It makes no difference to the future direction of the Labour Party whether Mr Brendan Howlin or Mr Ruairi Quinn wins the leadership today. The similarity between both contenders is apparently so strong that neither of them felt they needed to produce a manifesto to outline key policies and strategies to rebuild the Labour Party from its disastrous results in the general and presidential elections.
Both are committed to bringing the Labour Party into future coalition governments with Fianna Fail or Fine Gael, depending on which of these big business-backed conservative parties is available and has the appropriate number of Dail seats.
The commitment to permanent coalitionism, which both contenders espouse, has resulted in the abandonment of even the pretence of representing working-class people. This has resulted in the marginalising of the Labour Party.
Perhaps they are encouraged to continue along this politically disastrous road by the gushing tributes to the retiring Labour Party leader, Mr Dick Spring. In their fulsome praise of Mr Spring, the media and political establishments are firmly pushing their own agenda and not at all considering the crucial need for independent political representation for working-class people.
The fact that Mr Spring, supported by Mr Quinn and Mr Howlin, had manoeuvred the Labour Party into government and won some leading positions in Cabinet was held up as the main criteria of success. The upward curve of the personal career paths of a handful of careerist politicians is judged to be a great success all round for the Labour movement.
This betrays the contempt with which the media and the political establishment regard the Labour Party. In their scheme of things, Labour is to obediently serve as a prop to one or other of the major big business-backed parties to form a government.
The fact that the Labour Party has been seriously damaged by virtue of the betrayals of policy engaged in to make these governments possible is deliberately overlooked.
Thus, we have eulogies to Mr Spring who, after 15 years of leadership, leaves the Labour Party badly demoralised and its electoral support on the same single percentage figures where he found it despite having reached 19 per cent in 1992 following five years of independent standing.
Democratic Left is now also in complete agreement with the views of the Labour leadership on coalition. In a recent debate with Democratic Left leader, Mr Proinsias de Rossa, on RTE's Primetime, he dismissed my proposal for an independent electoral strategy for the left and accused me of wanting to consign the left to perpetual opposition in the Dail.
The reality is that going into coalition governments is what condemns the left parties to permanent minority status because the growing numbers who see the need for political change are disappointed with the inevitable failure of parties like Labour and Democratic Left to secure any fundamental changes in Irish society.
Labour has been in government for nine of the past 15 years. It was joined by Democratic Left for the last 2 1/2 years of the 27th Dail. Political conditions massively favoured an independent left challenge with the revelations of sleaze and corruption touching the two establishment parties. Yet Labour and Democratic Left slumped badly.
Why? Because they failed utterly to mount an independent challenge or pose a credible alternative to the major parties of the right or to their economic system.
The upshot of this is that, despite the massive propaganda about the Celtic tiger, we have major unemployment problems. We have had massive emigration of our young people. The economic boom has been almost exclusively for the big business sector and the rich.
Share values on the Dublin stock market have doubled while wages have only gone up by 1 per cent per annum. The gap between highest and lowest paid is second only to the that in the US. In the mushrooming construction sector, housing speculators' profits soar while workers have died on dangerous building sites.
In areas hard hit by long-term unemployment, only the most primitive facilities exist for the communities, factors resulting in the nightmare of heroin addiction.
Is this a legacy that a genuine Labour Party would be proud of after nine years in government? Perpetual coalition, with Labour as a junior partner, makes that party little more than a doormat for whenever Fianna Fail or Fine Gael might need them to form a government.
Mr Spring has already acknowledged this limited future when he speaks of 30 or so Labour and Democratic Left TDs being in the Dail as a target over the next period of years. The former Labour leader claims that this would ensure a social democratic influence in government. In other words, the only aim is to have sufficient forces to get into government with either of the two big parties.
The idea that Labour and Democratic Left have influenced, or will influence, further governments does not stand up to any serious examination. By insisting on continuing along the path of coalition with the right, Labour and Democratic Left have abandoned any role in building a strong and independent political alternative and will suffer accordingly.
No one on the left will shed any tears as an increasingly right-wing Labour Party sees its base steadily eroded. The role of building a genuine independent and socialist party to represent ordinary working-class people is the main task before us now that Labour and Democratic Left have nothing to contribute to this. This now falls to the Socialist Party in co-operation with other genuine socialist groups.
Joe Higgins is the Socialist Party TD for Dublin West. He was a member of the ruling body of the Labour Party, the Administrative Council, from 1980 to 1989. He was a supporter of the Militant wing of the party and strenuously opposed Labour's participation in government with Fine Gael. He was expelled in 1989.
