Minority government?

Submitted by AWL on 7 April, 2015 - 5:55 Author: Colin Foster

If on 7 May Labour becomes the biggest party but doesn’t win a majority, left activists should advocate a Labour minority government which presses on with the positive elements in Labour’s promises (repeal of Health and Social Care Act, scrapping of bedroom tax, curbs on zero-hours contracts, etc.).

If other parties block those measures, then we advocate that Labour calls a “vote of confidence” to force them through, resulting in a new election focused on those issues if the measures are defeated.

The problem with Labour minority governments in the past has not been any impossibility of forming them, but that they have used their minority status as an excuse for reneging on the positive elements in their promises.

Many Labour ministries have been minority governments or had tiny majorities. Labour ran minority governments in 1924, 1929-31, February-October 1974, and 1976-9; had tiny majorities (three or four seats) in 1964-6 and October 1974 to 1976.

Socialists have no absolute rule against coalition governments. The first workers’ government of revolutionary Russia in 1917-8 was a coalition of Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries. The Mensheviks and Right Social Revolutionaries were invited to participate but refused. The coalition broke only because the Left SRs, dissatisfied at being outvoted on the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty with Germany, used their strong positions in the Cheka to assassinate the German ambassador in the hope of provoking renewed war.

The problem in 2015 is that a coalition would be of a timid Labour leadership, ultra-anxious to be seen to serve “all classes”, with a party explicitly outside the labour movement.

Between March 1977 and July 1978 the minority Labour government had a formal pact with the Liberal party, consulting it on every issue though not inviting Liberals to join the government. Liberal leader David Steel said at the time that this pact “would allow the banks to sleep at night”, but the Labour government was already pushing through harsh social cuts on the say-so of the IMF.

Anyway, minority governments have been more common at Westminster than formal coalitions, outside of wartime.

Even if the Tories win slightly more seats than Labour on 7 May, the Lib-Dems will be uneasy about being seen to enable continued Tory rule, and the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the SDLP, and the Greens will not back the Tories.

Labour should then go for a minority government which will seek to subsist through different permutations of smaller-party support on different issues.

The difficulty is not so much with techniques of minority government as with the spirit of Labour’s leaders, characteristically timid.

Ramsey MacDonald, prime minister of the first-ever Labour minority government, saw its achievements in these terms:

“[Labour] have shown the country that they have the capacity to government in an equal degree with the other parties in the House... The Labour government have also shown the country that patriotism is not the monopoly of any single class or party...

“They... have done much to dispel the fantastic and extravagant belief... that they were nothing but a band on irresponsible revolutionaries intent on wreckage and destruction”.

He was so pleased about showing that Labour was “responsible” that the question did not even arise for him of what the Labour government had or hadn’t done to serve working-class interests or to carry through policies demanded by the labour movement.

Even worse now, probably, with Labour leaders who live their entire lives in wonk-world, with focus-group reports, think-tank studies, and consultations among teams of political apparatchiks doing for them what workplace and street experience and discussion do for working-class people.

But it’s clear which way we should push.

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