Fractures show in Tory party, while Labour Party tops shift further to right  

BY JONATHAN SILBERMAN
LONDON - British prime minister John Major went to Buckingham Palace March 17 and requested that the Queen dissolve Parliament and set the date for the general election for May 1. Under British constitutional arrangements, the Queen as head of state has the power to dissolve Parliament at any time, within a maximum of five years. This meant that the election had to be called by May 22. But in making the announcement six weeks in advance - the minimum is three weeks and the norm is four - Major initiated what will be the longest formal election campaign since 1918.

British politics has been overshadowed by the coming election for months. By deciding to have a longer formal campaigning period, the Tory leader was hoping he could overcome disunity within the Conservative Party, appealing to Members of Parliament (MPs) to put their common interest of winning the election ahead of political differences.

But the rifts in the ruling party are once again laid bare, as they were in 1995, when Major resigned from the party leadership and put himself up for reelection. The prime minister was bruised in that gamble, when 85 Tory MPs voted for his opponent, John Redwood. What has frequently been dubbed a "civil war" in the party continued, including among its central leadership.

A number of prospective parliamentary candidates announced their intention of publishing election manifestos at odds with that of the party leadership, with demands for opposition to closer European integration and for tighter immigration controls prominently featured. Public debate opened as to when Major would resign the party leadership, following the presumed defeat at the polls. Tory MP and member of the European parliament Edwina Currie, for instance, said she hoped Major would go quickly.

The pro-Conservative Daily Telegraph wrote March 15 of the party's "disarray" and the Economist business newsweekly wrote March 22 that "As a grassroots party, it is in a state of decay. As a parliamentary party, it has disintegrated."

Death and defection has wiped out the party's parliamentary majority, which stood at 21 after the last election in 1992. On February 27, the last parliamentary by- election, in Wirral South near Liverpool, witnessed a 17 percent swing to the Labour Party. Opinion polls have the Tories trailing Labour by 26 percent.

The Tory Party crisis is an expression of the 100-year decline of British imperialism, which is taking a particularly acute form in the depression conditions of the 1990s. Britain's decline has wracked all the institutions of political rule built up in the epoch of Britain's world ascendancy - from the Conservative Party, to the monarchy and established Church, to the fabric of the United Kingdom itself, which is fracturing along its weakest - that is national -seams.

Debate over Europe
The unbroken resistance of working people in Northern Ireland has opened up an historic opportunity for the Irish freedom struggle. There is a new fight for Scottish independence. In spite of attempts to keep Ireland off the election agenda by the major parties, the issue won't go away. The revolutionary nationalist party Sinn Fein is standing candidates and many political commentators forecast that they will win one or two seats.

In Britain itself, the crisis is throwing up turbulent changes in the whole framework of capitalist politics. The Tory Party has been the main party of the imperialist rulers. But it has come under growing strains, as the rulers continue with the assault on working-class living standards that they need to restore declining profit rates, and as they search for a new role in the sharpening European and world conflicts.

As Bonn led the way in the fight for European Monetary Union - using the strength of the D-Mark and the stability of the German economy - Britain fought to make London the EU's financial center. Against the overwhelming size of the German economy, the British rulers vainly sought to rely on the historic importance of the City of London in international currency trading and the weight of investment into the EU from America and Japan, of which Britain receives the lion's share.

With the prospect of a monetary union receding fast, following the EU summit in Dublin last December, a new pressure is buffeting the British rulers: Washington's drive to expand NATO to Russia's borders. Defense Secretary Michael Portillo gave the Tory government's immediate backing to Washington's war move, seeking to utilize the "special relationship" with the U.S. rulers as a counter to London's decline. Associated with this, the British government has favored the integration of Turkey, as a strategic NATO member, into the EU.

This foreign policy has received bipartisan support, but the pressures are mounting against what former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd described as Britain "punching above its weight." This is evidenced by British troops currently being deployed in 22 countries; in Bosnia, London has a contingent second only to Washington. Britain's former world role and its continued position as the world's fifth largest trader makes it particularly sensitive to international developments. But its decline makes it more and more dependent on overseas alliances, which are shifting fast in the conflict-ridden world of the 1990s. The "special relationship" with Washington is much weaker today. It means much more to London than to Washington and increasingly depends on Britain's clout in Europe.

Such developments come to the center of domestic politics, fueling divisions within the Tory party over Europe. Some sections of the ruling class are attracted to the French government's stand against Washington. The Labour Party is promising a "defense and security" review, but has already let it be known that it favors military cooperation in the air with Paris, now a NATO member.

The newly-formed Referendum Party, led by rightist billionaire James Goldsmith, has sought to take advantage of the growing factionalism to strengthen its ties with the Tory right. It withdrew its candidate in Kensington and Chelsea when the right-wing populist former defense minister, Alan Clark, was selected as the local Tory candidate.

The Referendum Party claims to have 100,000 members "with thousands more joining each week." Goldsmith has recently widely circulated a brochure entitled "The Betrayal of Our Nation." The brochure contains the text of a speech in which Goldsmith salutes former French president Charles de Gaulle and argues in favor of a "strong British leader" who will stand up to the "Eurocrats." Goldsmith has expounded sharply racist and anti-immigrant views in his book The Trap.

Broader sections of the ruling class have looked to the Labour Party under Anthony Blair to provide temporary respite from the Tory crisis. Over the last few years, Blair has taken advantage of the retreat of the labor movement to shift the Labour Party significantly to the right, dubbing it "New Labour." As the prospect of victory approaches, the Labour leadership has taken the opportunity to dot the i's and cross the t's in the shift Blair has effected in the Labour Party.

The Economist recently wrote that Blair "has made Labour electable by adopting many of the Tories' own policies and, just as notably, much of their attitude, in economics, in social policy, on the welfare state, in dealing with crime, even on Europe and the single currency."

In the last few weeks, the Labour leadership has announced that:

A Labour government will stick to the limits on public spending and inflation decided by the Conservative government.

Labour will not change the top rate of income tax in the first five years of government.

There will be no reversal of any of the government's privatizations and Labour's much vaunted one-off windfall tax on privatized public utilities is to be more restricted than originally projected.

Labour officials are drawing on Adair Turner, director- general of the Confederation of British Industry, to help prepare a special Labour "business manifesto."

As the election approaches, there is only one major issue upon which the Labour and Tory leaderships diverge: the question of Scottish devolution - with Labour in favor and Conservatives opposed. But here too there is unity in their common opposition to Scottish independence, and Labour has won support from the Liberal Democrats and some leading Tory `lefts' for a program of constitutional reform to modernize the institutions of political rule.

The consolidation of Labour's program has been rewarded by the party's endorsement by growing sections of the capitalist rulers. On March 18 the daily Sun, owned by international media billionaire Rupert Murdoch, announced on its front-page poster cover "The Sun Backs Blair." The Sun, along with the Daily Mail, is one of the most right- wing of the popular dailies and sells 3.9 million copies. The news was rapidly followed up with speculation that Associated Newspaper, publisher of the Daily Mail and the London Evening Standard, would be dropping their traditional support for the Tories.

And the Financial Times carried a report March 24 entitled, "Business chiefs `not worried by Blair,' " of a survey conducted by Reed Personnel Services in which 80 percent of 750 of the biggest businesses in the UK said that the election of a Labour government would either make no difference to their prospects or would improve them.

But this temporary shift doesn't mean the top bosses have switched their basic preference from Tory to Labour. The same Financial Times article reports that a poll from the Institute of Management showed that, while support of company managers for Labour had risen from 13 percent in 1992 to 25 percent now, the Conservatives still hold the allegiance of 40 percent.

Bosses still leery of Labour
The imperialist rulers are not confident that Labour is, in the longer term, a trustworthy instrument. In a March 24 editorial entitled "Hard Labour," the London Times - which like the Sun is owned by Rupert Murdoch - wrote that the last two Labour administrations had made far too many concessions to the unions and cautioned that a new Labour government "would be under intense pressure from its supporters to revert to a traditionalist strategy on job creation, workplace conditions and union rights" and could well return to what it called "the old collectivist approach."

The rulers' fears arise out of the nature of the Labour Party, which was formed at the beginning of the century out of the struggle of workers through the trade unions to break from reliance on the Liberals, an open party of the capitalist class. Because of the strength of British imperialism, the rulers were able to make concessions to the working class, which blunted the struggle -especially of better-paid workers - for class independence. The party became the political expression not of the trade unions themselves, but of the trade union bureaucracy - with a capitalist program and structure. This contradiction lies at the heart of the Labour Party to this day and explains why, despite the Labour leadership's record of servility to the rulers, masses of workers continue to push for Labour to be an instrument of struggle for their interests. Blair has shifted Labour away from the labor movement, but has not broken the link.

Meeting over the March 22-23 weekend, the Central Committee of the Communist League decided to launch an election campaign that would provide an independent working- class voice. Auto worker Ian Grant will be the League's candidate in the Bermondsey and Southwark constituency in London; chemical worker Tim Rigby will be the candidate in Manchester Central. Their manifestos will be published in time for campaign supporters to hit the streets on the Easter weekend. In Northern Ireland, the League announced, it will be supporting the election campaign of Sinn Fein. The League urged people in British constituencies where no Communist League candidate is standing to nonetheless involve themselves in the League's campaigning; on election day it advised them to vote Labour.  
 
 
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