BY PHIL HEARSE
LONDON — Candidates of the Socialist Alliance and the Scottish Socialist Party won more than 129,000 votes in the June 7 British general election. In England and Wales constituencies, Socialist Alliance candidates won an average of 1.75% of the vote. In Scotland, the SSP received an average of 3.1%. These results are an important advance for socialists.
Why did Labour win again with a huge majority of 165 seats in the House of Common (413 seats against the Conservative Party's 166)? Why was the turnout the lowest since 1918 (only 59.2% of eligible voters cast a ballot)? Why did the Socialist Alliance in England and Wales achieve relatively modest results? What does the outcome mean for the future?
Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair was lucky. Because Britain is so closely tied to the US economy, during the last four years the country has experienced growing incomes and falling unemployment. With the slowing of the world economy, the next four years will be very different.
Labour's victory was above all a massive rejection of the opposition Conservative Party rather than an endorsement of Blair and New Labour. There is evidence of widespread tactical voting, where Labour or Liberal Democrat voters switched to the party most likely to defeat the Conservatives.
The Conservatives fought a campaign based on old-style Thatcherism, emphasising xenophobic themes like opposition to immigration and asylum seekers, opposition to British entry into the single European currency (the Euro) and opposition to tax increases. This bolstered the core Tory vote, but failed to reach out to the vast majority who reject racism and were much more concerned with the crisis of public services like transport, education and the health service.
Former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was wheeled out for the campaign but her hectoring nationalism only did the Tories more damage.
Conservative crisis
After this second massive defeat in four years and the immediate resignation of Hague (the only Tory leader in the 20th century not to have become prime minister), the Conservatives are in a huge crisis. The party faces bitter internal battles as pro-European former ministers slog it out with hard-core Thatcherites.
The main winner overall was Britain's third party, the Liberal Democrats, which picked up a few percentage points to 19% and scored 52 MPs by standing to the left of Labour. The Liberal Democrats promised an extra 1p in the pound on the basic rate of income tax and a 50% tax on incomes over 100,000 pounds to fund better public services. This chimed in with the still dominant social-democratic beliefs of most electors, who opinion polls show are stubbornly in favour of publicly provided services and greater equality.
Many who voted for Labour did so grudgingly. Voting in Britain is not compulsory and millions showed their disillusionment by simply staying at home. The 59.2% participation figure represented a drop of more than 10% since the last election. A BBC opinion survey found that the main reason for abstention was that "it doesn't make any difference who wins".
Labour's shift to a semi-Thatcherite position is speeding a process of depoliticisation affecting young people and the poorest in particular. Since Labour came to power in 1997, the gap between rich and poor has grown and social services have got worse. Few among the poorest 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ of the working class think Labour will do anything for them. In many safe Labour seats, where the Tories couldn't possibly win, abstention was massive. In an ultra-safe Labour seat in Liverpool, only 28% turned out to vote.
Many in the 18-24 age group don't remember the 1980s' struggles like the miners' strike and the poll tax fight. They have experienced politics as merely being meaningless arguments over details between two right-wing parties. Only the emergence of the global justice movement is a counter to this depoliticisation.
Scotland
In Scotland, only one Conservative was elected in the 72 Scottish seats. In many places the Tories ran third or even fourth place behind Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP).
The SSP's decision to stand in every Scottish seat was vindicated by its vote (72,000) and the thousand new members the party recruited in the campaign.
The SSP won more than 6% in every seat in Glasgow, except Anniesland, where it won 5.56%. In Glasgow Pollock (the seat that corresponds to the Scottish parliament seat held by the SSP's Tommy Sheridan), Keith Baldasara won an outstanding 9.98%, in Glasgow Springburn Corlyn Leckie got 7.8% and in Glasgow Maryhill Gordon Scott won 7.85%. Even in the Orkney and Shetland islands, the SSP won 4.6%. As the Guardian put it, the SSP were the big winners of the election campaign.
There is now a five-party system in Scotland — the three major parties, the SNP and the SSP.
As Sheridan said: "[The SSP has] not realised the 100,000 target, which we knew was ambitious, but what we didn't foresee was the huge drop in turnout which is a badge of shame for the four big business parties. They have had wall-to-wall, cover-to-cover TV and newspaper coverage, and yet they have failed to inspire the electorate of Glasgow and Scotland. Despite the political censorship of our campaign by the broadcast media and the daily broadsheets, we have secured a magnificent 70,000 votes for genuine, radical socialism and we feel we have now arrived on the political scene in Scotland."
The advantages the SSP had compared with the Socialist Alliance in England and Wales were its having been established for several years as a properly organised party, and is therefore well known, and that the Greens are weak in Scotland.
In the eight Glasgow constituencies, there was only one Green candidate whereas Socialist Alliance candidates in many places had to share the radical vote with the Greens.
Socialist Alliance
In England and Wales, the Socialist Alliance did less well than it did in last year's London Assembly elections. Two things determined this. First, Britain's "first past the post" electoral system always squeezes minority parties when the government is being elected, and second the Socialist Alliance was unknown to most voters. The 57,000 votes in 96 seats represents a good beginning.
There were some outstanding Socialist Alliance results. Neil Thompson won 7% of the vote in St. Helens, where the Blairite machine had imposed an ex-Conservative MP as the Labour candidate. In Coventry, former Labour MP Dave Nellist also won 7%. In London, Cecilia Prosper in Hackney South got 4.6% of the vote, Weyman Bennett got 1162, 3.7% in Tottenham and Louise Christian got 1106 votes (2.5%) in Hornsey and Wood Green
Other good results included Withington in Manchester where John Clegg polled 3.5%, Holborn and St Pancras (London) where Candy Udwin won 3.1%, Nottingham East where Pete Radcliffe won 3.8%, Liverpool Riverside where Cathy Wilson received 3.6% and Lewisham Deptford (London) where local councillor Ian Page got 4.3%.
Racists
There was a downside to the votes which went against the main parties. In two Oldham (Lancashire) constituencies, the fascist British National Party won more than 11,000 votes. The town has recently been torn by pitched battles between Asian youths and the police, a response to an upsurge of racist attacks.
Surveys showed that the fascist vote came from ultra-poor white housing estates, where the BNP sometimes got 50% of the vote, and affluent middle-class suburbs, where up to 30% voted for the BNP. The BNP also got more than 1000 votes in four east London constituencies. These votes are a reminder of the dangers of the radical right in periods of mass disillusionment with mainstream politics. In the recent past the right-wing reactionary vote went to the Conservatives.
Britain now faces four or five years of Labour government which are likely to be extremely stormy. As the world economy slows, unemployment will rise and tax income will decrease, putting big strains on public services. The Blair government has one answer to the public service crisis, which it claims it now has a mandate to implement fully: privatisation. The Private Finance Initiative is going to be the centrepiece of Labour's policy towards schools, hospitals, social services and the London Underground rail system.
Labour's theme in the election campaign was that it would put public services first; indeed it would "pour in" investment. This will come from the private sector and the last remnants of the "mixed economy" and the "welfare state" will be crushed.
These processes will work to the advantage of socialists during this period. Millions more working-class people will lose any vestigial illusions in Labour. Trade union battles will erupt. Indeed, the last 12 months have seen a rash of strikes in the public sector. And the global justice movement will continue to grow, offering new opportunities for the socialist left to win young people.
The collapse of the Tories and disillusionment with Labour also provides opportunities for right-wing populist and fascist groups. Labour has implemented an utterly reactionary policy towards asylum seekers and the Tories have threatened detention camps for anyone who enters Britain seeking asylum. This is also the main issue for all the far-right and neo-Nazi groups, which all feed off the racism of the main parties.
There will need to be a big response from the left and anti-racist campaigners to the BNP vote in Oldham and its attempt to strengthen itself in London.
The coming social and political crisis puts an enormous responsibility on the Socialist Alliance to organise itself for the battles ahead. The issue of whether the alliance should become a party on the model of the SSP is bound to be debated further. However, for the moment, this is being resisted by the largest organisation in the Socialist Alliance, the Socialist Workers Party.
The process of building unity on the left has to continue. The positive experiences of united work during the election campaign make this extremely likely.
In an election night statement, the Socialist Alliance said: "The Socialist Alliance and Scottish Socialist Party campaigns brought the socialist argument to more working people over the last four weeks than in any general election campaign in several generations. As the Tory party went into meltdown the Socialist Alliance made a great start in building a nationwide socialist alternative to New Labour.
"This was an ambitious campaign in our first general election. It was only in the course of the campaign that we constructed an effective nationwide organisation. We were right to do so. The attacks on working class people that the New Labour government are planning mean that we have acted just in time. We must now capitalise on the best experiences of the general election campaign so that we can extend our organisation and prepare for battle with a pro-capitalist Labour government."
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