Limp send-off for TUSC

The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition held a national launch rally for its general election campaign in London on 25 March.

To me it seemed a desultory, tired, going-through-the-motions affair.

The last "big" left election-campaign launch I attended was the one for the SWP's 2008 campaign for Lindsey German as "Left Alternative" candidate for mayor of London. The 2008 rally was a shoddy event, run on false bravado. (German ended up with 0.68% of the vote).

But it was bigger and more spirited than this. For TUSC, about 150 people came to hear dreary and perfunctory speeches (or, at least, speeches that seemed that way to me). The 150 were mostly activists from the Socialist Party and SWP (the two main groups involved) and other leftists who had come to observe.

I came to the meeting sour about TUSC, I must admit. However desirable a broad but principled labour-movement-based challenge to New Labour at the general election may be, TUSC did not look like it to me even before the rally.

It's neither a broad, lively, living, open-ended unity project, with potential that puts immediate political flaws in the shade, nor an admittedly narrow but nevertheless sharp and clear exercise in socialist flag-waving.

All proportions guarded, Trotsky's comment from 1936 seems relevant:

"The mass organizations have value precisely because they are mass organizations. Even when they are under patriotic reformist leadership one cannot discount them. One must win the masses who are in their clutches: whether from outside or from inside depends on the circumstance.

"Small organizations which regard themselves as selective, as pioneers, can only have value on the strength of their programme and of the schooling and steeling of their cadres. A small organization which has no unified programme and no really revolutionary will is less than nothing, is a negative quantity".

"No2EU" - described by Hannah Sell of the SP, chairing the meeting, as TUSC's "precursor in the Euro-election" of 2009 - soured me. The seven months or so of secret negotiations which followed, as the SP tried to cajole the Stalinoid-rump Communist Party of Britain into further alliance, soured me more.

So did the way they ended, with a "coalition" consisting of the SP alone, but with a platform consisting of SP politics scissors-and-pasted with chunks of CPB politics ("a clear programme", Hannah Sell called it, but I don't think so). Its face has since been slightly saved by the SWP's decision to use the SP's "coalition" as a flag of convenience in the general election.

However, even to someone not soured in advance this rally must have looked poor.

Hannah Sell, and Dave Nellist, the concluding speaker, pleaded that TUSC was a "modest start", expecting only "modest results" on 6 May. It shouldn't be measured by votes on 6 May but by how it helps the fight back after then.

"It's only a start" is a weak excuse after years of more promising left electoral coalitions, like the Socialist Alliance of 2000-1, wrecked in its time through a walk-out by the SP and a shutdown imposed by the SWP.

The speakers were Chris Baugh (SP, a leading full-time official of PCS); Karen Reissman (SWP); Brian Caton (SP and Prison Officers' Association general secretary); and Dave Nellist (SP). Bob Crow, general secretary of the RMT, was billed to speak but did not show. TUSC has evidently been unable to get other left-wing union leaders, such as Mark Serwotka, to join its platform.

There were also short speeches from two of TUSC's candidates in London, Jenny Sutton and Onay Kasab, and from RMT London Transport regional organiser Steve Hedley (about the RMT's dispute over job cuts in London Underground). Although the meeting ended early, no contributions were allowed from the floor.

Almost all the speeches repeated the same few ideas, surely already well known to everyone in the audience. The three main parties all want cuts. We should not accept cuts. Britain is an unequal society.

Some absences in the speeches were notable. None of the SP speakers raised their usual call for unions to disaffiliate from the Labour Party.

No-one said anything approximating the concepts of workers' representation or a workers' government.

Or socialism.

In a meeting of activists you might hope for some strategic overview on the economic crisis, beyond the opposition to cuts which everyone in the meeting must have shared already.

But the answers offered were all "alternative cuts" - to cut the Trident replacement, military spending on Afghanistan, the ID cards programme - plus, from Karen Reissman, a call on the government to get in "uncollected taxes" (as if that all adds up to enough to re-balance the government budget, which it doesn't).

Chris Baugh mentioned the idea of public ownership in general, but no-one posed the idea of taking over the whole of high finance and defying the global financial markets.

Brian Caton, who told us he will retire in five weeks' time as POA general secretary, was the only SP speaker to raise their usual slogan of a new workers' party. He also spoke against the anti-union laws.

He noted that he is sometimes challenged in left meetings because he is a prison officer. His response? He isn't one any longer. He was one for 20 years. He saw "horrible things" done in the job. He decided he wanted to change both the union, the POA, and the profession. He thinks he has changed the union considerably, though not enough.

It seems to me a bad combination that TUSC activists don't feel confident to propose more than a minimal "against cuts" message (Dave Nellist cited Germany's soft-left/Stalinoid Die Linke as a political model), and admit in advance that their votes won't be sufficient to register as a political fact, yet focus all their effort on scratching votes for a few candidates.

A minority candidate on a bold socialist programme may do a good job. A campaign which accepts that we have to vote Labour to keep out the Tories and BNP, but which focuses on organising in every area around adequate working-class policies for a fight back within the labour movement, in the workplaces, and on the streets, may do good.

However sympathetic we are to the motives and intentions of the TUSC people, I can't see how they can do much good.

As regular readers will know, AWL wrote to the incipient TUSC in November last year, saying that we "wanted to take part in the discussions about a coalition" but also wanted to say what we thought necessary for that coalition be useful:

• "A structure allowing open, lively, democratic political decision-making..."
• "A stand for the principle of independent working-class political representation [and for the] aim [of] a workers' government..."
• Clear answers on jobs, including nationalisation under workers' control;
• "A stand in favour of free movement of people across borders..."

We received, after much delay, a letter saying nothing on those issues, and giving no information on how or whether we could join the coalition, but asking us how many members we had on union Executives, and whether we had voted No2EU in the Euro-election. We replied, and have not heard back.

The "behind-closed-doors" character of TUSC has weakened it. Two bits of information I picked up in conversations outside the rally filled out this picture.

The Workers' Power group supports TUSC and is running a candidate in Vauxhall. Jeremy Drinkall, the candidate, told me that he has asked for TUSC support, and been told officially that TUSC will not support him because the Labour MP he is challenging, Kate Hoey, is in the RMT parliamentary group. (This although RMT is not in TUSC).

Dave Hill is the TUSC candidate in Brighton Kemptown. Despite that, he told me, his group, Socialist Resistance (the former ISG), never received a reply to its letter to TUSC asking to participate as a group.