Today at the Gresham Hotel there is a conference titled Political Change and People Power which has the expressed aim of discussing the ‘New Political Possibilities in Ireland for all Left-Wing Parties in Partnership with Civil Society’. We are now almost a week into the General Election, and so far we have had the continuous polls revealing similar results, the at times shouty TV debates, the visual blight of election posters, the launching of policy documents to ADD-prone reporters, the innumerable press conferences/manic hand-shaking/baby-kissing around the country and the failed attempts by unremarkable politicians to show how they are different to the other parties.

The main issues being discussed are: fiscal consolidation, how much, whether it will be adjusted more through taxation measures or through spending cuts; how can we stimulate job growth; how do we stimulate the economy through infrastructural investment; should we repudiate the IMF/EU/ECB bailout or simple try to renegotiate the interest rate and should we burn the bondholders and how: only those bondholders not covered by the bank guarantee, or all of them senior, subordinated and whatever exists in-between?

To the majority of the electorate this is just political white noise.

After all that has gone on, since the collapse of the property bubble and the disastrous banking and budgetary policies that the Fianna Fail/Green government have implemented, lumbered us all with still untold billions of debt, you would think that this election would be a real opportunity to provide a clear left-wing alternative economic and social program.

Politically too you would imagine the left would get together to ensure that the cleptocracy that has run this country into the ground is not.

But this hasn’t happened. Credible alternatives exist – they’ve been put forward by economists, think-tanks, trade unions, political parties and commentators. But it has not been put forward by all left-wing economists, trade unions, political parties and commentators and not in a consistent way. Add to that the tendency to try and get into the media debate by adapting the argument to the premise and assumptions used by the right, thus undermining the argument itself in a desperate effort to get heard.

The result is that the ‘program for change’, as it exists within the public domain, is muddled, confused, contradictory and unclear.

And as for the notion of political unity across the left….

The senior members of the Labour Party in the weeks before the election was officially announced went to some lengths to dismiss the chances of forming any left coalition.

Roisin Shortall, when it was suggested to her by RTE’s Sean O’Rourke that a coalition of the left was possible given the polling numbers said that Labour were not interested in forming one with what she called a ‘rag-bag’ of leftwing parties and independents. What this country needs, she said, was strong and stable government. A statement of intent, which have increased in frequency since the publication of their barely detailed Pre-Budget Submission, that they plan a coalition with Fine Gael (given the polling numbers and the relative strength of Fine Gael at 30% or so this can be referred to as a desire for a strong and stable right-wing government).

The performance of Joan Burton on Tonight with Vincent Browne was a similar deployments of this distancing technique. On the program she did everything possible to talk over Joe Higgins to try and prevent him from criticising Labour’s unwillingness to stop the Finance Bill when they had the opportunity to do so, and for allowing it to pass so that they would be able to accept its precepts as part of the ‘necessary’ Austerity Drive Redux in a Fine Gael/Labour coalition. After all, there is nothing more seductive to a politician than uttering in the course of a debate the delicious-sounding phrase “we are where we are”.

Other senior party members made similar attacks on Sinn Fein and the ULA deploying scare tactics about the ‘lunacy’ of their economic program – even though Sinn Féin’s economic policies are virtually the same as those put forward by TASC, the economic and social policy think-tank with, presumably, such ‘Looney Lefties’ as Fintan O’Toole, Jim Stewart, Paula Clancy and Paul Sweeney.

Finally, Eamonn Gilmore urged leftwing voters to vote Labour Party and not for other leftwing parties.

But similarly the other left-wing parties and independents are hardly doing their utmost to form a broad coalition of the left. Sinn Fein’s leader Gerry Adams, standing for the first time for the Dail, has made a number of calls for an alliance with the Labour Party, first at the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis in 2009 and most recently this week. The call bolsters Sinn Fein with leftwing voters, safe in the knowledge that the Labour Party would reject it.

There is also the tendency of Sinn Fein to capitalise on Labour’s stance. The showboating by Pearse Doherty when Labour were in negotiations with Fianna Fail about how to speed through the Finance Bill, declaring it a ‘grubby little deal’ came across well as a sound bite, but was also viewed as mere political point scoring, an intra-left in-fight.

There was also the accusation by Sinn Fein when Labour announced its economic program for the election that they had sat on the fence for weeks and then when they finally announced their economic policies, nicked Sinn Fein’s ideas. If this is true, why was it not an opportunity for cooperation?

The ULA, while being an alliance itself of left-wing groups, largely the SWP, or People Before Profit Alliance and the Socialist Party have already made clear that they are not interested in working with Sinn Fein or the Labour Party, both of whom they accuse of an excessive willingness to join with right-wing parties in a coalition.

While there has been mutual hostility down through the years between those in the ULA and the Labour Party the stance against Sinn Fein seems to go against what ordinary people want. Sinn Fein is the only party to have put together a highly credible, fully-costed and critically appraised left-wing economic program. Like the ULA, they are challenging IMF/EU/ECB ‘bailout’ which has switched private debt for funds provided by the troika and turned the Irish people into debt slaves, condemn austerity, saying they would reverse the cuts and are calling for state led investment to create jobs and develop much needed infrastructure. They both put equality and social justice at the top of their agenda when it comes to reforming the health service, education and justice and both have led parallel campaigns in the various EU referendums against the neo-liberal policies behind most EU governance.

Yet despite the cooperation that occurred during the Vote No for Lisbon campaign, such an alliance to form a joint political program that would allow people to get hopeful that real politics actually exists and that it can bring about significant change has been dismissed out of hand.

There is no doubt, of course, that each of the parties and groups that I have mentioned have different political philosophies, from the vague remnants of social democracy existing within the strictures of neo-liberal orthodoxy, to Republican Socialism to Trotskyism and International Socialism, as well as other independent leftwing, Anarchist or Marxist-Leninist affiliates. Each of these philosophies depend on being able to identify their differences from other philosophies with a similar ethos, and to suggest a blending of these into a homogenous ‘left’ is to ignore how politics and political struggle work.

An alliance based on common principles would always be difficult when those principles range from a softening of neo-liberalisms worst excesses to a desire to end Capitalism and create a society for workers based on genuine equality. But other countries have shown that this is possible, that difference can be overcome when an economy and a society is in crisis.

But one of the biggest obstacles getting in the way of providing a credible alternative is the stand taken by the Labour leadership.

It has been the Labour leadership’s inability to get behind a serious left-wing economic program that has prevented the chances of a popular movement developing which would provide a detailed critique of right-wing economic policies and help to build an alternative. It is possible for a popular movement to develop without the Labour party, but with the option of electoral change still available, the sense that Labour is a leftwing party with support amoung those who want an alternative actually disapate the chances of that movement gaining strength. It is only when Labour enter government with Fine Gael and they begin to implement Fine Gael policies that people will release that they must look elsewhere.

The Labour Party, by agreeing on the need for a reduction of the deficit, with “an €7bn adjustment between 2012-2014”, calling for a cuts in public sector jobs, a public sector pay freeze and saying they would implement a “Comprehensive Spending Review and Waste Audit across government departments, akin to the British coalition government’s idea to putting a ceiling on expenditure equally across all departments, offering nothing more than a paltry 500 million for a job stimulus program and dumping a new 48% of tax rate on individuals earning over 100,000, saying that changes in the USC have made it unnecessary. This latter policy suggests that they’d keep the USC despite its deflationary impact and indicate that the Irish Labour Party’s economic policies are right-wing. This presents a problem when working for left-wing unity.

Their left-wing credentials, as they see it, are in the fact that they don’t want to cut as much as Fine Gael, that they won’t seek as many redundancies in the public sector as Fine Gael, that they’ll do it gently through retirement and other kindly means, that it won’t affect frontline workers, that, unlike Fine Gael that won’t privatise the semi-state sector, and so on.

But the broad acceptance about the priority of reducing the deficit through cuts in government spending when Ireland has had the greatest economic shock in its history, - which was the result of a collapse of private investment and a slump in tax revenue added to by the strain of huge banking debts - indicates that they have a specific right-wing view of how to fix the economy. The recent downward revision of growth projections from the Central Bank shows what the impact of an extra 3 bn (added to the fiscal consolidation after the previous projection) has had on the economy.

As Michael Burke explains on Progressive Economy:

“…the real change in circumstances [between the previous projection and the most recent] is the much larger ‘fiscal consolidation’ in 2011; €6bn in spending cuts and tax increases rather than the anticipated €3bn. This is a rare explicit official admission that the cuts’ policy has a depressing effect on activity, with obvious implications for the entire logic of the policy. If an extra €3bn in fiscal measures can depress GDP by 1.4% and GNP by 2%, what will be the impact of a €15.8bn ‘fiscal consolidation’?”

The closeness of Labour’s economic policy to Fine Gael’s is no surprise to anyone who has observed Irish politics down through the years. They have enjoyed many years of coalition after all. The idea of both Labour and Fine Gael having to compromise on policy when negotiating the program for government is an odd one, considering that the difference seems to be one only of degree. Labour will try and use its increased presence in the Dail to curb Fine Gael’s monetarist excesses; Fine Gael will offer concessions not to immediately torch the thin veneer of a welfare state, all in the interests of stability. Of course, Labour may cherish its new found popularity, but with the eyes of the ‘market’ looking on all we are likely to hear about is the need for stability, stability, stability.

But no one, no matter how well Labour is doing in the polls, is under any illusions that this coalition will be a right-wing government and a very strong one. With the polls suggesting that Fine Gael may get up to 75 seats, with Labour at 31 it will be one of the most stable government in a long time.

The phoney war between Labour and Fine Gael at the moment is a stark contrast to the strategy of 2007 when the two parties launched a joint manifesto which included such polices as cutting the basic rate of tax from 20% to 18%, reforming stamp duty, maintaining capital gains tax and provide additional forms of tax relief.

The reason for this is fairly clear.

In 2007 the objective was to join forces to get Fianna Fail out at all costs. Fine Gael, after doing very badly in the 2002 election didn’t have the support to do it on their own. The problem was that while Labour voters transferred to Fine Gael, as the 2002 transfers show, Fine Gael voters tended not to give a transfer to Labour.

Now however, Fianna Fail are between 15% and 18%, so are safely out of the way and the emphasis for both parties is to try and suck up as much of the straying Fianna Fail vote for themselves as they can. This, both parties imagine, is a largely middle class vote. Those middle ranking public servants, teachers, nurses, gardai and small and medium sized business people unable to get credit from the ‘Gombeen’ banks. The priority of both parties now is to get as many TDs into the Dail and increase the influence they will have in any coalition government.

But this willingness to get behind Team Enda is not surprising either within the historic context of the party. In 2007, after the failure of the pre-emptive coalition to get into government, the Labour Party started talking about the decline of the trade union movement and how this will lead to the decline of Labour.

So, the question is, is it possible to speak realistically about left unity government in these circumstances? Leaving a comment on Irish Left Review Labour Party activist Desmond O’Toole contested the claim that the Labour TDs due to appear at Saturday’s conference dropped out because of pressure from the party leadership (story detailed here in the Pheonix). In the comment he said, that contrary to the opinion expresseds the majority of the party membership are fully behind the leadership, and that the timing of the conference was wrong.

It was his opinion that Labour is capable of leading a coalition government with Fine Gael, and that once this is achieved that Labour would then be in a position to talk to other leftwing parties and civil society groups about ‘left unity’.

That O’Toole is not capable of understanding the irony of this suggests that there is a broader lack of awareness within the Labour Party itself.

But he maybe right about one thing.

The majority of the Labour Party membership probably are very supportive of the Labour leaderships strategy of coalition with Fine Gael, even though, they must know that Fine Gael would give them barely any room within a coalition. Of course, we can surmise that a good proportion of the Labour membership is right-wing too. More centrist perhaps, but right-wing all the same.
This leaves a relatively small number of Labour members who are not happy with the direction that Labour is taking, and haven’t been happy with its economy policy.

Is there any chance that Labour would ever become a real left-wing party?

I’m reluctant to suggest that any popular people’s movement that is able to fight back in this class war needs to reply on a political party, especially one that is so undemocratic and centerist as the Labour Party.

However, one thing is clear, people want an alternative. The biggest news story around the polls is the increase in the share taken by the independents, largely left-wing to 15% - a portion of this added to Sinn Fein’s 12% to 15% brings us close to where Fine Gael are now. Its unlikely that Fine Gael will go much above 33%. Therefore, according to the numbers if we include Labour there is enough to make a left coalition.

It’s clear that none of the party leaders in each of the leftwing parties are interested in such a formation. The blending of a Irish Leftwing is considered to be impossible, while the blending of a ‘leftwing’ party and a rightwing one is just a matter of waiting until the 25th of Feb. All the electorate have to do is press the button.