Left regroupment, part 196
Posted on Friday 2 October, 2009
Filed Under The left
THE Communist Party of Britain has pulled out of talks aimed at putting up a far left challenge to New Labour at the next election. Or that’s what is claimed here, anyway. Some leadership figures may have quit the organisation as a result.
The way Phil BC tells it, tensions between the pro-Labour traditionalists in the CPB and those who wanted to line up with Respect a couple of years back have scuppered the possibility of it signing up to the so called ‘son of No2EU’ coalition.
No2EU, of course, is to the far left slate that stood in the European Parliament elections earlier this year. The RMT union contributed its members’ cash, with the CPB, the Socialist Party and some smaller groups providing the footsoldiers.
If I remember correctly, No2EU secured the backing of one point something percent of those that bothered to vote. This is less than the tally for Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, which didn’t even pretend to mount a campaign.
That was in a proportional representation contest; general elections operate on a first past the post basis. The best any ad hoc grouping, thrown together just months before the poll, can hope to attain is a truckload of lost deposits.
Maybe it will cost Labour three or four marginals. Or maybe it won’t even manage that. And for what? Oh well, maybe they will pick up some recruits.
Broadly speaking, British far left groups have now spent 13 years trying to establish a united electoral alternative. Result? We now have more left sects than at the start of the process.
I regularly get asked how come someone with my politics can be a member of the Labour Party. But let me offer one good reason; the British far left are too sectarian and too stupid to engage in serious politics. Good luck, comrades.
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21 Responses to “Left regroupment, part 196”
To put this in perspective, in London, which is the RNT’s strongest region.
No2EU got less votes in the Euro election than the SWP’s hapless “Left List” did a year earlier.
“I regularly get asked how come someone with my politics can be a member of the Labour Party. But let me offer one good reason; the British far left are too sectarian and too stupid to engage in serious politics. Good luck, comrades.”
I wouldn’t say that is a good enough answer. The “British far left” (not all of it very “left” at all) may be sectarian and stupid. And you don’t have to belong to it. But you don’t have to belong to the busted flush party of war and neo-liberalism either. Yet you do.
I think it is unlikely that Griffiths would resign, as far as I understand things he’s on the pro-Labour wing.
As per Mark, except there is no question that the British far left are too sectarian and stupid to work together to build an alternative.
Well, I always want to live in hope, hence I used “may be” rather than “is”.
Do you actually HAVE to have a party card burning a hole in your pocket? Is that Labour’s attraction? And what is “serious politics” about belonging to Labour? You can see the seriousness of it all from Mandelson hinting he is just as ready to put his slimy talents at the service of the… Tories.
In my completely impartial and utterly non-sectarian view anyone who does not vote for Labour or does not vote in the forth coming general election is just doing the Tories work for them.
“I regularly get asked how come someone with my politics can be a member of the Labour Party. But let me offer one good reason; the British far left are too sectarian and too stupid to engage in serious politics.”
You may well be right about ‘the far left’. As to ‘serious politics’, is that what Labour Party membership involves?
Massive loss of members, declining local activity, massively diminished ability of members to select candidates and affect policy – what ‘serious politics’ are on offer were I to rejoin the LP?
Hi John Gray, up here in Scotland I will primarily be involved in fighting the constituencies the Scottish Socialist Party decides to contest.
Outside of areas where there is a socialist candidate, or possibly single issue campaigner, for instance for the NHS or other public sector cause, I would advocate a vote for the Scottish National Party (SNP).
If the Scottish Labour heartlands switch to the SNP then Labour are finished for years to come.
From the partisan viewpoint of a socialist in Scotland this will be an entirely positive thing in terms of the dynamics of Scottish politics.
Being in a corrupt, privatising, warmongering, racist party is, of course, infinitely better than being in one which is merely sectarian and stupid.
Wars, privatisation, racism, xenophobia, the triumph of villainous plutocratic greed, the prospect of a state funeral for Thatch… And this is a LABOUR government.
It has acted too much like a Tory one for me to be obediently align tribally on voting day. Maybe the Tories will be significantly worse – perhaps I and people like me will be put in some establishment where the uniform is pyjamas with red triangles on the chest.
As far as I am concerned, I have lived under one or other variety of Thatcherism since 1979. Please tell me the election result will change that reality.
Vote Labour or else (or even worse, be a Labour member or else) is pure tribalism. It is possible that there are some Constituencies where there is an argument for the left uniting behind a Labour candidate – i.e. the seats of John McDonnell or Jeremy Corbyn. However, to argue that we should all unite behind Charles Clarke, or Straw, or Milburn or Hoon is to argue for self defeating activity. I am quite happy to support and belong to a non-Labour Party – the Greens in England and Wales. We have hopes of electing Green MPs in several seats at the next election and the left should be united behind these candidates, as it should unite behind viable left candidates like Salma Yaqoob in Birmingham. In Scotland and Wales, as mentioned above, there is an alternative. In fact, it entirely depends on who your sitting MP is and what the chances are of someone to their left defeating them. In a “safe seat” again, there is the chance to vote your conscience rather than for some New Labour lickspittle.
What is required of the sensible left of labour people in this country at the current time, as has been discussed at the Convention of the Left, is unity around a platform of minimum demands and policies and genuine debate about who is best placed to move politics leftwards in each seat.
Labour are very likely to lose the election. What the left must fight for is the election of a number of representatives (We could see a bloc of 10 or 20) united to fight for the advancement of working class interests, the environment and social justice. These could be left Labour, Green, left Scots and Welsh Nats, Respect and Independent lefts. The real task, again as outlined by the COL, is to build grass roots movements for change around immediate bread and butter demands and issues. Parliamentary representation for such a movement would be useful but is not the be all and end all.
We are going to be facing Tory attacks, possibly a resurgent Euro imperialism (Euro-President Blair, anyone?)rising political disillusion and the likely continued rise of the far right. We need unity in diversity rather than seeking the holy grail of some outdated 20th Century monolithic party held as a shibboleth by many whose pipe dream is the dominance of their own micro-sect.
To use the language of the left, we need United Front tactics rather than a Popular Front strategy.
“These could be left Labour, Green, left Scots and Welsh Nats, Respect and Independent lefts.”
Welsh Nats? You obviously haven’t been in Wales for a very long time! Plaid’s idea of “Socialism” is a very small country of very small shopkeepers. “Socialism In One Corner Shop.”
As for Dave’s (risable) , “people keep asking me why, etc.” – Just stay away from mirrors, Dave.
From what I can see, Leanne Wood AM and Adam Price MP are preferable both in policy platforms, and in terms of being good representatives to the vast majority of New Labour clones.
http://www.adampriceblog.org.uk/
http://www.leannewoodamac.blogspot.com/
As for the “very small” comments I am afraid this just evokes the kind of scoffing the non-Communist left used to get from those who liked to fawn over tractor plants and five year plans…..
Orwell’s thoughts on the eve of the Second World War somehow seem appropriate for our time:
…our move will be more armaments, more militarization, more propaganda, more war-mindedness — and so on, at increasing speed. It is doubtful whether prolonged war-preparation is morally any better than war itself; there are even reasons for thinking that it may be slightly worse. Only two or three years of it, and we may sink almost unresisting into some local variant of Austro-Fascism. And perhaps a year or two later, in reaction against this, there will appear something we have never had in England yet — a real Fascist movement. And because it will have the guts to speak plainly it will gather into its ranks the very people who ought to be opposing it.
Further than that it is difficult to see. The downward slide is happening because nearly all the Socialist leaders, when it comes to the pinch, are merely His Majesty’s Opposition, and nobody else knows how to mobilize the decency of the English people, which one meets with everywhere when one talks to human beings instead of reading newspapers. Nothing is likely to save us except the emergence within the next two years of a real mass party whose first pledges are to refuse war and to right imperial injustice. But if any such party exists at present, it is only as a possibility, in a few tiny germs lying here and there in unwatered soil.
– ‘Not counting niggers’ 1939
Dave: Your post felt valedictory. Will you still be keeping up this site?
Patrick Bishop in “Bomber Boys” quotes Orwell’s approval of the bombing of Cologne by the RAF in 1942 (400 German dead, many of them Cologne civilians). Orwell was by then working for the BBC and expressed his approval in the course of a broadcast.
Orwell moved to the right during the war and throughout the 1940s, and made his peace with the establishment.
SueR: “Dave: Your post felt valedictory. Will you still be keeping up this site?”
If Dave did stop this blog Sue, who else would tolerate your racist bilge?
Greenman” – “From what I can see, Leanne Wood AM and Adam Price MP are preferable both in policy platforms, and in terms of being good representatives”
Ahem – “Egoman” Adam Price is currently jacking in all in and is soon off the the States on a WONDERFUL Fulbright scholarship. (to be Prince over the water). The Lovely (oh sooo radical) Leanne was censored by the Assembly (in 2005) for saying that Regional AM’s ungrateful constituents could basically, “F…off” as they never voted Plaid anyway. So, to use the designated (public) funds to er., “advance the party”. Nice.
And part of Plaid’s “Independence” pitch is that a Independent Wales (sic) would attract greatly more … “(Tractor) factories” as overseas/inward investment . As per the Irish, Icelandic and Lativian neo-lib economic “miracles” that we now all know, respect and love. Not.
“greenman” in all senses.
Richard Harris,
You got any more spite left?
It’s ridiculous to say that Adam Price has not been one of the most progressive and forward thinking MPs of the last two Parliaments.
He has been arguing against privatisations and cuts (along with Leanne Wood) for some time and has not once taken the Tory bait on cuts like Labour and the Lib Dems.
Yeah Andy, and where else could you get your Stalinist cheerleading out to a wider audience. We would both be poorer for the loss of this blog. Thankfully, I see Dave has continued it.
Not to worry, Sue. Unless I lose that libel case a former Respect activist turned Tory is bringing against me …