10.05.2000

Party notes

LSA momentum

A fully attended meeting of the London Socialist Alliance steering committee on May 9 reviewed our intervention in the Greater London Assembly elections on May 4 and started to make some plans for where the alliance goes from here.

All comrades who spoke agreed that the LSA had been an outstanding success. First, because its vote was generally respectable - in a few individual constituencies, very respectable. Second, because the unity displayed in the campaign was an important indicator of the revolutionary left at last taking its responsibilities to the working class seriously. Mike Marquesee commented that a number of prominent lefts in the Labour Party had confidently predicted that - post the election - the LSA would once again fracture into its constituent parts. In fact, the sort of frivolous sectarianism that has done so much to hamper and discredit the revolutionary left could be left behind in the forthcoming period.

This is not to say that everyone agrees. Far from it. The discussion on the result revealed some sharply counterposed interpretations of the campaign and the direction it should take now.

Naturally, comrades from the Socialist Party were at pains to claim the result as a vindication of their erratic gyrations on the election (a series of contortions so convoluted that one of their leading members in the capital - Arwyn Thomas - actually ended up stranded on the rival slate of the Campaign for Tube Privatisation). Originally, the SP demanded that the LSA back the CATP list and "only stand LSA candidates in the 14 constituencies, which is where we can best build support for socialist ideas". It was only in The Socialist of April 14 that comrade Jim Horton finally announced that his organisation had - "with reservations" - decided to recommend "a vote for the LSA in the top-up list section".

Speaking for the SP on May 9, comrade Horton suggested that the smaller vote for the LSA list in comparison with our average for constituency candidates justified this stance.

This desperate salvage operation was firmly rejected by the majority of the meeting. The plethora of other lists and voter confusion was cited. It was also pointed out that without taking our challenge seriously - that is, by seeking to make a national impact - the inexorable logic would have been to dramatically scale down our intervention, to miss a unique opportunity for the left. As LSA chair and Communist Party member Marcus Larsen put it, "We would have ended up standing in just one constituency."

Which perhaps would have suited the SP down to the ground - as long as it was its constituency, of course. The narrow sectarianism of Taaffe's beleaguered little sect produces some weird self-aggrandisement. For instance, the latest issue of the Committee for a Workers International journal, the International Bulletin (April), carries a report on work in Britain by the SP's Hannah Sell, originally submitted to European members of the international executive committee of the CWI, meeting over the weekend of March 31-April 2.

Comrade Sell's short, mundane report includes a section on elections. Here - in full - is what she writes:

"Many areas of Britain don't have elections this year. In May we are standing in 30 council seats that do. We are hopeful that we will get a third councillor, Rob Windsor, elected in Coventry. We are also standing, under the banner of Lewisham Socialist Alliance, Ian Page for the Greenwich and Lewisham seat for the London Assembly in May."

We have no way of knowing what the participants in the meeting said about the comrade's rather selective report. One useful question might have been - what planet did comrade Sell think they were actually delegates from? Did she hope that they might never have heard of the LSA? Did she really believe that the difficult questions posed by the SP's orientation to the unity project in London could be circumvented by silence? Yet in its own way, this wacky, sectarian refusal to even mention the name of the LSA underlines what we have written about the SP - that, despite the clumsy denials of its Taaffeite loyalists, its change of line on the elections was the result of internal crisis and struggle.

For example, we were told that the switch to backing the LSA came at the SP political committee meeting on April 5 - just three days after the close of the European IEC meeting. More tellingly, the semi-detached SPer Dave Nellist had already explicitly called for an LSA vote at the Socialist Alliance network conference on March 25 (Weekly Worker March 30). It is a welcome development that SP comrades are now more fully engaged in the LSA - reflected by the fact that the organisation has at last pledged a token amount of money to the campaign - £100! However, as evidenced by the May 9 LSA meeting, tensions clearly remain.

General criticisms were made of a certain loss of momentum in the campaign, our inability to integrate new contacts and a lack of real emphasis on our list members as an essential corollary to the pressing local constituency leafleting and canvassing. Comrades from the Alliance for Workers' Liberty also correctly pointed to a failure to prioritise finding out the trade union affiliations of new supporters, something that would have greatly facilitated taking the battle into the ranks of the organised workers' movement.

A far more important line of division was introduced in a brief discussion on the Green Party and its electoral base. How can the LSA compete for the support of those who voted green? There seems one school of thought that suggests that it is irrelevant, as they are not workers anyway. There is another that implies that the LSA accommodate politically to this type of politics - "The trouble was that we weren't green enough", as Alan Thornett of the International Socialist Group put it.

Clearly, this is an important difference that must be debated at more length. Communist Party comrades will fight any drift to accommodate Greenism, a trend outside the workers' movement which contains within it deeply reactionary politics.

The meeting agreed on Sunday June 11 as the date for an LSA conference, to bring together activists from the local campaigns, political and trade union organisations that support the LSA and - hopefully - new forces attracted to us after the election success. The LSA will also write to the other left organisations that stood slates - effectively ensuring that no left candidate would be elected - pressing on them yet again the urgent need for principled unity.