Despite Tony Blair, New Labour and the marginalisation of the left, the Labour Party is still a bourgeois workers’ party. That is the agreed assessment of the CPGB and its Draft programme. Most of the big trade unions are affiliated and most workers with some level of class-consciousness continue to give their vote to Labour candidates.
For communists the Labour Party remains a key site of intervention and struggle. It is one of the battlegrounds where we must learn how to fight. Not, it should be emphasised, in order to persuade Labour machine politicians to lead the socialist transformation in Britain, but, on the contrary, in order to win the working class base away from the trade union and labour bureaucracy.
SPEW refuses any longer to accept the scientific designation of the Labour Party that seeks to capture its contradictions as a political formation: ie, a bourgeois workers’ party (a term that originates with Engels). Indeed Peter Taaffe’s organisation has gone from deep entry and auto-Labourism when it was Militant to auto-anti-Labourism now that it is SPEW. Nowadays SPEW lumps the Labour Party together with the Liberal Democrats and the Tories. They are all bourgeois parties. In response SPEW sponsored the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party (though it proved stillborn).
The CPB is divided down the middle on this strategic question. The Griffiths wing vaguely talks of a “new party of labour”, as does comrade Crow (the RMT was disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 2004). Meanwhile, the slightly larger traditionalist wing of the CPB, grouped around international secretary John Foster and Anita Halpin, the millionaire backer of the Morning Star, remain doggedly loyal to the old BRS perspective of gaining sway over the Labour Party through bringing to bear the full weight of the trade unions.
Quite clearly No2EU is a testing ground for a “new party of labour”. And, typical of such projects, it is envisaged to be a Labour Party mark two. Organisationally it will resemble old Labour and politically it will resemble old Labour too. Towards that end both the CPB and SPEW shift the face they present to the public further and further to the right.