THIS WEEK's Tory party conference shows only too clearly the price being paid for last week's Labour conference and the surrenders of the last three years. Kinnock moved Labour sharply to the right. His supporters have progressively broken up the struggles against Thatcher. This has enabled Thatcher to move the Tory party three paces further to the right this The platform which is being unveiled at the Tory party conference has almost to be seen to be believed. The Evening Standard summarised it in its headline 'Better deal pledged to landlords'. Compulsory privatisation, abolition of controls on private landlords, more support for the racist police, overriding democratic local authorities on education, the possibility of further laws against the unions, that is the platform that was The opportunity for that still further rightward shift was given by the policies Kinnock pushed through at Labour Party conference at Blackpool and the defeats those who support him have imposed on the labour movement in the last three years. Hugo Young, writing in Tuesday's Guardian, summed up the situation very clearly. He pointed out that on every crucial issue, except defence and nuclear power, Kinnock had capitulated to the results of the first seven years of Thatcherism. His summary was "The Hattersley macro-economic package which, with its constant protestations about now borrowing too much, feels obliged to pay heavy respect to the monetarist analysis ...
"The sale of council houses, a central tenet of early Thatcherism and opposed by Labour every step of the way, is now a central feature of Kinnock-Rooker socialism ...
"The sale of public assets to private shareholders is challenged only by the back door "The palpable discrepancy between Labour's spending promises and tax pledges suggests how much terror Tory populism has planted in the soul of modern socialists ...
•When the external pressure is clear, it is socialism not Thatcherism that has buckled.' Of course Young is totally wrong to believe that the policies pursued at last week's Labour Party conference had anything to do with socialism. But Young's is a perfectly accurate assessment of the politics of Kinnock. The 'modernising' of Labour under his leadership has Simply meant moving party policy to accept almost the entire economic and social outcome of the first seven years of Thatcherism.
And what is the consequence? That Thatcher breaks up Kinnock's famous 'consensus' by moving still further to the right! As Tory Treasury minister Norman Lamont put it on the first day of the Tory party conference: 'What this government has brought into being is not just a set of policies, it is a revolution, and like all revolutions it cannot stop halfway?
The revolution' which Lamont promised to extend was the new announcements that the government intended to privatise Rolls Royce, the British Airports Authority, and pass compulsory measures to force councils to privatise refuse collection, street cleaning, catering, vehicle maintenance. Meanwhile no measures whatever to deal with unemployment are announced. And the hang them, bash the blacks' brigade is in full cry.
The result of the failure to support the miners, of the failure to give the support that was needed at Wapping, of the adoption of right wing policies is now only too clear. It has simply encouraged Thatcher to be bolder and more ruthless in her policies. As Mick McGahey, for once, rightly said in the miners strike: 'if you run away they'll just keep chasing you.' The brutal truth has to be spelt out. The course down which Labour has been taken for the last three years, the results of Labour's conference last week, are a disaster for the movement. They have given the opportunity for the Tories to put forward policies that get more right wing by the week and they have disarmed the movement faced with them.
There can be no confidence in Kinnock's ability to fight Thatcher. The only time Thatcher has been seriously rattled in this parliament was with the miners strike and its aftermath. It is the left which led that struggle. It is only the left that can effectively fight Thatcher.
That is the truth which has to be spelt out coming out of the Labour Party conference -and as we see the bitter fruits of Neil Kinnock's policies in this week's Tory jamboree in Bournemouth.
Socialist Action 10 Oct 1986