A Little Less Talk, A Little More Action?

The latest meeting of the Convention of the Left took place in Manchester at the weekend, within yards of the barricades around the Labour Party conference. The Convention's first meeting was in 2008, also in Manchester. Its purpose was, and is, to unite all factions on the Left. I have not attended any of the previous conferences but they do not seem to have achieved much more than enable Left activists to talk to each other (or make speeches at each other) for a number of hours without anybody falling out over sectarian differences. But this latest conference had a more focussed theme. Faced with a government that has declared its intention to make cuts in public services and the welfare state that will destroy the living standards of the working class, the only topic was: how do we stop this?

The trouble is, the Convention was long on talk and short on action. The first Convention in 2008 was attended by 200-300 people. This latest one was attended by about seventy-five.  Other than that, they appear very similar. They had no structure and the main sessions consisted of giving everybody who wanted to speak three minutes each, to essentially make speeches to the converted.

But the Convention was not pointless. If it did not produce any concrete proposals for action against the cuts, it produced a number of ideas to be followed up. Much of the discussion in the general session concerned the potential role of the trade unions in opposing the cuts, naturally so since the TUC havs taken the lead in passing a resolution to oppose the cuts by civil disobedience if necessary. Will the unions go that far? The conclusion of the discussion was 'maybe'. Although unions are at risk of having their funds sequestrated, the risk is probably not as great as it seems. Unions have broken the anti trade union laws many times since the Miners Strike in the Eighties and no attempt hs been made to sequestrate their funds. The Thatcher government may have had a particular beef with the miners, but subsequent governments seem to have lacked the political will to attack the unions quite so viciously. It may be more politically risky now for them to do so. They will find it harder to demonise trade union members who are defending the services everybody relies on.

Myself, I confess that I'm sceptical that trade unions can be an effective force for political change. But the Convention also presented information about local campaigns that are up and running and getting results. For example, Wigan People Against the Cuts is a bottom-up community organisation that rallies local people to oppose the cuts, is not aligned with any particular political party, and refuses to have "bureaucrats telling people what to do." A young shop steward from Rochdale talked about how council workers there are opposing the local authority's plans to make £100 million worth of cuts. This can include exposing council hypocrisy. Rochdale Council bid to host the National Bike Ride this summer, and spent £200,000 tarting up the town centre to make it look presentable enough. This included hanging vinyl sheets from the fronts of the empty shops with pictures of what they would look like if they weren't empty. Naturally the council staff saw this as something of a piss take. The Council then withdrew its bid after a rumour went round that the activists intended to have a protest which would involve them blocking the route by lying down naked in the road. There was probably no truth in the rumour but it shows how activists can use the sheer fear the authorities have of what they might get up to.

Are individual community campaigns going to be enough to stop the cuts? The only point of comparison people had was with the anti poll tax campaign of the late eighties and early nineties. Then, local campaign groups across the country managed to bring down a major government policy by civil disobedience organised from the ground up. A similar campaign against the cuts might work. But opposing the poll tax was relatively easy in that people could undermine the policy by simply refusing to pay and refusing to register. Stopping the cuts is going to take more than refusal, it is going to take pro-active, creative and aggressive work. That could mean civil disobedience and more. One of the significant features of the anti poll tax campaign was the almighty riot in 1990 in which the business district of central London was trashed and the police were forced to retreat. 

So will the Convention of the Left be able to promote the strong community campaigns that will be needed to stop the  cuts? As an organisation, I think not. The impression I got from watching the general session of the conference was that the people there were used to making speeches but, with a few exceptions, could not or would not contemplate taking practical action to pursue a political aim without making sure that the action was ideologically 'pure'. The anti poll tax campaign didn't get into discussions about material dialectics (or is it dialectic materialism?) it just set about refusing to co-operate with an unfair tax.

What the Convention could be is a clearing house for ideas, a swop shop of what tactics and methods work best, a source of inspiration and (if people continue to bury their ideologivcal differences) an opportunity for different factions to work together to achieve something they couldn't achieve separately.  The Manchester delegates made a start by having a separate meeting at the end of the main conference to set up a local activists group to share information and co-ordinate activity. Watch this space for developments.