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.
The seat is well suited to saying different things to different people: it includes large numbers of students, big council estates, some posh enclaves and growing numbers of professional owner occupiers. While Iraq and tuition fees would play well with students and disillusioned Labour voters, the Lib Dems made a concerted attempt to get Tories to vote tactically. Every piece of personally addressed mail I received read as if written specifically to persuade Tories to vote Lib Dem — including one on blue notepaper! As a result, the Tory vote dropped by 2,000 on an increased turnout.
While the Lib Dem campaign was dishonest — for example, they claimed the Labour MP Keith Bradley had not voted against the war, when he had in the major votes — it built on real discontent with Labour on both local and national issues. The government’s decision to cancel extensions to the Metrolink tram system and a rumoured breaking-up of the world-famous Christie’s cancer hospital gave the Lib Dems easy issues to exploit.
On issues like this Bradley faced a credibility gap. He had, for example, said he would vote against top-up fees but allowed himself to be persuaded otherwise at the last moment. And prior to 1997, he had campaigned for Withington Hospital to retain full services, only to agree to the removal of in-patient services and selling off much of the site for property development once Labour was in government. In addition, there was little evidence of Labour campaigning on the ground, presumably as a result of a lack of active party members.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Lib Dem campaign has lessons for the far left. Prior to the General Election, they had spent a lot of time on their classic “community politics”, campaigning and taking up local issues of concern to working class voters. Some of this was cynical too — campaigning on and then claiming credit for things the council was going to do anyhow — or exploiting the death of a child killed by joy-riders. But it enabled them to build a base, including winning council seats that they could cash in on in the general election.
The left should learn from this that it is not enough to parachute into a seat once every four years and hope for electoral success. We have to be known as activists with a real involvement in the issues that concern working class people.
Comments
Foot Soldiers Not Paras
I agree with Bruce's last comment here wholeheartedly. It is not just the Lib Dems that have proved the necessity of this kind of work, but it was also basic the work of Marx and Engels, and to the Bolsheviks when they were able to do so, and more recently has been the basis on which Sinn Fein have won popular electoral support.
Reading the quote from Trotsky "Against the Stream" about "our isolated comrades - in a hospital, in a trench, a woman in a village" etc. I was forced to think, but that this takes for granted the woman in the village was already known, had some level of confidence even if the people she spoke to didn't understand the niceties of historical materialism, and didn't necessarily accept her insistence on the need for a Workers Government.
Being involved in local community activities many of which might seem to have nothing to do with the loftier ideals to which we aspire is part and parcel of being immersed in the working class perhaps even more than in a trade union, which is self selecting in terms of activists. In order to connect with those "deeper currents" the working class community is often a better grounding in reality.
The problem is that most revolutionaries don't want to be involved in these sort of issues. They can often be seen as a distraction precisely because they do not necessarily link directly to those things revolutionaries think are important, they try to get the working class to move at their pace rather than setting their own activity in accordance with the pace and level of the real working class as opposed to their idealised version of it.
I remember when I was 20 years old and had recently joined a predecessor organisation to the AWL. I had already been a shop steard for 2 years by this time, as well as being a delegate to national conference, the local Trades Council etc. A strike occurred involving members of my union at a local factory, and being only a revolutionary for a few months I asked my Branch Organiser to come with me to the picket line, and bring some papers so that we could talk to the strikers. He came with the papers, but declined to join me on the picket line saying as a student he didn't react well with workers!
That unfortunately sums it up for many so called Marxists. The working class are okay in theory as long as you don't have to work with them and do all the mundane stuff in practice.
Arthur Bough