needs to be.
The unions face a challenge, both industrially and politically. Ten years of “new realism” in the last period of the last Tory government and the early Blair years; another ten years of supposed “awkward-squad”-ism which produced not much more than occasional protest strikes and demoralised clutching at small concessions from a boomtime, public-spending-increasing New Labour government; and two years of being stunned by the crisis, have left us with a big hill to climb in order to regroup and reorient.
Desperate times call for drastic measures – and for bold and energetic activists willing to pioneer ideas of fighting back even when they first meet with incredulity and resignation.
How? Join us to start organising at post-election events such as the 15 May conference in London jointly sponsored by LRC and SCSTF (10.30am, ULU, Malet St, London), the 15 May SCSTF meeting just after that conference (3.45pm,ULU), and other SCSTF or SCSTF-LRC meetings round the country.
