BY GREG HARRIS & MARGARET ALLUM
With Westminster elections likely to be called for May 3, Tony Blair's British Labour Party appears to be reaching the limits of government by image management. Leaving aside questions of ministerial competence and honesty, a recurrent theme in the British press, the country is showing signs of core infrastructure collapse.
The government's main comfort is the complete disorganisation of the opposition Conservative Party.
The latest crisis is the outbreak of foot and mouth disease, which has paralysed Britain's farm sector and has spread now to several countries on the European continent and to Ireland. This follows a series of fatal rail accidents, caused by the decay of infrastructure, and a recurrence of major industrial action against further rail privatisation.
The breakdown of British infrastructure can't be blamed on any single government. Consecutive Conservative and Labour governments have been consciously contributing to the breakdown, through mismanagement and privatisation, for more than two decades.
The British government has now admitted that foot and mouth is "out of control". The last major outbreak of the highly contagious disease, in 1967, involved 2500 reported cases in eight months and required the slaughter of 450,000 to overcome. This latest outbreak involved 114 cases in the first two weeks and several hundreds of thousands of animals are already scheduled to be killed.
The rapid spread of this latest outbreak is largely due to modern agricultural management practices. In the past, livestock was taken to local abattoirs to be slaughtered. The closure of many of these since the 1960s meant that infected cattle were shipped across large parts of the country before the infection was identified.
The spread of mad cow disease, which has also wrecked havoc in large parts of Britain's farm sector, has been blamed on the close integration of different agricultural processes (specifically, making cattle feed out of sheep). In both cases, the drive for agricultural market "efficiency" has broken down important natural barriers to disease.
The rail transport debacle has a different but related cause. The privatisation of railway tracks allowed rail bosses to make huge profits — by taking money out of maintenance.
This series of disasters has failed to move the Labour government, however. In particular the government remains pathologically intent on privatising the London Underground, the railway system that millions of Londoners depend on for travel every day.
Opponents of the tube's privatisation now include the Financial Times, the arch-conservative voice of London's capitalist class, which has been warning for months that, regardless of privatisation's intrinsic value, selling off the tube will inevitably destroy it.
Rail workers, more traditional opponents of privatisation, are also taking industrial action over the safety of the Underground. While one of the unions covering tube workers, the ALSEF, agreed to a government offer on safety issues and called off planned action for March 29, the other union, the RMT, is not satisfied and is planning further industrial campaigning.
Britain's structural decay may not have caused any challenge to Blair from his right — the Tories would continue much the same policies — but it is spurring a challenge from the left: the Socialist Alliance.
Formed as an electoral alliance to contest the Greater London mayoral elections in May 2000, the coalition of socialist groups and individuals has now developed into a nation-wide Socialist Alliance with branches across the country.
Bringing together the largest socialist organisations in England, including the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party, the alliance will contest up to 92 seats in England in the Westminster elections.
Three hundred and fifty members of the alliance met on March 10 in Birmingham to decide on its policies for the upcoming general election. Socialist Alliance chair Dave Nellist introduced the conference by declaring, "The Socialist Alliance, along with the Scottish Socialist Party and the Welsh Socialist Alliance, are aiming to attract those who feel let down by the major parties."
"We want to develop as a pole of attraction to the left, and are standing in a quarter of the constituencies in England and Wales. This represents the biggest left challenge for decades. We are putting socialism back on the agenda."
In Scotland, the Scottish Socialist Party is planning to contest all 72 seats.
The platform agreed by the Birmingham conference includes both immediate demands (such as putting a stop to privatisation, taking tough action on food safety and bringing in the 35-hour week) and democratic ones (such as ending all forms of discrimination and halting the "onslaught on civil rights"). It also calls for the cancellation of the Third World's debt.
The Socialist Alliance is adamant that its candidates are the ones who will provide the real alternative on polling day.
Its policy document says "The Socialist Alliance is different because it actively supports all struggles of workers, poor, oppressed, those fighting the destruction of the environment ... ; is a campaigning organisation, not a cynical 'here today, gone tomorrow' vote-grabber; is a democratic alliance of socialists and activists from various backgrounds ... ; and because any of its candidates who get elected will only take a workers' wage for the job and will stay accountable to those who elect them."