02.05.2001

Salford

Oldham in our sights

Electoral work is moving up a gear in Salford, where Peter Grant of the CPGB is our prospective parliamentary candidate. Leafleting has now been started in all wards of the constituency and a regular Saturday stall is being held on Salford market, with leaflets, balloons, badges, petitions and speeches relayed over our public address system.

Open weekly campaign organising meetings have been established and it has now been agreed to extend these in order that a political discussion can take place each week. At the last meeting, this was on the subject of ?The race card and the general election?. Discussion naturally focused on the situation in nearby Oldham, on which the national news media had feasted during the preceding week after a group of Asian youth had allegedly declared a ?no-go area? for whites.

This had been seized upon too by the fascist British National Party, which has announced that its leader, Nick Griffin, will contest the Oldham seat held by the Labour MP and junior minister, Michael ?nine homes? Meacher. Griffin has stated that the key demands of the newly respectable BNP will be support for the police and for Asian leaders to ?restrain their hotheads?. Meanwhile, the BNP?s ostensible rival, the National Front, has embarked upon an auxiliary role based on marches in the town.

The situation has been building up for some time, with the vociferous local police chief many times repeating his assertion that the majority of reported racial attacks in the town are by Asians upon whites. His latest offered statistic is 62% in that direction. Community leaders retort that the figures are false because Asians do not report most attacks - believing that the police will take no action and will even respond with hostility to the complainants.

CPGB contributors to the debate argued that the situation in Oldham should be approached from the position that we have a split in the working class, which the forces of reaction are seeking to deepen and exploit and which the forces of the state, notably the police, will use as an excuse to impose more draconian forms of control on the whole working class. The Socialist Alliance should intervene in Oldham, by standing a candidate. This is an action which the Greater Manchester SA had originally considered, but rejected, on the grounds of ?lack of resources?.

Our campaign should be based upon arguing for united black and white working class defence patrols, and for no support to the police, alongside propaganda explaining the real reasons for the deprivation that is endemic in this depressed town: ie, the ravages of capital. We must not just sloganise, ?Don?t vote Nazi?. This abandons our class and implicitly calls upon them to vote for their New Labour attackers, thus permitting the fascists to portray themselves as the only radical alternative.

The majority of Socialist Workers Party speakers disagreed with this approach, stressing in particular that the most important consideration should be avoiding splitting the working class vote where fascists could be the beneficiaries. A creditable BNP performance would, they claimed, give the Nazis a massive boost. Other SWP speakers were unhappy at the concept of the situation being characterised as a split in the working class. The victims of racism are exclusively blacks, one comrade insisted.

A CPGB proposal that Salford SA call for a special general meeting of the GMSA to consider standing a candidate in Oldham did not find any wider support. However, Mary Black of the SWP, the Salford campaign organiser, reported that a Socialist Alliance has now been set up in Oldham. It will have on its agenda at its next meeting the question of whether to stand a candidate in the seat.

John Pearson