10.06.2009
CPB: national interest
Lawrence Parker waits with bated breath for further post-mortems
It has not been the best of weeks for Rob Griffiths, general secretary of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain. That one could have easily predicted the poor showing of ‘No to the EU, Yes to Democracy’ in the European elections does not make the blow any softer.
Not one solitary speaker at the June 8 London leg of the People’s Press Printing Society (PPPS)/Morning Star AGM mentioned No2EU, although the management committee did make a reference to the paper’s support for the campaign in its report to shareholders. It was the success of the BNP that evoked more concern from CPB members present.
This was the tack initially taken by Griffiths on the CPB’s website the same day. Rather than provide his eager audience with some kind of analysis of the No2EU campaign, he chose what he presumably thought would be a much safer option: blaming New Labour for abandoning working class voters and pushing them into the arms of the BNP.1 No2EU did not even rate a mention in the piece, although its national result was recorded in the Star.
The comrade might then have hoped to be left in peace for a while to formulate some kind of coherent spin on the campaign as a whole. Unfortunately, Andy Newman of the Socialist Unity website quickly weighed in to suggest that No2EU may have played a role in assisting the BNP: “The possible impact of No2EU standing in the three Euro constituencies where there was a clear and present danger of a BNP victory was not only foreseeable: it was foreseen. These seats were on a knife-edge, and it was always possible that a few thousand voters who could otherwise have been persuaded to vote to keep out the BNP, by voting Green or Labour, might vote for No2EU and let the BNP win.”2 Newman, himself a soft Stalinist, singled out the CPB in particular, given that it “normally [understood] this sort of reasoning really well”.3
This produced a response from a clearly stung Griffiths. The dynamics of this low-level debate about the merits and demerits of lesser evils are much less interesting than the light shone back on No2EU by Griffiths. He said: “Andy assumes that without No2EU campaigning in the North West, and without the No2EU election broadcasts, the constituent bodies of No2EU might well have made the difference by delivering the extra 5,000 votes needed for the Greens to deny the BNP a seat … But my own extensive campaigning experience in this election indicates that many No2EU voters would have been unlikely to vote for anyone else. They liked the anti-EU emphasis, especially when they could vote for it without having to vote Tory, Ukip or the BNP. Very few of the many undecided yet interested people I met on stalls and in hustings showed any inclination to vote Green.”4
Let us be clear what is being said here. Griffiths basically admits that there was no particular class content to the No2EU platform. People just “liked the anti-EU emphasis”. So, in other words, the campaign was able to win some nationalist votes away from the Conservatives, Ukip and the BNP, and thus cannot be accused of letting the BNP in. Of course, some voters would also have picked up on the trade union element of the campaign and acted accordingly. But the list was packaged in ‘black and white’ as ‘No to the EU, Yes to Democracy’ and, as Nick Wright of the CPB argued in the same discussion thread, “People in elections vote for complex reasons and often with a very hazy idea of the ideological hinterland to the most simple of propositions.” There is thus a good reason to question whether much of the No2EU vote had any progressive content at all. Griffiths suggests the campaign mostly turned out a nationalist vote - which is, of course, precisely what it was designed to pander to.
We wait with bated breath for further CPB post-mortems. However, the CPB itself did not have a particularly happy campaign. There were a number of internal grumbles about the fact that all too often the Socialist Party was the organisational face of the campaign. Not that there was much that CPB organisers could do locally with their apathetic members beyond a few street stalls.
Many CPB branch secretaries did not even receive their No2EU campaign material until the weekend before polling day. Whether this incompetence was down to the CPB or the No2EU campaign itself is difficult to judge.
Notes
1 www.communist-party.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=485:new-labour-to-blame-for-fascists-gain&catid=58:summer-09&Itemid=2
2. www.socialistunity.com/?p=4191
3. Ibid.
4. www.socialistunity.com/?p=4191#comments