After the fuel blockades

Blair's black September

Labour's Brighton conference should have been the launch pad for a general election next year. Only a few weeks ago the omens still looked very encouraging. The illusion of strength and purpose created by William Hague's instant mounting of every reactionary bandwagon had, it is true, produced some narrowing in the polls, but by late summer the Tories were once again in decline. Blair and New Labour looked unassailable, and even the most cautious of Millbank strategists must have been quietly sanguine about the party's prospects.

But a fortnight is a long time in politics. On the eve of conference, the Labour Party found itself behind in the polls for the first time in almost eight years, after one of the most spectacular falls from grace in recent political history. A respectable lead of 13% was transformed within days into a deficit of eight percent, with Blair's personal satisfaction rating falling from +2 to -34 points (ICM poll, September 17), a rout greater than that suffered by the Conservative Party after the UK's abrupt departure from the ERM in 1992. Almost overnight, Labour's aura of invincibility and its assiduously cultivated image of competence had been destroyed. The talk was all about holding on, of staging a fightback. Suddenly every-one was 'off message', with ministers engaged in open warfare in the media.

There were obviously a number of contributory factors, including the dome (monumental folly, incompetence, lies and reckless waste of the people's money); the Ecclestone affair (lies and naivety) - though this probably has little resonance beyond the metropolis and the Guardian-reading classes; and a generalised dissatisfaction, reflected in chronic mass abstentions in recent elections by Labour's core support among the grassroots working class, which evidently feels - quite rightly - that Labour is not their party any more. However, far and away the most important catalyst was, of course, the fuel blockade by farmers and hauliers, an extraordinarily interesting and significant political phenomenon.

Messrs Brown and Blair have both used the conference platform to do what they can in terms of immediate damage limitation. In an effort to stave off a revolt over pensions, for example, the chancellor has promised a one-off, 'inflation-busting' payment to OAPs this year, together with a complex package designed supposedly to help the least well off among them. Blair has told us ad nauseam how he understands the impact of fuel prices on small business, how much he is listening to the people, and how sorry he is that Labour has made mistakes. There were hints of limited concessions on fuel, but no firm proposals. It is, however, significant that the autumn budget statement has been brought forward by a couple of weeks, to fall within the protesters' 60-day deadline for action.

Those who are fascinated by the minutiae of the Labour conference, not to mention the amount of "sweat" brought forth by the prime minister's Herculean apologetics, can read it all and see the pictures in the bourgeois press. It is something we can return to later. But for the moment, surely the most pertinent questions arise from the fuel blockade - its specific nature and class character, its significance for British politics and also what it revealed about the Labour government.

Some serious Marxist thought is needed, but for the time being let us begin with the Communist Party of Britain and the Morning Star. Even by the CPB's eccentric standards, its analysis of the fuel crisis reaches a new nadir of theoretical wackiness. We are seriously asked to believe that the blockades were part of a conspiracy on the part of the oil companies (presumably in cahoots with the Tories) to destabilise, if not bring down, the Blair government. Ransacking its bag of historical parallels, the Morning Star casts 'comrade' Blair in the role of Allende, and the oil companies in the role of the CIA. Chile 1973 becomes Britain 2000. Bizarre or what? Just why Shell, Texaco et al should want to remove the most business-friendly Labour government in history is left unexplained.

Of course, the paper is right in stating that the blockades were supported by influential commentators in the Tory press. It was, after all, the Daily Mail that played the major role in instigating this summer's abortive 'dump the pump' initiative. The CPB was also right to point out the obvious fact that many of the participants in the blockades were rightwing sympathisers - in a broad sense. But if the comrades actually read the Tory papers, or thought about what they read, they should have known that the Tory Party itself, far from being at the centre of events, was severely criticised by the rightwing press for not getting sufficiently involved at the time. Hague and Portillo were just as nonplussed by the scale and effectiveness of the protest as were Blair and Brown, and confined themselves to making solemn, statesman-like pronouncements. It was only after the event that the Conservative leadership made its opportunistic promise to lower the rate of tax on fuel. The CPB's 'analysis' is simply incoherent, and probably stems from mutterings by the likes of Bill Morris about "collusion" and "connivance" between the protesters, the police and tanker drivers.

Another approach altogether was taken by the Socialist Party, whose paper published a four-page supplement by Peter Taaffe which virtually depicts the fuel blockade as a popular uprising by 'working people' against the Blair government. Given the SP's position that Labour is now entirely a straightforward bourgeois party of the bourgeoisie, such an 'uprising' must, of course, be a good thing (see 'Painting things red').

An adequate analysis of the significance of the fuel protests and their relation to contemporary British politics must begin with the recognition that, leaving aside such cases as Carson in Ulster and the blackshirts in London, they constituted a very rare example of extra-parliamentary action from the right - not, however, on a party-political basis, but as a spontaneous expression of the anger, despair and sense of impotence felt by certain sections of the petty bourgeoisie, whose interests are tangibly threatened by Labour Party policy. Marx himself pointed out, in discussing Napoleon III, that when the left finds itself mired in reformism, currents can arise among the right that willingly use 'revolutionary' methods.

But it was the 'right' in this case only in a broad, extra-party-political sense. Farmers represent the clearest example. For a complex of historical reasons, they have in general tended to be supporters of the Tory Party, not least because Labour governments of all complexions have consistently paid scant attention to them. Why should they? Farmers represent about two percent of the electorate and have been traditionally regarded politically by Labour as a lost cause. But, talking to farmers today, you find a degree of bitterness and cynicism that extends to all political parties, including the Conservatives.

The movement that brought about the Blair administration's most serious crisis and destroyed the Labour Party's hard-won reputation for competence has roots that go back to the BSE crisis in the 1990s. Contrary to the adage that 'there is no such thing as a poor farmer', the vast majority of British farmers, including the progenitors of the fuel blockades, like David Handley, of Farmers For Action, are archetypal small proprietors, employing a handful of labourers - perhaps two or three on a typical 500-acre mixed dairy and arable tenant holding. Even taking into account the receipt of subsidies, most are deeply in hock to the banks, and their 'take home' incomes are typically below the national average for skilled industrial workers.

Yet it was precisely the farmers whom Labour singled out for vitriolic condemnation in the aftermath of the fuel crisis. David Blunkett, the education secretary, of all people, was evidently deputed by the cabinet to denounce farmers as "subsidy junkies" who had cost the country £20 billion (an absurdly exaggerated figure) through BSE (The Guardian September 16). In the same paper, Margaret Beckett hinted darkly that the farmers were part of a plot engineered by those who could never and would never reconcile themselves to the existence of a Labour government.

The sheer vehemence of Labour's denunciation of a numerically insignificant layer in the petty bourgeois stratum has much to tell us. The debacle needed a scapegoat, in order to deflect blame from the real quarter. It took Blair the best part of four days to realise the seriousness of the situation. So much, you might say, for the effectiveness of focus groups, and Labour's much vaunted claim to be in touch with the people. Blair's first reaction betrayed obvious bewilderment and was followed by an attempt to shuffle responsibility onto the fuel distributors - complete with a melodramatic invocation of emergency powers courtesy of the privy council. This was followed by plans for rushed legislation in order to introduce statutory powers compelling fuel distributors to carry out their obligations.

In an atmosphere of near panic, the Labour machine's fatuous lies proliferated rapidly. First the lie that there was wide-scale intimidation of tanker drivers by pickets: an odd assertion, when every TV broadcast showed farmers and hauliers sharing flasks of tea with drivers on the other side of the fence at Wilmslow and elsewhere; even odder, when you listened to Bill Morris of the TGWU condemning "collusion" between the parties, demanding that the police use their powers of arrest under obstruction laws, and urging the oil companies to take out legal injunctions to break up the protests because they were a hindrance to trade. Abundant anecdotal evidence points to the fact that the refusal of large numbers of tanker drivers to break the line was motivated not by fear, but by sympathy with the aims and methods of the protesters. Many of these drivers are TGWU members and we must hope that they have taken note of the attitude displayed by their chief misleader.

Another lie, disseminated by health secretary Alan Milburn, and probably already forgotten, was that the fuel crisis was causing severe problems for the NHS. Embarrassed hospital spokespersons had no alternative, when questioned by the media, than to state that such claims were, to say the least, exaggerated. Hospital staff, like those from other essential services, obtained priority supplies of fuel - supplies sanctioned by ad hoc committees of protesters at petrol distribution centres.

The biggest lie, and one that impinges on the whole spectrum of Labour's policy stance, was that any concession to hauliers and farmers, let alone to the motoring public at large, would inevitably result in the cancellation of vital funding to health, education and so forth. Let the figures speak for themselves. According to city estimates in the press, the forecast balance of government revenue over expenditure for the current financial year will be in the region of £10-15 billion above that envisaged by Gordon Brown's last budget. Extrapolation from current levels, though obviously conjectural, puts the surplus as high as £24 billion. In part, this embarrassment of riches reflects falling unemployment with a commensurately higher take from income tax, and falling social security payments and higher VAT receipts from rises in consumer spending. It also reflects, it need hardly be said, an unforeseen windfall from the dramatic rise in the price of crude oil and from associated fuel taxes. To put it simply, the money is there for pensions, for a reduction in the tax on petrol and for much, much else besides.

If one is looking for a deeper cause of Labour's crisis than a spontaneous tax revolt by a small stratum of the petty bourgeoisie, it could be argued that the origin of this critical situation can be found in a fundamental contradiction in New Labour, a malaise that could be characterised as political schizophrenia. On the one hand, a hubris amounting to folie de grandeur, engendered by the 1997 landslide, by a post-electoral 'honeymoon' of unprecedented length and by the evident lack of serious opposition from a Tory Party that was demoralised and riven by continuing tension over the European question. On the other hand, a profound sense of insecurity centred principally on taxation and public expenditure, the Achilles heel that had played a definite part in keeping Labour out of office for 18 years.

The first aspect has been evident from the beginning. New Labour came to power on the basis of a decidedly vague manifesto, a vacuous 'modernising' agenda, revealingly described by Blair himself as "pragmatism with values". By lining up with a 'middle England' profoundly disillusioned with the perceived exhaustion and decadence of the Conservative Party, while at the same time conning the working class into the belief that Labour still represented their fundamental interests, Blair achieved a remarkable victory. He managed the trick of preserving the category of 'social democracy' in form, while jettisoning even its feeble reformist content. New Labour's 'social democracy' was essentially a cover for a strain of bourgeois neo-liberalism with a menacingly rightward trajectory, but for a remarkably long period it won the trust of a broad swathe of the population.

Mandelson, Gould and the Millbank machine appeared vindicated: listen to what the focus groups are saying, then tell them what they want to hear - a self-feeding process that in the long term can only breed dangerous delusion. The resulting plethora of declarations, aims and commitments gave a good impression of activity while actually doing precious little, but it served to convince many people - not least Blair himself - that he was 'in touch' and could do no wrong so long as he remained so. To say that the entire nation was behind him is an obvious exaggeration, but he evidently believed it - until recently.

The second aspect - Labour's paranoia about taxation and public spending - centres on Gordon Brown, whose economic and fiscal 'prudence' has attained the level of self-parody. For three years he has been the best chancellor that the Tories never had, a man whose conference speech on Monday was acclaimed even by the Daily Mail as "masterly". It is a reflection on our superficial, semi-literate media that this self-serving opportunist has managed to retain 'socialist', even 'leftwing' credentials in the popular consciousness, when the aggregate effect of his stewardship of the public purse has been to give every support to big capital, while actually widening rather than narrowing the gap between rich and poor.

In his speech to conference, Blair threw down the gauntlet to the Conservative Party, indicating that his main line of attack in the general election campaign will predictably be on the question of taxation. In this sense, we have a paradoxical reversal of the situation that pertained in the 1980s and beyond: this time it will be Labour that poses as the party of economic and fiscal prudence, the Tories who will be condemned as profligate adherents of the 'tax and spend' approach.

Notwithstanding the concessions that must surely be forthcoming in the next budget statement, it seems unlikely that we have heard the last word from the frustrated petty bourgeoisie. Interesting times lie ahead.