In the United Kingdom, you could hardly say that Labour and its leader Ed Miliband are riding high. Having sat at no more than a 3% lead over the Tories for some months, they’ve now fallen to 1% — well within the margin of error. Nevertheless, even the 1% margin has been enough for the party to believe that it is on track for victory, for one simple reason — and its name is UKIP. The batty UK Independence Party, though lacking a single seat in the House of Commons, has managed to consistently poll 10%, most of it taken from the Tories, and making UKIP a valid fourth party. And in a first-past-the-post system, that could prove disastrous. Given that Miliband has moved the party to the Left from its New Labour nadir while keeping many of the shire votes it needs to win, that’s not nothing.
So there was considerable gnashing of teeth when Left filmmaker Ken Loach made a public call this week for a new Left party to replace Labour, arguing for Left Unity — one of two or three distinct groups floating around to offer this sort of positionality. There’s been no groundswell to turn these groups into parties, and splitting Labour (at the Right end last time) has spelt disaster before. So it would be in the UK — but in Australia, it’s exactly what should be considered. Not a new party, but something more modest, yet possibly more effective — separate candidacies by a progressive trade union list in key seats and the Senate. In this case, it is not the Left that is leaving the party, but the party that is leaving the Left.
The campaign to separate Labor from the unions is in full swing. There is no doubt that the relationship has to be revised, that the union-factions-party connection promotes sclerosis and contentless “microfactions” — really gangs — coalesced around a charismatic figure, or David Feeney. But that is not really the main impetus for the new push for separation, which is being run out of The Australian, in the space between its obsessive and grinding anti-18C and anti-ABC campaigns. The Labor-union separation push is coming from the party’s pro-market forces, who want to wind back such commitment as the Rudd/Gillard government had made, and present the party as little more than a steward of the markets, extending “opportunity” through further neoliberalisation — and caring little, it would seem, about the greater entrenching of every sort of inequality that such a process represents.
They’re a strange mob, Labor’s gung-ho marketistas. They’re led by some, such as Craig Emerson, who have compared Australia unfavourably to the United States, admiring the latter’s dynamism (and unruffled by its huge class of working poor, backwardness and public squalor), and by Michael Costa, who swapped a youthful obsessive Trotskyism for a midlife crisis obsessive Hayekism, both sought out for psychological reasons rather than for a real progressive politics. When Costa’s protege, Cassandra Wilkinson, announced she was signing on with the Centre for Independent Studies for a few months and detailed what a daring move this was, it was — well, as shocking as that time when Michael Stipe came out. Really? You’re joining a right-wing think tank? What a surprise. Next you’ll be saying Paul Howes might be seeking a position in the corporate world.
“The truth is, Labor’s marketeers are symptomatic of a deeper-run process …”
The truth is, Labor’s marketeers are symptomatic of a deeper-run process, whereby the separation of the culture/knowledge producer class from which Labor’s elite comes from the mass groups it purports to represent is now so total that no sympathy runs between them. The public remains far more collective, nationalist, protectionist, and statist than the head members of both major parties — who share a mutual sympathy at the stupidity of their own supporters in rejecting neoliberalism. Their support for market solutions is different from the application of it by Hawke/Keating — even though Keating remains a fetish object for them. They regard the neoliberal market not merely as an efficient form, but as a moralising and disciplinary force, to shape a public that would otherwise become lazy and undynamic, and, you know, want a life or something.
Progressive unions should recognise that this is happened, and that the party that was originally constituted as a Labour/Union Representation Committee has now become the opposite of that — the pro-market leadership projects such ideas onto Labor, with a barely concealed hostility for the values of solidarity and full humanity of the worker that the union movement represents. It has become anti-representation, for which union dues still foot the bill.
So key progressive unions should re-represent themselves, a more social democratic set of policies, and their members in the electoral sphere. Half a dozen unions — the CFMEU, the NTEU, ETU and others — could run a candidate in a dozen or so key seats across the country, where the Greens are competitive with Labor. Unlike the dire situation in the UK, the preferential system has been designed to make this a viable process. Such candidates may only get 5% or so — but they would only need 5% to play a key role, scare Labor shitless with a Labor/Greens preference split, or open ticket, or by supporting a high-profile independent in key seats.
The great advantage of such a move would be that it would cement a larger progressive electoral vote bloc than the Greens can currently manage, as it would finally draw away another tranche of Labor stalwarts who, for class and cultural reasons, can’t bring themselves to support the Greens. The Greens might get nervous about it — but since their class base is overwhelmingly in the culture/knowledge/policy class, they cannot fully represent the people that might be attracted by a union/labour list either. Above all, it would expose how threadbare is the support for Labor’s market fundamentalists, a tiny insider elite parasitic on a host party.
Likely? Not from any of the large core unions that continue to support, year in and out, pollies who want to marginalise their members and their world view. These things don’t happen and don’t happen and then they do, and everything changes. If the will is there, and a willingness to risk the margin of error.
Thoughtful, provocative article.
[coalesced around a charismatic figure, or David Feeney]
ROTFL You’re a treasure Guy.
Well said for the most part Guy. However, it’s not true that the public is more statist than the leaders of both major parties (whether they are more collectivist or nationalist is debatable). No one could be more statist than our current political elites, who currently give bipartisan support for draconian anti-terrror laws, draconian drug laws, endlessly increasing the powers of ASIO, not to mention the persecution of Assange, Snowden and other “enemies of the State”.
Rundle for president
Seems a bit defeatist to just state / accept that Greens “cannot fully represent the people that might be attracted by a union/labour list either”.
Greens have industry & manufacturing policies that approach future market constraints realistically – unlike major parties who seem intent on pretending that we can all keep waltzing to a never-ending “growth” that isn’t doomed by realities of finite resources.
Are you proposing that “workers” are unable to understand this? Surely not. I would agree that at this stage of the game a majority don’t accept my contentions, but they soon will – when the physical realities start to bite harder.
I agree that unions should split from ALP – because the ALP is effectively dead as a progressive force and some unions are so backward they should never have been affiliated (SDA) or should have joined the DLP.
But I reject the idea that Greens and workers cant join in an effective political force. And if some of the union leaders had real long-term interests of members at heart (to say nothing of their members children) they would be telling them this too.