Workers' Liberty

The Socialist Alliance in the June 2001 General Election gave voters in 98 constituencies the chance to vote for "socialism" and against New Labour. On average, 1.62% of the people who voted in each constituency did so.

We have something to congratulate ourselves for in having organised such a widespread public challenge to Blairism. The Socialist Alliance has little else to congratulate itself for. With very few exceptions our impact on the electorate was not noticeably greater than that which any half-way presentable socialist candidate would have made in any suitable constituency at any time in the last hundred years.

So far, the main significance of the Socialist Alliance lies in its impact on the left, where it has brought a number of tendencies together in a loose collaboration, rather than in its impact on the working class electorate or the broad labour movement. So far, the latter is slight.

Blairism is still at high tide in terms of parliamentary seats. It dropped only 10 seats. But this masks a great deal of disillusionment, and millions of lost votes. Swathes of those who flocked to Blair in 1997 with hope, however faint and faltering in their hearts, simply did not vote in the 2001 General Election. Many of those non-voters were traditional working-class Labour voters, people who have come to think that Labour is no longer, even minimally, their party.

One measure for the performance of the Socialist Alliance is its striking failure to attract more than a tiny proportion of those ex-Labour voters, or of the Labour voters who stayed Labour this time only with extreme reluctance.

The Socialist Alliance did very much worse in the circumstances than we could reasonably have hoped to do.

One factor was the generally low level of confidence and morale in the working class, which works against all large new enterprises. But, beyond that, the brutal truth is that the Socialist Alliance waged a campaign that was shaped and limited by the politics and by the organisational practices of the SWP, which was by far the predominant force within it. It ran a campaign that was, essentially, sectarian towards the broad labour movement.

The central fact of recent working class history, the thing that made an electoral challenge to the Labour Party both necessary and plausible, is the hijacking of the old Labour Party by the Blairites. The labour movement has thus been deprived of its own representation in Parliament for the first time in the last 100 years.

What should, in response to that hijacking, have been the central rallying cry of the Socialist Alliance, labour representation, the need for working class MPs, played very little part in the campaign. Outside of Nottingham East, where the campaign was shaped by Workers’ Liberty and other non-SWPers, and a few other areas, this was something that was, at best, given an occasional mention in small print or the tail-end of speeches here and there.

This campaign was not focused on the biggest event in British working class politics for decades. It did not highlight the need for new measures to secure labour movement parliamentary representation. Instead, the campaign had a curiously timeless quality.

It was motivated on the need for a "socialist alternative". In fact, under headlines about being a "socialist alternative", Socialist Alliance leaflets proposed a few reforms and resistance to New Labour. Instead of striving to convince, and engage working-class voters in honest political debate about why they should no longer vote Labour, and how voting Socialist Alliance could be part of rebuilding a working class political force, the leaflets were designed to advertise the Socialist Alliance as having a collection of policies which the SWP thought would look attractive to ex-Labour voters.

To "front up" the Alliance, they systematically chose showbiz figures, journalists and lawyers, the sort of people that a conventional advertising campaign would use to endorse a product, rather than figures who could symbolise a drive for working-class political representation. Working-class voters are understandably, and reasonably, sceptical of advertising material.

Where a campaign more focused on restoring working class representation was mounted — in Nottingham East and Manchester Withington — the results were among the best achieved (apart from the special cases such as that of the well-known ex-Labour MP, Dave Nellist, in Coventry, and the challenge to Tory defector Shaun Woodward in St Helens) in votes — and also in activist and labour movement impact.

The bulk of the leaflets were shaped by the SWP-dominated national office of the Alliance. The content of the leaflets was, quite apart from the lack of focus on labour representation, largely routine SWP agitation stuff. This was the SWP in reformist mode, rather than its “f**k capitalism”, “one solution, revolution” mode. But it was unmistakably the SWP, with its characteristic view that elections and politics are scarcely proper concerns for socialists, and that the fundamental purpose of agitation is to advertise “the party” to the working class.

Even on that level there was disorientation and lack of focus. Albeit in special circumstances, the victory for a local doctor in Kidderminster, who campaigned to save the local hospital, showed how the future of the NHS should have been central to our campaign. Even the need to restore full freedom for trade unions received far less than its proper attention in the campaign.

The “timelessness” and the routine-agitation quality of the Socialist Alliance leaflets reflected the politics of the SWP. It reflected both their general approach to political agitation, and their failure to grasp what has happened in recent working-class politics. In their view — spelled out in the article written by John Rees in International Socialism 90 to orient their members for the Socialist Alliance campaign — “it is an error to suppose that the Labour Party has fundamentally changed its nature. No, the Labour Party has [not] fundamentally changed its character. It is still the political expression of the trade union bureaucracy and it enjoys the support of most organised workers. It is, as Lenin described it, a ‘capitalist workers’ party’. The fundamental strength of the unions and the strength of their ties with the Labour Party remain considerable.”

The whole business of the Socialist Alliance is, therefore, in the SWP’s eyes, just another scene in the age-old drama of people “breaking from reformism”; and being reformist, for them, is defined as being “members of, or deeply committed to the values of, the Labour Party…”

The second biggest, albeit semi-detached, group in (or, rather, semi-attached to) the Socialist Alliance, the Socialist Party — formerly Militant — makes the opposite mistake. The SP thinks the old Labour Party is entirely defunct and dismisses even the residual links with the trade unions. This despite the protests by trade union leaders against New Labour’s policies of privatistion, showing the union link to be still a potential focus of struggle. But at least they have registered that there is something radically new in New Labour. The SWP have not.

That stops the SWP grasping that labour representation is the central immediate question in working class politics. Their decision to stand candidates for the first time in 20-odd years had more to do with calculation about themselves, and worries about being gazumped by other left factions, than with calculation about what has happened to the Labour Party and therefore to working class political representation.

The blighting effect of SWP predominance on the Socialist Alliance campaign did not stop at politics. Their organisational sectarianism created a certain amount of disruption in the latter period of the campaign, when they suddenly decided that Socialist Alliance campaigners would not canvass door-to-door. Leaflet door-to-door? Yes. Yes, indeed! Do it again and again! Talk to potential voters? No!

This was not just a judgement about the use of resources, of the sort that was reasonable in areas where the Socialist Alliance had very few activists. It was a Party Line, centrally decided and imposed almost everywhere that they were numerically predominant. One high point of this anti-canvassing drive was in Islington South and Finsbury, where the candidate was a Workers’ Liberty supporter, Janine Booth. There they tried to impose the ban on canvassing through a binding vote of the local Socialist Alliance: there would be NO canvassing! This, to put it delicately, was downright eccentric.

Even SWPers were reduced to speculating about what was going on. Was it just that they wanted to control the flow of new contacts? (Those who responded to a leaflet would contact a central address, rather than talking to a possibly non-SWP individual.) Were they afraid that the doorstep reality would demoralise young SWPers hyped up on “revolution is near” fantasies? Or did they really believe that there were voters waiting only for a leaflet advertising the Socialist Alliance to drop through their letterbox in order to rally to us — and so many of them that there was really no time to talk to them?

The problem is not just the SWP. Very few decisions in the Socialist Alliance have been pushed through only by an SWP numerical majority, or by SWP predominance in the national office. The other groups in the Socialist Alliance have chosen to go along with the SWP. All of them, for example, disagreed with the SWP on canvassing; none of them have argued the issue vigorously within the Alliance.

The Socialist Party has been content to let the SWP run the main Socialist Alliance operation so long as the SP maintains autonomy for its own electoral activities as a sort of semi-attached annexe to the Alliance. The CPGB and Workers’ Power have chosen to focus on rather abstract controversies about whether the Socialist Alliance should be more “political” (as against “economistic”), more “revolutionary” (as against “reformist”), or more of a “party” (as against “alliance”) — controversies which have little grip on the day-to-day political choices of the Socialist Alliance, and in which the critics are, anyway, by no means always entirely right as against the SWP.

The ISG has adopted the role of friendly adviser to the SWP on how to be non-sectarian, with the manner of an elderly uncle counselling a cherished, vigorous but headstrong nephew. All these groups seem to desire above all to become the “loyal opposition” whose arguments will be accepted by the SWP as meriting attention.

Most of the prominent, unaffiliated activists in the Alliance seem to have chosen a broadly pro-SWP stance — in return getting some individual leeway, and maybe even the chance of some influence on chosen issues — as preferable to what they perceive as the available alternative, being marginalised.

Whatever the explanation for the SWP-imposed “party line” on canvassing, the point is that this strange nonsense and the effects the SWP attempts to impose “the line” had on the campaign — in Islington South, for example — is another measure of how far we have to go before we have in the Socialist Alliance a politically coherent, democratically structured, electorally credible force. That is another way of saying that the left needs to sort itself out. Part of that self-sorting will have to be a learning of the lessons of the General Election campaign in time for next year’s local government elections.

Of course, it will take time. No-one could have expected that the left would realign itself instantly or without controversy. But time alone will not sort us out. Only political argument and conflict will. In the months leading up to the Socialist Alliance conference in December, fruitful and relevant controversy should flourish, instead of being smothered under calls to get on with organising for the next demonstration or appeals to our natural inclination to console ourselves by thinking that the General Election result was not so bad after all.