Hours of sectarian fun are to be had at Electoral Commission website, examining the financial accounts produced by all parties that stand in UK elections.

I haven’t had time to digest all the goodies yet. But even from a cursory glance, I can assure readers that this is a goldmine for leftist trainspotters.

Thus I can tell you that SPGB copped a legacy donation of £85,317 last year, and that membership of the CPB rose from 821 in 2004 to 923 in 2006.

Workers’ Liberty is nominally a profitable operation, while Respect have registered an outfit called Respect – the Unity Coalition (NI) to operate in Northern Ireland.

Oh, and Respect’s membership subscriptions last year fell from £126,660 to £48,708, confirming earlier reports that recruitment isn’t exactly going great guns.

I suspect that Arthur Scargill might be fibbing when he gives membership of the SLP as 3,000 affiliated and 2,958 individual, though. That’s because membership dues total just £9,075, and I’m sure the dwindling ranks of the party’s supporters are being asked to cough up rather more than three quid a head.

Scargill’s vanity project is £16,571 in deficit.

Hey, you. Yes you, George Galloway. And you, Arthur Scargill. Not to mention comrades Tommy Sheridan, John Rees and Lindsey German, with Alan Thornett picking up a special Oscar for best supporting actor.

Thanks to you guys, the prospect of a viable party to the left of New Labour emerging in Britain is now deader even than that embalmed corpse still on display in Red Square.

The socialist left will be more isolated and enjoy less influence than has been the case for almost a century. Meanwhile, New Labour will have a complete political blank cheque in the major unions.

And responsibility for all this lies wholly and exclusively with the arrogant, pettifogging, incompetent, narrow-minded, unprincipled, conniving, anti-democratic, catchpenny boneheaded sectarian control freaks that make up what we sadly still have to refer to the ‘leadership’ of the British left.

Collectively, they bear about as much resemblance to serious socialist politicians as bad Elvis impersonators do to The King. But sometimes putting on big shades and a rhinestone-spangled white jumpsuit and mouthing the lyrics to Jailhouse Rock won’t do. Your baby well and truly left you.

What should have been a process of political regroupment started 12 years ago, with the launch of the talks that led to the formation of the Socialist Labour Party in 1995.

Since then, the initiatives have come along more quickly than the average single twentysomething gets through new lovers, with initiatives including the Scottish Socialist Alliance, the Scottish Socialist Party, the Socialist Alliance, Respect, Forward Wales and the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party.

All of them have come to nothing. Even now, there is talk of building some sort of formation around the RMT transport union, the Communist Party of Britain and deselected Labour tankie MP Bob Wareing.

What a horrible organisation that would almost certainly be; unapologetically Stalinist in ideology, with the trade union bureaucrat playing the bad cops in order to keep control of the organisation well and truly out of the hands of ‘the Trots’. Luckily, it seems unlikely to happen.

It’s not as if the simple idea of a united, democratic leftwing party is more difficult to get your head around than Materialism and empirio-criticism, is it? Or am I missing something?

But if an intelligent, rational, humanist Marxist current were to exist - and it very plainly doesn't - what would it look like? Here are a few thoughts.

Ideologically, it would need to base itself on the realisation that answers to the political questions facing us do not come gift-wrapped in the classical theoretical works of the tradition.

Marx's dissection of Victorian capitalism and Trotsky's exploration of the political situation in 1930s, for instance, remain unparalleled analyses of these topics. But both were marred by the expectation of 'revolution round the corner', and in any case, no political literature can be expected to transcend its times, at least not indefinitely.

In a world that has changed in so many ways in my adult lifetime - globalisation, the demise of Stalinism, the dramatic resurgence of religion and nationalism, global warming, the communications revolution - it really is necessary to sit down and think things through, rearticulating the categories of Marxism for the present day.

Luxemburg's insistence on democracy and Gramsci's take on hegemony are probably more relevant to Marxists drawing up tactics for use in western Europe right now than anything that proceeded from the pen of Lenin.

Discussion and debate should be completely public, and take full advantage of the possibilities opened up by the internet, as well as more traditional forms of getting our ideas across, such as journals.

Rather than scorn anarchism, feminism, ecology and other schools of radical thought, we should take on board their genuine insights.

Organisationally, the toytown Bolshevism that the forerunners of the SWP once rightly derided should be junked immediately. A modern Marxist grouping needs to be loose, libertarian and Luxemburgist; there is no need for Elvis impersonator Lenin wannabes handing down 'the line' from on high.

Such a current's orientation should of course be towards promoting basic socialist ideas in the organisations of the working class, including the community organisations of the working class. Members may belong to the Labour or Green parties, leftwing parties or no party at all, to whatever extent holding a card facilitates such tasks.

Sadly, I guess sanity is rather too much to ask for right now. And hey, it wouldn't be half as much fun as petty bickering over minor sectarian quiddities, would it?

It was pretty damn obvious that the IWMA now lacked the ability to keep such an essentially irreconcilable range of forces together. Unsurprisingly, an opposition grouping was starting to coalesce around a charismatic maverick.

It had long been established that Mikhail Bakunin was a political shyster. He routinely exaggerated the numbers of IWMA members in branches sympathetic to him, for instance.

Moreover, this man was virulently anti-semitic, and although he professed to be on the left, that didn't stop him maintaining financial ties with shady bourgeois elements in some of the world's most reactionary regimes.

As IWMA secretary, Karl Marx had long been aware of all this, but had hitherto been prepared to overlook it. But now control of the organisation was at stake.

Marx and his supporters quickly decided to precipitate matters, and issued a pamphlet called 'The Fictitious Splits in the International'. The very title was designed to mislead. Divisions with the Bakuninites were very real indeed, as the first page of the document - now only of historical interest, of course - makes amply plain.

Bakunin responded with the demand that a congress should be held to settle matters once and for all. The gathering duly convened in Hague, in September of the year in question. According to what we know today, it immediately went into closed session. One account reveals:

'The arguments were both angry and prolonged; for three days the rival factions jostled for advantage by challenging the credentials of almost all of their opponents ...

'At the end of the three-day marathon it was clear that the anarchists were heavily outnumbered. Some delegates, unable to stay away from work any longer, then returned home without waiting for the actual debates and votes; others wandered off in search of more stimulating congress in the local brothels.

And a contemporary newspaper article speaks of:

'... applause and interruptions and pushing and jostling and tumultuous cries, and personal attacks and extremely radical but nevertheless extremely conflicting declarations of opinion, with recriminations, denunciations, protests, calls to order, and finally a closure of the session, if not of the discussion, which at past ten o'clock, in a tropical heat and amid inexpressible confusion, imposed itself by the force of things.'

Luckily, leftwing political conferences today no longer take place in such a patently intolerable atmosphere. How differently Marxists conduct their relations with other leftists 135 years later!

Marx - pictured above - then embarked on tactics expressly designed to wreck IWMA rather than allow anyone else any meaningful say in its internal affairs. His master stroke was to produce secret documents, indisputably proving financial impropriety that Bakunin had earlier denied. Finally, he successfully moved that the General Council of the association be relocated from London to New York.

Ostensibly, the Marxists had retained control. Yet the congress - designed as it was to bring about unity - proved to be the beginning of the end. History records that the IWMA went into rapid decline and formally dissolved in 1876.

Thought for the day: if you wait by the river long enough, you will see the corpses of your enemies float by - Sun Tzu

Back in the early seventies, a small number of anarchist activists initiated Britain’s first urban guerrilla group, styling themselves the Angry Brigade. They were responsible for around 25 bomb attacks between 1970 and 1972, at least according to the police.

Mainly they targeted property, including the home of a Tory cabinet minister, although in one case, one person was slightly injured.

Even though I was only ten at the start of this period, I still remember the television coverage rather vividly. As an adult, I have read many of the ‘communiqués’ the organisation issued to justify what it had done.

Many of them were calls to action; their impatience with what the Angry Brigade seemingly regarded as the quiescence of the British working class, even at one of the most militant phases in its history, often shines through.

‘Bogside, Clydeside, join the Angry Side,’ communiqué number eleven memorably implored. The implication here is neither that the Catholic community of Derry, in direct daily confrontation with the British Army, nor the shipyard workers that were shortly to lead the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders sit-in, were angry enough already.

I’m too young to remember whether any of this had a wider resonance, either on society as a whole or on the far left. Perhaps older readers could fill me in here?

But I presume that there will have trade unionists who didn’t feel that strike action was quite enough; that there were revolutionary socialist polytechnic lecturers who trotted out the ‘Marxists condemn individual terrorism’ line, but who were secretly quite elated with the idea that somebody somewhere was really, really sticking it to the man.

Some 35 years later, we are at a point where the struggle at the point of production is at a particularly low ebb, to the frustration of many.

Large organisations on the left ‘refuse to condemn’ atrocities such as 9/11, while the politicians that serve as their figureheads insist that it would be morally justified to assassinate Tony Blair.

They see themselves as somehow ‘all Hizbollah’, and earnestly argue that the only way to be consistently anti-imperialist is to demand ‘victory to the Iraqi resistance’.

The mental distance between getting a vicarious hard on thinking about the bomb attacks of others and going on to a bomb oneself is not unimaginably long. In the case of the Angry Brigade, it certainly wasn’t too long for middle class white leftists with a graduate education to travel.

Can any explicitly socialist publication in Britain credibly claim a five-figure circulation anymore? And does it matter if they can’t?

Let’s start from the premise that New Statesman doesn’t count for these purposes; it’s better described as left of centre rather than leftwing.

Last time I checked, the Morning Star and Socialist Worker were officially insisting that they shift more than 10,000 but less than 20,000 copies, per day and per week respectively.

Then again, I have heard sources close to both these fine organs frankly admit over a beer that quoted figures more accurately reflect print run than actual sales. I look forward to the outraged denials from CPB and SWP loyalists in the comments box.

I further understand, as a former contributor to the magazines, that Tribune and Red Pepper may also put an optimistic slant on these matters, shall we charitably say.

Weekly Worker does about 2,000 papers in hard copy format, but can of course boast a considerable online readership. I assume that the rest of the field – the Socialist, Solidarity, Respect, Socialist Resistance, Workers Power, Permanent Revolution – number paid sales in the hundreds.

It wasn’t always like this. I have seen estimates for the peak circulation of the Daily Worker at 94,000 and 115,000, and in the early 1970s, SW is said to have sold around 30,000.

Nowadays, the truth is that popular leftwing blogs such as Socialist Unity and Lenin’s Tomb outstrip what were once the big hitters, and even Dave’s Part gets more readers than the second and third rank print titles.

I guess this is just another one of the many pointers to a general decline in class consciousness in Britain in recent decades, and I also suspect the often mediocre quality of the journalism on offer is a factor as well. But I’d be interested to hear what others think.

Will we ever see another socialist magazine or newspaper that can impact on public political debate and act as a counterweight to today’s national press, which – to paraphrase Dorothy Parker – offer the whole gamut of political opinion from A to B?

Or is the future online? Will the existing Brit left blogs develop the kind of readership enjoyed by some left-liberal political blogs in the US?

Footnote: This train of thought was sparked by reading an article about Italian communist paper L'Unità in the Financial Times today:

L'Unità, the daily newspaper that rose and fell with the once-powerful Italian Communist party, has gone through such a revival that it is now facing an attractive takeover bid by the Angelucci family, industrialists who run a rightwing tabloid.

Just like the Italian left, L'Unità, which was founded by Antonio Gramsci in 1924, has gone through a reformist makeover. Today it sells 50,000 copies and has foreign bureaux only in Washington and Paris. It identifies itself with the new Democratic party, whose leader, Walter Veltroni, mayor of Rome, was once a communist and L'Unità editor.

Read the rest here.

I even knew some of the people in it; members included the husband of my mother’s best friend. The first of my pals to get politicised was a guy a couple of years older than me, who got a place to study at a redbrick and rapidly signed up with the Young Communist League.

I remember buying a copy of the YCL paper Challenge from him and talking a bit about why he had joined. As a young factory worker who realised from day one that there was something wrong with a society where people like me did all the graft while the owner of the company spent all day playing golf, I was by this time inching my way towards socialist politics.

I’d been on Rock Against Racism and Youth CND demos, where I had picked up copies of Socialist Worker and Socialist Challenge. But this being the hey day of the Sex Pistols, I was more sympathetic to anarchist ideas.

In short, I almost certainly would have got involved in something more organised, had there been anything to get involved with in Wellingborough, Northants. But the CPGB had all the appeal of root canal surgery while being forced to listen to Belgian techno.

The USSR, I told Rob, was a repressive dictatorship over the working class and the CPGB were basically its UK sales reps. He hit back with the contention that I had gullibly swallowed too much ruling class propaganda and that it wasn’t like that at all. Sadly, we now know for certain that the ruling class were bang on the money.

By the early 1980s, I had moved to London and become a student myself. Even at this stage, the Communist Party remained the largest organisation on the left, claiming about 20,000 in its ranks. While that dwarfed the SWP and the Millies, still on about 2,000 each, it seemed as nothing compared to the size of the Bennite current. What’s more, Communist Party politics didn’t seem that different from the Labour left, either. So I cut to the chase and joined the Labour Party Young Socialists.

Just ten years later, both the CPGB and the USSR had dissolved. One element of the party – the eurocommunist wing around the magazine Marxism Today - even set the pace for the drift rightwards experienced by the Labour Party and trade unions in the Thatcher period.

Several groups – ranging from very small to just plain small – claim its mantle, and with former members in positions of influence, it can perhaps be said to have an ideological afterlife. But most of its trade union fellow-travellers will retire soon enough.

For an organisation that was never a mass party – unlike its counterparts in several continental countries – there is an extensive literature on Communist Party history. The most recent addition is ‘The Kick Inside: Revolutionary Opposition in the CPGB, 1960-91’, which focuses on a number of internal and external left oppositions that arose inside the organisation.

This is probably one for the trainspotters; the material on the two original British Maoist currents, for instance, is of little immediate relevance. More information about what these grouplets actually did in the labour movement would have been useful, too.

One splinter, the uncritically pro-Soviet New Communist Party, apparently still functions. But the critique I offered as a gobby teenage punk still applies to these diehards, a fortiori given the disappearance of the workers’ fatherland.

Unlike the author, I don’t see any of the ‘hard Stalinist’ tendencies of the 1960s and 1970s as in any way saving graces. It is questionable even whether they could even objectively be described as ‘revolutionary’.

Ultimately, the snazzily-named Committee to Defeat Revisionism for Communist Unity, the still-extant-last-time-I-checked Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), the Appeal Group and Proletarian barely register as also rans.

That leaves the last of the outfits Parker details, which presently trades as the Communist Party of Great Britain. And why not? It’s a brand name with a certain cachet, even though I wouldn’t fancy taking on all the historical baggage it carries myself. Unlike most of its rivals, it has not only consolidated its existence but even managed a modest measure of growth in recent years.

As its founder-members are the first to admit, probably the main reason it has done so is its ideological evolution away from Stalinism toward many essentially Trot positions.

It also publishes the controversial – and therefore must-read – newspaper Weekly Worker, often unfairly derided as a gossip rag. That is absolute nonsense.

Sure, they’re a bunch of ultralefts going nowhere fast. But personally, I am bored witless with socialist publications that think it is enough to rehash Guardian articles and tack two or three transitional demands on the end. Weekly Worker is a grown-up Marxist paper that seems to be the only place to find the debates on strategy and tactics the far left badly needs to have.

It is currently faced with the need to find an extra £500 a month to meet increased printing bills. I’ve taken out a standing order, and I think anyone concerned with the future of the UK far left should also back the WW appeal.

Lawrence Parker, ‘The Kick Inside - Revolutionary Opposition in the CPGB 1960-1991’ may be ordered from the author at vorzedia@yahoo.co.uk, Payment - £5.15 including P&P - may be made by PayPal to the same email address.

Picture shows post-war CPGB recruitment poster

To put the same point another way, come up with a list of the most important living anglosphere intellectuals, from across the spectrum. Off the top of my head, I’d mention people such as David Harvey, Robert Brenner, Francis Fukuyama, Noam Chomsky, Samuel Huntingdon, Joseph Stiglitz, maybe Richard Dawkins.

You might select entirely different names, but hopefully you see where I am coming from on this. Whatever you think of their arguments, not to have these guys on your bookshelves is equivalent to falling asleep in class. But while most of this blog's readers know who they are, for most of the population, name recognition will range from limited to virtually non-existent.

Then think about the people who most shape popular political perceptions. True, some of the above have access to broadsheet op-ed pages. But in this context, the Guardian’s readership is too miniscule to count.

The mass audiences in Britain and the US go to those with broadcast and tabloid slots. The other common denominator is that they are usually effective humourists.

Any one column from Richard Littlejohn - pictured - will have more political impact than a dozen party conference speeches. Not having a comparable figure on our side is a loss for the left.

Littlejohn would probably like to think of himself as even-handed, and it is true that he directs plenty of venom towards ‘Call Me Dave’. Maybe his underlying message is closer to the UK Independence Party line than Compassionate Conservatism.

But the ability to write the soundbites his target audience of Sky viewers and Daily Mail readers later roll out as if they had thought them up themselves is a prime political asset for the British right in general.

On the other side of the Atlantic, US political satirist PJ O’Rourke is another case in point. The politics suck, but the gags are actually funny. That means the politics usually goes unnoticed.

But they are certainly there. I’ve just finished his book ‘Peace Kills: America’s Fun New Imperialism’. When writing about the Middle East, for instance, he quotes leading US rightwing academic experts on the region, including Fouad Ajami and Bernard Lewis. The man has obviously done his homework and builds it in to what he writes. He's good, damn it.

A handful of figures on the left can pull off the same trick. I watched a DVD of the Michael Moore flick Sicko a couple of nights back, and couldn’t help admiring how well it was all done.

I mean, it was dreadfully simplistic stuff. There are plenty of more sophisticated arguments for universal healthcare in the US than the ones he adduces, but that is entirely beside the point; reeling off country-by-country stats on proportion of GDP spent on health services is just plain dull.

In Britain we have Mark Steel, who can be extremely funny when he is on form, but lacklustre when he isn’t. Mark Thomas has built a young audience with an anti-arms trade stand-up routine. I’m not in a position to judge how effectively George Galloway utilises his TalkSport and cable television outlets as an anti-war platform, as I haven’t managed to listen to either. I’m sure readers will have their own opinions.

None of this is to decry the importance of theoretical clarity in politics. But we are not faced with an either/or choice here. Let me conclude with a plea for the left to transcend its frequently turgid literary output and at least try to couch its agitation in digestible terms. Until we do, few will listen. Sadly, we remain abso-bloody-lutely hopeless in this respect. Any ideas why?

The divisions underline a generalised lack of political seriousness, perhaps driven by some sense that the stakes are low. After all, the pumped up borough council that is the Greater Rubberstamp Assembly hardly represents Britain’s most puissant political body, is it? What does it matter that not a single socialist candidate has even a remote chance of success?

Well, it does matter, and this is why. The British National Party - logo above - is looking good to secure at least one and possibly even two seats. That will confer on it greater legitimacy and a better platform than it has ever previously enjoyed.

The truth is that the BNP has built itself – in the outer eastern suburbs of London, anyway – primarily by articulating real working class grievances. Socialists that still espouse class politics need to ask themselves why the far right is succeeding where the far left has so completely failed.

If you want a warning about where all this might be heading, look at continental Europe. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, parties of the populist right have in country after country both made real inroads into the voter base once enjoyed by social democracy and even the communist parties, and then gone on to consolidate them.

The earlier wave of British fascism peaked too early. The National Front enjoyed some degree of success – short of a real political breakthrough, thankfully - in the 1970s, but then lost ground after Thatcher’s Tories made a play for the anti-immigration vote. Cameron’s Conservatives are not going to do that a second time round.

What is more, today’s social conditions are far more propitious for the far right than the fag end years of the post-war consensus. The diminution of the welfare state, to the greater glory of neoliberalism, has created a terrifying mood of thorough-going despair not always fully visible from a north London winebar.

It would also be wrong for the left to duck the fact that immigration has created tensions within the working class, in a way that Marx and Engels would recognise from their analysis of the impact of the influx Irish labourers in the 1840s. Britain is not the great big happy multicultural family most of us would like it to be.

These are some of the reasons why the BNP vote has increased from 35,832 in the 1997 general election to 192,746 last time round, and from 102,000 in the 1999 Euro-election to 808,200 in the 2004. Labour has lost 4m votes over this period.

There are many explanations for why this has happened. By far the largest proportion of the blame accrues to a Thatcherised Labour Party, which long ago abandoned the people it once purported to represent.

But that doesn’t let the existing leadership of the left entirely off the hook; its decades-long failure to cohere a political organisation with any implantation in the social class it purports to represent has essentially given the BNP a free run.

Does it really take the election of two fascists to the Greater London Assembly to shock the Marxist left out of such damnable sectarian complacency? There really should be easier ways to learn this lesson, comrades.

Sadly, I was only eight at the time, and May 1968 will for me personally always be more about Lego then les événements. But for the true soixante huitard generation, what happened in France that year was a defining political moment.

It is probably impossible to underestimate the subsequent psychological significance of these protests for the far left. Its role as a symbol - or dare I say it, myth - is perhaps second only to that of Russia 1917.

Its most common usage in this context is as a counter to the commonsense argument that revolutions simply cannot happen in advanced capitalist countries. May 1968 proves they can, we are told. Well, almost, anyway. But how valid is this case?

Prompted by the 40th anniversary media coverage that will presumably grow to a crescendo this month, I have been rereading some of the leftist literature produced to mark the 20th anniversary in 1988. Much of it, extravagently celebratory in tone, seems to me to overstate results and prospects.

Crucially, many writers fail to grasp that what occured was not a revolution. To say that is not to downplay the importance of developments that genuinely do deserve the much overused adjective 'earth-shaking', just as the classic picture of rioting in the streets of Paris hints.

France in 1968 was a textbook example of dual power, in the sense that Lenin used the term. But it was - again in the jargon - a prerevolutionary situation, not a revolution proper. Perhaps it would have possible to secure a relatively peaceful transition to socialism; the means of production were in the hands of the working class and, given the correct approach, a largely conscript army might have split on class lines.

On the other hand, there were 70,000 troops on the other side of the Rhine, and de Gaulle's cross-border chopper trip proves he would have been prepared to use them if a crunch had come. Nor would other capitalist countries have stood idly by and watched one of their number succumb to workers' control. They too would likely have committed armed support.

What is more, the forces of indigenous reaction could undoubtedly have mobilised the support of millions of people on the right. It would be lightminded to insist that extensive bloodshed could have been ruled out in advance.

Several writers slam the cowardice of the Parti Communiste Français, and maintain that 'correct Marxist leadership' of their precise and pure ideological stripe was the only missing magic ingredient.

But to postulate this is to fail to ask why neither the Trotskyists nor the anarchists secured a mass base, either through their work in the preceding decades or in the course of the struggle. Why do our historians think their outfit would necessarily have done any better? There is more to politics than retrospective transitional demands.

All of this leads me to what I think is the most pernicious effect of the May 1968 myth, namely the idea that there is a serious chance that a small group of revolutionaries can suddenly be catapulted to the bigtime, almost on the random caprice of history.

The 1988 literature on 1968 was full of confident predictions that revolutions were on the agenda, in France and even in Britain too, before the end of the twentieth century. This perspective, to say the least, hasn't panned out.

This post is not intended to say that we will never see new May Days, or even new Octobers; what I am arguing is that France 1968 was an exceptional historic conjuncture that even four decades on has yet to be repeated.

It is essential for the revolutionary left to dream, of course. But given a reality that could see two fascists elected to the London Assembly today, remember that day dreams can be debilitating.

Happy May Day comrades. Sous les pavés la plage.

If the voters want to go back to a social democratic future, how come they are showing it by turning to the Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives or even the British National Party?

And if there really is any support for full-on socialism, why can’t any of the numerous far left electoral outfits save their deposits, let alone secure electoral representation at any level beyond a handful of council chambers?

The paradox is indeed real. On issue after issue, the policies touted by the left - both inside and outside the Labour Party - are probably close to the public mood.

Yes, there is popular distaste for rocketing inequality, support for affordable public transport, opposition to further privatisation of the NHS and other services, and a growing realisation that market mechanisms alone cannot offer enough affordable housing.

Yet the parties that are gaining from New Labour’s failure to deliver on these points are parties of the centre, the centre right, and the far right, which broadly offer more of the same, at even faster velocity.

Some of this is down to low levels of political awareness; we live in an era where the differences between the major parties are not habitually boiled down to easily-presentable ideological outlooks, so most people do not share the reference points so widely used by political activists.

That is why the Socialist Workers’ Party is probably mistaken in branding their electoral intervention as the Left List; for millions of voters, especially younger ones, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are meaningless. This is a presentational nuance, granted, but perhaps not an unimportant one. You cannot appeal to a class consciousness that is no longer there.

Another reason that new political formations often find it hard to get a look in is the traditional instinct for alternation between the big two; ‘that lot’ have had a go for 11 years and messed up, so it must be the turn of ‘the other lot’ to show us of what they are capable. But that barrier should not be insuperable, as the BNP are increasingly proving. New political forces can and do emerge.

Another factor is that for every left policy that is popular, there is at least an unpopular one not too far behind. Opposition to immigration controls is a case in point. While it is the only principled position the far left can take, it must be bloody difficult arguing for that one on the doorsteps of Barking and Dagenham.

Some groups go further still and include demands for the abolition of the age of consent and for the formation of workers’ militias on the leaflets they churn out for council by-elections.

Whatever the merits of such policies, they are entirely beyond local authority remits. That’s probably why council subcommittees stick to the allocation of allotments rather than setting budgets to train up council tax collectors in the art of stripping down AK-47s, guys.

Yet none of the factors listed above really explains why the BNP have got a seat on the London Assembly – on the back of a largely working class vote, too - while neither the SWP or Respect Renewal can say the same.

The truth is that the far left remains dominated by inveterate sectarian hacks who have repeatedly revealed themselves incapable of co-operating with others inside a pluralist and democratic formation that they cannot control.

I had all too much of an inside track on the petty factionalism that wrecked both the Socialist Labour Party and the Socialist Alliance. Fortunately I was able to enjoy watching the disintegration of Respect from a distance.

But it is interesting that neither side of the split has been able to come up with a convincing political explanation for the break-up. It still appears to outsiders as largely a question of personality clashes between two men with egos the size of a 1930s transatlantic Zeppelin, only with an added tendency to crash and burn. Hint: that’s them in the picture.

Amateurism, childishness and an inability to transcend the inevitable frictions involved in common projects of all stripes continues to condemn an entire political milieu to the status of permanent losers, squandering tens of thousands of pounds in order to secure fractions of a percentage point of the popular vote, and then arguing afterwards that the central committee’s thinking was of course correct in every detail.

I had half kind of hoped that the raw shock of finding a fascist sitting inside a London City Hall under rightwing Tory control would bring recognition of such basic realities to the more thoughtful elements on the far left, but there has been precious little sign of that. And we all know what happens to life forms that prove incapable of evolution.

During his campaign for the deputy leadership in 1982, Tony Benn – pictured - regularly attracted larger audiences to public meetings than any politician would be capable of today, promoting a platform that combined nationalisation and planning with workers’ control and the extension of democracy.

These were – to a young man radicalised by the experience of long-term unemployment in the early Thatcher period and becoming involved politics for the first time – exciting ideas.

A quarter of a century later, my thinking has evolved in a direction both more Marxist and more libertarian, but I still consider Tony Benn something of an inspiration. So I was rather disappointed to read this in the Independent:

Mr Davis won the support today of veteran Labour left-winger Tony Benn.

Mr Benn said he was "totally opposed" to the anti-terror measure and urged Gordon Brown to ditch it if Mr Davis was re-elected in Haltemprice and Howden.

Mr Benn, father of Environment Secretary Hilary Benn, wrote to Labour chairman Harriet Harman saying he felt free to offer his backing to the Tory former shadow home secretary since Labour was refusing to enter a candidate in the contest.

OK, I can see where Benn is coming from on this one. The introduction of what amounts to internment without trial has even had me reconsidering my 2006 decision to rejoin the Labour Party.

In so far as what Davis is doing serves to keep the issue in the headlines and thus maintain pressure on the government, his gesture might even be a good thing.

But opposition to 42-day detention is not best advanced by backing a crude PR stunt from a pro-death penalty SAS hobbyist Tory, running for re-election in a safe Tory seat he is hardly unlikely to lose, partly at least in order to bolster the factional position of the Tory hard right.

Davis’s game is designed to fit in with the narrative that the Conservatives have somehow transmogrified into ‘progressives’. For Britain’s best-known socialist to back his candidacy can only lend credibility to this patent charade. Sorry, Tony, you’ve got this one badly wrong; please think again.

Meanwhile, this whole issue has completely exposed the inadequacy of the far left, despite the bluster from SWP/Left List and Respect Renewal to the effect that they are serious electoral players.

Literature produced by both these organisations regularly stress their commitment to defending the Muslim community. Well, if 42-day detention – a measure that will in practice be aimed almost exclusively against Muslims – doesn’t constitute clear-cut Islamophobia, what does?

If either of these groupings – or any other section of the left, for that matter – had even minimal tactical savvy, they would be drawing up plans to stand a candidate on a consistent civil libertarian platform. Not to do so is an admission of irrelevance.

That only a miniscule vote could be expected is beside the point; it is imperative to highlight Davis’s hypocrisy. But no, the central committee and national council prefer to leave the electoral field to politicians of higher calibre, such as declared or potential runners Mad Cow-Girl, Miss Great Britain, a pub landlord from Blackpool and a two-time Eurovision song contest loser. Says it all, really.

It is a minor historical irony that the financial markets crash of 2008 comes about at a time when there is no dissent from the neoliberal consensus at any point on the spectrum of establishment politics.

For three decades now, people have been told - by politicians of all parties - that there is no alternative. Understandably, most of them have come to believe it. Young people, in particular, haven’t heard any narrative other than free market ideology.

That much has been brought home to me by my recent experiences as a mature student. Last year, I sat what Americans would refer to as ‘economics 101’ for the second time in my life. It’s not that I particularly needed a refresher on the essentials of supply and demand curves, but the course was deemed a prerequisite for the more advanced modules I’m taking this year.

In a classroom full of people mostly a generation younger than myself, I was struck by the differences between the students of 1981 and the students of today. Fittingly for kids keen to get a well-paid job in the financial services sector, they are a lot more smartly dressed, for a start.

And they take things rather more seriously, too; they don’t tend to skip classes, because they have paid for them after all, and I somehow don’t get the impression they too spend much time hanging around in the college coffee lounge rolling spliffs. That’s probably because they are busy with part-time, or even full-time, jobs.

But most striking of all was that most of them tended to think capitalism is great. Where in the Thatcher period we were angry because the Tories had put three million people on the dole, the consensus - in 2007, anyway - was in praise for a system seen as virtually guaranteeing 42-inch screen plasma televisions and two weeks’ annual holiday in Thailand to all but a few unfortunates.

In the first week, the lecturer explained about the differences between free market capitalism and Keynesian demand management, and asked students to vote on which they favoured. When I replied that I was a socialist who didn’t favour either, the derision towards the old git in the corner was almost palpable.

Put simply, anti-capitalist ideas clearly no longer have the resonance they did when variants of Marxism influenced a sizeable minority in the Labour Party, with substantial parliamentary and local government representation, and when a network of shop stewards was able to popularise such notions in many workplaces.

Nor does the left advance a systematic diagnosis of what is wrong with capitalism as it is now, and what can be done about it. Books outlining an Alternative Economic Strategy no longer feature prominently on university library shelves.

That brings me back to the current crash. There have been plenty of predictions that meltdown on Wall Street and in the City will generate a revival socialist fortunes. Interestingly, many of them have come from the right, featuring prominently in quality newspaper opinion slots.

There’s also renewed optimism from some on the left. Alex Callinicos of the Socialist Workers' Party, for instance, reportedly told a recent public meeting in Tower Hamlets that the crisis represents a ‘moment of opportunity’ for rebuilding the left.

He's not necessarily wrong. But the important thing to stress is that any upturn in our fortunes isn’t going to happen automatically. For a start, the first thing we have to do is to articulate a coherent set of counterproposals, and as far as I can make out, work on that task hasn’t even begun.

Then we have to popularise our ideas, and that will require a political vehicle to give them organised expression. I’d like to think the British left is capable of doing that, but after the experience of the last period, I’ve got this horrible suspicion that another moment of opportunity is going to just walk on by.