06.10.2004

Dissappointment and hyperbole

Steve Cooke analyses Respect's vote in Hartlepool, where John Bloom achieved 1,82%

If one was to rely on the press statement issued by Respect’s national office, it would be easy to imagine that a political earthquake had occurred in the September 30 Hartlepool by-election.
Headlined “Labour humiliation, Tory disaster, Lib Dem failure”, the official version of events claims that “Respect and its candidate, John Bloom, did exceptionally well. We gained a clear fifth place and established Respect as the largest and best organised left challenge to the establishment, gaining well over twice the vote for the Green candidate.”

However “clear” this fifth place may have been, the stark reality is that Respect only attracted the support of one in 55 of the Hartlepudlians who made it to the polling stations. Compared with recent results in Leicester South (12.7%) and Birmingham Hodge Hill (6.3%), the 572 votes (1.8%) achieved in Hartlepool can only be regarded as a disappointment. Socialist Labour Party leader Arthur Scargill polled 2.4% in the 2001 general election (although there was much more competition this time round, with some 14 candidates seeking election).

Respect’s analysis of the Conservatives’ performance (beaten by the United Kingdom Independence Party) may be sound, but this result was hardly a “humiliation” for Labour. They held the seat, albeit by only a couple of thousand votes, but their support went down by 18.2%, compared with falls of 25.2% in Leicester and 27.4% in Hodge Hill. Although they did not win this one, the Liberal Democrats’ so-called “failure” involved a 19.2% increase in the share of the poll, which was more than the boost that gave them victory in Leicester.
Unlike Yvonne Ridley and John Rees, who were parachuted into Leicester and Birmingham respectively, Respect’s candidate had a high profile in the local community as a leading figure in progressive campaigns to protect health services and against the nuclear power industry.

Reflecting on the result, comrade Bloom stated that “a lot more people wanted to vote for us than actually did”, but Respect’s potential support had been “squeezed by the Liberal Democrats”, as voters looked for the most effective way to deliver a protest message to the government. He felt “it was always going to be difficult” fighting a by-election in a “tucked away place” like Hartlepool, where people were reluctant to break with the party loyalties of several generations than was the case in “more metropolitan areas”.

Obviously this is untrue. There was a defection to the Lib Dems, who captured the anti-war vote. This left Respect floundering, in the absence of a significant muslim population. According to the 2001 census, only 0.4% of Hartlepool’s population are muslims, so appealing to religious community leaders, as the unity coalition did in the more ethnically-mixed Birmingham and Leicester elections, was unlikely to make any significant difference to Respect’s performance. Local issues featured heavily in the campaign, but comrade Bloom’s strong track record as chair of the Save Our Hospital group did not produce a ‘Kidderminster effect’ here.

On the positive side, though, comrade Bloom felt that Respect had “built a good profile” in a town where few had heard of it before. Campaign coordinator Jill Ruffell agreed with this assessment, reporting that the Hartlepool branch’s membership had quadrupled during the campaign, including a number of shop stewards. She estimated that up to 50% of the electorate would be aware of Respect as a result of the campaign, whereas only a small proportion would have known of it beforehand. If Respect had made any mistakes, opined comrade Russell, it was in “not being tough enough on the other candidates who jumped on the bandwagon” of the hospital issues after previously showing little interest.

Comrade Bloom identified three stages in turning Respect into a viable political challenge - namely visibility, credibility and relevance. He believed that the by-election had achieved the first two of these, but it would require a lot of hard work to make people believe that the unity coalition was relevant as an electoral option. “Establishing links with the working class,” he argued, was “a slow burn”. The “work between elections is what matters” when seeking to convert goodwill into active support, so it was essential that Respect members built on the platform they had established by sustaining their engagement in the town.

Respect’s attempts to win support among British muslims is entirely appropriate. At a time when muslims, or indeed anyone suspected of being one, are being demonised as potential terrorist sympathisers and subjected to discrimination based on a tabloid-induced panic, it is important that the left demonstrates its solidarity with the oppressed. However, this appeal is currently being pitched at imams and self-appointed ‘community leaders’ among the middle class rather than the working class muslims who, as in the rest of the UK population, make up the vast majority.

The Hartlepool-based comrades cannot be criticised for this, but there is a danger that socialists involved in Respect in many areas will become deskilled and lose their ability to engage with working class communities because of the constant obsession with appealing to affluent, religious-based opinion-formers. Although the town has an exceptionally small ethnic minority population, Hartlepool is perhaps more typical of the constituencies that Respect will fight in a general election than are Leicester South and Birmingham Hodge Hill.

Comrades Bloom and Ruffell both felt that the government’s primary vulnerability came from leftward sentiments among voters (albeit manifested in Liberal Democrat support in this instance due to the lack of an established socialist electoral force) rather than the right. The pressure to move rightwards in the bid to ‘respectabilise’ the unity coalition’s appeal to floating middle class voters therefore runs the risk of jettisoning the core socialist values that may appeal to working class people increasingly disillusioned with New Labour and who may eventually reach the point where they are prepared to break with previous loyalties.