The other September 11th, the Chilean coup of 1973, may offer a clue
to the current malaise of Britain's Labour Party.
Hassan Akram (Cambridge): Gordon Brown is in serious trouble. Behind the scenes people are no longer talking about whether he should be replaced but when. But if Brown is to be replaced we need to understand what's gone wrong with his government. And to understand what's gone wrong for Brown we could do well by starting with September 11th.
September 11th marked a horrific terrorist outrage. In the English speaking world people think automatically of the 2001 bombing of the Twin Towers. But in Chile September 11th was the date, in 1973, of a very different type of terrorist attack: the bombing of the Chilean Presidential Palace (La Moneda) by rebel officers in Chile's own Armed Forces. Unlike the Al Qaeda attack these rebels were actually successful in overthrowing the democratically elected government, unsurprising given that the Chilean terrorists enjoyed the support and funding of the USA. The death of the left-wing Chilean President, Salvador Allende thus marked a clear victory for American power in the world.
The background of the coup was economic chaos in Chile. Skyrocketing inflation and a wave of strikes had crippled the country as the combined forces of the CIA and the Chilean oligarchy worked desperately to create unrest against a President who had nationalised the American-owned copper mines without compensation. Finally, when it seemed they might not achieve their goal through elections, they used direct force. The bloody destruction of 'democratic socialism' in Chile, and the 18 year dictatorship of General Pinochet, still casts a long shadow over Chilean politics. Today there is a leftist President, Michelle Bachelet, the country's first woman to hold the office. Bachelet's own father, a general in the Air Force, was tortured and died in Pinochet's jails and she herself was also tortured before being released into exile. While she represents an attempt to heal the past and restore Chile's long tradition of democracy the timidity of her government has a great deal to do with 'the lesson' the Americans taught the country in the 1970s.
What does all this have to do with Gordon Brown. Well the Bachelet and Brown governments have a great deal in common because what happened to Chile since the early 1970s has been mirrored, albeit in a milder form, by what has happened to Britain since the late 1970s. Thus analysing the failures of the Chilean Left helps us to understood Labour's problems in Britain more clearly. 'Democratic socialism' failed in Chile because, in the face of US intervention, the Left was disunited, ill-disciplined and poorly organised. Huge wage-claims sparked off inflation, revolutionary rhetoric obscured sound policy-making and the orderly introduction of social reforms was forgotten in the economic chaos that followed.
Although there are many obvious differences, it seems helpful to look back and see the Labour party's much vaunted commitment to democratic socialism in Britain as suffering a parallel fate to its sister party in South America. In his contribution to the OurKingdom debate on 'Labour After Brown' Gerry Hassan has written that Labour's problems date back to the Callaghan government when the party's narrative began to break down. This breakdown has many similarities to the breakdown of socialism in Chile.
Strikes flared up in Britain, as they did in Chile, as each section of the union movement sought to protect its members against hardship in the face of a government that had clearly lost control of the economy. Arguably, it was also the Americans, angered at Labour proposals to tax US imports, who finally finished the government off. The Sunday Times (21st May 1979) reported a State Department official explaining the US government's fears:
"We all had the feeling it could come apart in quite a serious way. As I saw it, it was a choice between Britain remaining in the liberal financial system of the West as opposed to a radical change of course: we were concerned about Tony Benn precipitating a policy decision by Britain to turn its back on the IMF. I think if that had happened the whole system would have begun to come apart. God knows what Italy might have done; then France might have taken a radical change in the same direction. It would not only have had consequences for the economic recovery it would have had great political consequences.? So we tended to see it in cosmic terms".
Terrified by the prospect of 'losing Britain' the US government moved to intervene working through the IMF instead of the CIA. It forced Callaghan to make 3 billion of spending cuts which led to the 'Winter of Discontent', the wave of strikes which then let Margaret Thatcher into Downing Street. This memory casts a long shadow over British politics today. The market can't be 'bucked' is an integral part of New Labour's thinking.? There is a lot of talk about 'equality of opportunities' but while the government sounds strong it acts weak, a characteristic of the Blair and we can now see the Brown years. The timidity of Gordon Brown's government goes back to the 'lesson' the Americans taught Britain just as the timidity of Bachelet's government goes back to the 'lesson' they taught Chile too.
In the 1970s few people in the Labour party thought that the bloody coup in Chile, and the wholesale destruction of the trades union movement that followed it, was a portent of things to come in Britain. But they were wrong. While the ultra-left were engaged in surreal debates about setting up Soviet style councils in the North of England, the Conservative Party had come up with a new way of governing. The Thatcher group purged the Tories of their social conscience and decided that to fight inflation and get the country's income growing again it was willing to sacrifice the country's social safety net. When Margaret Thatcher came to power, her chancellors Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson remorselessly pursued the neo-liberal economic agenda. Aided by the fortuitous victory in the Falklands (during which Pinochet gave Thatcher vital assistance ) and the revenues of North Sea oil, the unions were destroyed, the financial sector deregulated and the country transformed. The Labour Party was taken by surprise. But an advance signal had been sent from Chile.
There the Pinochet legacy is fiercely contested. The brutalities of his government are undeniable, the tortures and the killings are well documented, but his supporters point out that his government's socio-economic record was strong: poverty and infant mortality fell steadily during the dictatorship. The Thatcher legacy is also still being fought over. She presided over a terrible recession, where unemployment went over 3 million. Child poverty rose and remains stubbornly high, something that can be dated clearly to the early 1980s. Even as the economy recovered large swathes of the old industrial heart-lands were left behind: a new under-class was born who did not share in the prosperity of the rest of the country.
But the country grew faster under Thatcher than it did in the troubled 1970s. Her supporters argue that most people were better of at the end of her government than they were at its start. And as Gerry Hassan rightly says, whatever we think of the neo-liberal legacy what is clear is that no political alternative to it has ever been offered: neither the Chilean nor the British opposition has succeeded in freeing themselves from the political and economic legacy of this period.
With Gordon Brown's poll ratings in freefall and David Cameron looking an increasingly plausible Prime Ministerial candidate; it seems as if the old debates about the 1970s are rather stale and irrelevant: there are new issues on the table today. But a clear look at Chile suggests a different perspective. When Ricardo Lagos, the first Socialist President of Chile after Allende, came to power, diehard Pinochet supporters predicted a return to the economic chaos of the 1970s. In Britain they said the same thing when Blair came in. And Lagos himself, like Blair, used the memory of the 1970s as a weapon to remind his own party why a more radical agenda could not be followed. Both countries had seen a massive rise in inequality during the 1980s, with a large poor minority excluded from general prosperity, but neither Lagos nor Blair had the political courage to address this and inequality rose under both of them. It is this unfulfilled legacy that threatens their successors.
Michelle Bachelet, the Chilean Socialist party's second President since Allende faces the same problems that Gordon Brown does as Labour's second post-Thatcher Prime Minister. What has threatened Bachelet's government most profoundly has not been Chilean opposition parties (indeed the Socialist Party now governs in permanent coalition with the old Christian Democrat Opposition) but a radical new student movement. Protesting against the educational inequalities that resulted from the dictatorship's effective privatisation of the schooling system, the Chilean students managed to organise a national strike. They did this with the support of the teaching unions, and succeeded in shutting some 80 per cent of educational establishments. This movement dominated the political scene: for the best part of a year decisions of the National Students Assembly made headlines. Interestingly the movement's electoral effect was to reduce President Bachelet's poll ratings to below 50 without increasing those of the opposition. The movement was highly political but rejected the traditional political parties showing the deep dissatisfaction felt towards the inequalities of the post-Pinochet political consensus. A non-party opposition to the government seems to have become the main new force in Chilean politics.
Cameron's shiny new Conservative party seems to be a storming success. But there are more profound movements at work in British politics also. The tectonic plates of the post-Thatcher consensus are shifting even though we have yet to see eruptions on the scale of the protests against the post-Pinochet consensus in Chile. Although the anti-war movement came close, the kind of non-party oppositional politics we see in Chile are not mainstream in British politics yet. But if the history of Chile gives hints about Britain's future then perhaps the most important change in British politics today, that will count over the coming 30 years, is not the rehabilitation of the Tories but the increasing unpopularity of party politics in general. The alternative is arguably the rise of nationalism, with the SNP in Scotland leading the way. But this too can be seen as a deep protest to the traditional offerings. In both Chile and Britain it appears that the neo-liberal epoch, initiated by the right and serviced by the left, is coming to an end. If Labour is to make itself electable again, in the post-neoliberal era, it must lose the timidity about talking about the big issues of class division and inequality. Inequality and social division has led the country into economic crisis by overreliance on the super rich financial elite, Labour now needs a leader who can address these issues unafraid of invoking the ghosts of the past.
