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Communist Party of Britain: 45th Congress, 2000
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WINNING THE BATTLE OF DEMOCRACY
The current government is initiating major constitutional changes. The
changes include the establishment of the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish
Parliament, the modification of the Upper House in Westminster, new
constitutional arrangements involving Northern Ireland, the creation of a
London Assembly with a directly elected mayor, the adoption of new systems
of voting and the creation of new structures in local government that reduce
democratic accountability and consolidate partnership with the private
sector. The government is also promoting the idea of regional assemblies.
The general thrust of these changes is to limit democratic participation and
the ability of working people to use democratic institutions to control big
business and the capitalist state. Even the potential of the Scottish
Parliament and the Welsh Assembly has been significantly limited by the
additional member electoral system. This concentrates power in the hands of
party leaderships and reduces accountability to constituents. At the same
time as these internal changes, Britain's adhesion to EU treaties is
progressively stripping away the power of the Westminster parliament -
especially in terms of parliament's ability to control the economy or
intervene in the areas of foreign policy and defence.
These changes pose a direct threat to the interests of working people in
Britain and in particular our ability to advance towards socialism. Marx
and Engels described the key political task of the working class as "winning
the battle of democracy" - in the sense of achieving institutions that
enable working people to begin to take real, collective control over their
economic and social lives. Currently, we are in danger of losing much of
what has been achieved. Our democracy is in danger.
STATE MONOPOLY CAPITALISM IN BRITAIN
It remains the case that state power is exercised at British level by
British finance capital. The actions of the last two governments have been
to strengthen the executive power and increase the links with big business
at every level. In this way British state monopoly capitalism has been
consolidated. The EU Treaties have in no way restricted this. On the
contrary, these treaties have been used to cut away the democratic powers of
the Westminster parliament over big business.
The Labour government, in its preparations for monetary union, has
surrendered its power to limit the anti-working class effects of capitalist
crisis. In particular, jurisdiction over interest rates and levels of
government spending has been lost. This power represented a key part of the
gains won by working people in 1945. It enabled governments to increase
employment in ways that could prevent economic crisis being resolved at the
expense of wages and working conditions. It made it possible for governments
to finance the universal benefits of a Welfare State.
The prime beneficiary of this surrender has been British big business. For
British Petroleum, GEC-Marconi, British Aerospace and the British banks and
insurance companies, the British state remains indispensable. The British
state fights, often literally, to secure their access to markets and raw
materials across the world. It provides these companies with the research,
contracts and trained labour without which they could not survive. It
bargains on their behalf within the institutions of the European Union,
NATO, the World Trade Organisation and G7.
The challenge today is to win a mass understanding of the seriousness of the
current threat. In the past working people had to wage a century-long
struggle to win universal suffrage and subordinate parliament to democratic
control. In doing so they demonstrated their practical understanding of the
importance of how government is organised. Victories in this battle for
democracy mobilised whole generations for progressive change. The great
objective of Conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s was to reverse
this process. The pro-big business, anti-democratic trend has been continued
by the Blair government. The result among many sections of working people is
a dangerous fatalism about the possibility of genuine political change.
Marx and Engels never saw the institutions of government as ends in
themselves. Institutions would not resolve exploitation. What was important
was the way they related to the wider process by which this was achieved.
Full economic and social democracy had to be achieved by the collective
organisation of working people themselves. The democratic transformation of
institutions reflected and confirmed this process. Institutions could not
be assessed in isolation. Democracy had to be judged in terms of its
economic and social content: "the economic foundation, the economic
interrelations of voters".
Today the battle for democracy has a number of critical fronts. All are
linked.
* the representation of the nations of Britain
* the rights of national minorities
* Insert as per amendment
* the nature of local government democracy and the representation of regions
* the character of the electoral system, PR and access to selection
* the use of the legal system to restrict the collective power of working
people exercised through trade unions
* the capacity of the second chamber and the monarchy to thwart the
democracy of the Westminster parliament
* the loss of powers from the Westminster parliament to the EU
* the resolution of the British state's occupation of the six counties of
Ireland
* the ending of the semi-feudal big business fiefdoms of the Isle of Man and
the Channel Isles
THE NATIONAL AND REGIONAL QUESTION IN BRITAIN
Britain is a multi-national and multi-ethnic state. It is also an
imperialist state. Our ruling class has always sought to exploit the
divisions between nations, to nurture feelings of national superiority, and
to use the resulting antagonisms to sustain its role. In terms of Britain's
component nations and regions this century has seen increasing inequality.
Uneven development has been accentuated by the growing concentration of
capital. Economic development in regions and parts of regions has been
stunted. For all sections of the population this has highlighted the
unaccountability of big business. People are now increasingly seeing the
need to control capital and plan the economy at the level of the nation and
the region.
Communists have campaigned for national parliaments for Scotland and Wales
since the 1930s. This demand was democratic in the full sense that it had a
manifest economic and social content. It asserted the right of the people
of Scotland and Wales to possess their own national institutions that had
could take action on unemployment and dereliction, and it was thereby seen
as essential that such parliaments had power to intervene economically.
These parliaments were also seen as national in the democratic sense. They
would enable people living in these countries to decide for the first time
their own social priorities and forge, in terms of the new balance of class
forces, a progressive and democratic content for their national culture and
identity.
The Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament have now finally been
achieved. Their establishment marks a major step forward. Yet at the same
time it is also a prime example of why political institutions cannot be
viewed in isolation and must be seen in the context of their class content
and direction. The Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament have been
saddled with a system of proportional representation, the alternative list
system, that divorces elected members from their constituents and
consolidates power in the hands of party managers - and most importantly in
the hands of those who hold executive power within the British state. In
Scotland this has led to the formation a Lib-Lab coalition Executive founded
on horse-trading over PFI and student fees which directly frustrates the
will of the electorate. The new bodies have come into being at time when
other aspects of our democracy have been put into reverse. The trade union
movement remains legally restricted. The signing of the Maastricht and
Amsterdam treaties has withdrawn powers over the movement of capital and
almost entirely removed the ability of such national parliaments to create
employment and fund the development of local or publicly owned industry. In
combination, the way the new institutions have been set up, and the context
of their operation, threatens to gut the economic and social content of the
new democracy and intensify feelings of powerlessness.
By default, this situation is also leading these new institutions to adopt
the "free market" regional agenda of the European Union. This regional
agenda seeks to bypass the remaining democracy of member states and
encourage regions to compete in terms of the most favourable conditions they
can offer to big business through the provision of infrastructure, training
and "flexible" labour. To the degree that the Scottish Parliament and the
Welsh Assembly adopt this agenda, so also will the regions of England demand
similar powers to "attract" capital. The Blair government will do
everything it can to encourage this. It has already set up unelected
Regional Development Agencies with close links to big business. It is
promoting the idea of Regional Assemblies that will usurp many of the
remaining functions of local government. It is backing attempts to create
directly elected mayors and "cabinet-style" government in the town halls.
These plans are already well underway in London.
On these terms regional democracy would be emptied of real content. It
would be used instead to set working people in competition with one another
- in the interests primarily of British big business and its consolidation
of power at the level of the British state.
This is the measure of the challenge we face.
OPENING A NEW DEMOCRATIC OFFENSIVE
Today we need a fight for democracy as fundamental as that waged by the
British Labour Movement at the beginning of this century. Where must it
start ? With winning an understanding of how each part of the struggle is
linked. If each separate aspect of the democratic struggle is treated in
isolation, it will be impossible to give it a progressive, class content.
Every aspect of life in Britain is dependent on defending, against the EU,
the democratic sovereignty power of the Westminster parliament: above all
its power to control capital. The ability of nations and regions to defend
the interests of their peoples, and to give a real content to their
democracy, will be determined by whether or not Britain is a member of the
EU. No less important will be the defence of the democratic rights of the
individual - in terms of ethnicity, gender and disability and the right to
collective organisation. The capacity of working people to use any
democratic gains will depend on their unity and the restoration of the
democratic rights of workers and organised labour. It will also depend on
the revival of organisation as against passive membership. This will be no
less the case for the traditional vehicle of working class democracy: the
Labour Party.
What is the democratic agenda we must fight for ?
* To reject the treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam and ensure that the
Westminster parliament controls
Interest rates
Currency
Taxation
Public expenditure
Power to own and control within a public sector
power over the movement of capital
Foreign Policy and Defence
Legal Systems and policing
* To repeal anti-trade union laws
* To repeal the Asylum and Immigration Act and oppose all racist immigration
laws
* To strengthen the Race Relations Act and the Commission for Racial
Equality
* To make discrimination against Lesbians and Gays unlawful
* To introduce proportional representation for all elections based on the
Single Transferable Vote in multi-seat constituencies and to ensure
democratic selection of candidates
* To restore to local government democracy with powers to decide levels of
tax raising for local services - based on the introduction of a local income
tax - and to end privatisation based on best value and any other form of
privatisation
* To give the Welsh Assembly full parliamentary status and enable the
national parliaments in Wales and Scotland to control the conditions of
employment and to fund the development of industry on the basis of full tax
raising powers
* To give comparable powers to democratically-elected regional councils in
England and make accountable to them those services currently controlled by
non-elected quangos including regional economic development, training,
further education and the health service. The structures now legislated for
London's government should be reformed
* To strengthen the freedom of the press by establishing a legal right to
equal access to distribution and sale by all newspaper and media and an
equal access to government advertising
* To end the special status of capital within the Isle of Man and the
Channel Isles, and instead to provide for democratic representation within
the Westminster parliament and the strengthening of the democratic
institutions of the States and the Tynwald through proportional
representation, and the exercise of the same economic powers as the national
parliaments of Scotland and Wales
* To create a Cornish Assembly with similar powers
* To abolish the House of Lords without replacement
* To announce intent to withdraw from all remaining British colonies
A FEDERAL REPUBLIC ?
These changes will not exhaust the democratic agenda. They represent the
issues that are immediate and urgent - precisely because they are at the
forefront of the agenda of the Blair government and of our ruling class.
They are at the same time key to the success of the Alternative Economic and
Political Strategy. They would constitute a major step forward to a real
democracy that would work on behalf of working people - and against the
centralised, executive-dominated structure of power being created by the
Blair government to meet the needs of British monopoly capital. They would,
as part of a strategy to achieve economic and social democracy, inevitably
meet intensified opposition from big business - in the course of which new
democratic initiatives would become necessary.
Our party's programme of democratic reforms will first and foremost have to
be fought for at British level - because it is here that the power of our
ruling class is vested. As was stressed in the 1848 Communist Manifesto,
"the working people of each country must first of all, of course, settle
matters with its own bourgeoisie." At the same time this democratic
struggle has to be expressed and experienced in terms of the rights of
people in workplaces and communities. It must also include the national
rights of the peoples of Britain. Lenin always stressed the importance of
recognising that the culture of any nation always included two, and
sometimes more, trends. These reflected a nation's class composition and
development. What was critical was the relative dominance of reactionary and
democratic cultures - of those that represented ideology of the status quo
and those that represented movements of emancipation. The winning of
national institutions for the peoples of Britain is itself directly related
to the process of enabling these nations once more, in the modern age and in
terms of collective struggle, to redefine their identities and culture on
progressive terms within their own institutions.
This poses directly the question of the English nation, its identity and
culture. This nation was at the core of the process by which a British
ruling class was created at the centre of a world-wide empire - an
imperialism which still subsists, in modified form, on the basis of the
economic power of British finance capital and its tactical alliances with
both the US and EU. As the birthplace of the world's first mass working
class movement, English working people have very strong traditions of
collectivism and social justice. But for this very reason the capitalist
class have always sought to develop ideas of national superiority and
chauvinism. The Conservative Party today is actively seeking to exploit and
keep alive this chauvinist trend which last century Marx identified as the
key weakness within the English working class. In relation to the call for
an end to the occupation of Ireland, Marx laid down, in face of opposition
among British trade unions of the time, that "a nation which oppresses
another can never be free". This applies equally today.
The democratic agenda must therefore also address the issue of imperialism
and specifically the continuing British presence in Northern Ireland. In
the course of the 1980s and 1990s the British Labour Movement and the Labour
Party was won to a position where it argued that the role of Britain should
be as an active persuader for unity within the island of Ireland. The
objective of a united Ireland is now recognised as a legitimate political
aim. The issue of consent of the majority of the people of Northern
Ireland, whilst legitimising the Unionist platform for continuing as part of
the United Kingdom, also opens up the right to work politically for a United
Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement has been accepted by the majority of the
people of Ireland - North and South - in referendums as the basis of the way
forward. It is now urgent that the British Labour Movement once more throws
its weight behind the full implementation of the Good Friday Agreement and
the demand that the British government becomes an active persuader for unity
and ends the long legacy of national oppression in Ireland.
The struggle for this outcome, alongside that against other national
oppressions, will be central to the consolidation and development of a
progressive and democratic culture among people living in England (as well
as those within the other countries of Britain).
It will be in the course of these battles that people within England will
need to decide whether an English national parliament is required for
further democratic advance parallel to those elsewhere. A century ago, in
1891, Engels argued that, at that stage, a federal republic would represent
a step forward - particularly with regard to the national question in
Britain. The abolition of the monarchy has long been a demand of our party.
The creation of a constitutional council, based on representatives of the
national parliaments and assemblies, would provide a body that could act as
guardian of the legal framework of the constitution and ensure the transfer
of executive power after elections and at other times - but with no other
powers. This would complement the abolition of the House of Lord and the
consolidation of the democratic powers of the elected House of Commons - as
the body that would ultimately be required to settle issues with British
finance capital. Demands for further changes, including the formal
establishment of a federal republic, may arise in this process of
fundamental change - of which a key aspect will be the development of a mass
understanding that democracy is not itself an institution but a process of
emancipation.
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Communist Party of Britain,
3 Ardleigh Road, London N1 4HS
Tel:(+44) 171 275 8162 Fax:(+44) 171 249 9188
e-mail: cp-of-britain@mcr1.poptel.org.uk
Homepage: www.communist-party.org.uk
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