socialists in the u.k.

[thejambo1]

i am from the anarchist persuasion but was a socialist and still take an interest in socialism/communism in the u.k. what i want to ask people about is what they think of the piss poor socialist vote in the glenrothes by-election. solidarity got less than 90 votes!! while the ssp were beaten for fifth place by the senior citizens party. this was in a staunch working class area,so the results are even worse. what do others think?

[Yehuda Stern]

I think that even those workers of some socialist persuasion see little difference between the heavily toned down campaigns of the "Marxist" parties and those of the bigger parties, and that therefore see no use in voting for these small groups.

[BobKKKindle$]

The poor electoral performance of "socialist" parties can be partly explained by tactical voting, which means that people reject the idea of voting for these parties, not because they are strongly opposed to what they have to say, but because in any given constituency there are generally only two parties which have any change of winning the election, and people are inclined to vote for the party which they think will be slightly less bad, which in most cases means the racist and imperialist Labour Party. However, a more important factor is the complete failure of these parties to engage with the working class and put forward a revolutionary program which addresses the needs and interests of ordinary workers.

[Labour Leftie]

Hey, there were many reasons for the poor Socialist vote in the by-election. I campaigned in Glenrothes for the day (for the Labour Party) so I got a lot of feedback from people.

Firstly, there were two socialist parties. There was absolutely no point for this..SSP and Solidarity, and no-one that I asked knew the difference between the two. I think its time for socialist parties in this country to learn that they aren't going to get anywhere by splitting and fighting over petty details.

Secondly, there is a lot of good feeling about the Labour Party at the moment. As a result of the repeated Brown bashing of the past few months, the left is actually getting behind Labour much more. The Labour Party isn't perfect but they are far better than the Conservatives. Anyway, because of the increased Labour vote, the socialist parties did not do so well. When Labour lurches to the right or have made some bad decisions (10p tax rate), the vote is increased for 'other' parties, notably socialist. So, the good Labour turnout didn't help.

Thirdly, and probably the biggest factor, I talked to a lot of socialists who said that the next general election is key. Because it will be so close between Labour and the Conservatives, many people who said that they would normally vote socialist, said they were going to vote Labour to try to keep a left-wing party in power. Now I would have to put myself into this boat. Of course, as socialist/leftists we disagree with much of what the New Labour party does, but we feel we have to try to keep Labour in power because we can't have a Conservative government. No-one expects the socialist party to win the election so why not make it a more useful vote and vote Labour. This is a key reason as to why the socialist vote was lower.

Lastly, the economy. The economy is in tough times at the moment. Whatever political background people come from, Gordon Brown is trusted to do a good job. When an election is completely on the economy, some could argue that socialists do not do as well (people reminded of 1970s etc.) I spoke to at least a few socialists who said they were voting Labour because they trusted Brown to get us out of this mess and didn't think, at the current time, a socialist government would actually help that much.

Hope this clears it up. There are more reasons of course but those were the ones I heard from talking to people around Glenrothes.

[bolchevique]

This confirms again that the outside the mass organization of the working class, there isn't any shor cut to create the instrument for the socialist revolution Te Grant ideas arenwly vindicated

[thejambo1]

i think you are right bolchevique, the smaller socialist parties are seen as a protest or throwaway vote. i also think there was a good deal of anti snp in glenrothes as the tabloids at the start of the campaign had the nats going to win big. also i think bobkindles is correct in his assumption that these socialist parties have indeed failed to address the needs of the working classes. i watched and read a great deal over this by-election as it a region close to my heart(my missus is from there!) and solidarity and the ssp were pretty abysmal.

[Yehuda Stern]

Actually, Ted Grant's ideas are not vindicated. Though he warned about shortcuts, he was blind to the fact that burying yourself in Labour and taking reformist positions is just another attempt to take a shortcut over a cliff, which ended exactly in Militant crashing and splintering. Today the IMT is one of the smaller groups on the British left, and without HoV it would probably be much smaller.