09.05.2001

Liaison Committee cancelled

It's the state, stupid

Just four weeks to go. The Socialist Alliance election campaign will no doubt pick up considerable pace now. With the end of the interregnum between May Day and Tony Blair's request to the monarch to dissolve parliament, the phoney war is over.

This weekend, Socialist Alliance activists across England and Wales, and Scottish Socialist Party supporters in Scotland will be wearing their voices and shoe leather thin as they get the socialist message across to a quarter of Britain's constituencies.

And in Birmingham, the Socialist Alliance executive will meet to fine-tune our election strategy and decide upon our collective tasks up to the June 7 poll.

Originally, the May 12 meeting was due to be a full Liaison Committee meeting. However, reluctance from many to attend or support this meeting, combined with difficulties in finding an appropriate venue, led to it being shelved. I think this is a disappointing outcome, though by no means a blow to our election campaign as it stands. But why the reluctance for a full Liaison Committee meeting?

At the core of it is the continuing amateurism and localism throughout the Socialist Alliance. Of course, it is early days yet, and we have come a long way from the pessimistic, low-horizon perspective of standing just a handful of candidates across the country, originally peddled by the likes of the International Socialist Group and John Nicholson. Now comrade Nicholson is a much keener advocate of our ambitious intervention and, as for the ISG, well, this "British section of the Fourth International" thinks that whatever the Socialist Workers Party says is just fine by them.

The problem is politics. The platform and manifesto of the Socialist Alliance is fundamentally economistic, reformist and Labourite. From shoddy politics comes shoddy organisation. While our press committee is doing a commendable job in its attempts to raise our national profile, it is doing so against the flow of politics in the other direction. Rather than our platform raising national politics to the top of our agenda, it is local issues which dominate. Despite the best intentions of many, our campaign essentially remains a network of local campaigns rather than a truly national intervention.

In Greenwich, Kirstie Paton is concentrating on the PFI of her local school; in Hornsey, Louise Christian concentrates on asylum-seekers; in Brent South, Mick McDonnell concentrates on housing issues. While local issues are important to highlight in the constituencies affected, it is national politics which demands our attention if we are to replace Labour as the natural home of the working class. Just as Bill Clinton used 'It's the economy, stupid' in his 1992 election campaign, as socialists our slogan must be 'It's the state, stupid'. Unless we are able to break from localist reformism, our national profile will suffer.

A Liaison Committee meeting would only have required one person from each alliance to attend. This would hardly dent local campaigning on the day. Such a meeting could have briefed these activists with a plan of action for the next three and a half weeks. It could have outlined a timeline of political activity. This has been attempted through e-mail communication, but there is no substitute for personal interaction and report-back.

We should emphasise in the constituencies that we stand for a different sort of society: we stand for the mobilisation of the working class, not just on questions concerning the hip-pocket or the handbag, but on the big issues: the countryside, Europe, the monarchy, the army, the police, the nature of the state, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, immigration.

I do not aim to be overly carping, but I do want to point out a source of our weakness. Until the Socialist Alliance and the party that grows from it takes on high politics as its core, we will remain a network of local campaigns, which can only serve to weaken the fight for what the working class needs as a matter of urgency: a working class party, based on consistent independent class politics.

Marcus Larsen