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Editorial
Norman Tebbit's eleventh great election
For the period since World War Two, Tebbit chose four elections for his list: 1945, 1951, 1979 and 1997; and his commentaries on the significance of these changes in government are useful in helping to understand the context and importance of the votes that will be cast on Thursday. Although of course Lord Tebbit did not put it in quite this way, three of the the post-WW2 elections on his 'greatest election' list were expressions of changing compromises in the balance of power and interest between the working class and the capitalist class. Thatcher's victory in 1979 was the exception, resulting in the end of the previous compromise, and an unalloyed triumph for capitalism.
Despite that a situation of 'no overall majority' may conceivably be the result in parliamentary seats, and thus give rise to horse-trading between the parties; Thurday's election is also likely to terminate the current social and economic compromise- that which has been the essence of the New Labour project.
1945
On the result of the 1945 election, the first to give the Labour Party an overall Parliamentary majority, Norman Tebbit has this to say:
Clement Attlee's 1945 government refashioned much of Britain. But it was not just the programme of nationalisation of industry nor the botched implementation of the Beveridge Report on the Welfare State, nor the creation of the NHS that mattered. Coming in 1945, Labour's victory put men like Attlee and Ernest Bevin, who had served in Churchill's War Cabinet, into office.
They formed the Nato alliance with America against the Soviet Union, commissioned the British nuclear deterrent and re-armed for the Cold War. Had Labour not come to power for another ten years, the fellow travellers of the left would have been far more powerful, probably strong enough to have forced the renunciation of Nato and our nuclear weapons.
Tebbit's last sentence is mere speculation, and given that he is opposed to the very existence of the welfare state, his barb that the Labour government "botched" the implementation of the Beveridge Report can be taken with a large bucket of salt. But Tebbit expresses the nature of the implicit deal that was done in the wake of the Second World War.
Although the Labour Party was swept into office on a wave of socialist feeling which included widespread sympathy with Britain's then ally the Soviet Union, the government proceeded to take the UK as a partner with the USA into the Cold War against the USSR and the newly established socialist states in Eastern Europe, China and Korea. One could add that despite being forced to concede independence to India, the Labour government strove to hang on to the rest of the British Empire and fought a colonial war in Malaya.
On that basis, the Labour government's nationalisations of industrial firms, the founding of the National Health Service, and other left wing aspects of its home policy were tolerable from a capitalist point of view, temporary concessions to socialism that could be put right when the opportunities eventually emerged.
1951
But meanwhile, Labour's social and industrial programme was so successful and popular that the Tories could not hope to win and retain power except by going along with most of it. Tebbit comments:
By the time of the 1951 election, the post-war consensus ran two ways. Labour was committed to Nato and the West, but the Conservatives broadly accepted Labour's domestic settlement. So when the Tories won a hard-fought election in 1951, polling fewer votes but winning more seats, almost nothing of Labour's economic or social reforms was undone. There was a 'bonfire of controls' and rationing of food and clothing ended but the NHS, welfare state and nationalised industries were left untouched.
They were left untouched for sound practical and strategic reasons. As an article in this journal (21st Century Socialism) has observed of that period:
Britain’s great achievement during the post-WW2 generation was peculiar but notable. Supplanted by the USA, it lost the immense economic advantages of empire and much of its international influence, although it continued to bear the burden of a very high level of military spending, second only to that of the USA itself in the capitalist world. Britain’s prominence in industrial exports was ended by the challenges of continental Western Europe and Japan. Yet this relative decline was managed in such a way that the living standards of the majority of people markedly improved. Anthony Crosland, the Labour Party's ideological guru of the 1950s and 1960s, declared:
"Traditionally socialist thought has been dominated by the economic problems posed by capitalism, poverty, mass unemployment, squalor, instability, and even the possibility of the collapse of the whole system... capitalism has been reformed out of all recognition. Despite occasional minor recessions and balance of payments crises, full employment and at least a tolerable degree of stability are likely to be maintained."
Unemployment was lower than 2.5% for most of the twenty five years after the Second World War and did not rise above 5% until 1979; trade union membership grew as did workers' wages in manufacturing, in the docks, mining and other mass occupations; workers won entitlement to paid holidays and the dread of illness and old age was softened. Almost one and a half centuries after Britain became the ‘workshop of the world’, it became the rule that working class families would each have their own indoor bathroom.
Tebbit continues:
The Conservatives settled for a quiet time in office rather than a role in setting the political agenda, ameliorating or improving their inheritance from the previous government, but never reversing its policies. That set the scene for the rise of trade union power, the decline of industry and the rise in inflation, which increased until the unions toppled not only Edward Heath but James Callaghan.
Two corrections should be noted here. The 1951 Tory government did privatise the steel industry; however it was re-nationalised by Labour under Harold Wilson in 1967. More importantly, Lord Tebbit's insinuation that Labour policies (not reversed by the Conservatives until 1979) were the cause of the decline of Britain's industry cannot be sustained. The main factors in the UK's slow manufacturing decline in the three decades following the World War were the loss of the empire (previously a captive market for UK-made goods and source of cheap raw materials) and the industrial rise of continental Western Europe and especially Japan.
However, Britain remained a net exporter of industrial products until 1982. It was not until Margaret Thatcher came to power that the gradual contraction of manufacturing in the UK became a stampede of de-industrialisation.
1979
Norman Tebbit remarks succinctly on the Thatcherite period:
Battered by the Winter Of Discontent, Jim Callaghan's Government lost a confidence motion in spring 1979 and Margaret Thatcher swept to power. The post-war consensus was ended. She discarded controls on wages and prices, deregulated, decontrolled, denationalised, reformed trade union law, sold council houses to their tenants, liberated the Falklands, reduced taxation, cut the costs of EU membership and, alongside President Reagan, ended the Cold War in victory.
The reaction of the left was determination to simply reverse the Thatcherite reforms. It was not until Tony Blair that Labour accepted Thatcher had not only ended the post-war consensus but established a new one.
To which it must be added that Thatcher's policies, ultra-capitalist though they were, were not purely 'free market' policies. For example- the council houses (social housing provision), and also the privatisation shares in formerly nationalised industries, were sold at discounts of 60 to 70 percent of their market value; a massive state subsidy to entrench public support for capitalist ideology.
1997
On the New Labour win of that year, Tebbit is also concise:
John Major staggered to defeat at the hands of the Labour Party in 1997 at what may yet prove to have been the most significant election since 1945. To win, Tony Blair had to drop the old Left's commitments to renationalisation, the repeal of the Thatcher/Tebbit union reforms and unilateral disarmament.
Blair's promise to stand by [Conservative] Chancellor Ken Clarke's tax and spending programmes for the first three years of his Government and the well-planned 'prawn cocktail offensive' reassured business leaders and convinced Rupert Murdoch not only that Blair would win, but that he could be trusted.
Which is a notable observation on the nature of British democracy. To attract the neccesary support from the media and big business in order to win the election, the Labour Party's leadership had to convince the owners that they could be trusted, ie that key elements of the Thatcher programme would be continued.
The continuation of Tory policy on military and international matters, and in particular the alliance with the USA, was never an issue. Despite the honorable claim by the late Robin Cook that Labour would pursue an 'ethical' foreign policy, Labour when in government, as had been firmly established in 1945, could always be trusted to take the imperialist line.
But there was more to the 1997 bargain than Lord Tebbit outlines. An economic boom was taking place, and the business side accepted that- so long as de-regulation continued for the financial markets of the City of London, and privatisation and marketisation was carried on in industry and the services, and the pro-market ideological position was boosted in ideology, via the rhetoric of government ministers, and so long as the rich could carry on getting richer and richer... the Labour Party would nevertheless be able to deliver also, in practice, on its vaguely worded promises of hope to the working class majority.
Thus the minimum wage was introduced, as was the tax credit system, and after the time expired on their pledge to maintain Tory expenditure limits, the Blair / Brown government raised public spending; thereby maintaining and even increasing services, and reducing abject poverty. The number of jobs that were lost through the continuing de-industrialisation were more than balanced by the provision of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the public sector; and despite the further rise of the super-wealthy, changes to the tax system resulted in a significant transfer of income from the rich to the poor.
But the boom inevitably ended, and the global recession arrived, voiding the contract between Labour and the 'business community'. And sweet-talking David Cameron had also arrived.
2010
The Economist magazine, which is the intellectual voice of big business, has- alongside the Murdoch press and The Guardian- withdrawn its support from the Labour Party. It explains its position in its April 29th editorial:
Our bias towards greater political and economic freedom has often been tempered by other considerations... But in this British election the overwhelming necessity of reforming the public sector stands out. It is not just that the budget deficit is a terrifying 11.6% of GDP, a figure that makes tax rises and spending cuts inevitable. Government now accounts for over half the economy, rising to 70% in Northern Ireland. For Britain to thrive, this liberty-destroying Leviathan has to be tackled. The Conservatives, for all their shortcomings, are keenest to do that; and that is the main reason why we would cast our vote for them...
The prime minister has tended to take the side of producers—especially the public-sector unions—rather than consumers. He frustrated some of Mr Blair’s efforts to reform the health service and education and slowed down others once he became prime minister.
...the Tories have gone quiet on the question of cuts. But, more than their rivals, they are intent on redesigning the state. They would reform the NHS by bringing in more outside providers; their plans to give parents and teachers the right to set up schools are the most radical idea in this election... Some of this is clouded in waffle about a Big Society. Other bits do not go far enough: it is foolish to rule out letting for-profit companies run schools and wrong to exempt the NHS from cuts. But Mr Cameron is much closer to answering the main question facing Britain than either of his rivals is. In this complicated, perhaps inevitably imperfect election, he would get our vote.
That "liberty-destroying Leviathan", in the words of The Economist, is the social state, which under New Labour- for all its many and grevious sins- was used as the mechanism for ameliorating the individual and social impoverishment which is the consequence of de-restricted capitalism. The question on Thursday's ballot paper (except in a very small number of constituencies where a left-wing alternative to the Labour Party stands a genuine chance of being elected) runs as follows: to what extent will we give a mandate for the economic crisis to be used as the opportunity for the obliteration of the public sector and the welfare state?
Like The Economist, Norman Tebbit is concerned that, assuming he wins power, David Cameron might not go far enough in 'answering the main question facing Britain'. But to a great extent, how much the 'Leviathan' which they hate is destroyed over the next several years, thus returning Britain- even closer than was achieved while Tebbit was in government under Margaret Thatcher- to the capitalist model which existed before the Second World War, will depend on the size of the gap between the Labour vote and the Tory vote on Thursday.
This truly is the main question facing Britain. And the answer, for everybody who wishes to reduce the scale of the unemployment, poverty, and abolition of public services which will be the hallmark of the years to come in our country, is to vote Labour.