A sea of troubles… September 26, 2012
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish Politics, The Left.trackback
As if to hammer home the point the news of Róisin Shortall’s resignation came after this was posted up earlier in the evening.
Don’t know if others agree but there’s something a bit unhinged about the Government at the moment. It’s not just the Reilly issue which promises a world of pain for them – and perhaps more specifically for Enda Kenny. Nor is it the mutterings taking place in the Labour Party which are problematic for Eamon Gilmore. Nor is it solely the issue of some in Europe making the supposed deal on deficits appear hazy – at best. Each is enormously serious, but each is happening at effectively the same time. It is this which is the real problem. It’s one damned thing after another, or one damned thing coming all together.
There’s also the problems – that were intrinsic to this government from the off, of it pulling in two directions. One doesn’t have to agree or disagree with the idea that the Labour Party is just another neo-liberal party to know that all else excepted Fine Gael and the Labour party have a different tone to one another. And this isn’t a small thing. It’s a very function of the fact they appeal to somewhat divergent constituencies in electoral terms. From the beginning they had a markedly different emphasis on spending cuts as against tax increases and this is merely symptomatic of such things. It doesn’t matter whether their respective leaderships take a cynical or self-serving view of such matters, these can be used as yardsticks to measure their subsequent behaviour against.
Small wonder that there are those mutterings. But as with the polls the problem is that all this, even though some of it is potentially deeply damaging, is in advance of the Budget, a Budget which the Government parties will require all their strength to get through reasonably intact.
Actually, there’s a thought. Last year saw the departure of three TDs from the Government (albeit Patrick Nulty is in some ways sui generis having arrived in the Dáil on foot of a by-election). What are the chances that we’ll see more this year. Doesn’t matter of course, unless there was a major rupture in one or other party, and frankly hard to impossible to see that taking place in FG.
But returning briefly to the main point. Here’s another problem. That majority is so large that it near enough guarantees that the Government will remain in situ barring something entirely catastrophic. So, no change until later in the Dáil term, and no change then either because – as with its predecessor – the closer the election draws near the more likely the parties will tend to stay on board until the bitter end until something, anything, anything at all turns up. But that raises another interesting possibility. In that respect it might also be like its predecessor, moving on towards the inevitable meeting with the electorate and losing legitimacy all the while – albeit staying in power until the bitter end. Which means that we’d have a scenario where both FF, FG and the LP would each have major problems in relation to credibility (and ironically perhaps only FF able to mount something of a resurgence). Which leaves…
Granted it may not be as bad as that, three and an half years is a long time in itself, plenty of scope for other matters to change the situation. But…
RTE reporting that Roisin Shortall has resigned her junir Minister role and also the LP whip.
Well done her.
Link here: http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0926/reilly-and-shortall-meeting-tense-and-difficult.html
Fair play to her. Mark P will be along in a minute to dispense the scorn.
F**k him.
Thanks for that LATC.
Shortall voted for the Programme for Government, and she voted for each and every attack on working class living standards since, from the household charge to pay cuts. She was a TD during the last two Labour governments as well and reliably voted for things like the Tax Amnesty and all of the other shameful decisions of those governments.
The main quote from her about the reasons for her resignation in the article linked explains that she felt that the government, and Reilly in particular were showing a “lack of support for the reforms in the Programme for Government and the values which underpin it”. That is, she still seems to be declaring her support for the “reforms” in the most right wing Programme for Government in the history of the state and the utterly repugnant “values” which underpin it.
I’m glad to see people resign from Labour. The sooner there’s nobody left in that cesspit the better. But Shortall’s record to date, and the quote attributed to her now, give nobody any reason to expect her to be any kind of leftist just because she’s now half in and half out of Labour. She’s still young enough to have continued electoral ambitions and this sort of stand will do her no harm on that front.
But I suppose that this is too snide for some of you and the only acceptable response to right wing politicians resigning is to clap and cheer and announce that we always thought they were decent skins.
That’s actually a pretty interesting point. Nulty, Broughan and other Labour dissidents are in a position to criticise Government policy (even if, as in Broughan’s case, they voted for the Programme). By tying herself so firmly to the Programme in her resignation statement, is Shorthall giving Labour a stick to beat her with in the future?
I wasn’t criticising Mark P, just anticipating the inevitable. He’s probably right as it happens. But it is interesting to see this kind of decimation in Labour, it hasn’t happened in past coalitions when they were forced to put their name to equally obnoxious measures. So I do think there’s something different going on, even if that something isn’t hugely substantial.
The reason I praise Shortall is that in the past Labour politicians stayed in their jobs at all cost. Which means she surely deserves two cheers, especially if it puts that dolt Reilly under pressure and makes it more politically difficult to continue with the project of punishing people who don’t have private health insurance.
I wonder if the bailiffs have come for his furniture yet.
Unfortunate timing there!
Although I do think it’s surprising – and very significant – that Shorthall resigned the party whip, as well as the Ministerial position.
As a minor aside, I think it’s a shame it happened now, rather than a week ago, or a week from now, as I’m guessing that Phil Hogan’s utterly shameful actions regarding that family in Kilkenny will now be brushed aside in the media frenzy over Shorthall.
excitement
statement:
It is with regret that I have today tendered my resignation as Minister of State at the Department of Health to An Taoiseach, Enda Kenny. I have also informed the Tánaiste, Eamon Gilmore, that I am resigning the Parliamentary Labour Party whip.
It is no longer possible for me to fulfil my role as Minister of State for Primary Care because of lack of support for the reforms in the Programme for Government and the values which underpin it.
The public have a right to expect that decisions on health infrastructure and staffing will be made in the public interest based on health need and not driven by other concerns.
This decision comes after repeated and lengthy efforts to reach agreement on the implementation of the Programme for Government both within the Department of Health and across Government.
Let’s be clear about what Shortall has been complaining about over the past number of weeks – Shortall has been demanding the accelerated implementation of Universal Health Insurance and criticising Reilly for his failure to act by privatising health care in Ireland. She is using this ‘scandal’ of Reilly adding the care centres to Dublin North in order to bolster her own position within the LP and protect her political base. No one should be under any illusion that this represents someone shifting to the left within the PLP. She has fully supported the implementation of austerity for the past 18 months and has been the most ardent advocate for the privatisation of health care and the introduction of UHI within the government in recent times.
Though when you put it like that. Sigh.
Is she really? I recall that the Labour and FG conceptions of UHI are diametrically opposite.
No they are not. FG advance the Dutch system, the LP want the German system – one is as bad as the other and both dramatically advance the privatisation of healthcare and result in massive increases in cost for working class people. Both have also resulted in the near bankruptcy of practically every hospital.
Don’t be under any illusions that Shortall and the LP have been promoting anything other than private health care.
In the context of the ownership structure of the current health service what in particular strikes you as a significant deepening of privatisation? And in terms of costs how do they substantially differ from say revenues extracted from increases in general taxation (which would be the other option)?
Hahah, when I wrote this at lunch I surely didn’t expect this to happen this evening. Still, as EamonnCork says, perhaps two cheers. If we’re hoping for there to be pressure put on the LP leadership, even accepting that that will only have limited effects, this is precisely the sort of destabilising event (whatever the motivations involved) that I’d look for. It’s not the end of the world for the LP, not even the beginning of the end of the world, but every little bit helps.
And though I dislike political gossip intensely and think of it as effectively useless it is interesting to me that the last short while I heard a lot of people talking about significant tensions within the LP.
You know what I’d like to hear? The Bartley take on this. It would be great for once to have a post from him which wasn’t simply a dressed up defence of Fine Gael economic policy, no? (Insert annoying smiley face here).
Hmmm…well… maybe.
How can he possibly concern troll this announcement, though?
May yet be a game-changer , not a LP supporter but Shortall has been a LP stalwart and I gather is well respected within the ranks. Probably more to do with personality, but in fairness to her , to give up a plum pensionable role because she could’nt stomach looking and listening to JOR and Phil really gives a good indication of their ilk!
Shortall went on record in the early 90s as being very critical of Democratic Left and was opposed to the merger with them in 1998 (I think…). Perhaps a straw in the wind for Joan Burton’s ‘old’ Labour counter-coup, much predicted for years now against Gilmore/Rabbitte etc.
Whatever her reasons for going, it shows a fragile side to the coalition and is to be welcomed.
Interesting thought re ex-DL/LP divisions. I wonder is there that to this as well?
The 4 TDs that have gone Penrose, Broughan, Nulty and Shorthall were all ‘Labour’ people as opposed to ex DSP, DL, Ind etc
Re DL as far as I remember the most high profile resignation from Labour at the merger was former TD Brian Fitzgerald in Meath.
Pat Leahy says ..
The message of this resignation is that Shortall believes she no longer has the support of Gilmore and his fellow cabinet ministers in pushing for that more publicly-oriented system.
http://www.businesspost.ie/#!story/Home/News/COMMENT%3A+Shortall%27s+resignation+aimed+at+Gilmore/id/89127228-1885-0635-dbc7-3a1c69269953
Has some merit I think.
Interesting how he sees it as being Shortall more pro-public oriented health service as against Reilly/FG pushing for ‘privately influenced’.
Nothing she & Labour didn’t know since well…
Though to contradict myself above I dont think anyone should be chalking this down to ideological divisions just yet frankly
2 cheers sounds about right.
I don’t know Shorthall and don’t particularly care to. Her personal motivations are largely irrelevant, even if it would be nice to think that this decision was based on morality and ethics rather than opportunism. What makes this important is it helps to destabilize the current government. It won’t bring it down, but it weakens it.
@Mark P.
Bit of a kettle argument up there: either para 2 or para 3, but surely not both. She may be definitively unprincipled by your lights as a member of the Labour party, but that doesn’t necessarily make her thick.
I’m not sure that I follow that Stan. Paragraph 2 says that she’s been a right wing politician throughout a long career, while paragraph 3 says that her resignation statement wraps her in the right wing programme for government. Where’s the contradiction?
I wouldn’t describe her as thick, by the way. She has never struck me as notably stupid by the standards of our political elite.
Sorry, I guess I meant 3 and 4 – wasn’t counting your fraternal greeting to LATC at the top. I don’t see how she can simultaneously be leaving because of the failure of her minister to conform to the right-wing prog for gov, while also wishing to appear a bit of a rebel for the benefit of her constituents.
I don’t think that you have to take a particularly “leftist” stance to get “rebel” points in your constituency. I’m not entirely sure why Shortall has wrapped herself in the Programme for Government though – it’s possible that she really does have a sincere ideological commitment to it.
The Shortall position will be familiar to anyone who’s been listening to Labour politicians since the 1980s.
It goes something like this:
“The programme for government we negotiated was progressive. It was not a socialist programme, but it was as good as we could get because Labour didn’t have the numbers to get anything better. However, we have been frustrated in having the programme implemented by Fine Gael right-wingers.”
So far, so familiar. What’s different now is that Roisin Shortall has put her money where her mouth is in support of this analysis. She – and the others who’ve resigned from Labour during the past year over matters of principle – should accordingly receive encouragement and support from the ULA and its constituent groups. If the left is to expand, it will include many (and I’m not talking about the TDs, or not just the TDs) who have had their illusions stripped away by coalitions and suchlike.
“If the left is to expand, it will include many (and I’m not talking about the TDs, or not just the TDs) who have had their illusions stripped away by coalitions and suchlike.”
Agree. And it’s probably worth recognising that the political terrain upon which such expansion will occur is not the terrain where the SP/SWP currently reside. It will be Leftwards of the stated / actual LP position of course, but it will not necessarily be based on a Marxist analysis. Not initially.
Who are these “many” who will have their illusions stripped away, John?
If you are talking about people who would have voted for right wing parties in the past, including Labour, Fianna Fail, etc, then there is no disagreement. But some on the left go much further than that and actually imagine that a worthwhile left is going to be base in some important way on people who are currently Labour members and even TDs. That, quite frankly, is a fantasy. The Labour Party is tiny, and its membership, let alone its parliamentary party, makes an extremely unpromising audience. Looking towards them is a waste of time, part of the unexamined assumptions from another place and time which Irish socialists all too often cling to.
There are two further points to make in response to your comment:
1) Shortall has not not resigned from Labour. She has resigned the Labour whip, but is still within the cesspit.
2) There’s no indication in her resignation statement that she has resigned because of some left wing rejection of the government’s course or the programme for government. She voted for that programme and she has been a reliable hand raiser for every cut and every regressive measure.
I’m glad she’s resigned from the Labour Party because it weakens Labour and the government in a small way. I don’t expect anything more useful from her than that, and I base that expectation on her multi-decade political career and her actions as part of this government. She’s been a useless right wing politician since the early 90s and she hasn’t currently given any indication that she’s planning on changing that.
To be honest Mark P what you write about the LP and not engaging with their members seems illiogical. How can it be less profitable to engage with people who are in a labourist/social democrat milieu. How could they be less receptive to leftist thinking than people who’ve consistently voted for FF and Fine Gael and others over the years?
And in fairness isn’t the broader further left argument that illusions will be stripped away by workers? You essentially state it yourself. If you’re arguing with the idea that LP members can’t have illusions stripped away what possible faith canyou have in the idea that those further to right will shed theirs?
There’s something a little strange about the idea that LP members are somehow beyond redemption.
Finally, cesspit, etc… again as always the rhetoric of 1930s show trials.
You may not see the irony. But some of us do.
BTW There’s an obvious reason she would so heavily reference the Programme for Government. It’s a means of pointing up the Labour leadership, saying that they’re too close to FG for their own good that they’ll actually bend towards FG policy despite what they themselves agreed last year.
Granted, as smiffy notes, it’s high risk in so far as it opens up the prospect of room for them to fire stuff back, but in the context of her avowed motivations it makes perfect sense.
This is not really about the Labour Party at all, but about an approach to politics.
Talking to people today, I find that many are tremendously impressed by what they see as Roisin Shortall’s principled stand, which they understand is a stand in opposition to a two-tier health system. In order to communicate with such people, it is necessary to be on the same wavelength as them. Roisin Shortall deserves at least some credit – let her have that, and coax her a little further to the left. If you refuse her any credit, thousands who are currently very exercised about the health service simply will not listen to you. A moment will probably come when it will be necessary to disagree with Roisin Shortall about health. This is not that moment.
To be honest Mark P what you write about the LP and not engaging with their members seems illiogical. How can it be less profitable to engage with people who are in a labourist/social democrat milieu.
Let me suggest that this is because you haven’t thought about it very hard. People will vote all kinds of ways without having a particularly strong ideological affiliation, in this country with its catch-all parties and tradition of voting based on the merits of individual candidates more than most. Party members and even more so party activists tend to have rather stronger ideological commitments however.
And in the case of the Labour membership we are talking about people whose commitment has been to a party which for going on for a couple of decades now has been essentially a liberal party, wedded to neo-liberal economics with a bit of socially concerned handwringing welded on. The random punter on the street who has voted for a couple of mainstream parties over the years without ever considering him or herself particularly “political” is a more promising audience for left wing ideas than a committed Labour Party (neo) liberal. This is all the more so when you remember that the actual activist base of the Labour Party is so small to begin with.
There’s something a little strange about the idea that LP members are somehow beyond redemption.
I don’t think that Labour members are “beyond redemption”. I simply don’t think that trying to “redeem” them is a good use of anyone’s time, and I don’t see any particular evidence that any significant number of them are looking for “redemption”.
Just as there’s at least one poster here who is an ex-Fianna Fail member, I have absolutely no problem with people who leave the Labour Party and turn towards left wing politics. Even if those left wing politics are less radical than mine. I just haven’t encountered any significant number of such people and don’t expect to. I do expect to see many Labour Party members getting very disgruntled over the course of this government, just as we saw many Green and Fianna Fail members get very disgruntled, but that’s a rather different issue.
As for your “show trials” comment, that’s just silly. You’d have no objection to me calling Fine Gael a cesspit in an off hand way. You are only squeamish about similarly strong language being applied to their partners in crime because of your misguided reluctance to write off Labour entirely.
In fairness to Mark P, we’ve all seen Gilmore, Burton et al pour scorn on the ULA in the Dail with a zeal which greatly exceeded that of their coalition partners. And Roisin Shortall was there nodding away meaningfully along with the rest of the minions as Gilmore made devastating points along the lines of the one suggesting that Militant’s behaviour on Liverpool Council somehow invalidated the Socialist Party’s stance on the household charge. I think he’s entitled to a degree of scepticism about her rebirth as a left-wing hero. But I do think she deserves praise for doing something rather than the usual Labour Party method of dissent which is to wait ten years and then write in your autobiography that you really should have done something at the time.
The meaning of her resignation will only become clear when we see her subsequent political behaviour.
“Roisin Shortall deserves at least some credit – let her have that, and coax her a little further to the left.”
Shortall was a right wing career politician with a shit record yesterday and she’s a right wing career politician with a shit record today. Saying anything else to people would be lying to them.
And from a pragmatic point of view if the resignation of Roisin Shortall proves to be a rallying point about people concerned about the manic privatisation of the health service, that’s surely all to the good.
Eamon – the problem is that Shortall supports the manic privatisation of the health service. Shortall is an open supporter of the implementation of compulsory universal Health Insurance – a measure which has wrecked the health services of several European countries. the only difference in her approach is that the insurance company could (note the word ‘could’) be publicly owned instead of private. However this is an utter irrelevence – once UHI is introduced private companies rampage to take over (and EU competition law will facilitate it). Her platitudes about the health services are bogus and the utterings of a right-wing career politician attempting to protect her political base.
With regards the LP and ‘elements within’ that might swing left. The last LP conference I attended was in 1992 in Waterford. One of the LP’s general election candidates that year made a speech that received a standing ovation. It went something like this ‘When I joined the LP it was full of trade unionists and workers and people like that. But that has all changed now – now we have real people – people that matter – like doctors and solicitors and accountants’ – the standing ovation was still ringing in my ears as I closed the door behind me.
As ever with the rude response. To be honest, given the fact I write about this stuff on a daily basis give me some credit for thinking about it in considerable detail.
The point is that the LP membership doesn’t have a commitment to what you suggest it does. Many of them would strongly disagree with being painted as neo-liberals. And of course they’re not neo-liberals in the main in a functional way. It is true, and I wrote about it only this evening and posted it up earlier, that as Harry McGee said there’s a conservative and ‘pragmatic’ leadership in the LP which is all too willing to bend in the wind, but this isn’tthe totality of that party and it makes no sense to pretend that it is. Even their vote on the Programme for Government was made in an environment of being presented as saving the country and as we see the wheels are beginning to come off that wagon (not saying it wouldn’t have passed anyway, but I suspect dissent would have been greater).
None of this means they’re socialists, and most I’d suspect are mild social democrats. But their instincts are leftish and pretending that they’re analogues of the Progressive Democrats is a bit pointless, particularly when the last few months we’ve seen manifestations of anything but in terms of the CLP, etc, etc.
But there are basic problems as well with your thesis as regards the woman or man in the street. I don’t see, even when exposed to further left thinking any great appetite to embrace it. Quite the opposite to be honest. And that’s reflected time and again in voting patterns even in places where one might expect otherwise.
As regards me saying FG was a cesspit and not having a problem with that. Christ, Mark P one would think that at this stage you’d be beyond telling mewhat I think. Of course I wouldn’t use that or any other childish baroque term about them.
I wouldn’t talk about FG as a cesspit because it’s not, because hyperbole is pointless at the best of times and because it always seems to me to be function of weakness rather than strength.
Why should I write off Labour entirely? Because your savant like genius tells me to? C’mon now. I like you, but I’m not entirely sure why, as above you appear to believe your opinions are the last word on any given matter.
I don’t know if you know many people in the LP but it would appear you have few or no interactions with them. By contrast I know quite a lot working away in various areas and generally, though by no means exclusively, in ways which I consider to be progressive. Those I know are almost exclusively in opposition to the current leadership. I don’t actually know what will happen to the LP, but I’m fairly certain it will continue to exist, even in attenuated form in ten, fifteen and thirty years. I suspect that after this experience of government it will shift leftwards, I don’t know how far, but it seems both logical and predictable. If some or all of those who are members can move to leftward positions either within it or outside of it that strikes me as a win.
And by the by I’m no fan of Shortall.
JRG, I asked you a question earlier in the thread about privatisation and so on, but I’m now curious, which states in Europe have been wrecked by universal health insurance?
WbS – you completely misunderstand the nature of the membership of the LP. The LP membership is primarily a paper membership who do not engage in political activity to any degree other than canvassing at elections. They are primarily in the LP because of personal affiliation to the local TD or councillor. while they might not consider themselves as neo-liberal, they are in so much as their main activity is in ensuring the election of public representatives committed to neo-liberal economic policies – and the LP has been like this since the mid-80s when what was left of an activist layer was emptied out of the LP by the 82-87 coalition either through expulsion or disillusionment. The LP is, as Mark has pointed out, at best, a liberal party with a right-wing economic agenda (and it still has some socially conservative elements within it). The continued existance of the LP is of benefit to the political establishment in this country as it can continue to present the LP as a left-wing party and use it both as a mudguard for austerity and a mechanism to discredit the ‘left’.
As for the impact of UHI – well the Dutch system (lauded by FG) is in tatters as a result of UHI being implemented in 2006. Insurance consts now run to over €6K per family per year with more and more elements not being covered. More than half the hospitals in Holland are bankrupt and the Dutch government is facing the prospect of having to bail out the hospitals at enormous cost. Instead of eliminating the two tier health system it has actually created a third tier – those who buy extended levels of insurance – those on the compulsory system – and those who have attempted to drop out of the system entirely because they can’t afford it (now estimated at close to 1 million people) and who end up being dragged to court and having their wages or welfare payments garnished to pay for UHI.
The German system (the darling of the LP) is also in serious difficulties. Most hospitals in Germany are now in private hands. The cost of UHI is about 15% of income – the cost can be as high as €600 per month. Numerous services provided under UHI have been downgraded or eliminated over the past few years. Inpatient care is a minefield of bureaucracy and administration with countless patients finding out they have to pay huge bills after treatment. the insurance bundles are a nightmare that results in the above financial carnage for patients. The state subsidised system for those on low incomes is running at a deficit of €10billion and the German government are attempting to pull the plug on the entire system and let the market have free-reign.
There’s been an important development: a split has appeared in the govt on the important issue of health. The responsibility of socialists is to widen that division – not to drive the Nulties and the Shortalls (and, more importantly, those who respect them) back into an accommodation with Gilmore and the rest.
People may write on this site about there being no more than 50 left-wingers in the Labour Party – and cite membership figures and conference votes – but the reality is that there are hundreds (perhaps over a thousand in some cases) who identify as ‘Labour people’ in constituencies which return a Labour TD on a regular-ish basis. Few of them have ever been paid-up party members, though they do a bit at election times. Their political outlook, to my knowledge, is a combination of the views of Roisin Shortall and those of Joe Higgins.
To refuse to acknowledge Shortall’s stand in the present situation is as sensible as was the KKE’s attitude to Syriza in the Greek election. It makes people stop listening to you!
There was nothing particularly rude in my response there WbS. I really don’t get the impression that many independent people on the left spend much time thinking about where there is or is not an audience for left wing ideas, no matter how productively they think about politics in general. Organisations, or at least reasonably ambitious organisations, have no choice but to spend considerable time evaluating precisely that in quite a ruthless way.
The predecessor of the Socialist Party spent years in the Labour Party because it believed that it was a key place where a potential audience could be found. And on a small scale it was right. It left the Labour Party because hard experience had taught it that was less and less such a place with each passing year. That was twenty years ago now, twenty years in which the situation within Labour has continuously gotten worse, until there was essentially nothing there of interest to left wingers at all. That’s not some prejudice – that’s an opinion grounded in much, much more intimate knowledge of Labour at every level than any other part of the extra Labour left has.
I have no interest in Harry McGee’s trivial “political correspondent” opinions. More to the point there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the Labour Party membership is to the left of the “conservative” leadership. There has been no evidence to suggest that at any point over the last couple of decades. None. At no point has any significant body of Labour members come into conflict with the leadership in any significant or sustained way. The left of the Labour Party simply disappeared. Opposition to propping up right wing coalitions simply disappeared. The oppositional institutions which had been a constant feature of the Labour Party rank and file for decade after decade simply disappeared.
None of these basic, irrefutable facts, have ever stopped some leftists outside Labour from engaging in wishful thinking about a mythical left leaning rank and file of that party, hidden in the Mitchelstown Caves perhaps, or sworn to a vow of silence in some Belgian Trappist Monastery. The notion that there’s some left wing, social democratic, soul of Labour, a rank and file whose instincts are left wing but which for some inexplicable reason keeps quietly backing right wing leaderships, is a religious sentiment not something stemming from any analysis of who these people are and what they actually think.
The three main parties in this state have been uniformly neo-liberal in their policies for a couple of decades now. The only difference is in the branding. Fianna Fail was neo-liberalism with a greedily pragmatic brand. Fine Gael is neo-liberalism with a Bond villain cackle. Labour is neo-liberalism with guilty hand-wringing.
The argument that the Labour membership is “social democratic” or “labourist” is either wishful thinking if you give a meaningful content to those words, or tautologous if you simply define social democratic or labourist as whatever self-defined social democrats or labourists do. And yes, I do know Labour members, plenty of them. I know quite a few of the tiny number of leftists (including some of those behind the mini-me Labour Left CLP) and I know rather more rank and filers who are behind the leadership or who are critical of them for not particularly left wing reasons. As a whole my experience of Labour Party members is that they tend to be a bunch of deeply smug useless liberals. Which is exactly what I would expect them to be, given their party’s history and politics, funnily enough. There are a handful of decent people still in there, and in my view, basic honesty requires telling them that they are wasting their time, that every bit of work they do to get a Labour candidate elected is actively harmful and that they should leave Labour immediately.
You have absolutely nothing to support your rosy views about the “leftish” views of Labour rank and file. And in fact believing that they have “leftish” instincts necessarily implies that they are fools or cowards because they’ve gone quietly along with a right wing leadership for years and years without so much as a peep of leftist dissent. I don’t think that they are fools or cowards who have hidden their views for decades. I think that they are useless liberals who have the neo-liberal leadership they deserve and want.
On your other points:
1) I didn’t say that you would be so blunt as to refer to Fine Gael as a cesspit. I said that you wouldn’t whine about it if someone else did. Whereas you start coming out with nonsense about “show trials” when I’m rude about their partners in crime.
2) I at no point suggested that the average punter on the street is particularly receptive to socialist ideas at the moment. I said that he or she was a better audience than someone ideologically committed to liberal politics, like the average Labour Party member. And I stand by that. Most Labour members are actively hostile to left wing ideas in a way that the average politically unaffiliated person isn’t, even if that person isn’t particularly interested or is dismissive.
People may write on this site about there being no more than 50 left-wingers in the Labour Party – and cite membership figures and conference votes – but the reality is that there are hundreds (perhaps over a thousand in some cases) who identify as ‘Labour people’ in constituencies which return a Labour TD on a regular-ish basis. Few of them have ever been paid-up party members, though they do a bit at election times. Their political outlook, to my knowledge, is a combination of the views of Roisin Shortall and those of Joe Higgins.
Yes, let’s not bother grounding our views in mere facts and figures, when we can substitute your fantasies instead.
Perhaps you’d be so good as to let us know which rock precisely these hundreds or thousands of Higginsite-Shortallist “labour people” are hiding under? It would save us a lot of time.
‘particularly’ rude? Rude is rude. And on the substantive issue, look at this site, ask yourself if those involved don’t think about how and where the left can develop. You should know, if you don’t that that’s just wrong on your part (as it happens I suspect Independent leftists are amongst those who think about these matters most often because the isolation beyond – and of – formations is particularly obvious).
Whether the LP has a paper membership as JRG asserts (true in parts, not true in others), or whether they’ve fairly easily gone along with neo-liberal policies, albeit from your perspective all policies right of a certain point are neo-liberal which is problematic to those of us who look at these matters from a different viewpoint (because while there are overlaps there are also clear enough distinctions), the reality is Labour has not been in power until last year for twelve or thirteen years. It made not a blind bit of difference what their leadership said – it was all academic. I think there’s something in what you say about people going with the flow (though whether it is actually cowardice or just a queit life or a function of the boom where tough issues never had to be addressed is another question).
But now the LP has gone into government and there is a fair bit of activity amongst that membership – not a huge amount, but some, which suggests developing oppositional viewpoints. Already they’ve lost two TDs explicitly due to their left wing concerns over the Programme for Government and its implementation (I don’t really count either Penrose or Shortall). Those are basic irrefutable facts.
I’ve no illusions that the LP as an entity will come over to the left en masse. I’ve never said that I think even a bare majority would do so. But I am a bit surprised how much of that activity noted above is going on. And this only one year and one budget in. It seems to me that there is a leftist minority strand that is beginning to manifest itself. I find that interesting and a positive development. And of course over the years I’ve met smug LPers. But then over the years I’ve met many a smug member of further left parties too.
Finally, I still find it unlikely that there’s the devotion to neo-liberalism amongst the LP membership you ascribe to them. Some? Sure. Many? Most? I’m not so certain.
JRG, in fairness you say yourself you’ve been out of the LP for two decades. Are you entirely sure about the nature of the LP membership? I mean I’m not myself, I’ll readily admit, but it does seem to be a little bit more active than you paint it.
Thanks for the stuff about Germany and Holland. I’m off to research them in light of your analysis.
Let me rephrase that then: There was nothing rude about my initial response to you. You are being over sensitive.
You are conflating two slightly different things – many people on the independent left think to varying degrees about how a stronger left might come about. But few are forced to think about where there currently is an audience in quite the same immediate way as people committed to building an organisation in the here and now. And few of them have the practical feedback which trying to follow that sort of analysis provides. Militant had an extremely close view of how the potential audience for left wing ideas – the Marxist ideas of the Militant and the social democratic ideas of Labour Left alike – shrank and shrank and then disappeared in the Labour Party.
The notion that things somehow improved in the meantime in Labour is absolutely laughable. Society as a whole has moved to the right. The economic consensus shared by all of the main parties has moved to the right. There has been at no point a visible rebirth of a Labour left in any way shape or form, no alternative institutions over all that time, no oppositional forces, no opposition to three different coalition governments.
As for a “devotion to neo-liberalism”, few people in Irish politics, whether in FF, FG or Lab are so self-aware as to openly declare that. But all of them accept the neo-liberal economic consensus, at leadership level and at rank and file level. And all of them, bar perhaps our confused band of fifty, are hostile to anything outside of that consensus.
When it comes to smug useless liberals by the way, the most important and most insulting word in that phrase is “liberal”, rather than smug.
You are a caution. Now you’re telling me how I’m meant to feel when I read the following.
Let me suggest that this is because you haven’t thought about it very hard.
I’m not overly sensitive, I just know your all guns blazing MO. It’s a bit predictable, but I’ll say it when I see it.
As to the independent left a fair proportion of the independent left is now within the ULA. Others have coalesced around groups like Perry, and others including TDs. It seems to me that all those would have to have at least some experience of looking at extending support, if only by dint of the fact that most of them are involved in electoral campaigns. Of course there are lone rangers here and there, but that’s not quite the crew I’m thinking of. I also think you’re underestimating just how many of those on the independent left would like to be in a broader all embracing formation/platform party or whatever.
Assuming you are correct though and those in political parties have some intricate methodology for increasing numbers worked out the fact that party numbers still remain lamentably low across the further left, and indeed the SD left what remains of it, and across all political formations of all stripes, suggests that there are some basic problems with the methodology, at least in application.
But I wonder though if you’re not being overly optimistic about the prospects for organisation building. For a start a very small political formation with a fairly rigid political ideology is going to always be a tough sell to a broader group of people. Simply put they’re not that attractive to most people.
Add to that the fact that time and again we see how such groups tend to buckle at a certain point, either in terms of a tipping point when numbers of members reach a certain point or when the character of them changes in some substantial way. The WP which was probably quite a lot larger than any current formation on even a generous definition of the left (unless we count SF in to the mix) cracked once it grew in size and almost simultaneously room grew for TDs to become semi-autonomous. I’d hazard that it is near enough impossible to have a very tight political formation of greater than a few thousand, if even that in the current climate.
I’m not sure why you think anyone suggested there was an ‘improvement’ in the LP in terms of the last decade or so. But the point is that now it is back in Government again and engaged in enormously problematic policy implementation it’s hardly surprising that we’re beginning to see manifestations of dissent. After all losing four TDs is a pretty significant example of same. And the arrival of a campaign within the party suggests same as well.
As to neo-liberalism, there’s a bit of an have your cake and eat aspect to that argument as well. On the one hand you say there’s no reason to reach out and engage with LP members because ‘The random punter on the street who has voted for a couple of mainstream parties over the years without ever considering him or herself particularly “political” is a more promising audience for left wing ideas than a committed Labour Party (neo) liberal.’ But now you say that ‘few people in Irish politics, whether in FF, FG or Lab are so self-aware as to openly declare that [a devotion to neo-liberalism]. If you think they are just accepting of it that suggests that they are actually open to change, after all most people out on the street appear to accept it just as much.
Re smug, perhaps that’s true from your perspective, but…
On Vincent Browne now it is being suggested that Shortall’s problems stemmed from her own party- she was isolated over her criticism of Bottler.
Anyone who remembers Militant in the 1980s is likely to be bewildered by the SP attitude to potential cracks in Labour today. I remember Militant berating people that the ONLY place for socialists was in Labour, and this was a Labour party that included Sean Treacy et al. But that didn’t matter; Labour was the party of the workers.
Was it fuck. Far more workers voted Fianna Fail.
But no, if you were outside Labour you were a sectarian. So when genuine socialists or lefties, say Tony Gregory, Jim Kemmy, Declan Bree or whoever, stood against Labour, Militant supported Labour against them, no matter who the Labour candidate was (Frank Prendergast anyone?). Labour was where it was at. And when Prendergast resigned because he was worried that the FG/Labour coalition would cost him his seat in LImerick, Militant said that showed potential cracks in the edifice. And canvassed for him in 1987.
But when Shortall does it, she’s a right-wing toerag and it means fuck all anyway. Cos Labour are shit now.
(How Militant managed to put up with the 1973-77 coalition and fucking canvass for the fuckers after the Heavy Gang etc will no doubt be explained in great detail by Mark P).
this stuff has been gone through on numerous occasions in the past – and I have no intention of regurgitating it all again -
as for the potential cracks in the LP today – I welcome them. The destruction of the LP can only benefit those who want to see the building of a genuine left alternative. But anyone who has any illusions in the likes of shortall, Broughan, Penrose or Nulty is p*ssing against the wind.
As you know, Militant’s involvement in Labour had a pretty simple premise. It was, in their view, the best place for socialists to find an audience in the 1970s and 1980s. And, give or take the Workers Party, which would have presented certain “difficulties” (eg their goon squad) as an area of work, they were correct. A serious orientation to that audience required Labour membership and Labour membership required backing Labour in elections. There’s nothing particularly complex about this.
It’s precisely that orientation that gave Militant an up close and personal knowledge of the Labour Party at every level. Including a very close view of the rapid disintegration of the left of the party, leading to its complete disappearance as a force. Something which some others on the left remained (and quite remarkably remain) oblivious to. There has been no Labour left to speak of for twenty years, even while the party has been involved in three right wing governments. It is a liberal party, with all that implies.
As for Shortall, yes, she’s a right wing career politician with a right wing politician’s record. You can sneer all you like about Militant’s past orientation, although there’s no evidence you understand it, but you won’t be able to find any evidence that she’s something other than what you call “a right wing toerag”. She voted for Reynolds, Bruton and Kenny as Taoisigh. She voted for the tax amnesty. She voted for regressive flat rate taxes on workers. She voted for pay cuts in the public sector. She voted for cuts to services. She voted for the most right programme for government in the history of the state and now, at the moment when she resigns the whip she wraps herself in that programme.
So, my anonymous friend, why don’t you explain to us how she’s really a secret leftist, and what these important “cracks in Labour are” mean for the left?
Again the problem arises that for anyone on the left outside the LP during the Militant period it’s sort of impossible to understand that logic you present. At every point it kept going into government with Fine Gael. It didn’t even wobble as it did in the early 1990s and go in with the marginally less right wing FF of that period. For those of us outside it it has never been, whatever about some of its membership, anythign other than a party of the centre or centre right in functional terms (by propping up Fine Gael). As it did again in 2011.
I also think that’s not an entirely convincing point about backing LP candidates even when they were clearly to the right (and you say it yourself about the current crew) of other better socialists external to the LP.
The other problem, and I just raised it with JRG, is that twenty odd years have passed since the last of Militant left the LP. If the SP isn’t the same now as Militant was then why should the LP – for better or for worse?
And in a way you raise the contradiction yourself, why chastise the LP for continuing doing what it did best in the 1970s and 1980s in the 1990s and after? It surely didn’t take twenty years in it and expulsion to figure it out – because that’s the other side of this, if Militant thought it was such a busted flush why did they continue to organise against expulsions right up to the end? If they hadn’t been expelled in the end what evidence is there that there was any pressing ideological or principled reason that they’d have left anyhow?
There’s something particularly irritating about having to repeat the same explanation of a not particularly complex subject to the same person over and over again.
As you’ve been told a dozen or so times at this point, not only was Labour in the 70s and 80s more left wing in terms of policy and much more clearly aligned with the unions, it also crucially possessed a substantial left wing rank and file who were open to socialist ideas. Both the Marxist ideas of Militant and the social democratic ideas of Labour left. There really used to be the left leaning rank and file you now fantasise about in other words.
That situation changed in short order, leading to the complete collapse of Labour Left and all of the other oppositional institutions to the left of the leadership, the incorporation of the likes of Stagg, MD Higgins, Taylor etc and the departure of Militant. Militant didn’t suddenly change its mind, the sea it swam in dried up, beaching all of the fish which didn’t swim away.
Militant “chastised” the Labour leadership throughout the 70s and 80s, by the way. It was absolutely unyielding in its hostility to that leadership. What changed is that the substantial chunk of the membership which was open to that chastisement or to the rather less vigorous chastisement of the social democratic left disappeared without trace.
Your last question, again, misunderstands the history of the issue. Militant didn’t leave because it was expelled – most of its members were never expelled and it could easily have continued in Labour just as it did for years in England after expulsions started there. But it also didn’t leave for some “ideological or principled reason”. It left for the extremely pragmatic reason that what had been a very useful tactic for years had ceased to be useful as the people it worked with, recruited from and sought to influence simply disappeared. For years afterwards, Militant Labour still took the view that Labour would eventually swing back, that workers of leftish inclinations would move back into it and that work in it would be on the agenda again. It took years to realise that the move to the right wasn’t stopping, that the left wasn’t reviving, that in fact there’d be twenty years of uncontested right wing consensus politics without a peep from the rank and file.
Finally, your core position is incoherent. When you criticise the approach Militant took you tell us that Labour was never anything other than a party of the centre or centre right. How does this square with your imaginary leftist Labour membership now? The only consistency in your argument is that you consistently misunderstand the nature of the Labour membership, then and now.
In fact Labour has moved drastically to the right in terms of policy (you can go look at previous party programmes in the archive here if you like). And more importantly it has shifted in terms of the politics of its membership. You wrongly damn the rank and file of the past and you imagine a mythical rank and file that doesn’t exist now.
Yeah, I know, you have explained it.
What I don’t think you quite understand is that quite a few of us don’t find that explanation entirely credible. Now that’s okay, I come from a background of being in two parties where frankly I didn’t find the explanations as to various splits from any side as being entirely credible, so it’s not new to me. The thing is that those involved in such matters rarely have an objective viewpoint, if ever. But…
I’ve gone through the data available and in truth there appears never, not once, to have been a genuine point where Militant could have wrested control of the LP during the period between 1970 and 1989. Members elected to internal structures simply weren’t sufficient to do so, and even in tandem with the also minority strand of the Labour Left there was no serious opportunity there – quite apart from the fact that the LL in the organisation sense appears to have been pretty hostile to Militant. So that alone would constitute a remarkable failure of analysis on their part.
But Militant didn’t really leave, now did it? There were thirteen expulsions at one go which saw many of the most prominent Militant members depart and that was in 1989. I’m trying to recall were there others and I seem to recall a number after that, not sure about before. But those members contested the expulsions up to the very end. Why on earth would they contest them if they felt that the LP wasn’t worth staying in? But their own position in the LP was so marginal why would they feel that? And if they were contesting them what would they have done if there hadn’t been a push to expel them?
By the way no point in arguing that my position is incoherent. You’re the one who suggests I think the majority of LP members are leftists. But I’ve never said that once on this thread. I’ve suggested instead that there’s a leftist strand. I’ve not put numbers on it, I’ve not suggested that they’d wrest control of the LP and indeed I’ve been pretty pessimistic about their influence.
“I’ve gone through the data available and in truth there appears never, not once, to have been a genuine point where Militant could have wrested control of the LP during the period between 1970 and 1989.”
Where did you get the idea that Militant ever thought it was going to take control of the Labour Party? I can assure you that it didn’t think that such an outcome was at all likely.
It thought that Labour contained the most important available audience open to a small socialist group and would provide an opportunity to assemble a cadre. And in the longer run it thought that a continued growth of the labour left (both Marxist and reformist) would lead to a major split in Labour. And, I’m pretty confident that if the Labour left had continued to grow that this would have happened as the right would never, ever have accepted a left run party. This, of course, did not happen as the Labour left went into retreat both because of the actions of Labour in coalition and then because of the same wider social factors which killed the WP and many of the small independent groups and forced the unions into headlong retreat.
But at no point was taking over Labour on the agenda.
As for why Militant would resist the expulsions, that was a pretty straightforward issue: They could attract sympathisers by making the leadership go through a bitter process of expelling left wing young people, whether they stayed in or left. A large majority of the organisation had not been expelled when a final decision to leave was made.
By the way, I’m curious as to what you find “incredible” about my account.
Is it that you don’t think that there was a substantial change in the Labour rank and file in that period? And if so, how do you account for the complete collapse of Labour Left, the disappearance of every Labour left publication, the disappearance of TDs with a profile to the left of the leadership, the disappearance of opposition to coalition etc? All of this was there… and then it was utterly gone.
Or is there something else that you don’t find credible?
“Where did you get the idea that Militant ever thought it was going to take control of the Labour Party? I can assure you that it didn’t think that such an outcome was at all likely”.
JRG on this site in this last year argued something very similar and today has offered a somewhat modified view of same. That’s what sent me back to the facts and figures which I offered on that previous thread. I’m not dissing JRG, it was in fairness quite some time back and it took no end of digging to find it.
And in a lower key way you yourself offered in the discussion on Labour Left some time back a sort of weaker version of that (albeit not quantifying numbers) IIRC, but I’ll go back and check.
WbS – of course those outside the LP in the 1980s don’t understand the role of the Militant within it. You criticise the Militant for being in the LP when the LP went into coalition – yet among who criticise the Militant for doing that over the years were members of the WP that support Haughhey for Taoiseach and backed his government.
And you are right WbS – the LP is not the same as it was 20 years ago – it is now more right-wing, it is devoid of any social-democratic element what-so-ever and it is completely useless as a political vehicle for anything other than pushing the austerity agenda.
Last point – during the 1970s and the 1980s there was a firece political battle being waged within the LP on a daily basis between the marginally dominant right-wing and the left (including but not exclusively around the Militant) That political battle continued right up to the period of the expulsions. With hindsight it was clear that the process of emptying out of left-wing elements in the LP was well advanced by the time of the expulsions – the expulsions were the final act in the utter domination of the right-wing in the party – Labour Left had caved in to the leadership in the return of promises on the gravy-train. The Militant should have left earlier – certainly before the 1987 election – and should have stood candidates independently in that election – but hindsight is a wonderful thing.
It’s not for me to say what Militant should or should not have done, though I think there’s a strong argument in purely political positioning terms that an earlier break might have been no harm. But that’s the central point, it’s not just hindsight. The orientation towards the LP during that period seems to have been almost an article of faith, when all the facts on the ground would to quite a few of us outside the LP at the time to have pointed to a different strategy entirely.
There’s certainly room for reasonable and fair minded disagreement over the most appropriate orientation for a small group of Marxists in the 1970s and 1980s to have adopted. There were really three options: Independent work, work in Labour or work in the WP. There are quite reasonable points that can be made in favour of all three and against all three.
On balance, I think that independent work wasn’t a good idea and the small groups which tried it never got anywhere, crushed between the LP and the WP and unable to provide a viable alternative to either. The WP was, in retrospect, quite an attractive option in that it was clearly going places in the 1980s and had a lot of the requisite radical audience in and around it. However, I’m not convinced that organised work in the WP by a group of people with an alternative political analysis and programme was viable – at the very least they’d have been summarily expelled, and at worst they might have been subjected to considerable violence.
Remember, we are talking about the options open to a small Trotskyist group here, not the options open to an individual radical without a predetermined view on programme etc.
Work in Labour, in the context of a substantial and growing Labour left seems to me to have been the best available option – and Militant was in fact the only small Marxist group to grow substantially during that period, which indicates that at the very least the Labour orientation had important things going for it. I tend to agree with JRG that as this began to change that Militant pursued the tactic too long. The opportunities inside Labour started to dry up, and at that point Militant had assembled enough of a cadre to make independent work more viable than it had proven to be for smaller groups.
I don’t think that there was anything “obviously” wrongheaded about any of those three approaches however. It’s all a matter of tactics. I get the impression though that you are genuinely baffled by Militant’s decision to work in Labour?
Baffled? I don’t know if that’s quite the word. It would have struck me then, and still does, as the least attractive option – a very mildly social democratic party – or probably more accurately as you say a social liberal party with a leftish minority, most of the time in govt with the most right wing party in the state across two decades, and that’s not disregarding the idea that it did then and still does in attenuated form some links into the working class (but if that was the criteria I could make a half decent, and not entirely tongue in cheek, case for Fianna Fáil as the chosen party to enter – granted they’d have gone down the expulsion route a lot quicker, but their links into the urban working class were very strong then).
That’s true that it depends upon how many Militant activists there were. Fewer and I can understand the impulse to stay in the LP but even so. And that makes me think that whatever about the principled aspects of this, and I don’t deny there were some, there probably was a great big comfort zone as well. But even there there were problems. LL, with capitals was unfriendly in the main. Critical mass was still quite some way away.
There’s also the thought that one can’t help but feel that the WP’s success wasn’t universal, far far from it. Loads of spots, as eventually happened for JH, where hard working folk could gain seats eventually.
And there’s the contradiction that is so difficult to address. You berate the LP today. But functionally what the difference between 2012 and 1976 or 1984? I just can’t see it. How long would it take to see there was no prospect for change? To see that the links with the working class were low level and tenuous? To see the same with the unions? And then look at where the LP was represented. In Dublin 1973 while it took 19 seats nationwide out of 10 seats it took 7. 1977 it took 20 seats but out of 14 Dublin seats it still only took 7! Antagonistic, ideologically incompatible and underachieving!
As a brief aside and following on from what Mark said – at one stage in the 1980s the Militant CC did discuss the option of doing entry work in the WP. I was rejected for a number of reasons (and this is for information purposes and not to take a swipe at the WP) – the lack of internal democracy within the WP would have made it difficult to engage in political discussions like took place withint eh LP and would have resulted in at the very least expulsion (and we did consider our physical wellbeing in the discussions). Given the nature of the WP it would have required the use of experienced members – most of whom would have been known to the WP (or it would have required asking members to move from where they lived to facilitate the entry work) – politically it would have been very difficult for newer members to survive the internal nature of the WP. For the Militant the complications clearly outweighed any potential benefits that could have been gained from such a strategy.
Yes, baffled. I say that because you don’t really seem to have a handle on what Militant thought they were doing – which is why I’ve had to explain that they didn’t think that they were going to take over Labour and why I keep having to point out that they had no affiliation whatsoever to the politics of the Labour Party.
Pointing out all the many and myriad weaknesses of the Labour Party isn’t a point against Militant. Nobody was harsher on the Labour Party than Militant when they were members of it. Labour’s almost comical political timidity, their organisational weaknesses, these were things Militant spent large amounts of energy banging on about. Labour Party membership was about going where a potential audience was, not a softness on the official politics of Labour then. And the lack of softness on Labour then doesn’t mean being unable to see the difference between Labour then and Labour now – it’s precisely the rather ruthless and in no way rosy view Militant had of Labour which made it keenly aware that things had changed. There’s a reason why Militant left one member behind when they left Labour.
There were three organisations on the socialist left which grew relatively substantially in the late 70s and 80s. These were the Workers Party, Militant and Labour Left. What the latter two have in common is that they were within Labour. The Workers Party had other options open to it that weren’t open to smaller groups because they had a critical mass to start out with. All of the (many) smaller groups which tried to eke out an independent existence, outside and opposed to the LP and WP, went nowhere – there simply wasn’t room. Their potential recruits were looking towards Labour or the Workers Party (or, if they were particularly nationalist, sometimes SF). Militant and Labour Left both managed to build something because they were within Labour and in a position to take advantage of a rise in left wing sentiment amongst the ranks of that party.
Now, Labour membership also presented problems. Not least that the years when the left of Labour was growing gave rise to what was in retrospect an overly optimistic view about the degree to which that would continue. And there were advantages to being outside Labour too. I don’t think that it’s so obvious that Labour was the place to be that there’s nothing to discuss about tactics in that period. But I think that the growth of Labour Left and Militant relative to all of the other small socialist groups is evidence that Labour membership was a useful tactic (and incidentally, the complete inability of the Fightback group of Militant revivalists in recent years to grow at all is evidence for the futility of such a tactic now).
This is of basically academic interest now, of course. There simply isn’t a largish left party for anyone to consider work inside. But, as people keep raising Militant’s orientation in the 80s as if it somehow contradicted the Socialist Party’s view of Labour now, it’s worth pointing out why that orientation (whether it was the best option or not) made sense then and why it fits with a completely different orientation in different circumstances. Tactics follow from circumstances. Most objections to the Socialist Party’s changed approach flow from a misunderstanding of what Militant was doing and a misunderstanding of the changes which took place at the base of the Labour Party.
Mark P, Ithink it’s very very easy to look back from this perspective and say x y or z was the intention of Militant. And it’s also very easy (and rather self-serving given that you’re a member of a successor formation) to ascribe the incomprehension of others to their failings. But the fact is that for those of us who were actually there there’s some divergence between what you say was said (whatever was written in party docs) and also actions on the ground.
It’s as Splintered Sunrise once said, many formations, indeed pretty much all, diverge from their written programmes and their internal and external culture can be if not at odds with those programmes at least distinct from.
You’re in a milieu where there are those who have to justify what they did, and they make a good enough case, but there’s a sgnificant degree of forgetting difficult aspects of this.
The internal contadictions of being in the LP are glossed over by you to a considerable extent, the fact that Labour Left (capitals) was essentially unfriendly to actively hostile throughout and in no real sense a potential partner in running a supposedly more left wing LP even had Militant and them wrested control from the right.
Moreover it’s not as if there weren’t other options during that period. The NLP for one. And again you seem indifferent to the reality of those FG/LP govt (which by the by would much as easily fit the bill of ‘most right wing admins in Irish political history as the current one we labour under).
What’s interesting is that you don’t seem to quite understand that that sense of forgetting and retrospective justification might indeed be the dynamic or even factor it slightly in to your defence of those actions.
Mark P, Ithink it’s very very easy to look back from this perspective and say x y or z was the intention of Militant.
Well, yes, it is easy. It’s easy not only because I have easy access to the retrospective opinions of many people who were involved, but because I also have access to a complete archive of Militant’s publications and, more importantly, internal documents.
What I’m describing is not a justification after the event, but precisely what Militant understood itself to be doing at the time, as expressed in its internal documents and its conference documents.
That you didn’t understand what they were doing at the time is in no way evidence that they didn’t understand what they were doing at the time. Not understanding at the time is hardly a crime, particularly when you remember that there were very good reasons why Militant did not publicly explain much of what it was doing.
The internal contadictions of being in the LP are glossed over by you to a considerable extent, the fact that Labour Left (capitals) was essentially unfriendly to actively hostile throughout and in no real sense a potential partner in running a supposedly more left wing LP even had Militant and them wrested control from the right.
Once again, Militant did not expect to take control of the Labour Party, either on its own or in a partnership with Labour Left. The “contradiction” here applies only to a project you insist on assigning to Militant, not to the project they were actually pursuing.
Moreover it’s not as if there weren’t other options during that period. The NLP for one.
I’ve repeatedly said that there were other options, and outlined some of the advantages and disadvantages of each.
However, it is a fact that Militant made substantially more progress than any of the similarly small groups which tried independent work. Work in the Workers Party would have been very difficult for reasons I’m sure you understand. And the SLP was a disaster for all involved, which Militant did well to steer clear of.
I get the distinct impression that you are instinctively inclined to be hostile to entryist tactics, which in a sense is fair enough. But I don’t get the impression that you are engaging at all with the options actually open to a small group of Marxists with a particular outlook and programme in the period we are talking about. You don’t actually make a case for an alternative tactic at any point, you just insist that there must have been a better one. I don’t think that there was.
I get the distinct impression that you are instinctively inclined to be hostile to entryist tactics, which in a sense is fair enough. But I don’t get the impression that you are engaging at all with the options actually open to a small group of Marxists with a particular outlook and programme in the period we are talking about. You don’t actually make a case for an alternative tactic at any point, you just insist that there must have been a better one. I don’t think that there was.
My baseline position on entryism would be that to some on the Trotskyist left it appears to be not dissimilar in a way to what secret armies are to some on the Republican left. Problematic at the best of times.
I also think that it’s a cul-de-sac. The instant one is operating within a broader organisation then one is hostage to that broader organisation, unless the object of the exercise is to take it over or to split it and hope that one’s successor organisation will be in a stronger position subsequently.
BTW, as for my ‘making an alternative case’, isn’t your line on the economy and suggestions as to alternative detailed strategies that it’s not up to you to do capitalisms work for it?
As it happens though I have suggested one or two other examples of potential ways forward beyond the LP, though in this discussion it’s actually not incumbent on me to offer any particular alternative strategy, I’ve every right to argue though that the strategy taken was on the face of it massively contradictory.
Once again, Militant did not expect to take control of the Labour Party, either on its own or in a partnership with Labour Left. The “contradiction” here applies only to a project you insist on assigning to Militant, not to the project they were actually pursuing.
But that’s illogical. All Militants activities within the administrative structures, if we are to believe JRGs own words on this thread and previously, were aimed at gaining some level of influence if not outright control. Why else would he talk about elections and having ‘actually won a vote that would have removed Spring as leader’? Why contest elections to those administrative structures if the goal wasn’t to exercise increasing levels of influence and ultimately control?
What on earth was the purpose of the exercise if only to go down in defeat time after time. And again, if that wasn’t a problem, that the LP didn’t move leftwards in any functional way, why on earth stay as long as they did given the track record?
I’ve repeatedly said that there were other options, and outlined some of the advantages and disadvantages of each.
However, it is a fact that Militant made substantially more progress than any of the similarly small groups which tried independent work. Work in the Workers Party would have been very difficult for reasons I’m sure you understand. And the SLP was a disaster for all involved, which Militant did well to steer clear of.
I’ve never for a second suggested that the WP was a viable option. Though on reflection I wonder if just possibly in the 1988-1992 period it might have just about been feasible. But that’s later and not really the point. As for the SLP, it was indeed a disaster, but a different constituent make up might have reaped dividends. We’ll never know because Militant was still oriented to the LP. The point being though that there were also other options and I mentioned them, something that you suggest I didn’t do above. Just because you don’t like the options is another matter entirely. It doesn’t mean they didn’t exist and it certainly doesn’t mean that I have to take your analysis as the last word on the matter.
Well, yes, it is easy. It’s easy not only because I have easy access to the retrospective opinions of many people who were involved, but because I also have access to a complete archive of Militant’s publications and, more importantly, internal documents.
You take all that on face value? What people said retrospectively, even what was said in internal documents? That’s it, the final word? Any historian would deal with similar material with deep scepticism for any number of reasons. It’s not that I doubt that that’s what is written, but one has to have a much broader view as to the motivations, etc involved.
There’s also the obvious point that those documents aren’t available t the rest of us so you arguing ex cathedra from a position of supposed greater knowledge doesn’t actually mean anything at all. Not that I doubt you, but then we’re dependent upon your interpretation of these matters.
What I’m describing is not a justification after the event, but precisely what Militant understood itself to be doing at the time, as expressed in its internal documents and its conference documents.
That you didn’t understand what they were doing at the time is in no way evidence that they didn’t understand what they were doing at the time. Not understanding at the time is hardly a crime, particularly when you remember that there were very good reasons why Militant did not publicly explain much of what it was doing.
It’s not a question of my not understanding what they were doing at the time. And while it may make you feel more comfortable in your skin to believe that is the case I’m afraid to quite a few it’s not terribly convincing. Anyone can give explanation for anything, there’s always an explanation, but the thing is it a sensible and reasonable one and on that test I think Militant falls down.
Their own position was fairly, perhaps largely, incoherent. Part of a party, represented on its administrative and policy making structures, and yet if one is to believe you not part of the party at all and with no responsibility for the actions of that party either in or out of government. Despite having campaigned for LP candidates left and right.
And that’s before we get to the point that this was a party that at every opportunity it was given went straight into coalition with the most right wing party in the state during that period and that signed off on grievous cuts on working people.
And this not over a two or a five year period, but again and again over twenty odd years (JRG tries to make some comparison between that and the WP external support for FF on one occasion but there’s almost no comparison at all, even putting aside that objectively speaking the FF govt at that point in time was vastly less injurious to working people than the FG/LP alternative. On one occasion the WP took such a decision, it never did so again and ironically always took an anti-coailtion with centre and right parties line throughout).
Again the point has to be made, the Militant members expelled contested that expulsion. You yourself noted that it took a number of years, quite some time actually, before the orientation to the LP was eventually seen for what it was. But that’s a remarkable thought because it suggests that far from it being self-evidently apparent that in the late 1980s there was no ground for further progress within the LP a significant tranche of Militant believed there was and did so at least until 1993 or 4. Yet you’re the one who asserts strenuously that there was no such space from the late 1980s onwards. Even if – and I tend to – think that it is true that as an organised form Labour left died a death in the late 1980s that raises so many questions.
For example: Why do you place any (retrospective) faith in LL at all given that they were unfriendly or downright hostile to Militant?
Why do you and JRG seem to see that burst of LL indicative of anything terribly progressive when as had happened before and has happened since those formations subsided back into passive acquiescence with the LP status quo?
Why do you heap scorn on the current LP left-wingers when they’re simply following a pattern long established by… yes, that’s right, Militant, of sticking with the organisation come what may, right up to and including expulsion (or other wise why contest those expulsions?). What is the functional difference between them and Labour left in their day or Militant in theirs? [you might say that the left in Labour was bigger in those days, but so what? That’s the party the current crew find themselves in and they presumably have exactly the same objective of growing their numbers inside the party]. But ironically their aims and those of Militant seem oddly similar. Militant didn’t want to take one the party, according to you and JRG. What the ultimate aims of the current leftists in the LP are seem equally vague.
And of course there’s the question as to why is the betrayal by the LP today any more egregious or unexpected than that which took place in 1973 or 1982 or 1992?
Think about the conceptual contortions you have had to go through here in order to put distance between Militant and the Labour Party and beyond them Fine Gael.
In fairness I understand that completely. In the UK there was no such problems with coalition however right leaning the LP leadership could be.
And I also get that you don’t want to trample on the Militant legacy. But I can’t see the problem myself, those of us in the WP or whatever have had to come to terms with equally and often more problematic pasts. Thing is, and I may be way off beam, perhaps for some reason – some aspect of the SP and its engagement with its past and present – it seems reading your comments that it is more difficult for you to come to terms with that than it is for the rest of us.
That’s where, and here I have to agree with our anonymous friend, that your ‘cesspit’ comment seems so ahistorical. I’ve no beef against Militant – in fact like the SP after it I’m rather admiring of it, but it’s odd to see it defended so staunchly for doing what it did when others are attacked so vituperatively for doing pretty much the same. And the functional outcome was pretty much the same too, people supporting right wingers who then went into government with even further right wingers.
WbS – we have gone through the entire two decades before. No one ever claimed that the Militant could have ‘wrestled control’ of the LP for the right-wing. However, I have previously pointed out that you that the left (including the Militant) wactually won a vote that would have removed Spring as leader only for MDH to demonstrate a very pliable spine.
I really do get annoyed when others on the left make comments like entryism ‘was like an act of faith’. In all honesty, you should desist from such bullsh*t. Entryism was a tactic – nothing more and nothing less. During its time in the LP the Militant went from a handful of members to an organisation with several hundred members. After the Militant left the LP (and it did make a decision at a conference to ‘leave’) – as a result of the objective conditions – the organisation went into a period of decline – although nothing on the scale of the implosion of the WP.
You are correct that Labour Left was far from friendly with the Militant, but the Militant was willing to work with LL on issues of mutual interest, just as the SP will work with left-wing groups and indivdiuals today. LL never voted for Militant candidates in internal LP elections. However, the left in the LP at the time was not confined to Militant or LL, there was a wide layer of indepenedent lefts within the LP that the Militant worked closely with. The Militant never had more than 50 delegates at LP conference but could attract the votes of 150 delegates (none of them LL) in votes for the Adminstrative Council. Political resolutions regularly were fought out fiercely at both local and national level. Militant sponsored resolutions at Conference regularly attracted the votes of a majority of the delegates in the teeth of fierce criticism from the leadership. There is barely the whisper of dissention at the LP conference these days given they are too busy clapping themselves on the back.
Final point is this – for those who criticised entryism – if the Militant was so wrong and those on the outside were so clear in the waste of time that the LP was – where is the left force that was built to replace the LP? Why did the SLP disintegrate ? Why did the WP collapse in ignominy when the parliamentary group got a sniff of the pig trough? why are the SWP still screaming at everyone to join their latest demo under the banner of their latest front group just like they did 30 years ago? If the Socialist Party was so wrong in the 1970s and 1980s why is it the biggest and most influential left-wing group in the country today?
“If the Socialist Party was so wrong in the 1970s and 1980s why is it the biggest and most influential left-wing group in the country today?”
Because of the bin-tax campaign and Joe Higgins managing to get himself elected on the back of that. Paul Murphy does good work but will he keep that MEP seat? Clare Daly is gone. Maybe the SP will grow through the CAHWT in the local elections in 18 months time, and maybe not either. As WbS pointed out above, there’s an unattractiveness about the SP that dominates people’s perceptions. More work on rectifying that might do no harm.
Your first point is actually something I agree with. There’s only a tenuous link between the Socialist Party’s small scale successes and Militant’s history in the Labour Party. The Socialist Party’s current (tallest dwarf in the circus) prominence has more to do with its more recent work than its work in the early 80s.
As for the “unattractiveness” point, you’ll have to be a bit clearer than that if you want a discussion on it. The Socialist Party is not a fuzzy ecumenical sort of group. It’s very clear about its views and it’s unapologetic about those views. It’s also not prone to comprising for the sake of an easier life. These things (as well as its willingness to be rather blunt about its criticisms of others) rub a lot of people in other groups up the wrong way. But at the same time, the SP has a long record of working collaboratively with others on issues of common concern, certainly in comparison to anyone else who has been at any point the biggest group around on the far left.
Put it this way: If the CAHWT had been set up on the initiative of the WP in its pomp, it would be a party campaign under the party name. If it had been set up on the initiative of the SWP it would be formally independent but in reality a wholly owned front. That it was set up in a basically collaborative, although sometimes complex and fractious, way is a result of the Socialist Party taking the initiative. I don’t think that the SP deserves some kind of round of applause for doing things in a way that really should be a given, but I do think it’s worth noting that doing this sort of thing in that way unfortunately isn’t the norm on the far left when one group can get away with doing it differently.
“If the Socialist Party was so wrong in the 1970s and 1980s why is it the biggest and most influential left-wing group in the country today?”
It could be. Just for the sake of the kind of clarifying and general discussion that we like in the Cedar Lounge, what evidence is there for this? The biggest would have the most members. How do we know how many members the Socialist Party have?
I suggest you try counting if you are so interested, D_D.
I will disagree with Mark when he says that there is ‘only a tenuous link’ between the limited (and they are limited) successes of the Socialist Party and Militant’s entry work in the LP.
Firstly in response to LATC’s comments – I do think that Paul Murphy can be elected in 2014, there are 2 more austerity budgets and the potential for the building of a mass movement of opposition to austerity. Secondly, the Socialist Party does not and never has gauged it’s success on the number of public representatives it has elected. Electoral politics is only a part (and not the most important part) of the work of the Socialist Party. Final point – while Clare Daly’s resignation from the Socialist Party is regrettable and is a setback for the work of the Socialist Party – it is less of a setback for the Socialist Party than those outside the party believe.
As regard entryism – I would argue that the entry work the Militant conducted into the LP has had a significant impact on the influence and impact of the Socialist Party today. Our work in the LP opened up avenues into the trade union movement that would not have been available had we been outside the LP. For example the Militant made significant gains during the 1979 post office strike as a result of entry work in the LP. Furthermore entry work taught members of the Militant how to conduct political work in a firm but fraternal fashion without the rancour that can be evident from other far left groups. Entry work allowed the members of the Militant to hone their political skills in an environment that necessitated acute sensitivity to approach and argument while defending socialist principles. Finally entry work facilitated learning how to forge links for common objectives with others who don’t necessarily have the same political oiutlook. Mistakes made in the approach to entry work in Labour Youth were corrected in future work among youth and in general political activity.
The lessons learnt and the understand developed during the period of the Militant’s entry work into the LP facilitated the work of the Socialist Party in building the anti-water charges campaign, the anti-bin tax campaign and the CAHWT as well as consistent work among trade union activists and striking workers. The success of the GAMA struggle was to a significant degree down to experience gained during the 1970s-80s in entry work and the Socialist Party was the only left wing group who could have achieved the success that was achieved for the GAMA workers.
As has been said before – entryism was and is a tactic – a tactic that is not understood by most others on the left (including the former members of the CWI that are now in the IMT). That however is a side issue – what is far more startling is the lack of understanding demonstrated by left activists about the nature of the LP and the utter and complete change in the nature of the rank-and-file of the LP since the mid-1980s. It is absolutely astonishing that anyone on the left would have any illusions that the resignation of Shortall (who as Mark has repeatedly pointed out has wrapped herself in the austerity programme for government) is anything other than a political manoeuvre by a right-wing career politician. It will have zero political impact in the LP and at best will cause personality splits among elements of the ruling LP bureaucracy (hopefully collapsing the government in the process). It is not, however, anything approaching a left(ish – of a very soft nature)-right political divide in the LP.
Mark P, since when is D_D beneath a civil response to a question that was perfectly reasonable given the claim about the size and influence of the SP?
In all honesty WbS – are you seriously suggesting that the Socialist Party is not the biggest and most influential left group in the country (in a small fish in a very big pond kind of way)? and if you attempt to argue the point with me then you are doing it for the sake of having an argument.
In all honesty WbS – are you seriously suggesting that the Socialist Party is not the biggest and most influential left group in the country (in a small fish in a very big pond kind of way)? and if you attempt to argue the point with me then you are doing it for the sake of having an argument.
Well I’d like some evidence before coming to a conclusion. In terms of biggest (and exclusing SF which we can all agree whatever its nature is more in the social democrat stamp in the south), not in membership numbers no, I’d have thought the SWP was a bit larger – though I’m open to correction. In terms of representation it would, I’d have thought be a toss up between you guys and PBPA, you have the MEP and the TD, they have two TDs. Councillors, PBPA have 5, SP has 6.
Influence? I don’t know. How do we measure that?
Here’s an old thread on this very topic…
http://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/whats-left-the-irish-left-in-2012/
D_D is well aware that none of our left groups publish their membership figures. And he was aware that therefore neither JRG nor I nor the other SP members who post here are going to unilaterally take it upon ourselves to make public information that the party as a whole has opted not to publish.
As it happens, I don’t really see any reason to keep that information quiet, except for the rather minor benefit of making it harder for our opponents in the mainstream parties to judge the resources we have available. The Socialist Party in England does occasionally publish its membership.
D_D has a point. It’s all very well for people to make claims about size and influence – and after all it wasn’t D_D who introduced the idea in the first place, it was JRG, but if there’s no way those can be validated or those who make such claims and also know suddenly go schtum then I think it’s a) entirely reasonable to ask the questions and b) have some scepticism about the original claims.
Either way a dismissive response doesn’t cut it.
I hate wordpress – as usual I put my reply in the wrong place – see two above.
You and I are in complete agreement on that JRG!
In reply to John Cunningham -
John there is no split over Health. Shortall was and is an ardent supporter of UHI. UHI results in the wholesale privatisation of the health service. Shortall has actually been complaining that Reilly has been dragging his heels over the introduction of UHI.
To suggest that Shortall has resigned because of her opposition to privatised health care or austerity is nonsense. I am sure that over the next period she will make some noises in the direction of opposing austerity in an effort to protect her political base – but neither she nor any of the other LP people who are outside the PLP will play any role in building a left alternative. At best she might be a minor distraction – at worst pandering to her could actually undermine any such developments.
Your comparisn between the KKE and SYRIZA is inaccurate – Shortall’s stand is more like that of what is now the Democratic Left in Greece which is buried in a government with the ND and PASOK.
By the way, I expect this discussion to be repeated over the next few years as more and more rats try to escape a sinking ship.
WbS – you can start looking at UHI here – it gives a decent rundown of what is going on –
http://www.macliam.org/Health/AnalysisFineGaelFaircare.pdf
As for my knowledge of the current LP membership. My local LP branch has two active members – both local councillors and a paper membership of about 20 who never attend meetings and most don’t even canvass at election time. They are on the membership list so that the two councillors can go to LP conference as delegates. The next closest LP branch to me has an active membership of 5 people – one a TU official, one an accountant, one the local head of an NGO, and a couple of very old diehard right-wing LP types (who do most of the mundane donkeywork). Again the branch has a paper membership of about 50 – about 10 will canvass at elections and maybe 20 will turn-up to the AGM of the branch for the free beer made available by the local TD.
This scenario is replicated right across the country. In some areas the local TD is far more adept at developing a wider circle of personal supporters to help at election time (my local LP TD is an incredibly stupid indivdiual – and I am not trying to be insulting here) but there is nothing of any consequence even in mild-mannered social democratic terms never mind ‘left’ in anything in the LP within 50 miles of where I sit.
Thanks for the link, very handy.
My local Labour TD is a stalwart of the Chamber of Commerce, as small business person himself, seems to attend all manner of business breakfasts, seminars, gala dinners held by this or that branch of the local business community. He’s a shrewd and smart operator but rather gives the impression of a political hamster going like crazy round and round in circles giving the impression of doing loads but achieving nothing. The town has massive unemployment (increasing since he was elected), and not much local investment. If you got your manhood caught in a zipper he’d have a press release out and on facebook about how he wants the EU to legislate for compulsory manhood friendly zippers a couple of seconds after you’d told him. If, however, you were to ask him to stand with you to defend against cutbacks to local services he’ll make his excuses etc, etc. For instance, he won’t touch the red hot local issue concerning the closure of two small hospitals and their replacement by an out of town privatised nursing facility. If you were to develop a dispassionate check-list to score your local Labour TD and then, based on the score, place them on a political-ideological spectrum he’s indistinguishable from the local FG TD. Well he’s a bit younger, has less hair, better dressed; but politically, he’s the same.
I’ve seen a fair few examples of same in the current LP Oireachtas crew (and speaking of press releases one of the funniest exercises I ever did was to go through those from a TD, former Cllr not a million miles from where I am and compare and contrast from pre TD and post TD). I wonder if the boom in some way bred them? What will be fascinating now is how and if they can survive the winnowing. But I’ve no pity at all for the likes of that. They made their bed…
if you saw the vox pop in Finglas on RTE tonight, there was lots of support for Shortall and plenty of criticism of the Labour Party. Shortall may be a typical Labour TD, but she is becoming a lightening rod for discontent. That’s the dialectic I believe.
Mark P reminds me of one of those teenage skinheads you see in Temple Bar, who weren’t born when the cult was invented, but who wax lyrical on obscure ska music. You weren’t in Militant in the 80′s Mark and you haven’t a clue what they were like. It was Labour this, Labour that, and Labour the other.
I have no doubt that Shortall’s position will be popular in her constituency at all. But thinking that she’s going to help build a left wing movement in opposition to the government is simply wishful thinking of a sort that can only be based on ignorance of her recent and longer term record.
No, I wasn’t in Militant, which doesn’t stop me from being familiar with their arguments at the time, both in their press and in their internal documents – and, by the way, there are many things they argued which I don’t agree with, it’s just that their orientation to Labour at the time wasn’t one of those things. They took their approach to Labour seriously and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. If you are going to do entry work, you have to take it seriously or there’s no purpose to it. I think you’ll find, as an aside, that JRG, who has been making substantially the same arguments I’ve been making, was in Militant and has a rather surer grasp on what they thought they were about than most other people in this discussion.
Fair enough. I actually respect the SP and have time for many of its members. But there was an arrogance about your position in the 80s that was hard to take. And hearing you call the Labour party a ‘cesspitt’ now is even harder to take, having heard Militant supporters boasting about canvassing for right-wing Labour TDs because it was the right thing to do, against the likes of Kemmy, Gregory, Browne, the WP etc.
It was the right thing to do if you were committed to a policy of Labour Party work.You absolutely have to reliably work for the party, including in circumstances where in some constituency or other you might reasonably prefer another candidate on an individual basis.
And I stand by my description of the present day Labour Party as a cesspit. Its leadership are indistinguishable from FF and FG and its rank and file membership, such as it is, is overwhelmingly composed of useless liberals, almost apolitical associates of particular TDs and cynical careerists. Romantic, or perhaps religious, notions about a left leaning Labour rank and file, drawn not from any analysis of that party as it is but from ideas from another time and place (Britain in earlier decades mostly) are a persistent problem on the Irish left.
I agree, by the way, that Militant in the 80s could be arrogant about quite a few things.
You persist in ascribing to others views they do not hold. No one has said that the labour rank and file in its totality are left leaning. You brought up the term rank and file and now continue to use it at every opportunity. But the most that was said was that they were probably leftish (“ish”, not “ist”, and it wasn’t intended as a compliment) and at best mildly social democrat (hardly contestable given that we all agree social democracy has driven rightwards at a rapid rate of knots). What was also said was that there appeared to a be a minority leftist strand. But here again you attempt to suggest that there’s some sort of illusion about the nature of the LP membership. How many times must I refute it?
What you are of course doing is not so much attacking the LP as those who are questioning your analysis and you’re doing so in a fairly disingenuous fashion i.e. ‘persistent problem on the Irish left’. Given that no one, not one person, on this thread has put forward the idea that the LP is a progressive force, or likely to become one, and as far as I know only JRG was actually a member of the LP at any point the only formation with a persistent problem of delusion in relation to the LP is…er.. Militant and those who were in it and went on to be in the SP. Twenty odd years for those in Militant. Not one year for anyone else on this thread.
Projection, much?
It reminds me of nothing so much as certain people in a certain party not unknown to many of us going on and on and on about the iniquities of armed struggle when they themselves were part of a formation that had been intrinsically involved in armed struggle of one form or another for decades. And the greater their knowledge and proximity to such matters the more strenuous their protestations.
As for your ‘reliably work for the party’. Wow. That’s some statement. It appears entirely detached from the reality of what ideology and principle in relation to the working class itself and its objective needs are… and ironically is what I’ve heard from some self-avowed left leaning folk in the LP over the years both while Militant was in the LP and long after it left. I’ve also, and this too is ironic, heard it from some of the worst LP careerists its been my misfortune to meet.
And it begs the question, what was the bottom line. What was the limit of what would be tolerable to Militant in terms of a candidate? Steve Coughlan in Limerick, and his noxious views on all manner of issues? Michael O’Leary, a future FG TD?
The thing is if you can argue entirely seriously that that was tolerable then pretty much anything and everything is tolerable simply because Militant said it was okay. All the time we have only one yardstick to measure all this by, the purity of your intentions, but not the actuality of the outcomes. If a Labour party with the likes of that in it, why not a Fianna Fáil party? What was the functional difference? Anti-semitic LP candidates? Middle class dilettante LP candidates? Got to be ‘reliable’, got to be ‘serious’, got to get them elected!
WbS – not for the first time you are entirely missing the point.
Neither I nor Mark ever claimed that others were arguing that the rank and file of the LP was left leaning – we are and have been consistently arguing over a considerable period that there is no element of the rank-and-file of the LP that is left leaning outside of a couple of individuals who have zero influence and impact within the LP.
As regards canvassing for right-wing LP candidates – again you miss the point – a couple of weeks of canvassing was a minor detour from the work the Militant was actually engaging in. I canvassed for Frank Prendergast (among other obnoxious and odious characters) – my approach to the canvass (like that of other members of Militant) was to attempt to engage in discussion with people on the doorstep – argue for the need to build the left in the LP and win it to an anti-coalition position and attempt to engage with people around the ideas of socialism. Prendergast knew what we were doing – but it was more important to him to have bodies knocking on doors than to be worried about what we were actually saying to people. To suggest, like Sect has done, that members of the Militant ‘boasted’ about canvassing for right-wing LP hacks – this is utter nonsense. The fact that others on the left couldn’t understand the strategy and found it ‘unpleasant’ does not equate with ‘boasting’. The Militant would have, rightly, defended the act of canvassing – it was part of the requirements of membership – and the Militant then got on with the more serious work of attempting to build a left alternative.
Now – like I said – canvassing came around once in a blue moon. At the time in Limerick the Militant controlled two of the four city branches and Labour Youth (which had a membership of 60 or 70 young people) and used it’s position in the LP and LY as an avenue to make contact with workers and youth. In the 70s and early 80s there still was a significant base of support for the LP among TU activists and through entry work the Militant was able to connect and work with the best of these individuals. Both the LP branches were used for agitational work, press work etc in a way that could not be done by an independent organisation outside the LP at the time (the SWP attempted to build in Limerick on dozens of occasions but never could and the WP in Limerick was of little consequence and ended up as a vehicle for John Ryan’s political career).
Entryism was a tactic and a tactic that was used to effect as long as it could. Yes mistakes were made in the 70s and 80s – what political organisation doesn’t make mistakes? However, the Socialist Party has certainly learned from the mistakes and has made sure not to repeat them. There may be a time in the future when entryism will again be necessary into a left wing formation (although the likelihood is that it will be a short-term tactic given the likely political situation) and if it becomes necessary then the Socialist Party will conduct such entry work.
Finally your analogy with the armed struggle and those who were involved in it having a far better insight into it than those who weren’t. You are absolutely correct in that assessment. However, this does pose a political question – was the armed struggle the correct tactic? I would argue no and I would argue that events have demonstrated it’s futility. Was entryism the correct tactic for the Militant in the 70s and 80s? I would argue yes – and I would also argue that it correctly withdrew when the political circumstances changed (if a little belatedly).
Mark P wrote not two comments above yours the following:
“Romantic, or perhaps religious, notions about a left leaning Labour rank and file, drawn not from any analysis of that party as it is but from ideas from another time and place (Britain in earlier decades mostly) are a persistent problem on the Irish left.”
You think that’s too broad, that it could have been about others not on this thread? Here’s one he wrote earlier:
Finally, your core position is incoherent. When you criticise the approach Militant took you tell us that Labour was never anything other than a party of the centre or centre right. How does this square with your imaginary leftist Labour membership now? The only consistency in your argument is that you consistently misunderstand the nature of the Labour membership, then and now.
I don’t see how I’m missing the point about canvassing for right wingers. I mean how is that a part and parcel of a left wing project (not to mention the appalling hostages to fortune that are left in propelling yet another generation of rightists into positions of potential influence and power). And I’m entirely unconvinced about canvassing for right wingers only occasionally – so that’s okay then!
And to what purpose? To attract people to Militant? But that meant that in functional terms Militant was actually consolidating the power of the Labour Party, a party pretty much all of us agree had limited if any progressive potential. So that’s okay then too? And worse it suggests that it there was a reification of Militants needs as an organisation over the objective needs of the working class for proper workign class representation as distinct from centrist and worse shysters using the LP as a badge to get ahead.
I should say that there’s another obvious criticism of entryism, and that is that it’s fundamentally dishonest because there is a blurring of the needs of the smaller organisation that enters and those of the larger organisation that is entered.
What you’re describing here is almost a perfect example of that. Militant didn’t radicalise the LP, the LP housetrained Militant, used it where applicable and then when it was decided it wasn’t much use jettisoned the most high profile members knowing that the rest of the membership of Militant would follow them.
There’s also the small point of trust. How is it possible to entirely trust those who see entryism as a tactic? It’s not is the answer. Because again those who enter will invariably reify the needs of their own organisation (even if as in the LP instance these were distorted in order to serve the needs of the LP itself as a badge of ‘seriousness’) over that of the larger organisation.
BTW, I’m not attacking you personally in this, or even in some respects Militant though I think the strategy was grievously mistaken (as I’ve noted elsehwere I can’t help but feel that unlike the UK the Irish political context distorted matters enormously. But even with that caveat this is zany stuff).
My moniker is of course a play on that. But fair enough points from you.
Go away, I thought that was your actual name. I was going to ask if you were related to my old friend Tommy sect on the fringes of the labour movement.
I do know Tommy, but his lot were complete splitters so I don’t have anything to do with them.