SOCIALIST UNITY

Labour Home has provided the full results of the Labour Deputy Leadership contest; this was a significant contest as some 300,000 trade unionists voted, some 8% of those eligible to vote – which is a reasonably high turn out for this sort of election, presumably reflecting the activists. (some care needs to be taken in interpreting the results as Labour Home present them, because the columns represent the contribution towards the total vote, not the percentage of votes within that part of the electorate)
Overall it was a good result for the left, as it demonstrates that among trade unionists there is a significant layer articulating dissatisfaction. This is a much better context for continuing the struggle against the government than if the Brown-Blair policies had received a ringing endorsement.

The main right wing candidate, Alan Johnson, was ultimately defeated by the more centre Harriet Harman, and Harman had put forward some policy issues that are critical of the current leadership, noticeably opposition to Trident, and she has also said she was wrong to back the Iraq war.
The election was by single transferable vote, where voters place the candidates in order of preference, and at each round the one with the lowest vote is eliminated and their next preferences distributed among the remaining candidates.

The candidate most associated with the left, Jon Cruddas won the first round of voting with 19.39% of the Electoral College, 28.9% of trade unionists and won every round of voting amongst trade unionists. This means that some 100,000 trade unionists voted for Cruddas - demanding a more leftward direction from government. A slightly greater number of trade unionists also voted for the softer options of Hain or Harman, who were also making left noises toward the unions, and Hain was backed by the GMB, who sent out a strongly worded recommendation to vote for him. Unison backed the right-winger Johnson. According to the Guardian most trade unionist followed the recommendations of their leaderships.

Among trade unionists, only 24.96% voted for the hard right candidates Johnson and Blears. USDAW, Britain’s fifth biggest union strongly backed Blears. USDAW is institutionally right wing, with more than half their members working for TESCO where USDAW have a sweetheart deal with management and are seemingly cooperating with TESCO bosses in breaking the TGWU representation of drivers in Livingston in Scotland. If USDAW are proven to be playing this role they should be thrown out of the TUC as a scab union, so their support for Blears is explicable.

The fact that polling organisations had placed Johnson as a clear favourite who only came third in first preference votes, shows how political pundits misunderstand politics. Johnson got the highest vote amongst MPs, but was only third among trade unionists and individual members.
So what about Cruddas? Certainly his authority is strengthened, he came third overall, and was the candidate who received the most first preference votes, and as he led among trade unionists was also the candidate who received the absolutely largest number of votes, before weighting the votes in the electoral college.

There are two mistakes that we could make about Cruddas. One is to maintain the barely veiled hostility towards him that John McDonnell and his supporters exhibit. Objectively, Cruddas’ position is progressive. The opposite mistake is to overstate Cruddas’s position as a left winger. His policy positions are left compared to the mainstream direction of New Labour, but Cruddas is not an ideological left winger, but rather he is someone promoting a more left steer in politics because he believes that is objectively in the best institutional interests of the Labour Party.

Remember Cruddas was a New Labour insider at Milbank, and had special responsibility for relations between the Blairites and the unions. His critique is an intelligent one because he knows, from the inside, how the system works. Perhaps it is an unfair analogy, but Lavrentiy Beria and Yuri Andoropov became relatively radical reformers during their brief periods in charge of the Soviet Union, because as secret police-men they had no illusions how unpopular the government was, and where it was failing. Former Blairite Cruddas also has no illusions how unpopular Blair’s government is, and where it is failing.

It was correct to support Cruddas, and if he uses the authority he gains from this election to continue to promote left policies, then the unions and socialist activists should continue supporting his initiatives. However, Cruddas’s project is an impossible one: one of the characteristics of neo-liberalism is that it is self sustaining in perpetuating the conditions for its own continuance – as neo-liberalism eats away the participatory activist base in the Labour Party and wider civil society institutions.

The only institutions that are resisting that trend are the single issue movements, who are largely hostile to the Labour party, and those trade unions that have broken from the social-partnership model and who are trying to rebuild their activist and workplace representative base. It is only based upon these activists in the movement and unions that the left can be rebuilt.