Workers' Liberty

By John Bloxam

However weak the opposition, Galloway clearly got a big boost from his performance in front of the two US senators on 17 May.

Pete Radcliff, an AWL member, stood in Nottingham East under the banner of Socialist Unity. He got 373 votes, or 1.2% of the poll, about a third of his score in 2001. He writes about the lessons of the campaign

By Bruce Robinson

In Manchester Withington, the Liberal Democrats overturned an 11,524 Labour majority with a 20% swing to win the seat by 667 votes.

Early in the campaign, I was called by a Lib Dem phone canvasser. When asked why I wasn’t going to vote for them, I said “It’s because you’re a bunch of cynical opportunists.” (Not the whole reason, but a good enough starting point!) The Lib Dem campaign bore this out.

All comment on new possibilities after the election is mere wistfulness unless we also register just how bad the election was, and just how badly the left did.

All the left and Respect candidates' results in the 5 May 2005 General Election can be found on the Socialist Unity Network website.

How should socialist activists, trade unionists and anti-war activists vote in the 2005 election? The immediate choices of government are miserable.

One thing is certain about the General Election. The new government after 5 May will be one that most working-class people regard as arrogant, unresponsive, accountable, and one that is attuned more to the drives of global capital than to the wants and needs of most voters.

By Mike Rowley

The racist rhetoric of the 2005 election is already leading to violent attacks. Devon and Cornwall police have made a public statement about "election-related racism" inspired by far-right parties.

By Dan Nichols

In Romford, where I live, it seems immigration has been the only issue in the election. The charge is led by the Tories, who have published adverts in local newspapers and distributed leaflets claiming that asylum seekers are responsible for increased council tax bills. But in their wake have come several fascist/far right parties, eager to join the racist feeding frenzy. The BNP, Third Way (an offshoot of the old National Front) and UKIP are all standing in my local area. Even the Residents' Association candidates are making a big play on the issue of immigration!

By John Bloxam

George Galloway, the loud cheerleader for the fundamentalists and others of the Iraqi "resistance", noticeably changed tack last week when some fundamentalists turned up on his own doorstep.

The Tories have used the election campaign to pour scorn and hatred on gypsies and travellers. This has spurred the Sun newspaper into an explicitly racist "Stamp on the Camps" campaign against travellers, and there has been an increase in physical attacks on travellers.

Many socialists, trade unionists and campaigners who would usually vote Labour are thinking of supporting Respect, the Green Party or the Lib Dems as an alternative to Labour in the coming general election. We examine the manifestos of these parties to see whether they deserve such hopes being pinned on them.

A UNISON health steward is standing against Blair loyalist Stephen Hepburn in the Jarrow constituency. Roger Nettleship's platform is "Save the National Health Service!", opposing NHS cuts and privatisation .

Unison, one of the UK's biggest unions recently sent a broadsheet to its members, "Labour Link News", reminding them of the bad things the Tories did when power. One of the bad things it chose to highlight was this: "The total number of asylum applications increased by 45% between 1993 and 1997, while Michael Howard was Home Secretary".

By Colin Foster

Tories are saying that pay-outs to top bosses should be curbed, and New Labour is saying no such action is necessary. That's a measure of where Blair and Brown have taken the Labour Party.

The new issue of Tubeworker outlines how management are using the shorter working week agreements for stations and signalling staff as cover to push through attacks on the workforce, and calls for action under rank-and-file control. It also laments the worst General election in living memory, and reports on workplace issues including next week's TfL strike and the ongoing threats to our pensions.

Click 'read more' to read the text, and 'download' to download PDF.

By Rosalind Robson

For some months now the Tories and Labour have been trying to win votes by competing to see who can be the most “hardline” against asylum seekeers. More recently the Tories have added gypsies and travellers to their list of “undesirables”.

By John Bloxam

The Respect coalition’s electoral prospects on 5 May are increasingly focussed on George Galloway, who is standing in Bethnal Green and Bow, east London. The electoral “breakthrough” that the Galloway-SWP alliance have been predicting for their “radical fourth party” has now narrowed to getting Galloway, a sitting MP with a high public profile, elected in a seat with a 50% Muslim vote. “Imagine the impact if Respect wins a seat…” (Socialist Worker, 9 April, emphasis added). Respect’s footsoldiers, the SWP have made this seat their priority.

By Annie O’Keeffe

The 5 May UK election, which will return 17 Northern Ireland MPs to Westminster, will establish just what impact the months-long campaign by London and Dublin politicians and the media they influence has had on the standing of Sinn Fein with Northern Ireland’s nationalist electorate.

By Colin Foster

Stay at home and curse at the TV? Go to the polling station and write something left-wing on your ballot paper, in the hope that you get a message across at least to the individual who counts your vote? Vote for the Lib-Dems, on the grounds that at least they criticised the Iraq war, however queasily and weakly, and gains for them will punish Blair?

At the count after the 2001 general election, Nottingham East Labour MP and government whip John Heppell gave over much of his victory speech to denouncing his socialist challenger Pete Radcliff. Not, unfortunately, that Pete Radcliff had come near to defeating Heppell and winning the seat — but Heppell was evidently aware that the socialist campaign had bitten into the core of previously committed Labour supporters, and did not know how to answer its arguments.

Send a contribution to Pete Radcliff's Socialist Unity candidacy in Nottingham East, part of the England-wide Socialist Green Unity Coalition in this General Election. Cheques to "Nottingham SGUC" via P O Box 823, London SE15 4NA, or use the AWL online donation facility here and we will forward the money to Nottingham.

The new issue of Tubeworker assesses the forthcoming General Election, and sounds the alarm about stations de-staffing and attacks on pensions.

Click 'read more' to read the text, or 'download' to download.

Michael Howard’s summary execution of Howard Flight, the Tory MP who talked candidly about the Tories’ tax and spending plans at a private meeting, has prompted a storm of protest in the Tory Party.

In the Guardian on 26 March, Tariq Ali, who back in the late 1960s and early 70s was perhaps Britain’s best-known Marxist, called for a “tactical vote” for the Liberal Democrats in the General Election likely on 5 May.

By John O’Mahony

The forces of militant obscurantism, bigotry, intolerance, and social regression, are on the march in Britain! Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has implicitly advised Catholics to vote for Michael Howard’s Conservative party in the General Election, on the grounds that the Tories support a lower limit for legal abortion — 20 weeks of pregnancy instead of 24.

Only 27% of adults think that their vote gives them a say in how the country is run, but 67% insist that they want to have a say.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were unorthodox Marxist academics and German Jews.

In the early 1930s, like others of their sort who could, they fled Nazi Germany for the USA. And they reported that, in ordinary day-to-day life, they encountered more anti-semitism in the USA than they ever had in Germany.