THE decision of up to 40 members of Foreign Secretary Beckett’s local Labour Party branch, Derby South, to quit the party, concretely proves that the three imperialist politicians, Blair, Beckett and Brown are destroying the Labour Party and engineering the return of a Tory government.
The Derby South defectors say that they are joining the Liberal Democrats over the refusal of Beckett to demand an immediate cease-fire on the Lebanon and for her backing of the Bush-Blair line that Israel should be allowed to carry on slaughtering the Lebanese until they were satisfied that they had destroyed Hezbollah.
Israel was unable to do this, no thanks to Beckett, Blair and Brown. But it did turn over one million Lebanese into refugees, by destroying their homes, and it did kill over a thousand Lebanese civilians, many of them young children.
It is no secret that the majority of members of Labour constituency parties feel just the same way about the pro-imperialist Bush stance that Beckett and the Labour Party leaders took over the slaughter of the Lebanese people.
So an avalanche of resignations can be expected, proving that these traitors to socialism are engineering a Tory return.
The Derby South resignations follow on from the recent national opinion poll, which showed that the Tories were a record nine percentage points ahead of the Labour Party as far as the next general election is concerned, at 40 per cent against Labour’s 31 per cent.
This collapse of the Labour vote is not just due to Blair, Brown and Beckett’s slavish role in relation to the Bush administration, where when Bush yells jump, they merely enquire what height is required.
Jointly responsible is the Blair administration’s continued support for 100 per cent privatisation of the Welfare State, so that it can hand tens of billions of the state budget over to big business and at the same time condemn the working class to a return of the bad old days.
Labour MPs such as John McDonnell have a duty to act now to demand the resignation of Blair, Brown and Beckett, while the trade unions have a duty to bring this Blair government down before it engineers a return of the Tories, and to bring in a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies in its place.
At the moment the trade union leaders are seeking to make use of the financial crisis following the cash loans for peerages scandal, and also the political crisis of the Labour government, to obtain from Gordon Brown a pledge that if the unions rescue ‘new’ Labour from its financial bankruptcy, by giving it millions of workers’ money, he will moderate the Blairite policies that he supports and in many cases formulated.
That this is not good enough is obvious. To begin with, Brown will pocket the trade unions’ money and then betray union members by carrying on with the same policies that he has been operating for the last nine years. The Blairite leopard will not change its spots.
Secondly, the working class and the majority of the middle class will not be won back by such a cynical and shoddy manoeuvre.
The trade union bureaucracy’s tactics are seeking to shoe Brown into office with millions of workers’ subscriptions, so that he can carry on with his betrayals. Only the Tories will be the gainer from this unprincipled tactic.
The trade unions must refuse any cash for Labour until Blair, Brown and Beckett have resigned, and at the TUC Congress they must carry a resolution for their resignation and a call for a workers’ government that will carry out socialist policies, and put this to the Labour Party conference that takes place just afterwards.
