10.06.1999

Assessing Euro ’99

Party notes

On behalf of the leadership of the Party - the Provisional Central Committee - I would like to congratulate all cells, members and supporters of our organisation who have contributed to our European election campaign. Under very difficult circumstances, we fought to win a space. Our organisation will shortly begin a thorough examination of our intervention at a members’ aggregate. I think that, overall, we should be proud of the battle we have conducted.

First, we were united that our organisation had to stand. There was no question that after the abject collapse of our Socialist Alliance bloc partners in the North West and London, that we were not going to fight. In Scotland, the Scottish Socialist Party could be critically supported as could be Socialist Alliance in West Midlands and the Alternative Labour List in East Midlands. Elsewhere the SLP could be given extremely critical support. Nevertheless, the main thing was to publicise the communist message: opposition to bomber Blair, opposition to the red-brown politics of Scargill and the need for a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales

Second, the campaign itself has been an effective one. We have been featured on national and regional television and radio reports of the election and in numerous local newspapers as well as The Guardian, Financial Times, The Independent and other national media. Our revamped website has been linked by the BBC’s own site after we launched our manifesto on it on May 21. It quadrupled its rate of ‘hits’ with over 1,000 in nine days. This dramatic acceleration of the rate of visits to our site - soon to be greatly expanded with archive and other material - is very gratifying and a tribute to the work of the comrades who have managed it. We must continue to develop the website as an active means of bringing people closer to the Party.

Pleasingly, in media reports we have featured as the fourth ‘fringe’ party - the Greens, the British National Party, Scargill’s SLP and us. Tellingly, in a ‘Week in Westminster’ the shared anti-Europe stance of the Socialist Labour Party and the BNP was highlighted. “The communists” were singled out for their opposition to Scargillism.

It has also been useful that the media have consistently reported the anti-democratic ban on our Party that forced us to stand under the ‘Weekly Worker’ banner. This publicity is useful as we plan to campaign vigorously against this exclusion in the coming months. Thousands of leaflets and stickers have been distributed and we are getting a steady stream of enquiries and new subscriptions.

For all these reasons, we should judge the campaign a success. From a standing start, our organisation has mounted a politically credible fight, solidly based on principle. It has underlined the political importance the CPGB accords to elections as relative high points of political interest and activity, given the state of contemporary politics.

There are, however, very important practical and political criticisms to be raised of our campaign. Politically and organisationally, we are clearly still amateurs. Quite dedicated and single-minded amateurs, but nevertheless woefully clumsy in our work. With more foresight and planning, we could have made more effective use of the opportunities afforded to us by the election to get our message across.

Thus, the fact that we had to begin from a standing start is actually a serious criticism of our campaign. The pathetic timidity of the rest of the Socialist Alliance bloc in London and North West England came as a real surprise. We have learned that hard lesson. Whatever unity initiatives we are subsequently involved in - such as the projected left slate for the London mayoral and assembly elections - we will have a far more detailed ‘plan B’, premised on what we now know about the others and their lack of guts.

Our ‘war aims’ going into this election were, first, a militant and democratic alternative to Scargillism. This is a continuation of a fight we have been waging against his ugly regime in the SLP for three years. Secondly, to give a political expression to the possible development of organised mass opposition to the war. This second aim has certainly been more problematic, as the movement failed to mobilise new layers. Again we were dealing with the old familiar forces who are not yet receptive to our revolutionary democratic politics.

These forces - the left as presently constituted - resemble frightened rabbits. The evolution of the Labour Party to the right has thrown auto-Labourism into crisis.

Faced with these watershed elections - the first all-UK contest using a form of PR - groups that assure us that the general population seethe with barely contained rage against the Blair regime have frozen. They have either been reduced to silence or - grotesquely - collapsed before Scargill. Remember, we are not talking about how individual leftists voted on June 10: as sects they present themselves as the leadership of the working class.

The increasingly beleaguered Socialist Party in England and Wales has called for a vote for the SSP in Scotland and the Socialist Alliance in the West Midlands. But what about the rest of the country?

Most groups seem to have been reduced to making fragmented, locally dictated responses that actually contradict their stated national perspectives. The SWP for example - while assuring us that it “would like to see a united electoral front of all socialist parties” (despite having undermined the concrete efforts to bring such a front about) - is calling for a vote for the Socialist Alliance in West Midlands, the Socialist Labour Party in London, the Scottish Socialist Party north of the border, and the Alternative Labour List in East Midlands.

What the method is here is anyone’s guess. And what voters in the rest of the UK - the overwhelming majority of the electorate in fact - were supposed to do on June 10 is equally a mystery.

In effect, practically the whole left is advocating a form of passive abstentionism, a graphic illustration of their irrelevance, political cowardice and programmatic incoherence. From serial abstainers like the SL/B through to left Labourites like Bob Pitt of What next?, the left has practically nothing to say. It is perhaps the premature silence of the grave.

In these dire circumstances for working class politics, the ‘Weekly Worker’ campaign has been a courageous stand. Despite the many criticisms that can be made of it, and the understandable frustrations with its limited nature, it represents the politics of the future.

Mark Fischer
national organiser