Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Friday, 29 September 2017

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://www.cecaust.com.au

Corbyn and ‘old’ Labour smash neoliberal consensus in UK—which way ALP?

UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is destroying the political consensus that has enabled Margaret Thatcher’s free-market neoliberalism to reign supreme in the UK for almost four decades. Corbyn is leading his party back to the “old” Labour tradition that the reprehensible Tony Blair, whom Thatcher called her greatest “legacy”, had tried to expunge from the party. Will the Australian Labor Party follow suit?

Under the slogan, “For the many, not the few”, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour is vowing to:

End privatisation, and re-nationalise privatised assets. Corbyn’s shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer (Treasurer) John McDonnell said to the party’s annual conference this week: “Building an economy for the many also means bringing ownership and control of the utilities and key services into the hands of people who use and work in them. Rail, water, energy, Royal Mail—we’re taking them back.”
Establish a £500 billion national investment bank that uses the power of so-called “quantitative easing” not to prop up banks but to develop desperately-needed infrastructure and industries.
Build massive public infrastructure projects, including in rail transport and electricity generation.
Crack down on tax havens, and re-regulate the banks, including through the separation of commercial banking from investment banking known as Glass-Steagall.

For years, UK Labour members and supporters were told that the party would only be “electable” if it represented the political “centre”—defined by Rupert Murdoch and his fellow billionaire media moguls. That was always a lie, as opinion polls showed that the majority of Brits detested the privatisation and deregulation of the British economy that destroyed many industries and concentrated wealth in the City of London, but the “consensus” between Thatcherites and Blairites left them with no political alternatives. In this year’s June election Jeremy Corbyn gave UK voters a real alternative, with a manifesto that revived the old Labour policies of the post-war Clement Attlee government. Despite the worst efforts of Murdoch and the billionaire media (with repeated attacks on Corbyn as a terrorist sympathiser, “unelectable”, etc.), Labour was able to come from 25 points behind and an expected drubbing, to achieve a hung parliament; ever since, the party has been leading in the polls.

Corbyn, who served for 30 years as an isolated backbencher because he refused to accept the neoliberal consensus the way most of his party had done, triumphantly told Labour’s annual conference that the “centre” can change, as he has proved. “[T]he political centre of gravity isn’t fixed or unmovable”, he said, “nor is it where the establishment pundits like to think it is, because they know everything, as you know. … A new consensus is emerging from the great economic crash and the years of austerity, when people started to find political voice for their hopes for something different and better. 2017 may be the year when politics finally caught up with the crash of 2008—because we offered people a clear choice. … This is the real centre of gravity of British politics. We are now the political mainstream. Our manifesto and our policies are popular because that is what most people in our country actually want, not what they’re told they should want.”

Significance for Australia

Sadly for Australia, the policies of Corbyn’s Labour are rejected by the current Australian Labor Party. The ALP’s dirty truth is that it started the Thatcherisation of Australia, under Hawke and Keating, and ever since it has been party to what Julia Gillard in 2011 called the “post-1983 consensus on economic reform”. The ALP is responsible for policies that made the bowler-hatted, pin-striped toffs of the City of London chortle with delight over their cigars and brandies:

the deregulation of the banks into predatory monsters;
the deregulation of industries that concentrated domestic economic power in just two mega-corporations (Woolworths and Wesfarmers-Coles);
the mass-privatisation of state assets for private profiteering;
the tariff cuts that allowed multinationals who exploited cheap labour overseas to crush Australia’s manufacturers, with the resulting import-dependence driving up foreign debt; and
the emasculation of the trade union movement.

Today, the ALP is a party that puts the mythical “market”—actually private profiteers—ahead of the welfare of Australians, as demonstrated in the current electricity crisis; slashes welfare for single mothers in a vain attempt to balance the budget; and agrees to locking up innocent men, women and children indefinitely on island prisons. It does not oppose the Liberals on any fundamental economic policies, because it remains signed on to the neoliberal consensus.

The great irony is that it was “old” Labor in Australia that influenced the UK’s revolutionary post-war Attlee Labour government whose policies Corbyn has revived. The ALP fought a war against the “Money Power”: the great John Curtin and Ben Chifley led the way on using a national bank, the original Commonwealth Bank, to both regulate the private banking sector and create the credit needed for infrastructure and industries. Their success motivated Attlee to nationalise the Bank of England, after 252 years of private ownership, and try to bring the City of London financial centre under democratic control. Today the ALP is Another Liberal Party—not the party of Curtin and Chifley.

Australia’s “old” Labor tradition is still alive, however—in the Citizens Electoral Council. The CEC started in 1988 in opposition to the neoliberal consensus and the destruction it was causing to Australia’s productive industries. Ever since, it has continued the fight against the Money Power and for the policies of regulating the banks with Glass-Steagall, a national bank to finance the development of infrastructure and industries, and a nation-building vision of great water, power and transport infrastructure projects.

Click here for a free copy of the CEC’s 2004 New Citizen Special report, “Defeat the Synarchy, Fight for a National Bank”, which is a detailed history of Australian “old” Labor’s fight against the City of London-centred Money Power.

Click here to join the CEC as a member.

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