WHAT ELECTORALLY IS TO BE DONE?
Hilary Wainwright  

The Cabinet resignations of Robin Cook and Clare Short get all the media attention but there are other resignations and expressions of despair that are of far greater significance for the future of the Labour Party and of the left. Consider a letter that Manchester Councillor, Kath Fry wrote to the Prime Minister after loss of seven Labour seats – six to the Lib-Dems and one to the Greens – on the city council. This trend, repeated across the country, cannot, she told the PM, be dismissed as `mid-term blues.’ `We have substantial and irrefutable evidence that people voted Liberal Democrat or Green as a protest against the war in Iraq and your pursuit of Conservative policies.’ She tries to ring a loud alarm bell in his ears: ` I have been a member of the party for nearly 30 years. It is very hard for me to continue to work with the same energy and enthusiasm because I am so disillusioned about the policies being pursued by you nationally and our lack of influence over those policies. I know that this despair is shared by many of my colleagues and that many of our long-standing members have left the party or are on the brink of doing so’.

Activist frustration with Labour governments is not new. Hundreds of party members threw away their party cards in disgust over Harold Wilson’s anti trade union laws and support for the US in Vietnam. But at that time, the government’s shift to the right was of mainly internal importance, a betrayal of the Party conference decisions. And there was enough democracy left in party structures for a strong core of activists to feel with confidence, that they could hold the leadership to account, which in the 1970’s they did. Now the leadership has moved so far away from the party’s original values and has so effectively destroyed what limited democratic mechanisms there were, that vast swathes of the electorate – enough to win or lose elections - are voting for alternatives. In the 60’s and most of the 70’s, the Party leadership could take most of its traditional voters for granted and concentrate on the mainly middle class, centrist floating vote in marginal seats. Last months local elections showed that is no longer the case. Now the growing floating vote , reinforced by the large, previously taken for granted Muslim vote, is in significant part, a protest vote sharing values in common with the left of the party. The end result is that the left is slapped in the face by voters who share their views. Chris Paul, a Labour candidate defeated in a previously Labour seat, faced constant remarks like this one: `I know you’ve been trying to stop Mr Blair - but you’ve failed. My
daughter voted Greenpeace (sic) last time but we’ve always voted Labour
… but now she’s saying “I told you so!.” We can’t vote
Labour while Blair’s in charge.”

This puts the Labour left in an almost untenable situation. The left’s commitment to the party goes back to Keir Hardie’s comment in 1918, on the new party constitution. He argued that this amalgam of the trade unions and the party organisations of the Independent Labour Party, although putting the left in a subordinate position, nevertheless provided the left with a captive working class audience. It would prove to be, he concluded, ` a short cut to socialism.’ It turned out to be one of the longest short cuts in history.
What last months local elections showed and the experience of councillors and would be councillors like Kath Fry and Chris Paul, is that the behaviour of the leading actors has driven the audience away; the distinctive message of the secondary parts cannot be heard above the leaderships increasingly hollow sounding voices.

But, in England at any rate, that cannot be the end of the matter, with a call on the Labour left to leave and join/start a socialist/green alternative. For two reasons. First, because there is no credible alternative – I will return to this. But secondly because for the Labour left to pack their bags and go nowhere is exactly what Tony Blair wants. It would complete his project of thoroughly emptying the party of all political life and debate – on the model of his beloved US. The shockingly undemocratic suspension of George Galloway is one part of this process; but on the whole Blair would prefer the left simply to drift away and the unions to break their organised links – though still coughing up a regular election donation. Finally, what would be effectively a destruction of the Labour party would not benefit the left. At the present time in England, in the absence of any credible alternative, if Blair gets away with destroying the Labour Party it is the right which will y benefit, even if the Lib-Dems get a significant electoral filip. As we saw over their vacillations on the war and over privatisation, their leadership is too torn between filling the vacuum on the left and wooing Tory voters to maintain strong political stands. They are not a powerful enough progressive force to halt the advance of a renewed racist right (both through the BNP and an increasingly desperate Tory Party) – boosted by the poisonous political atmosphere created by Blair’s war against terrorism and Blunkett’s war against asylum seekers.

It is the stealthy but steady growth of the BNP which must shake the English left inside and outside the Labour Party, into thinking how to unite forces at electoral time, the moment when these two parts of the left normally part company. I’m thinking not simply of anti-BNP campaigning, exposing and challenging their racism and their fascism. That is important. But when their propaganda is tying racism and xenophobia to issues such as the selling off of council housing, unemployment, cuts in council services, we have to put forward a positive alternative to the policies of both the government and the majority of Labour Councils, if we want to stop them in their tracks. We have to be able to put it forward at election time, the time when the mass of people concentrate briefly on questions of political power. And if we are to be listened to over the hype of right wing electoral propaganda we have to have campaigned on our alternative policies constantly and around the events that are touching people’s everyday lives.

An electoral alternative does not necessarily mean standing alternative candidates. It is the question of candidates, in the absence of PR, and the coalitions that that makes possible, that normally divides the left. But is not the idea of an electoral intervention that presents a political alternative but doesn’t stand candidates a contradiction in terms? Not if we recognise the degree of unity there is across the left on public services, democracy, anti-racism, peace and anti –militarism, the dangers to the planet, plus the general openness to unrancourous debate where we differ. And also not if we recognise the potential for sustained campaigning coalitions in most of our cities and towns. A working model is underway on Tyneside: the Public Services Alliance. It’s an alliance of users and workers to defend and to improve public services but increasingly it is taking on related issues of racism and militarism. It is driven and sustained by local unions which insist on making the issue of alternatives central to their resistance to the Council’s attempts to privatise the city’s services. Their campaigns included industrial action, a city wide demonstration, a high media profile, educational mass meetings, a delegation to the European Social Forum and most recently concerted campaigning against the BNP. But in the end they found they had to take their campaign on to an electoral level. `The Council is run by a political party that has made commitments against privatisation but tries to drive through a privatisation agenda on every front. We decided we had to challenge it politically,’ said UNISON branch secretary Kenny Bell. But the PSA includes people from the Labour Party, the Greens, the Socialist Alliance, the Socialist Party and many independents. Supporting or standing particular candidates would destroy it. Its solution was to draw up a common manifesto and then campaign around that, including getting the commitment to it of different candidates. ` We can’t predict where this will go,’ says Bell, `that’s the nature of the situation. It could lead to reclaiming the Labour Party. It could lead to developing an alternative, or some mixture of the two.’ In Newcastle as potentially elsewhere, it is the increasingly political nature of many of the unions that makes this broad based political strategy possible. As well as being evident on the issue of privatisation, this is also apparent over the war where a number of unions, NATFHE, ASLEF and the CWU, for example, played a very active role in the Stop the War Coalition.

Interestingly, it is a history of campaigning coalitions that laid the foundations for the Scottish Socialist Party. And it is those day to day campaigning roots which sustain its present success (see news pages).
`A change in the electoral system did n’t guaruntee success. We did a colossal amount of grassroots campaigning over the years before we became a party. There was also a greater preparedness to coalesce and work together, to set aside our ideological differences in order to maximise unity.

Red Pepper itself owes its origins to the attempt to create a coalition which bridged the Labour and independent – and Green left – through the Socialist Conferences in the 1980’s. The energy for these came from the spontaneous coalitions created in the course of the 18 month miners strike. We too imagined these might lead either to the left `refounding the Labour Party’ or to the emergence of a credible left alternative. It wasn’t for us to prescribe.
It achieved neither. But that doesn’t mean that the principle of such a cross over of the left was wrong. It needs working at. And it needs to take electoral politics seriously (which at that time we did not). Those are the double lessons that I draw from last month’s watershed local elections. Certainly now is the time for widespread discussion about what is to be done. Red Pepper will open its pages and its website and electronic discussion to your views and experiences.