WeeklyWorker

11.07.2024
Fiona Lali, the only candidate of the newly- styled Revolutionary Communist Party.

Not marvellous at all

Carla Roberts looks at the deluded souls who are celebrating the low turnout, Labour’s poor share of the vote and the election of four petty bourgeois independents

It is rather odd to see so many on the left celebrating the election results - not because the left’s vote was so very good (it wasn’t), but because Labour’s vote was so very bad (not true either).

Andrew Murray, for example, writes in the Morning Star that “Starmer’s four-year war on the left now looks like a failure even in the terms by which its progenitors would insist that it be judged - winning votes.”1 Utter nonsense. The war on the left has been extremely successful from Starmer’s point of view - he has sufficiently transformed the Labour Party, which is now once again deemed fit by the ruling class to oversee capitalism on its behalf. There is no flight of capital, the entire mainstream media has adopted a broadly favourable attitude and the FTSE 100 index and sterling rose.

Tusc, the electoral front of the Socialist Party in England and Wales, lauds the “shallow social base of the new government” and the low turnout: “Never before, since the Labour Party first contested a majority of seats in the 1918 election, has the combined share for Labour and the Tories been so low.” The message: the government lacks the “stable social base” to enforce “the coming second age of austerity, privatisation, war and climate crisis retreats”, and so “the situation will not continue indefinitely”. Well, nothing does. But the implied ‘crisis of expectations’ seems extremely unlikely. Chiefly because there really are no expectations - Starmer promised next to nothing. Quite clever, really: any small improvements he now introduces will positively surprise.

Jackie Walker thinks it “a marvellous election in terms of the result”, because “the Labour vote went down in many places” and the fact that there are now “five excellent independent MPs in parliament” who ran on an explicitly pro-Gaza ticket.2

We very much doubt that Starmer will lose even two minutes’ sleep over the fact that more people voted for Labour under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 and 2017 and probably cares even less about the low turnout. But the election of the four additional independent MPs too is no slam dunk, from a communist perspective. Jeremy Corbyn - who, as expected, romped home in Islington North with 24,120 votes (49.2%) - might have announced at Saturday’s Palestine march that “parliament will now be very different. I will be joined by four great comrades who were also elected on a pro-Palestinian platform …” But will things be “very different”?

There is no party in parliament that fights explicitly for the interests of the organised working class. It is, of course, excellent that in many places, the horrific slaughter in Gaza is shaking up the establishment. Labour can no longer rely on the vast majority of Muslims to automatically vote for it. The organisation, Muslim Vote, successfully mobilised many British-Asian voters to choose candidates according to their stance on Palestine.

Muslim Vote

In addition to the four independents who won, candidates backed by Muslim Vote came second in over a dozen constituencies - sometimes a very close second, like Leanne Mohamed with 33.4% in Ilford North and Akhmed Yakoob with 33.2% in Birmingham Ladywood. The success of the campaign is a red rag for the right, naturally. It is a “glimpse into a horrifying future”, cries The Daily Telegraph, which warns of the “group’s sectarian insurgency over Gaza”.3 Muslim Vote certainly made a marginal difference in this election.

Of course, it is not only Muslim candidates the organisation supported. In Preston, for example, it backed Michael Lavalette (member of Counterfire, the split from the Socialist Workers Party) who came second with 21.8% of the vote. Andrew Feinstein came second in Keir Starmer’s seat of Holborn and St Pancras, where he polled a very decent 7,312 votes (18.9%), pretty much all of which are likely to have been former from Labour voters. But Starmer lost a lot more votes than that: he only got 18,841 votes this time, compared to the 38,641 people who voted for him in 2019 (64.5%). It was, however, never in doubt that he would keep his seat and those on the left who thought Feinstein had a realistic chance of winning were fooling themselves (and anybody who took them seriously).

Muslim Vote’s criteria4 led to quite a few questionable recommendations - where, for example, a Liberal Democrat was chosen over a candidate of the pro-Palestine left, because the former is a Muslim. In the Sheffield constituency of Hillsborough and Brightside, the organisation recommended that Muslims vote for the Green Party - and not Maxine Bowler, long-standing member of the SWP who stood as ‘Independent for Palestine’ and has undoubtedly done an awful lot more work on the issue than the Green candidate. As these recommendations only really mattered in areas with large Muslim populations, this was no problem for the eventual winner: Labour’s Gill Furniss.

The main question with the four independent MPs is exactly that - they are entirely independent. They most definitely do not form “the sixth largest party” in Britain,5 as the Telegraph fumes. None of them identify as socialist, as far as one can tell from their websites. Yes, they all talk about the need to defend the NHS and deal with the cost-of-living crisis, but who doesn’t? Ayoub Khan, who was elected in Birmingham Perry Barr, was until recently a councillor for the Liberal Democrats. Shockat Adam (Leicester South) runs his own optician’s practice and Adnan Hussain (Blackburn) used much of his campaign to talk about “assisting small businesses and enterprises in the town to create greater opportunities for young people”.6

They might be good on this or that issue - or they might not. They are accountable to nobody and will be voting with that worst possible political compass: their ‘conscience’. So they might vote with Jeremy Corbyn, when it comes to issues around Israel and Palestine. But how will they vote, when it comes to, say, abortion rights? Trans issues? Euthanasia? Crime and punishment? Nato’s proxy war in Ukraine? We are going to have to wait and see. This is clearly not the kind of principled, coherent voice the working class so desperately needs.

Galloway’s WPB

Someone who has been publicly speaking out against Muslim Vote is the Workers Party’s Craig Murray, who came third in Blackburn with 7,105 votes (18.3%) behind Labour’s Kate Hollern (10,386 votes or 26.7%) and Adnan Hussain’s 10,518 votes (27%). According to Murray,

Muslim Vote refused to endorse me, because I’m not a Muslim. But I’m much more pro-Palestine and have been campaigning for Muslim rights for decades, so this feels like a strange rejection. The majority of those who voted for me probably were Muslims and didn’t do what the mosque told them. We should not copy the way that Labour has been hijacked and controlled the Muslim vote - that does not seem a very legitimate way. Blackburn is extremely segregated - there are wards which are 99% Muslim - and this election has opened my eyes to a lot of issues around electioneering.7

As we have pointed out, Muslim Vote did not support only Muslim candidates, but nevertheless Murray points to a certain truth here.

Some readers might disagree with our decision to include the WPB under the left heading. Edmund Griffiths, for example, excludes them from his excellent overview of leftwing election results since 1841,8 and there is plenty in the WPB manifesto we disagree with - its red, white and blue patriotism, social conservatism and its Fabian socialism. In the 1930s Fabians combined elitist concern for the poor with technocratic gradualism and an admiration for Joseph Stalin. In that spirit, the Fabians called for the collaboration of “all productive classes”: workers, farmers and industrial capitalists. The WPB refers to “the old war between workers and managers” that it wants to overcome by appealing to common national interests.9 Hence the numerous mentions of “one nation, one class”. There is nothing wrong, of course, with trying to win over other sections of the population, but not by subordinating ourselves and our programme to them - which, we would argue, the WPB does (just like the Fabians did).

Still, we would also argue that the WPB is clearly on the left and, if any of its candidates had won a seat in parliament, it would have had to be seen as a victory for the pro-Palestine movement, not a victory for their anti-trans rantings, anti-immigration views or other reactionary parts of their programme.

The 154 candidates fielded by WPB collectively polled a total of 210,194 votes, though the average WPB vote of 1,364 votes per constituency disguises the fact that the results varied rather dramatically, depending, we should honestly say, on the percentage of British-Asians living in each area. In Richmond and Northallerton, for example, Louise Anne Dickens polled a measly 90 votes. In the majority of seats it contested, the WPB did as well (or, more precisely, as badly) as much of the rest of the left: it got a few hundred votes.

But in a number of areas with a large Muslim population WPB came second: for example, in Birmingham Yardley, where the converted Muslim and disability campaigner, Jody McIntyre, polled 10,582 votes and was only just beaten by witch-finder and sitting Labour MP, Jess Phillips, by a small margin of 693 votes.10 James Giles polled 26.6% in Birmingham Hodge Hill and George Galloway himself came a close second in Rochdale with 11,587 votes (29%) - but was apparently so disappointed that he refused to go to the count in order to avoid having to congratulate Labour’s Paul Waugh (who won with 13,027 votes, or 33%).

In another 22 constituencies, WPB candidates polled more than 5%. Their claim to be “the sixth largest Britain-wide party by votes cast” is certainly more realistic than the claim that the ‘independents’ form any such thing, though we do note the WPB’s emphasis on “Britain-wide”: this caveat excludes, for example, Sinn Féin (which polled 210,891 votes in the 18 seats it contested).11

However, I get the distinct impression that WPB comrades are not happy with the results. “We can hold our heads high,” they write post-election.12 “Many, however, will be understandably disappointed we will not have an MP in the next parliament.”

It seems George Galloway was not kidding when he repeatedly said during the election campaign that they were expecting to win about a dozen seats (later adjusted to a “handful”). Chris Williamson, who stood in Derby, coming third with 5,205 votes (13.9%), admitted to “getting a little carried away. I thought we’d get over the line. There were people queuing up to have their pictures taken with me.”13 The whole WPB manifesto is, of course, written in the style of ‘what we will do when we come to power’ rather than placing demands on the current state. This looks even more delusional in the cold light of post-election day.

And the rest

SPEW really should do the right thing and put its electoral front, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, out of its misery. It was clinging on for dear life during the Corbyn years, but, having lost its only union affiliate, the RMT, it surely is now well on its way to sect nirvana. The run-up to the elections was bad enough, when virtually no serious organisation took up the increasingly frantic attempts by Tusc election agent Clive Heemskirk to make it a viable electoral umbrella. The membership application of the Oehlerites of the Spartacist League made it a laughing stock on the left.14

The aim was to stand 100 candidates in order to reach the “fair media coverage threshold” that would have given Tusc the right to a TV broadcast. In the end, no more than 40 candidates could be found - getting an average of 314 votes (former Labour MP Dave Nellist came top of its list with 797 votes, or 2.2 %).15

Tusc and SPEW have recently added their support to Collective, the political wing of Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project, which states that it wants to “eventually transform into a political party”.16 We do not expect any such party to be remotely principled or based on democratic control by members, platform rights and representative conferences. But at least this is rather more interesting than Jeremy Corbyn’s declaration that we just have to “keep on marching”.

We hear he is still dragging his feet a bit, but surely he must now be under immense pressure by friends and allies to properly and officially join Collective. In which case its current membership of a measly 220 people (on the website, this is rather honestly featured as 220 financial “contributions”) would no doubt expand rapidly.

Mention should also go to Fiona Lali, the only candidate of the newly-styled Revolutionary Communist Party. She got, for the left, a good 1,791 votes (4.1%) in Stratford and Bow. Not quite the level of support that would warrant her organisation’s excited prediction that there will be a “British revolution” in “five to ten years’ time”.17 Of course, she did not “run this election campaign under our own banner”, as the RCP paper The Communist breathlessly claims, but as yet another independent. She actually stood against two other leftwingers: former RMT official Steve Hedley (who also stood as an independent, polling 375 votes, or 0.9%); and the Workers Party’s Halima Khan (3,274 votes, or 7.5%). Incidentally, attempts by the local left to cohere around one candidate were somewhat railroaded: the RCP did not participate in the hustings, while Halima Khan lost against Hedley - but she stood anyway.

In Manchester, Caitriona Rylance stood for Communist Future, polling 131 votes. Despite standing on an openly communist programme (despite its rather abstract nature), she did no worse than other leftwing candidates who once again stood on programmes which can only be described as ‘motherhood and apple pie’ - for example, Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party (its 12 candidates polled an average of 301 votes), the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain (14 candidates, average 187 votes), the new Transform Party (two candidates, average 298) or the Alliance for Green Socialism (two candidates, average 189).

Labour left

Lastly, let us take a look at what remains of the ‘left’ inside the Labour Party. Zarah Sultana spells out the extremely unambitious plans of the so-called Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs in an email sent out by Momentum:

I want the new Labour government to outline a bold, transformative agenda to tackle the crises we face. That includes scrapping the two-child benefit cap, introducing wealth taxes to fund our crippling public services, implementing the New Deal for Working People in full, and upholding international law by ending Britain’s supply of arms to Israel’s brutal war on Gaza.

It seems that Momentum has struck a deal with the SCG and now operates as its social media wing - John McDonnell, Olivia Blake and Mish Rahman were speaking in a (very dull) Momentum Zoom meeting on July 8, repeating pretty much verbatim Sultana’s demands. It is perhaps not surprising that McDonnell is hooking up with an organisation that was used by its founder, Jon Lansman, to implement the witch-hunt (for example, by denying Momentum membership to those who had been unfairly expelled from Labour) in the campaign against Corbyn. Momentum, of course, has now gone full circle and did not support Jeremy Corbyn on July 4 - despite him being its raison d’être.

Both Lansman and McDonnell were united in bending over backwards to the pro-Zionist right in and outside the party, calling for “zero tolerance” on any charges of anti-Semitism - when, of course, most of those charges had been blown up, weaponised and were, in the vast majority of cases, comments critical of Israel. The current situation in the Middle East shows that this ‘anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ campaign had two main aims: firstly, getting rid of Corbyn and the left, secondly, delegitimising all critics of Israel. Any pro-Palestinian protest can now safely be dismissed as ‘anti-Semitic’ - and, boy, are they making use of this weapon!

It seems that Zarah Sultana, who kept a well-advised distance from Momentum in the past, is now fully on board. That is a real shame and perhaps she is not as politically astute as one might have hoped. Or perhaps it is simple career mathematics. Which makes her decision even more unfortunate.

  1. morningstaronline.co.uk/article/failure-victory-starmer.↩︎

  2. Not the Andrew Marr show July 7.↩︎

  3. The Sunday Telegraph July 7.↩︎

  4. themuslimvote.co.uk/the-muslim-vote-candidate-selection-methodology.↩︎

  5. The Daily Telegraph July 6.↩︎

  6. The Guardian July 8.↩︎

  7. Not the Andrew Marr show July 7.↩︎

  8. edmundgriffiths.com/leftge.html.↩︎

  9. workerspartybritain.org/manifesto-britain-deserves-better.↩︎

  10. The Sunday Telegraph July 7.↩︎

  11. www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/regions/N92000002.↩︎

  12. workerspartybritain.org/general-election-2024.↩︎

  13. Not the Andrew Marr show July 7.↩︎

  14. ‘Farcical Labour Party mark two’ Weekly Worker February 8: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1477/farcical-labour-party-mark-two.↩︎

  15. The votes of all leftwing candidates can incidentally be found on this useful website: averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2024/07/left-of-labour-general-election-results.html.↩︎

  16. we-are-collective.org.↩︎

  17. communist.red/how-the-communists-in-britain-are-preparing-for-power.↩︎