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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 177 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 177, July/August 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
John Major may have bought himself a couple of months grace with his own backbenchers. But there is no mistaking the growing opposition to his rule.
The industrial peace on which the Tories have relied so heavily seems to have come to an end.
Strikes by workers in the BBC, Post Office, railways and colleges have all shown a new militancy and have created political generalisation which can threaten the government itself.
After years of trying to avoid direct involvement in industrial disputes, the government has placed itself slap in the middle of one. It is hard to credit how clumsily ministers have behaved in the rail signal workers’ strike.
Until recently the Tories seemed to be fairly agnostic about their pay policy. They announced it in last year’s budget, then seemed to backtrack only weeks later, saying that as long as overall budgets were not exceeded, actual settlements were up to employers and workers, not the government. What has changed their minds?
They appear to be taking a hard line because they want to firm up their own supporters, many of whom deserted them in the recent elections, but who they believe will automatically side with the Tories against strikers. The Tories also see the issue as one with which they can embarrass Labour.
This is very dangerous ground for the government. By raising the stakes in the dispute, the Tories have turned it into a major political showdown which they are by no means certain of winning.
They are also in danger of creating a general mood of opposition around pay which has not yet happened in this pay round. There are signs that acquiescence in low pay settlements among workers is beginning to come to an end.
A government which has shied away from directly taking on groups of workers for five years now – ever since the ambulance workers’ dispute – may now find it is fighting on more than one front and without any clear strategy.
The prospect underlines how very vulnerable the Tories are. The election results demonstrate everything that has been guessed at in the opinion polls for over a year now: the Tories’ support is at rock bottom. They held on to 18 seats in the European elections, but usually with only a bit over one third of the vote. They lost rural seats such as Hereford and Shropshire to Labour. And they did spectacularly badly in their south eastern heartland, where the swing away from them was higher than average, and in London where they control only four out of the 32 boroughs.
The best news of the election campaign was that there was a big swing to Labour, not to the Liberals (who managed only 16 percent of the vote) and that the Labour vote held up remarkably well even in those places where it looked like being squeezed. Labour is now the Tories’ major challenger in the south, winning Euroseats in, among other places, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Kent, and nearly winning in Sussex and the Thames Valley.
Labour would win a clear parliamentary majority in any general election on this basis. Many potential Labour supporters seem to have rejected the Liberal Democrats’ claim that they are the only party which can defeat the Tories in the south.
The by-elections which took place on the same day as the European elections confirm these voting patterns perhaps even more strongly. The once safe Tory seat of Eastleigh saw the Tories pushed into third place and Labour polling 15,000 votes to come second. The elections in safe Labour seats saw the Tory vote collapse and the Labour vote increase.
The only reason such results have not precipitated a leadership crisis inside the Tory Party is because no one really knows what can be done. The political crisis afflicting the Tories has been going on for five years now in various forms: the ambulance workers’ dispute, the poll tax, Thatcher’s departure, a brief respite round the 1992 election, then Black Wednesday when the pound was bounced out of the ERM, the revolt over the pit closures, opposition to VAT on fuel and to NHS cuts.
Getting rid of one leader and winning an election have only temporarily pushed the crisis into the background. Now the party is clearly and openly split on Europe, how far to cut public spending and whether to push ahead with unpopular policies or just sit tight.
No one is really certain whether getting rid of Major will make things even worse, or whether he will be replaced by someone even more unacceptable to either the left or right wings of the party. So the charade which is the British government continues. The Tories fear an opposition led by Tony Blair, although on his performance so far they have less to fear from Blair than from his rivals for the Labour leadership. But their real worries should be concentrated on opposition outside parliament. The strikes of the past month all demonstrate a greater determination to fight the Tories. It is coupled with a sense of enthusiasm among many workers about Labour’s election victories.
These workers and those who support them can begin to provide a real opposition to the Tories – if they take the initiative and refuse to be bound by their own timid union leaders or the fears of the Labour leadership.
The Tories have injected some politics into the industrial situation in the last month – we have to make sure we reply in kind.
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