The Tories

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KW: This rates backlash in Lambeth, could you say something about that and how significant you think it is? What steps are you taking to fight it?

IK: Inevitably, because we were forced to raise a supplementary rate-we were forced, in that instance, the District Auditor was able to force that situation-there has been an adverse reaction to it. People, of course, don't want to pay more money.

They don't always identify the services of the council with the need to pay money for them. And what has become obvious in meetings other than those orchestrated by Tory Party Central Office, is that people tend to identify the services of the council with their own immediate experiences. We've had situations where people have said-oh, the council, look at them, they sent down some workers and thernatie a door upside down.

scaffold up for twelve months, why was that?

In other words they identify the obvious and inevitable stupid things that happen in a major organisation as their experience of it, unless they personally have experience of the social services or other factors.

And so there was a reaction, but I think that reaction can be combatted. What we are trying to do at a local level is we are trying to use the council's machinery to the maximum for the maximum propaganda that we can put out countering charges made against us and that at local Labour Party revel. certainly this constituency (Norwood), IS engaged in a fight with leaflets and other propaganda, other methods of organising opposition to the Tories and the whole defence of the services of the I think it can be done-l don't think it is necessarily going to be a speedy process because I think the media has equated local government with waste. I think we have lost that battle nationally at the moment, or we are in danger of losing that battle, because neither the Labour Party has fought nor the trade unions have fought publicly for an equation of public expenditure related to services needed by people.

In fact, the Labour government previously, in its cutback on public expenditure, frankly only fuelled that situation where public expenditure was identified as wasteful. So I think there is a danger of that backlash being there for some period, but I think we can combat it and there is not a need for great pessimism.

Of course the problem that we have with the right is that they are now pointing to the fact that while we may be having some difficulties in elections at a local level, certainly say the GLC election, that they won't have any difficulties in their areas. This is certainly true. In local authorities that we can point to in London-Southwark, Islington, where they've been cutting and cutting and cutting and virtually destroyed the basis of some of their services-Labour is in no difficulties in the elections. There is a strong anti-lory feeling dominating.

Whereas the fight we have put forward has tended obviously, to provoke a situation where it isn t so easily understood.

The demands we are getting from meetings is not that we should stop services but that we should make cuts, that the government is too powertu, we can't defeat them. Well I think we've got to fight it back, which I think we are trying to do.

IS: I get the impression from reading the local press that on the one hand, one of the most vocal elements in the borough on the question of rates seems to be the shopkeepers-they suggest that it is going to become impossible to continue trading if the rates continue to rise. That would, if true, seem to contain dangers as that layer can quickly become quite extreme in a right wing way. At the same time are you not running the risk of also alienating Labour support within the borough?

TK: On the question of the shopkeepers that is inevitable. It is an easily identifiable levy, the rates. There is no evidence of bankruptcy amongst shop keepers in Lambeth. In fact we have a waiting list for small businesses coming into the borough. So there's no real issue, but it's an identifiable one. I mean they are not complaining about the commercial rents that are going up, or their electricity bills or their gas bills or anything else. So it's an identifiable political argument against us.

Yes, I think the Labour vote is going to be affectedin the sense that they are going to start questioning. The interesting thing about Lambeth is that you can't walk anywhere in Lambeth without some people aren't talking about Heseltine, the rates, Ted Knight or whatever it may be. In other words there's a great deal of political -not necessarily overtly political comment going on but a lot of it is big discussions going on all over the place.

In every shop, on every estate, in every area, major discussions are going on, at different levels, obviously, so that in itself is not a bad thing.

Is there a danger of right wing reaction? Yes, of course there is. The middle class, the small shop keepers can be driven to the right very easily. Of course what one has to be careful about is what is the answer to that. If we had made the cuts we wouldn't have driven them to the right. If we'd cut our services and therefore not had rate increases there would be no such dangers. Well I don't think one can follow that line of argument.

IS: Yes, I was outside the meeting you did in the Town Hall listening to the relay and it was quite clear that the majority of the audience weren't at all interested in most of the services provided to the people who need them in the borough. I'm not suggesting that you can avoid that right-wing backlash, but what worries me more is whether it is possible to mobilise the necessary support to counter that amongst the working class in the borough when they too have to find the money to pay mounting rate bills?

TK: Well I think it is. I think it does require people to go out and organise it. Our problem at the moment is that we've got people-basically Labour Party members-spending all their time debating what their best tactics are without actually going out to test any of their tactics. That's our problem in the Labour Party here locally. They can spend hours debating whether the Labour council is right or wrong but they get frightened to death when they go out and actually test anything outside.

The trade unions have actually stepped much further than the Labour Party locally.

The trade unions went out and campaigned in the streets. That's more than some of our more vocal comrades in the Labour Party have done, whatever faction they are associated with.

KW: You talked at the very beginning about the fact that you thought it had to be recognised that the Tories would not be persuaded, and theretore the point of building this movement would be to bring them down, Now we've just had a situation which lasted about two days with the miners' strike where there was a lot of enthusiasm for that struggle and the possibility of them doing the job for the working class of bringing the Tories down. How do you conceive of this movement actually taking the form of a confrontaion with the Tory government in order to bring it down? Is that going to flow out of the problems of local councils and what would be necessary to spark off a confrontation which would bring the government down?

TK: Throughout the building of our fight against the government we have argued for a change of policy from the government. Certainly the miners argued for a change of policy; they didn't ask for the government to fall. They told them to change their policy. We have done exactly the same and that has been the basis of our campaign.

What I have said is that I think there has to be a recognition that they are not necessarily going to take that position and that basically in the end we are going to have to think in terms of the working class I don't see local government-in fact we have always argued-that the local government arena itself is not capable of mobilising sufficient opposition to the government that would bring its downfall.

We've said it was very necessary for us to link continuously with wider areas of the trade union movement and we have used the argument that local authorities are in the front line of the defence of the social wage, which they are. Local services provided by the council are the social wage for the majority of workers-wherever their point of work is.

And we have argued that it is possible on the basis of the defence of the social wage to bring other sections of workers into that struggle in defence.

Now I think that what you will have in the building of a movement is not just a straightforward march of one section of workers. It will be a combination of struggles that take place over a period of time.

They may speed up when, for instance, the miners move into a situation of possible confrontation and you can have jumps in that development. It's not really for us to speculate how in practice it will work out. But I think the need is to be flexible in that situation. In other words a movement is building against the attacks of the government, by the employers on the living standards of the working class generally, whether it's the loss of jobs, whether it's the loss of services, or whatever it may be. And the various strands of that may well come together in a movement which I think will bring a change of government.

So I don't see us just marching up the hill at the head of anybody in that sense. But I do see the local authorities and the actual confrontation and the fact that they are very much in the forefront of the struggle making a major contribution to raising that consciousness.

ICH

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The 1929 Labour government could hardly have been elected in less suitable circumstances for a party which saw socialism as coming through gradual social reform.

In that year the Wall Street Crash ushered in the collapse of international capitalist finance.

Mass bankruptcies ensued on a world-wide scale. The slow growth of •unemployment throughout the 1920s became a torrent.

Protectionism in the US walled off whole markets and in Britain the Labour government found itself-as the managers of British capitalism-confronted by a crisis which could permit no reforms or social improvements for the working class-so long as they continued their vision to the continuation of the bankrupt capitalist system.

For socialists of this period there were two choices. Prop up the tottering capitalist system in order to Teform' it at a later date; or mobilise the working class to destroy it and create a socialist workers' state.

The choice was between reform and revolution. Here lay the clear dividing line between reformist social democracy and revolutionary socialism.

MacDonald and the Labour government chose to cling to their reformism, and therefore The arithmetic was simple.

By August 14 he and MacDonald had decided on a majof package of cuts necessary to preserve the sacred gold standard by which the pound was convertible into gold.

Snowden went so far as to claim that if Britain were to go off the gold standard then the living standards of the working class would be slashed by half at a stroke. , On 14 July MacDonald met the Tory and Liberal leaders to explain the situation. They agreed to support the government's anti-working class package of cuts. The question was whether the Labour Party as a whole would accept it.

The impression has been given since 1931 that MacDonald favoured cuts to which the majority of the Labour cabinet were opposed.

The truth is somewhat dalton and do. an, pand 52 million in cuts-they simply were not prepared to match Thus, the 1929-31 Labour government came to an end. But MacDonald did at least recognise at the time the class content of his actions.

As he said to Snowden:

"Tomorrow every Duchess in London will be wanting to kiss me." . For all his rhetoric to electors, MacDonald had, as retormists must, made a decision on class lines. The cross class electorate dissolved into its real constituent parts-the bankers, businessmen, brokers and barons. For bourgeois democracy is no more than the form of their class rule.

Altogether, 12 others joined Prime Minister MacDonald and his colleagues in their alliance with the Tories.

On September 11 Snowden presented his Emergency Economy Bill which reduced the dole by 10%, cut teachers' wages by 15% and slashed many other social benefit payments.

In all, £70 million was to be saved. at the expense mainly of HE MAM AT THE TOPIEquality of Sacrifice-that's the big idea, friends! UNEMPLOYED MAN