THERE IS no escaping it, Neil Findlay’s decision to leave the Labour Party on March 19 was a heavy blow for the Scottish Labour left. As reported in the Morning Star, his resignation letter was a stinging rebuke to the Labour Party leadership, citing the lengthening list of heartless decisions they have made in order advance the interests of corporate capital at the expense of the most vulnerable sections of the working class, with more to come. 

More of that later, but can I first express my thanks to Neil, as a comrade and a friend for the important contribution he made to the left of Scottish politics in general and to the left of the Scottish Labour Party in particular. 

His decision to stand for the leadership of the Scottish Labour Party against Jim Murphy in 2014, something he undertook only to advance the case of the left, was brave and unselfish. It allowed him to argue that the Scottish Labour Party with him as leader would have raised the minimum wage; accelerate council housebuilding; reduce the presence of the private sector in the NHS and give councils power to raise the revenue necessary to make a real impact in their localities. 

I only wish that were the prospectus of the Scottish Labour leadership today. 

He also played a key role in arguing the Red Paper’s socialist case for progressive federalism in the 2014 independence referendum and he heightened the profile and influence of the Scottish Labour Campaign for Socialism by becoming its convener. He used both his profile and his political influence in support of the campaign to elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party and Richard Leonard as leader of the Scottish Labour Party, and worked hard to sustain both in their positions despite vicious attacks from the right of the party and their outriders in the media. 

For all of that, I am eternally grateful, but I cannot agree with or endorse his decision to leave the Labour Party. Cuts by Labour governments, are, after all, hardly unique in Labour’s history, as Tim Bale points out: “Think of Philip Snowden insisting on cuts to unemployment benefits in 1931 in an eventually vain attempt to retain the gold standard. Or Hugh Gaitskell insisting on charges for NHS ‘teeth and specs’ to pay for the Korean war in 1951. Or Roy Jenkins reimposing NHS prescription charges in 1968 to calm the markets after devaluation. Or Dennis Healey committing to spending cuts to secure a loan from the IMF (and to save sterling again) in 1976. Or Gordon Brown insisting on cutting single parent benefits in 1997.”

They are precisely the kind of actions you would expect from a government trying to convince the markets that the economy is safe in their hands and this is exactly the kind of government the left expected under Keir Starmer. That may seem like an argument for socialists to leave the Labour Party as quickly as they can. 

Well, perhaps, if Britain had had a different history and the Labour Party was by constitution simply a liberal democratic party with (in the good times) welfarist ambitions, that would be true. But it’s not. The Labour Party was formed by an alliance of trade unions and socialist parties and groups seeking independent working-class representation, in local and national government; it did so on a predominantly reformist agenda, despite the active participation of a socialist wing. In that, it faithfully reflected the actual position of the British working class. It still does. 

There are, therefore, and arguably always have been, two competing Labour traditions: one, driven by historical notions of imperial superiority and British (including Scottish) exceptionalism can be drawn into anti-communism, anti-socialism, racism, sexism and a belief in hierarchies of labour.  

The other, at its best, is driven by the understanding that the root of inequality and unemployment and poverty is the capitalist system, not the immigrant, not the disabled and not the unemployed victim of that system. That is the tradition to which I and many comrades in the Labour Party belong. We know that winning political power at Westminster and winning support for that political challenge in the workplace is a necessary step for making any serious progress.

To achieve that progress, we need to transform both the trade union movement and the Labour Party simultaneously, because they are umbilically linked. We have been “privileged” in our recent history to see what happens when you begin to move in that direction. 

The venom directed against the “Corbyn Project” from outside and inside the Labour Party exposed the elaborate defensive frameworks the British state has in place to stop the victory of Labour’s progressive wing. But it also showed its vulnerability. 

The left, with a large influx of new members, was able to win the leadership. It was able to sustain it. Not for long enough, and there was a failure to sufficiently promote support for political change in the trade union rank and file, but it showed that it can be done. 

The alternative to this? Show me one. It is certainly not the pre-loved alphabet soup of parties that, with admirable commitment, regularly lose their deposits after their energetic exposition of their transitional demands at local and national elections. Nor have I read any credible case that the existing or any future diverse group of independents could develop a popular political programme without the integrated input of the organised labour movement. Constitutionally guaranteed political engagement by the trade unions in politics does exist, but only in the Labour Party. 

I wish Jeremy Corbyn was the leader of the Labour Party. But he’s not. I wish Neil Findlay was leader of the Scottish Labour Party. But he’s not. We have to deal with the Labour Party and labour movement as they are. So let me finish with the same quote that I used when reviewing Neil Findlay’s book If You Don’t Run They Can’t Chase You from Paul Doran’s song Natives: “Of those who are forced to choose, some will choose to fight.”

We choose to stay and we choose to fight.