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Weekly Worker 607 Thursday January 12 2006
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Scramble for centre ground
Don't be shy!
Communist Party members have been picking themselves up after the recent festival of pagan excess and slowly - a tad too slowly in the view of this columnist - easing back into political work. An important immediate task facing many of them is that of contacting sympathetic readers of our paper to ask them either to take out a standing order or up their existing one. Despite the inevitable indolence of the holiday period, I am pleased to report a reasonable start to the campaign. Standing orders have swelled by just under £100 per month. (For the purposes of the campaign, we are counting both those comrades who increase/initiate SOs direct to the Weekly Worker and those who are responding to the campaign by contributing regularly to the CPGB, the organisation that carries the main burden of sustaining this paper financially). In particular, thanks to Cardiff party supporter GD, for the very fine 150% increase in his quarterly contribution to the paper; to comrade JD for his extra £5; to the critically minded SWP comrade, TM, for showing his appreciation of the contribution our paper makes to his work with a new £15-per-quarter donation; to newcomer CM for his useful tenner and to BP - already one of our top hitters - for his stout £30 extra per month. Well done to all these comrades and to the others who, without being badgered, have taken the initiative to front up. Plenty more party members and closer sympathisers are making reassuring noises about increasing existing standing orders - as soon as the season of good will to all humans and GBH to all credit cards recedes. We are confident they will come through for us. But what will make the qualitative difference is a real increase in the number of sympathetic readers starting to make regular donations. As we are starting to engage with these comrades, we are noticing a degree of shyness. Comrades are actually a little reticent about taking standing orders for small regular amounts - it almost seems they believe they have to commit 50% of their gross income plus four pints of blood before we take them seriously. Our paper is engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the advanced, organised section of our class in the UK. The overwhelming majority of the comrades who read our paper still disagree, perhaps strongly, with many of the programmatic positions of the CPGB. Yet they still appreciate our press’s openness and commitment to principle. They have to understand that they are precisely the type of comrades who can make a difference. They must start contributing. Trust me - there are enough of you out there to make a qualitative difference to this paper’s financial position if you all did your bit. If that happened, our paper’s ability to intervene, to be an effective organiser for what could be broadly called the revolutionary democratic trend in the workers’ movement, would be greatly enhanced. Naturally, alongside this special appeal to raise standing orders, we are running our nuts ’n’ bolts monthly fighting fund to keep the paper on the road. Special thanks go to comrade TD - a CPGB veteran of many years who is a constant source of inspiration - for his monthly £60. Also thanks to comrades NJ (£15) and CR (£10) for showing the way with donations via PayPal on the web (they were two among 13,289 e-readers last week). With their help, plus gifts from YF, BJ, CS and RT, our basic monthly fund now stands at £185 - slightly lagging behind the rate needed to meet our £600 target. More news and feedback on our standing order campaign
next week. In the meantime, don’t wait. There are SO forms available
to download from our website or to order from our box number. Don’t
hang around for our overworked cadre to phone you. Now’s not the
time to be shy - make a commitment today. Robbie Rix
|
Our
organisation needs to raise £1,000 extra per month in standing orders
by the end of February. This is to stabilise the finances of the
Weekly Worker and - crucially - to give us the opportunity
to enhance our paper’s print quality, content, associated web presence
and circulation.
Emily Bransom comments on the resignation of Charles Kennedy
Sit on the fence long enough and one day you’ll fall off. In his determination to unite the different wings of the Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy failed to satisfy either and has resigned as leader of the party. The mission for the new leader will be to reassert control over the centre ground in British politics.
Things have moved on from the good old nights of late drinking in the bars of Westminster. Where once boozing was something many a red-nosed MP took pride in, now it is something to keep quiet about, an embarrassing secret, and if it gets really bad your trusted colleagues can describe you as “a dead man walking” to the newspapers. Alcoholism has been described as “the only disease you can get yelled at for having” and certainly has not helped Kennedy’s political career or reputation.
To narrow his resignation down to simply a drink problem, however, is to miss the point. Nor was his popularity with the public undergoing a nosedive. His personal poll ratings have been pretty good. Not only that - the Lib Dems won more votes at the last general election than they, or the Liberal Party before them, had seen in over 80 years. The party has made substantial political gains over the last 10 years, without actually having to do that much. The Liberal Democrats have had their place in politics and have made good use of it. So why get rid of Kennedy now?
The party harbours unresolved differences over its future direction - differences that Kennedy dealt with it by downplaying their significance. In simple terms, the Lib Dems are split between left and right, between ‘social’ and pro-market liberalism. Kennedy failed to bridge the gap, emphasising unity at all costs. To avoid rocking the boat this is also what the prospective candidates are doing at the moment.
Politics is not what it used to be. The Liberal Democrats have been floundering around blurry principles for too long and have woken up to find themselves playing a different game with different rules. It is just not as simple as it used to be. Previously, in the days when right was right and left was left, the Liberal Democrats could walk the middle line and still make themselves heard. Between what passed as the party of labour and what was the bourgeois party of big business, they were still able to call some part of politics their own. Rather than alcohol then, it was Kennedy’s fate that success inflated ambitions and fed dreams of minesterial portfolios, undermining his ability to give his party a unified message.
The Liberal Democrats have, at least since the 1950s, been the party of the reasonable middle classes, and therefore inhabited a centre ground which was created not by them, but by the struggle and temporary balance established between the main classes in society. The problem for the Lib Dems now is that the centre ground has shifted. But in the centre is where they want to be. That is their territory. To re-establish their position the Liberal Democrats must first make a choice. Do they want to align themselves closer to New Labour or closer to the New Tories? Even equidistance requires change.
Their decision will no doubt be influenced by the remote possibility that the next general election will result in a hung parliament. If this happens the ball will be in centre court, as eyes look to the Liberal Democrats as coalition partners. The different wings of the party will use the leadership contest as an opportunity to position themselves as kingmakers.
Former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown believes that David Cameron’s arrival on the political scene means an “interesting” contest for the centre ground. Under Thatcher, the Tories shifted distinctly to the right and were followed at a distance by Blairism and New Labour. The trade unions were defeated. The neoliberal agenda of privatisation and ‘marketisation’ is now part of the mainstream consensus, therefore. Whilst remaining firmly within this consensus, Cameron’s recent public repudiation of previous Tory policy for the financing of a middle class opt-out from the NHS suggests a move away from Thatcherism and towards a more traditional one-nation Conservatism.
Meanwhile, Gordon Brown looks set to be the next Labour leader, and though there are hopes that he will bring a more social democratic face back to the party, without a concerted outbreak of class struggle nothing of the like will happen. In any case social democracy as a form can no longer deliver either sustained reforms or guarantee class peace.
Where establishment Britain is at in 2006 can be seen in miniature within the Liberal Democrat Party. Standing in the leadership contest, in the left corner, we have a popular but (at time of writing) not yet confirmed candidate, Simon Hughes. The party president is known as the ‘tax and spend’ man and is on the ‘social liberal’ wing. Electing him would make the Liberal Democrats deeply unattractive to the City, the CBI and the rightwing press. To the right is home affairs spokesman Mark Oaten. From the economic liberal side of the party, he has reportedly said that the “market is not the answer to everything”. So he is a soft Thatcherite. Between the two is the current favourite, Sir Menzies Campbell. He aims to “restore a sense of purpose and unity”. In other words he is committed to repeating the mistakes of his political predecessor.
