03.10.2001

Welsh Socialist Alliance

Lagging behind

On a pitifully low turnout of 22.5%, Alan Thomson, the Welsh Socialist Alliance candidate in the Swansea East by-election for the national assembly won 173 votes. This represents 1.34% of the total vote and was on a par with the performance of the WSA in the general election.

Comrade Thomson, a member of the Socialist Workers Party, is to be commended for the vigorous campaign he fought in the lead-up to the September 28 vote in the face of such voter apathy. To his credit, he and his campaign team responded to the events in the USA on September 11 by giving out thousands of leaflets opposing the drive to war.

Nevertheless, the small vote for the WSA in the by-election demonstrates once again how much the organisation lags behind the Socialist Alliance in England and the Scottish Socialist Party. This is highlighted by the continuing absence of any WSA statement against the war drive.

The paralysis of the WSA in the face of war is now becoming all too evident to more and more of its members. In a recent broadside against the inability of the WSA to relate to events in the class struggle, independent socialist and WSA officer Jack Gilbert stated: ?We have reached the sorry state we are in at the moment, with no WSA focus for the horrors the imperialist powers are about to visit on the poorest sections of the global population, let alone a considered and practical strategy for dealing with their pre-existing attacks on the poor wherever they are.?

This sums up the way the WSA has so far failed the test of war. With the Socialist Party still a semi-detached affiliate (see below),  large part of the blame must rest with the SWP. Except in Gwent, the SWP has chosen to bypass the WSA in organising its anti-war activities, content instead to cosy up to pacifists around the slogan of ?No to war?.

This was on full display at a meeting of the South Wales Coalition Against the War in Cardiff last Saturday. An amendment by the CPGB to include defence of asylum-seekers in the promotional literature of the coalition was defeated by 13 votes to eight. The half a dozen members of the SWP present all voted against the amendment, defending their actions on the grounds that it could alienate potential supporters.

Members of Cardiff SWP would do well to read this extract from No to Bush?s war, their organisation?s new pamphlet. It states: ?It is not enough to be against this war or the scapegoating of asylum-seekers individually. We need to be organised so that in every workplace, school, college and community we can put those arguments to wider layers of people. The Socialist Workers Party is about just that? (p29). Perhaps it might have been wise for the authors (comrades Kevin Ovenden, Chris Harman, Hassan Mahamdallie, Mike Simons and Charlie Kimber) to have added, ?but not in the anti-war movement itself?.

There is a growing realisation amongst WSA members that this is crunch time for the organisation. All those who are serious about fighting to make it a pole of attraction for the working class must demand that the WSA takes a political lead against the war. Otherwise the WSA may end up being one of the casualties of the conflict.

Cameron Richards