New Labour is old hat

"Politics is the art of the possible," we are assured by those "hard-headed" pragmatists who, unlike us woolly-headed idealists, live in the "real world."

This aphorism could stand as the epitaph for new Labour.

Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and their acolytes have shown how it is possible to squander the biggest parliamentary majority in British history, drive millions of Labour voters away from the Labour Party and lose more than half of the party's membership in the process.

They have shown how it's possible to drag social democracy through the mud and the blood.

Whatever the shortcomings and failures of previous Labour governments - and they were many - it is impossible to imagine Clement Attlee privatising health and education services or Harold Wilson launching an unprovoked war with a pack of lies at the cost of half a million civilian lives.

James Callaghan was no great liberal, but it is difficult to see him wanting to bang up British citizens for three months without charge, or asylum-seekers for even longer.

Yet none of the four new Labourites contesting the Labour leadership disowns the disastrous, treacherous legacy of new Labour.

Instead, they either hide behind the democratic and social democratic achievements of its first term or they talk blandly about "moving on" because new Labour has outlived its usefulness.

They should not be allowed to rewrite history so lightly. Most of Labour's first-term achievements between 1997 and 2001 were the legacy of commitments demanded by the unions and conceded by John Smith, the last social democratic leader of the Labour Party.

This is true of the statutory minimum wage, trade union rights, devolution for Scotland and Wales and a Freedom of Information Act.

Even so, Blair and his new Labour cabal did everything within their power to limit the effectiveness of these policies. Other pre-1997 pledges, for example to maintain full employment and renationalise the railways, were dumped.

New Labour's main usefulness was to big business, especially the City of London and British transnational corporations.

Between 1997 and 2008, for instance, whereas total wages increased by just over three-quarters in money terms, the total domestic profits of financial corporations trebled.

The overseas profits of British-based transnationals rose by 179 per cent. In fact, towards the end of new Labour's reign, Britain's monopoly capitalists reaped more in profits from their overseas operations than from their domestic ones.

One of Blair and Brown's first measures in office was to increase the independent powers of the Bank of England, even though the general election manifesto had promised to make monetary policy-making more accountable.

The result was a strategy of high interest rates to prop up sterling and the City which helped destroy 1.4 million manufacturing jobs in 10 years.

It is significant that neither David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Ed Balls or Andy Burnham intend to reverse the new Labour counter-revolution inside the Labour Party.

They do not support public ownership of the railways - or of much else for that matter - or the restoration of Treasury responsibility for setting interest rates.

They do not intend to replace Labour's risible legislative commitment to cutting the public-sector deficit with a serious one to restore full employment as a central objective of government policy.

Indeed, as unemployment heads towards three million, with one-quarter of young people neither in work nor college, they propose nothing which challenges the prerogatives of monopoly capital to ramp up prices, close viable enterprises or cut wages while doubling dividends and bonuses.

They propose no measures of public ownership, no end to the private finance initiative, no controls on the movement of capital, no repeal of the most restrictive anti-union laws in Europe.

Their foreign policy also remains the same, peering out of the rear orifice of the United States, maintaining US military bases in Britain, committing £76 billion to a new generation of nuclear weapons under US control, striving to make the European Union safe for British and US monopoly profits.

The best on offer from the new Labourite epigones is Ed Miliband's pledge to introduce "a capitalism that works for people."

It's difficult to know whether to laugh at such political naivety or weep at the poverty of its ambition.

Monopoly capitalism has not only survived its biggest and most expensive crisis in three generations. It has done so with the power and arrogance to punish those whose public money bailed out the entire financial system - namely the people, the workers including public employees, the users of public services.

It requires supreme faith in politics as the art of the possible to believe that such a system can be made to work for the very people it exploits, extorts and then punishes in return for saving its life.

Like the House of Bourbon, which thought that restoration after the French revolution would allow it to be as reactionary as ever, new Labour has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Under any of the feeble four, it will be "big business as usual" - unless the trade unions fight to reclaim the Labour Party for the labour movement.

The signs are not encouraging, although the next few months could be decisive.

First, the trade unions, especially the main ones in the public sector, need to call joint meetings in all the regions and nations of Britain to organise broad-based local campaigns to defend public services and jobs.

A new, huge round of cuts in public spending will be unveiled in the Con-Dem government's spending review on October 20.

Unions and the forthcoming TUC conference must commit themselves to real action, ending the embarrassing contrast between the militancy elsewhere in Europe and torpor here in Britain.

Last year's TUC decision to support the People's Charter, which provides the progressive alternative to Con-Dem policies of slash and burn, needs to be turned into solid campaigning.

Whoever wins the Labour Party leadership election, affiliated unions should make clear that there will be no more blank cheques to fund anti-working-class, pro-war policies. To abjure this weapon, as some union leaders do at present, signifies a lack of determination to reclaim the Labour Party for the labour movement.

Without substantial changes in policy, no Labour leadership will carry any credibility when attacking all those Con-Dem measures which are based upon and extend new Labour's programme.

The next Labour Party leader should be told to read some of the classic works of Ralph Miliband, beginning with, say, Parliamentary Socialism and progressing to The State In Capitalist Society before moving into 10 Downing Street.

Anyone who blathers about building "a capitalism for the people" might be better deployed in the Tory or Lib Dem parties trying to civilise his colleagues, not misleading Labour into another cycle of hypocritical oppositionism, empty promises, hope-filled victory, abject surrender to big business, disillusionment and defeat.

But there are two other lessons to be learned from history here and from other countries in Europe.

First, the left in the trade union movement has to begin putting the case for a fundamentally different kind of society - socialism - in place of corrupt, crisis-ridden, anti-people, anti-planet capitalism.

And second, a bigger, more influential Communist Party is vital to counteract rightwards drift in the labour movement and the Labour Party, to help organise the fight for realistic militancy in the labour movement and to project the prospect of socialism.

Robert Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.