Home - SR Editions - Socialist Resistance No.48

After scrapping super-casino, election is

Brown’s biggest gamble

AS THIS issue of Socialist Resistance was preparing to go to press one huge issue has been dominating the domestic news agenda, giving some other discussions a slight air of unreality: will Gordon Brown, Prime Minister for just on three months, opt for an early election, on November 1 or 8?

Everything appears to be being done to give the impression that Brown will indeed go for it, to take advantage of New Labour’s current strong showing in the polls, exploit the weakness and disarray of the two main opposition parties, and get the voting in now, before any further bad news on the economic front after the traumatic Northern Rock fiasco triggered the first run on a British bank for 140 years.

Brown has therefore been running his new government pretty much in pre-election mode since the summer. In recent weeks we have seen further preparatory steps:

• A tub-thumping “law and order” platform was established from the Labour conference, with Jack “Have A Go” Straw shamelessly stealing yet another Tory policy.
• Brown has been photographed meeting soldiers in Iraq and telling them another 500 could be home by Christmas, cultivating the impression that a total withdrawal is on the way.
• Lord Darzi, the charismatic new health minister, has been pressed to bring forward the interim report from his England-wide review of the NHS to give the impression that the government is implementing dynamic and popular changes.
• And trade union leaders, with the exception of the postal workers, have been largely neutered or neutralised, and have connived at Brown’s brutal exclusion of their voice and votes at Labour conference and are reportedly digging deep to pay up next year’s political fund contributions in advance.

Brown has effectively concealed or removed most reminders of the discredited Blair era. But a number of issues seem set to undermine New Labour’s popularity in the period ahead, reminding voters that Brown is just as hard-line a neoliberal as Blair.

Among them:

The economy seems set for more problems, with the possibility of further bank crises which could be more embarrassing for the government and less easy for them to escape from than Northern Rock.

The military situation in Afghanistan and Iraq again seems set to worsen over the coming winter: the longer troops remain fighting, the more Brown takes on the Blair image of warmonger in chief.

The NHS is poised in many parts of England to carry through another wave of highly unpopular hospital closures and reorganisation – some of which were postponed in the face of mass protest and pressure in 2006, but are now driven by cash pressures.

All of these factors press Brown towards a “cut and run” election, which would also have the beneficial side effect of catching other parties less well prepared and hugely disadvantaging smaller parties which cannot resort to large scale corporate donations or trade union political funds.

However there are disadvantages, too, and it is by no means guaranteed that Brown would necessarily strengthen his position. And there are some indications that David Cameron’s Tories, after a disastrous six months of sliding poll ratings may have been able to use the threat of a swift election as the focus to reunite the party and regroup.

Interestingly some of the same factors also apply to Brown’s principal (sole serious) challenge from the left, Respect. Respect carries the banner of the opposition to neoliberalism, and has demonstrated an ability to transcend the limits of the tiny hard-core left vote and secure the election of George Galloway as an MP and around two dozen councillors. But (as we argued in last month’s Socialist Resistance) much of Respect, too, had been in the doldrums for some time, and has only been shaken out of a rather conservative and blinkered complacency and decline by a critical letter from George Galloway to the National Council, supplemented by a strong statement from Salma Yaqoob.

The initial defensive reaction from the Socialist Workers Party brought sharp words and a near-split at a National Council meeting in mid-September, but, with an election looming, this was followed by an apparent process of reuniting the organisation around unanimous motions.

The organisational and political concessions made by the SWP are necessary to enable Respect to grow and develop politically as a broad coalition to the left of Brown. There was also agreement that if there is an immediate election, Respect will again focus most of its resources on a limited number of target seats where a firm base has already been established, rather than spreading its limited resources too thinly around a large number of seats where little groundwork has yet been done.

We can hope that now peace has broken out – at least on paper – Respect can begin to match its potential in what remains a generally favourable situation.