17.06.1999

No breakthrough

Party notes

So, there was no breakthrough for Scargill in the European elections. Standing in all 11 regions, his organisation was only able to poll 0.87%. In London, the party did marginally better with a more credible 1.7%. This relatively healthy ‘blip’ is explained by a number of factors, not least the fact that Scargill himself headed the list in the capital and spent the necessary money to mail three million households.

The backing of the Socialist Workers Party in London (as well as the shamefaced support from others such as the Socialist Party) will have counted for little - in any part of the country. The SWP did not campaign for Scargill. Indeed - in common with the general public - the majority of its politically dumbed down membership barely knew there was an election taking place.

As an organisation, the SWP has sunk no roots in any significant section of society. This accounted for its ignominious collapse in the face of the announcement of Scargill’s pole position on the London SLP list and its call for a vote for this sad rump on the basis of its alleged ‘viability’ compared to the SWP, even in alliance with other forces of the left.

The people who did support Socialist Labour are mostly unorganisable by the SLP. First, because Scargill’s successive waves of paranoid purges has ensured that the SLP has no infrastructure that can integrate that small percentage of its voters who might have expressed an interest in becoming further involved.

Second, these 80-odd thousand are atomised individuals. Scargill’s vote represents no mass movement, no wave of militancy in the trade unions finding electoral expression. If this were the case, his lack of national organisation going into the elections would not have mattered so much. He could have come out the other side having built a viable structural skeleton composed of militants experienced in building campaigns and organisations.

Clearly, Scargill’s vote was an expression of a vestigial sentiment amongst some small sections of the left and the wider population. For these elements, his name is still synonymous with the Great Strike of 1984-85 (and to a lesser extent with the upsurge around the miners in 1992). Scargill fought these elections harking back to the 1970s. As his own history underlines, these already inadequate politics were hopelessly dated by the mid-1980s, let alone now. His clumsy attempt to give his politics a contemporary cutting edge - that of militant anti-Europeanism - failed totally.

We were not alone in highlighting the parallels between Scargill’s pronouncements on the “Common Market” and the platforms of the ultra-right. His attempt to position his organisation to gain from any left-inclined, anti-European backlash has fallen flat on its face. He is clearly not plugging into any real sentiment on the left with these tactics: it is the right that has articulated anti-EU prejudices.

Therefore, Scargill’s real victory in this election has nothing to do with the SLP vote, no matter what up-beat spin he subsequently puts on the result. As we have emphasised, he has positioned himself well in the fight for the leadership of the left wing of the workers’ movement. Despite his low poll, his has been the only national leftwing electoral challenge. He pigheadedly refused cooperation with any other section of the left - even when this could have resulted in SLP electoral successes.

The man is clearly out for political monopoly for himself and his hare-brained national socialist schemas. This is what has driven the SLP project forward and may still see it pose a real danger to our movement. In this, we should admire Scargill’s guts in comparison with most of the left, whatever we think of his politics.

We have used the phrase ‘labour dictator’ to characterise Scargill’s ambitions. His vote has done him little good in the attempt to break into mainstream politics. It has certainly strengthened his project of political domination of the rest of the left, however. Next year’s London mayoral and assembly elections will be interesting. SWP apparatchiks have been assuring their rank and file that the London Socialist Alliance project was scuppered to avoid “splitting the vote”. Will the SWP split the vote in 2000 if Scargill refuses any electoral agreement and presses ahead with an SLP slate? Can anyone imagine that he will not adopt such a course, having seen how easily most of the rest of the left can be faced down?

Our militant opposition to Scargillism must not evolve into a mirror image of his sectarianism. Again, the parallel with that other labour dictator, Lassalle, is instructive. While Marx vehemently mocked the man’s pretensions to a divine right to rule, he recognised that he had the real merit of having revived and to a certain extent reconstituted the workers’ movement in Germany after a period of defeat.

We must take a similar balanced view of that small sliver of our class who vote for Scargill in today’s conditions. They are clearly not voting for bureaucratic arbitrariness, the madcap politics of the Stalin Society or the prospect of a ‘socialist’ island prison. On some level, these votes represent an inarticulate opposition to the existing order, to Blairism and capitalism. Communists must evolve serious tactics to intersect with them and lead them in the direction of genuinely revolutionary politics.

Mark Fischer
national organiser