“We should call for a vote for Labour, not because they are progressive, but for the reason that we prefer to keep the tories out.”

May I ask why?

If the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance members of Labour’s National Executive Committee got their heads together with the TU group, then a positive package to mobilise a coalition for Labour victory could be assembled in time for the next meeting.

Peter Kenyon

elected member, Labour Party NEC, constituency section

Much more important than voting is building a socialist alternative, which carries on campaigning against cuts, for socialist policies like building more council housing and taxing the rich, confornting the BNP on the streets etc, whichever party is in power.

I’m sorry I think we would be better off with a Tory government because New labours done sod all for anyone, now not even the rich

It has not been sorely tested – it has been disproved.

Many years ago I asked a Labour voter who appeared genetically incapable of doing anything other than voting Labour a simple question:

In what way would Anne Widdicombe be a worse Home Secretary than David Blunkett?

Needless to say I am still waiting for an answer.

If there was actually ANYTHING for socialists to gain by voting Labour it could perhaps be an arguable case (which I would still oppose, but I could at least see why people would argue it)

A significant plank of Blairism was actually predicated on the belief that the proles and old Labour were daft enough to vote Labour no matter how they were treated, and what really mattered was ensuring that the middle classes and ‘new’ Labour voters still turned out.

I see that in the area of Hackney where I live – one Labour canvasser has knocked on my door since 1997 – whereas just last weekend I saw the De Beauvoir Labour ‘team’ rushing into one of the new build yuppie blocks that has gone up around my estate. That story is repeated across the borough.

To me, Socialists voting Labour in 2010 will resemble battered wives returning to an abused husband, not just for the umpteenth time, but after the battered husband has actually tried to kill you.

I ask you again: Get out whilst you can…………

* forces single mothers out to work,

* taxes people on min wages for only 16 hours per week

* cancels the 10 % starting rate, affecting what was it – 5 million ?

* pays people to do society-harming things like get fecklessly pregnant, while

* penalising those who would stive to get on by themselves with endless taxation and regulation.

Yes, much better that they stay in power …. for the sake of the poor, who will multiply in every sense of the phrase.

Alan Douglas

Consciousness follows events. Labour will likely get stronger, when UK shows signs of getting out of the recession.

In the US, the great depression was 1929. The big strikes occured around 1934.

There is no alternative, in my view, to the long, hard difficult work of building a popular political force to the left of Labour. Unfortunately the impatient, opportunistic and sectarian adventurism of the SWP and company over the past 10 years has made that even more difficult than it has always been.

The ‘lesser evil’ strategy will only serve to further weaken and marginalise the left: as the American left has found to its cost over the past 40 years.

The dynamics of ‘lesser evilism’ are instructive and all too predictable.

It starts with a left that is in the process of losing its popular political base. In the search for legitimacy and access to power (in the name of ‘helping the poor’) the left urges ‘realism’ and accommodation to their former political enemies. Because the left enters this accommodation from a position of weakness, and because short-term electoral success becomes the sole measurement of ‘political realism’, the left is drawn into the logic of ‘defensive unity’. It does not like the compromises it makes, but in pursuit of electoral success and political power (which requires unity and conformity on terms it can no longer determine) it begins to fall silent on key issues and to soften its criticisms.

A weary cynicism and air of despair take root. The baseline for political strategy becomes: how do we stop things from getting even worse?

This approach helps to further demobilise and demoralise its remaining extra-parliamentary base.

The left inside the party (Labour/Democrats – take your pick) increasingly define ‘realistic politics’ and ‘helping the poor’ in terms of narrow electoral gaming. From a position of weakness this means attaching increasing importance to internal party manoeuvrings. Securing marginal changes to party policy positions are presented as ‘significant progress’ which demonstrate that ‘the party really can be changed’. When those changes have no concrete political significance when the party takes power the left cries foul – but not too loudly or for too long in case disunity helps the really evil party to gain advantage.

Increasing importance is attached to leadership figures. Individuals with little or no attachment to the left are idealised as potential saviours: ‘but only if we unite behind them and get them into power: then we can exert real influence!’ so the argument goes. When that real influence fails to materialise, the left cries foul – but not too loudly or for too long etc…..

The imperative to unite from a position of weakness as part of the electoral game means the left can less and less initiate, engage with or support extra-parliamentary struggles. To the new generation of activists the ‘party left’ appears increasingly irrelevant to its concerns. ‘Realistic’ party politics appears to offer nothing other than the promise of boundless compromise and cooption.

So the results of ‘lesser evilism’ are doubly bad. Not only does the left contribute to demobilising and demoralising its own political base, it acts to discredit the very idea of organised party politics. This serves to further insulate key realms of capitalist power (such as the state and the content of national political discourse) from effective challenge.