15.05.2002

Community service

The Independent Working Class Association stood several candidates in the local elections in England, winning a seat in Oxford. In Haggerston ward, Hackney, one of the IWCA candidates was Carl Taylor, who gained 610 votes (26.9%) - less than 100 behind the lowest successful Labour candidate. He spoke to Peter Manson about the campaign

How do you account for the excellent results you obtained? First of all, let me say that the IWCA hasn't got a programme, so anything I say is my own opinion and could be disagreed by others. On the result, there were a number of factors. The most important is the amount of work we put in. In all the wards where we did well we have been active for a number of years. We've been involved with a lot of networking with tenants' associations and community activists. We've been putting out a local newsletter about three times a year - now it's grown to newspaper size. There's other stuff too. Some of our critics say we're 'localist', or not overtly interested in what mainstream socialists take for granted. It's true that we didn't campaign on anything that isn't in the remit of a local councillor. We have been busy with a door-to-door survey for the last six months, asking people what their priorities were locally. We spoke to two and a half thousand people and got 1,000 responses, feeding those into our election manifesto. We canvassed the whole ward, identified the possible voters and went back to everyone except those who told us to piss off. Apart from those, we visited every home six or seven times. We took it seriously and are now the party of opposition in this ward, and we have identified the base of our support. The Socialist Alliance did well in Hackney, but I got the impression they were not doing a great deal of canvassing. If you can't identify the people who voted for you, you can't build. For us elections are not that important - just another tactic to be used. We've got loads of contacts as a result of standing. Even if we'd done piss poor, it would have been worth it. For how long have you been active in this part of Hackney and where else have you been working? Here we've been working for about four years in three wards in Shoreditch. There was some debate about whether to stand in all three or concentrate in one. We only had six or seven core activists, so we only stood in Haggerston. We've got a greyer periphery, but on a good day we had 15 or 16 out canvassing. As well as Hackney, we've built up support in Romford, Islington, and Oxford of course. And now we've got a new branch in Glasgow. You said you asked for campaigning priorities in your survey. What would you have done if people had said, 'Send the immigrants back'? People could have said, 'Send them home'. If that had come out number one we might not have stood. But we were talking about class issues. I personally only spoke to two people who brought up the question. They said Hackney council was racist because it won't employ white people. We wanted to identify the working class issues people were most concerned about. We asked them to list three priorities, but we had suggested 10 areas ourselves. The things that came out were anti-social behaviour, housing and cuts in community services. Benefits has been a major issue. ITNet, the private company Hackney employed to collect rents, was largely responsible for the financial situation in the borough. The council had been taking its own tenants to court because it hadn't received the rents they had paid to ITNet. Now they've taken it back in house, but lots of estates are really run down. We never really anticipated people saying, 'Bring back capital punishment'. That was incredibly rare. We knew people were pissed off with the council. That's the reason we didn't talk about asylum-seekers - it's not their main priority. They want the estate clean and well maintained, irrespective of who lives next door. The Tories brought in a Turkish candidate to try and get the Turkish vote, but we don't believe in racialising issues. We recommended that people voted for the two IWCA candidates and gave their third vote to Nusret Sen, who did get support from the Turkish community. He didn't want to commit himself to joining us, but he would say, "My name's Nusret Sen. I'm here with the IWCA." I don't know whether he's left the Socialist Labour Party- we didn't ask. He stood on his computer democracy programme. The fact he stood alongside us helped to expose the white working class to the fact that there is a large Turkish community that's got a brilliant profile in fighting capitalism. The Weekly Worker called certain aspects of your campaign "reactionary" - namely, the fact that you called on the police to clamp down on drug-dealers. We said: "Dealing in hard drugs must be stopped." I've got no problem with that. There's some really serious stuff in Hackney. We also said: "The council and the police have a duty to stop it." That's true as well. People say, 'We pay rent and council tax, but they don't do anything about it.' We would be arguing, if we were elected, that the police and the council have a responsibility to do something about mugging and drugs, but we were actually looking for community responses. When we talk about anti-social behaviour, we don't claim to have all the answers. Surely we ought to demand the legalisation of all drugs, rather than calling on the state to clamp down even further. Legalisation would bring with it quality control, eliminate the criminal drug gangs and reduce drug-related crime. We have talked a lot about drugs and legalisation nationally (in as far as we have a national organisation). Some comrades say that legalisation could be a step forward, while others say more forceful responses are called for. I can sympathise with both positions, but we have not come to a consensus. We're not an organisation that says, 'This is a blueprint for the future.' It's about people getting involved. The problem is that the left is not taking up issues such as crime and drugs. They say, 'Wait until after the revolution.' That's why the traditional communities don't trust the left. We can't just wait for socialism. In the meantime we have to live in the present society. Somebody needs to take these issues seriously. The Tories do and so do the BNP. We know how well Le Pen did when he focussed on crime. The present drugs laws are used as a means of control by the state. They are often used by the police to justify searches or raids. I can accept all those arguments. The CPGB is like the thinking man's left. I've got a great deal of respect for you - you're prepared to have open polemic, even though I may disagree with your conclusions. But the left, predominantly the Socialist Workers Party, is not prepared to engage with any of these issues. They say, 'All coppers are bastards', but they call on the state to ban the BNP. On the other hand there is the call for workers' militia - in an upturn, fine. But we have a seriously disorganised working class. Maybe we could have worded it better, but I've got no real problems with it. We were saying that we were prepared to talk about drugs and crime and take them seriously. And there is the propaganda value - if the police aren't doing it, it's the community's responsibility to take action ourselves. As we said, "We will look for community-based solutions." We've had meetings with tenants' associations and they complain because muggings are rife. There's the nitty-gritty stuff like improved lighting, like a sense of community. People don't know who their neighbours are. It's pointless looking at crime without putting it into context. There are reasons for it. There's fuck all to do on the estates, so we've got to fight for community facilities. But ultimately the council holds the purse strings. I can appreciate that you want the community to fight back. But does all this amount to a strategy to defeat capitalism? Immediately it doesn't. Our analysis of the working class movement is that either it's been bought off or it doesn't exist. How do we start the process of building trust? I'm convinced there's no agenda for building a revolutionary party. We need some kind of process for self-organisation and working class action. Then we can move on from there. I think it's great the CPGB is talking to other socialists in the SA. But when so many workers are non-unionised and live in shit conditions, how can we begin to engage them in some kind of political organisation? As much as I might be sympathetic to what's happening in South America or Palestine, if most people are not interested, then you have to engage in another way. More money for the NHS - great. But we're looking for an impact in the here and now. That means bottom-up, from the grassroots, as opposed to your way of building from the top down. It's important for working class politicians to engage with people where their consciousness is at the moment. It's a question of how we get from here to there. Maybe we'll meet in the middle. Let's hope so. You have made an impact, but your work is limited to four tiny pockets. How can we build a national organisation capable of taking on the state? The outfall of our very good results is that people will hopefully look at our model of working. It's not good enough to sell left newspapers or go to trade union conferences. There are a hundred or so Socialist Alliance members in Hackney. We had six or seven. There's no reason why the SA can't do both at the same time - working in the community, as well as in the workplace. Unless we engage people in a political process of self-organisation, we're not even on the starting line. In places like Burnley we should be talking class politics, instead of racialising issues. The Communist Party did that in east London in the 1930s. That meant something to people. But the CP also took up the big national and international questions. It's a question of learning to walk before you start running. People must be organised to defend the things they have - against the state, the council, the BNP or whatever. It's a very slow burn. I think you're wrong to say that the working class isn't interested in global politics. Look at the Green Party, which is a relatively new force. It takes up local issues, but mainly addresses global concerns. I think I'm right! It's difficult enough to get people to go to meetings because their windows are falling out. If we can create some kind of dialogue, that gives us more of a chance of talking about Israel tomorrow. I've been in politics a long time. I joined the Labour Party in 1987, then I left and was in the SWP for five years in east London. I had serious problems with the SWP over their anti-fascist and community work. When I left, I felt I'd wasted five years of my life. They gave me a great political education, but they made no impact on the class. That's why I got involved with the IWCA. Some people have the impression that we're either glorified charity workers, very localist or not interested in politics or union work. It's not true. I've been a GMB shop steward for 15 years (in fact all our activists are shop stewards). But how can we engage with people, get them to think? If, for example, you organise around the closure of a local primary school, you can have the ability to make a difference - and score a few points. Then ultimately we'll be able to talk about our perspectives on the state, or on Israel. You won 600 votes. Maybe now you can talk about those things. It's not enough. We just got an email from someone in Burnley who said he had flirted with the IWCA, but didn't do anything. Now he's got a BNP councillor in his ward. Elections are a kind of litmus test. They're not the be-all-and-end-all. You can use them to gain a certain amount of credibility and build up a political opposition in some areas. Even if that's all we've achieved, it's a great thing. But it needs to go on and spread throughout the country. What's gratifying is that we managed to get exposure which was significantly larger than who we really are. And we are in touch with people in other cities. It's essential to do the work in places like Burnley, if characters like those can get up off their arse. You can disagree with our politics - fine. But ultimately it's about our model of work. If it can work for us, it can work for other left organisations. If six or seven can do what we did in four years, then 100 SWP members could have won several seats. There's a whole strategy for the left here.