Working-class socialists are as yet a small minority, Our ideas get a sympathetic hearing among wide circles of working-class people, but as yet it is a tentative, sceptical hearing.
It is a hearing made tentative and sceptical because of people's scepticism, shaped by successive setbacks, about the labour movement being able to mobilise to change society, and because of their disappointments about successive left-sounding political promises.
To establish our name, "Alliance for Workers' Liberty", previously absent from elections, as something solid and reliable enough to vote for in this general election was always going to be difficult.
The AWL candidate in Camberwell and Peckham, Jill Mountford, got a poor result: 75 votes, 0.2%. (To put that in context, the 2001 general election, standing as part of the Socialist Alliance, our candidates in Nottingham and Islington received 3.8% and 2.9%.) That does not mean that the election campaign was wasted effort. We explained basic socialist ideas to thousands of people; made new contacts and sympathisers; educated and trained ourselves in doorstep and street-stall discussions.
Unlike almost all other candidates, we argued the case head-on against the anti-immigration demagogy which filled papers like the Mail, the Express, and the Sun in the weeks before the election, and which the main parties all pandered to.
In short, we did a lot of the basic work of socialists: taking socialist ideas to working-class people. Whether people who sympathised with those ideas would vote for us this time was always going to be open to doubt.
Camberwell and Peckham was always going to be a difficult constituency to get a good left-wing vote in. Even in 2001, the Socialist Alliance did not do well in Camberwell and Peckham, despite a campaign in the constituency much more energetic than in most.
We chose the constituency for a "demonstration candidate" despite that, because of other advantages - a good local candidate, a central location, a heavily working-class constituency, a New Labour figurehead to oppose.
There was a radical shift in political conditions between our decision to stand an AWL candidate - in 2007, in conditions of strong working-class alienation from the Labour Party and little political differentation between Labour and the Tories - and the Labour/Tory electoral polarisation which took place in the weeks before this general election. That fundamentally limited us.
Beyond that, the result shows that we just did not have enough people on the doorsteps and on the streets, often enough, to establish a new political identity, lacking any national publicity, with the electorate.
Also, we focused our efforts on making political contacts, selling papers, and so on. That gives us a lot of contacts to be followed up by paper-sales and visiting in the coming months. But it had the flipside of making the campaign less ruthlessly focused on identifying, securing, and mobilising votes. In elections, that matters.
We will continue to be out and about on the streets and doorsteps of Camberwell and Peckham, advocating socialist ideas, and seeking to draw all those who supported or showed interest in our campaign into that basic work of socialist agitation and education.
Comments
There's nothing to disagree with ... apart from
There's nothing to disagree with in that report, with the things that are observed and pointed out. Doesn't go in to what the campaign is supposed to have demonstrated, in terms of election work. It's true that a lot of people focus on winning votes, when in this state of labour movement organisation, i think it absolutely right to see elections as one window to do organising and agitational work.
What about the message of AWL in the terms of working-class political representation, how that will come about, based on what democratic structures, what social base? I see nothing in Jill's candidacy that corresponds with what awl activists would presumably be saying to people elsewhere, or through the current paper in one of the front page slogans: "re-elect Labour, but don't trust Brown". Pretty astounding also, really, in the sense that I think it's possible (and actively preferable) to not spend one's energies standing election candidates as 'demonstrations',but rather support a legitimate local labour candidate, and promise as socialists that we will act to have Brown booted out (not just not trusted!) along with New Labour personnel and policies. I agree with Workers' Liberty, that a pretty decisive fight mounted by the trade unions and socialists in the LP, is one necessary step towards working-class political representation - and the LRC is surely the vehicle for this.
I also agree with what I think the group still supports alongside this: engaging with radical, socialist and trade union-based initiatives that oppose New Labour from the left, independently and outside of the LP structures. This is most significantly represented by TUSC. With all its limitations, its problematic and discouraging history - and even its potential futility - it is important at least in so far as it involves some very good trade union activists and the two biggest socialist groups, albeit the SWP half-heartedly.
Surely working along these lines over the election period would have served the labour movement better, and advanced the awl's perspectives more widely, among layers of socialist activists on the streets. and the seriousness and capability of the group to act on its perspectives would have surely been demonstrated to the 'new' people being canvassed, conveyed in either of those contexts.
Maybe one among the reasons that the vote was so low, was that 'the campaign' came across as simply an organisation trying to build itself, for 'its own sake', however necessary that task also is. Tempted even to say standing a candidate off the back of a low key internal decision, trying to draw in and work with no other left forces really, and being rejected by those that were approached, like the rmt, has set the group back somewhat, and attracted derision and scorn rather than demonstrated anything particularly useful.
Also standing your own (small group's) activist is not the only way to agitate for socialist ideas around the elections - obviously.
(the materials i personally distributed on the Isle of Wight LP stalls I ran in Ryde, and gave out on Mayday, can be found on the save vestas blog. The Secretary of the Ryde Trades Council has suggested that the TC pay for the newsletter, which we'll discuss tomorrow at our meeting. We both did the LP election stalls as Trades Council activists, neither of us being current LP members, the other comrade - 72 years old - never having been. We have got a lot of contacts through this work too, and i think a lot of respect for being open communists trying to rally a vote for the Unison branch secretary (endorsed by the LRC, to which the CLP is affiliated), in an area that hates Gordon Brown, but has always been stuck in a cycle of Tories and Lib Dems.
Socialist alliance
Hi Robin,
A problem with your analysis is about the nature of TUSC. It was set up in such a way as to exclude left groups other than the Socialist Party and the SWP - and indeed any input independent of these groups at all - and in fact went on to explicitly reject applications to stand candidates under its banner (eg Workers Power's Jeremy Drinkall in Vauxhall). Why would we want to have set ourselves up to be excluded in that way?
In line with this, it's not quite true that the RMT "rejected" support for Jill. The RMT's London Transport Regional Council, made up of delegates representing Tube and other TfL branches, voted to support her candidacy - but this was vetoed by the national executive... on the grounds that she wasn't endorsed by TUSC!
We need a new alliance of socialists, but we won't get one by pretending that TUSC, at least as currently set up, is it or anything like it.
Sacha