Good vote in Derry

Submitted by martin on 12 May, 2010 - 9:47

Almost the only non-Labour socialist candidate in the election to do positively well was Eamonn McCann in Derry.

He got 7.7% of the poll in the Foyle constituency, more than double the 3.6% he won on a similar platform in 2005.

McCann has been a socialist activist in Derry since the 1960s, for most of that time loosely associated with the British SWP. In the election, standing under the banner "People before Profit", he declared: "We stand for the interests of the working class, the marginalised and oppressed.

"We believe that it is through organising in communities, workplaces and colleges that we can best advance...

"We go beyond Orange versus Green to speak for the common interests of all who feel left behind by the peace process".

In Northern Ireland, where every political party is more or less explicitly communal, Catholic or Protestant - except arguably the very bourgeois Alliance party - this increased vote for some sort of working-class unity is a step forward.

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