SINCE THE election of the Thatcher government two enormous convulsions have shaken political society in Britain. Their results are the beginning of the greatest structural change in British politics since the aftermath of the First World War.
The first convulsion was the capitalist politics volitics remained confined within a simple opposition of he Labour and Tory Parties.
Liberal Party by the 1945, Lanents me vIctory olitical process that had been produced by the First World War itself.
Although much of the British left still cannot break out of thinking in terms of this old two-party system, in reality it is gone forever. The SDP-Liberal Alliance will not disappear. Its goal, and role, is to try to prevent the formation of a majority Labour government and to exert a new form of powerful right-wing pressure on the union and labour bureaucracy.
Alliance is a structural and fundamental feature To encompass this new political structure, and render organisation is required — British membership of the EEC, and the introduction of troportional representation, and coalition governments.
To create that system in turn British thorough-going reorganisation of the politics and structure of the working class movement. In particular it reand exclusive links of the TUC and the Labour Party, a quires a radical change Party — one moving away from basing Labour activity and membership directly on its mass affiliated organisations and towards the 'individual membership' basis of "New realism' and Kinnockism, in short, are just as as are Thatcherism, the SDP, and the Tory wets.
The aftermath of the First World War however pro1926 eliminated an authentic left bureaucracy, basing labour movement. The bureaucracy as a whole came to play the role not merely of derailing Cook, and the politics of 'not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day' disappeared for two generations as a force within the British labour movement.
This is why the emergence of Arthur Seargill, and the forces he represents most completely, is a fundamental Scargill has not been dragged behind the miners. He has for seven months led the greatest mass industrial confronted, and fought back against, the greatest direct assault of the bourgeoisie against the working class since once be described as 'Bennite', but which is today much MUrC 'Scargill/Benn/Livingstone'.
reform in the labour party, has today had added to it the supercharged force of the greatest trade union struggle for fifty years. The social base it is beginning to acquire is furthermore not simply the cadres of the working class, whom Benn always dominated, but a mass social base in the most powerful industrial union in the counqualitative shift in British politics within the working class movement which is equivalent in its impact and consequences to the shift in bourgeois politics which has already taken place. It is a leadership of a type the Marxof day to day tactics — and nor can it be confronted at the level of moaning, sniping, ultra-left criticism on tactics which much of the Marxist eft has liked to dress up as 'Bolshevism'. No one need go to bed at night worrying whether the miners' strike will political, including organisational, lies and to 1Qnl through winning the leadership of the labour movement masters, are therefore left in control organisations and can use this position to increasing advantage in betraying the struggles of the working class They did this in 1926 despite the leadership of Cook and others. But what is emerging today is still a leadership the first beginnings of a class struggle leadership in the the working class into labour movement, within that fighting for leadership and on the key political questions it confronts: it is on these basic questions that battle has to be joined in the entire next period in the workers movement.
fracturing of British the formation of the War until 1979 British The destruction of the old events of the inter-war period, and simply finished off a The SDr-Liberal and a change in the structure of the Labour politics. The defeat of of current once symbolised by AJ ane current which gained around constitutional biggest cities in the country, and the That development, which is only just beginning, is a The weakness of such a leadership is not at the level weakness of such a leadership on current profor must meet immediately, to
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Fighting to organise the forces which are emerging in struggle left wing in the.