Compass conference shows need for Labour left to turn outwards

There were a number of very positive things about the Compass conference 'A New Hope' in London last weekend. Both Caroline Lucas and Nick Dearden communicated very radical anti-cuts messages to a packed and very appreciative audience. The Green leader was very hard on both New Labour and the 'obscene Tory cuts', while the head of the Jubilee 2000 campaign talked of the disastrous failure of both the neoliberal and New Labour experiments, emphasising the urgent need to go beyond passive campaigns based on marketing, postcards and lobbying and to build links in the UK and internationally with those actively resisting capitalism. A packed Labour Representation Committee meeting saw John McDonnell tear into the legacy of New Labour and its campaign s to destroy democracy inside the party, using very underhand tactics such as parachuting central candidates into safe seats in order to bypass local Party organisation. He spoke too of the need to build a broad campaign against the forthcoming wave of cuts and to actively demonstrate solidarity with people in struggle, particularly with the BA strikers. An intervention from SR pushed the Labour Left to build for and to take part in the demonstrations on June 22nd outside parliament, an idea which McDonnell fully welcomed.

There were also a few dispiriting aspects of the Conference. Although Diane Abbott stood out in the party leadership debates, with her clear attacks on the illegal wars and her firm defence of immigration, there was clearly very little to distinguish between the other four on the platform. In a half-full meeting on how to rebuild the party in opposition, Doug Alexander demonstrated that reports of New Labour's demise may be premature, with his jargon-heavy managerial and breathtakingly uninspiring talk of community organisation in the form of the London Citizens, a church-based voluntary organisation suddenly beloved of Ed Miliband, James Purnell and other unreconstructed New Labourites. There was no talk in the debates about the banking crisis or the war, and afterwards a number of people seemed to be just as stuck as to who to vote for as before.

But as I say the leadership debates were not really representative of the rest of the conference, which saw a number of meaningful debates about what the role of the Labour Party should be, especially for its grassroots, and discussions on how to integrate and galvanise the 20,000 new members who have joined since the election, given that local party organisation is by the sound of it pretty moribund.

One thing which reawakened unpleasant memories for me was witnessing just how insular and sectarian the Labour Party can be, with some speakers rejecting out of hand any cooperation with the Green Party, and the otherwise relatively sensible Tony Robinson going out of this way to equate the dangers of 'infiltration' by the 'trots' and by the BNP. This kind of attitude will endear the Labour Party to noone on the left.

Compass itself is I would say to the left of the Labour party in that it stands for certain principles of Social democracy which of course New Labour long since abandoned. Neal Lawson seems to regard Sweden as something of a utopia, which is ironic given that the new education Secretary Michael Gove also claims to take inspiration from there. In terms of an influence on Labour policy it has to be seen as a good thing, a move away from the mid-Atlantic Anglo-Saxon politics of the New Labour age, as represented by the four identikit ex-New Labour policy advisors on the leadership debate platform.

Nevertheless if the Labour left is to rebuild itself on the basis of activism it will inevitably have to happen despite the leadership, and there are a number of uncertainties that will have to be argued out first. It was refreshing to see Labour members having meaningful discussions about politics, but it does seem that inside the party itself space for such debate is limited. It can't take place as part of the elections for a new leader, or at what Tony Robinson called the 'meaningless' conference, or at the apparently deathlessly boring branch meetings. There is hope however that the Labour left can revitalise itself through groups such as Compass, Tribune, the LRC, and Young Labour, which is soon to become semi-autonomous and may be transformed into an activist organisation rather than merely a factory for producing New Labour apparatchiks. Perhaps just as a thousand flowers may bloom on the broader left as the struggle against the cuts begins to heat up, the same will happen inside the Labour Party. Those 20,000 new Labour members have almost certainly joined the party because they hate the Tories and want to do something to challenge them. The Labour left may well be coming back to life, and the revolutionary left is faced with an opportunity to engage with it and to encourage any signs of genuine and meaningful radicalism to broaden and deepen.