FRANK Field, the notorious Labour party right winger has joined the Tory coalition and is to be its ‘Poverty Tsar’, no doubt bringing back the hated means testing and work camps of the 1930s national government.
That he must be expelled from the Labour Party without delay is obvious. However, he will not be the last Labour Party leader to join the Tory coalition as it seeks to become a national government.
It has not been forgotten that a few months ago Lord Mandelson declared that he did not rule out serving under a Tory government, especially with his experience of dealing with, and for, the EU on trade matters.
In 1997 he was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the victorious Labour Party with its massive majority going into a coalition with the Liberals.
More recently he was blamed by Labour MPs for trying to bounce the Labour Party into a coalition with the Clegg-led Liberals.
Field’s defection comes as the Labour party leaders are looking for nominations for the LP leadership with two hats already in the ring, ie the Miliband brothers. They have revealed the bankruptcy of those who are to remain behind.
They have been able with tremendous speed to drop their Blairite and Brownite principles, declaring that the ‘New Labour’ beliefs in globalisation and unregulated capitalism belong in the bin. Now they are seeking to embrace new opportunist policies to win a bigger share of the vote.
Ed Miliband last Saturday morning spoke to the Fabian Society.
He spoke of a constituent who ‘was voting for the BNP, because he told me his friends’ wages were being undercut by immigration from Eastern Europe. . . But the truth is that immigration is a class issue. If you want to employ a builder it’s good to have people you can take on at lower cost, but if you are a builder it feels like a threat to your livelihood.’
He added: ‘When competition is driving down your wages and your pension rights, saying globalisation is good for you and for the economy as a whole is an example of what I mean about becoming a technocrat. Because it is a good answer for economists but it is no answer for the people of Britain.’
His answer is not nationalisation or socialism, Miliband did not mention either. It is to be ‘community politics’, ‘fairness’, ie sharing out the cuts, a siege economy and anti-immigrant politics. Because EU citizens have a right to be in Britain the thrust of these will be directed at repatriating or keeping out black and brown people. This is a victory for the BNP!
Miliband calls for radicalism in dealing with banks. He does not call for nationalisation under workers control and socialism.
He says ‘we were stuck in a mindset of the 1990s which feared the idea of government taking on the power of markets’ – but he does not call for expropriation.
He concludes: ‘we need a new way of thinking about markets’, not their abolition.
He claims: ‘Globalisation is not simply an untameable force of nature to which we must adapt or die’ – but has no alternative.
He states: ‘we need a new way of thinking about the state. . . We need to show we are the people who can reform the state to make it more accountable and give power away.’ He does this without calling for the capitalist state to be broken up.
He says that Iraq broke the ‘bond in trust’, without condemning the war in Afghanistan or calling for a break with imperialism.
He did not call for a war against the Tory cuts regime. He did not denounce the 55 per cent voting that Cameron intends to require to remove a government, and he did not call for working class action to bring down the coalition.
His brother David spoke in the same vein saying: ‘Any one who thinks that the future is about re-creating New Labour is wrong. I think we’ve got to use this period to decisively break with that.
What I’m interested in is Next Labour.’
It is to be out with the old opportunism and in with the new.
‘What’s Next’ is the struggle to mobilise the working class to bring down the Tory led coalition and bring in a workers government that will carry out socialist policies and support the fight for socialism all over the world.
The Labour Party had 13 years to change the world. Five wars and a number of slumps and crashes later it is diseased and rotting, and more than ready to be deposited in the dustbin of history.
