Labour's collapse and the left's failure

Apologies about the unexpected two week gap in posting, I've been a bit busy over the last couple of weeks so to make up for it here's a massively long post.

This article is response to the some of the questions raised in this article which talks about why the right is beating the left.

There's no need to recount the background to the argument below in too much detail. The local elections earlier this month were a disaster for the Labour Party across much of the country, their vote collapsed to the lowest level since the 1960’s and they lost hundreds of councillors.The Labour Party is in a state of collapse in much of the country and will take many years to recover.

It’s not just the party’s vote that’s collapsing, that’s happened before and they’ve pulled through, but the organisation itself.

In Allerdale, the constituency I live in most of the time, is a solid Labour seat yet the recent collapse of the Labour Party has been astonishing. In 2001, the party had a membership of almost 1000 in the constituency. Now membership is around 60, not significantly higher than the number of councillors they have in the area.

I’m told that in the Labour Party in Carlisle is in a similar state with councillors trying to defend their seats at the last elections having few people apart from themselves to canvass and leaflet the wards.

Labour is getting desperate. You only need to look at their tactics in the current by-election campaign in Crewe to see this. Given that New Labour was founded on the explicit rejection of class politics, and the social background of much of the current Cabinet, these are extraordinary tactics. Yet the left have barely gained any advantage from this.

Let’s be honest, outside of a few strongholds for Respect Renewal, the other Respect and the Socialist Party, the results in the local and London elections the left vote was pathetic.

When I went down to Love Music Hate Racism the other week I speculated whether the Left List would get less votes than there were Left List placards printed for the festival and I don’t think I was far wrong.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, while the BNP's local election results were obviously disappointing for them, particularly in Cumbria, they made modest gains, winning a London Assembly seat and chalking up a number of respectable second places in areas they didn’t win seats.

The crucial question then is: why is this the case? Why is the right beating the left and why is the left not gaining any benefit from the collapse of Labour?

I’ve done my fair share of berating the inadequacies of the left, which is closely connected to a steady retreat from class politics, but I want to introduce another factor, recognising the determination of the Labour Party to prevent any viable independent working-class or left alternative from emerging.

Socialist Party members in Coventry, where Dave Nellist was defending his council seat, and IWCA members in Oxford can attest to this.

For all the recent decline it’s important to remember that Labour is still a party with thousands of members and millions of quid at their disposal and they will channel these resources and members, mainly students in Oxford, into stifling opposition from the left.This is because they know that if a credible, working-class alternative to Labour emerges in the current climate then its game over for the Labour Party.

Contrast this to response of Labour to the electoral challenge of the BNP, which, as I’ve seen at first hand, is complacent and limited. I’m beginning to suspect that Labour has little interest in taking on the BNP because they know the nominally anti-Labour and extra-Parliamentary left will do this for them, though this is mainly because we have to.

However, this doesn't detract from the fact that the left is being punished for failure, or more accurately a failure to take hold of the opportunities available to us.

A quick look at one of the few places where the left did achieve decent results might be useful in answering the questions posed above.

One of these places is Barrow-in-Furness, a solid Labour seat in South Cumbria.

I visit the town now and again as I’ve family round there and my Mum used to work at the hospital 20 odd years ago but I don’t claim to have any special knowledge about the area or insight into the political situation.

Like many old Labour seats Barrow was dominated by heavy industry that has declined sharply in the last 20 years, with Barrow shipyards shedding 9,000 jobs in a town of around 60,000 in less than five years, generating all sorts of problems in the area not least unemployment.

I think it’s safe to say that there is a lot of hostility towards mainstream political parties in general, and Labour in particular.

At the local elections the Socialist Peoples Party managed to win four council seats with 1,800 votes while four councillors were elected from the independent Our Schools Are Not For Sale group set up to oppose plans to build an academy in the town. Such is the feeling in the town that the anti-academy campaigners managed to depose the Tory head of the council and came within one vote of getting rid of another prominent academy schools supporter.

The BNP stood against the Socialist People’s Party and attracted a pitiful vote, coming 10th and 11th, that’s last and second last, in the ward they stood in.

So what’s the difference between Barrow and elsewhere in Britain then?

To put it bluntly, it’s because the socialists and independents in Barrow have demonstrated that they act in people’s interests, that they try and make peoples lives better at a basic level.

This isn’t something that’s easy to do either but a product of tough choices, the Socialist People’s Party was first formed by a group of Labour councillors kicked out for refusing to vote for cuts in housing benefits. I imagine they could have easily taken the route of so many other Labour ‘left’-wingers but they stuck to their principles and, more importantly, to the working-class people around them.

There’s no way to avoid it. The successes of the Socialist People’s Party and anti-academy schools campaigners in Barrow have been the product of well over a decade of hard work that has allowed them to humiliate the BNP in a town where they have been well established for 6 or 7 years now.

This is the example for the rest of us at a time when the Labour vote is collapsing and the BNP vote is rising.

It’s not only a way forward for the rest of us, it’s the only way forward.

Silence is golden

The BNP's Martin Wingfield, editor of their paper Voice of Freedom, often remarks that there is currently a 'quiet revolution' to describe a shift in public support toward the BNP.

If the latest local election results are anything to go by, it's currently proceeding very quietly indeed.

For a second year in a row the BNP have been met with disappointment in many areas. They managed to gain 10 council seats across the country, mainly in areas where they have done well previously, such as Stoke, but failed to make breakthroughs in areas like Wrexham, Southend and Basildon.

These gains were less than the BNP were expecting. The figure being quoted in the media is that they were expecting to win 40 seats but this what the BNP's legal 'expert' and idiot Lee Barnes predicted, not the party itself which has avoided the mistake it made last year of wildly inaccurate predictions of the number of seats it would win.

The results are mixed, with some encouraging signs and some warnings for the future. They got a lot of strong set of second places in Thurrock and their vote showed no signs of being damaged by the supposed 'split' in the party last December.

Since there's only room for one fascist party in Britain, and the BNP have the media profile and name recognition in a lot of areas, it's been business as usual for Griffin's lot and an abrupt decline into obscurity for the 'Voice of (Spare) Change'.

That said, in a lot of areas where the BNP have previously been strong, such as Burnley, Sandwell and Dudley, their vote has declined three years in a row. They're not invincible.

The fact that their modest gains, coupled with defeat in several seats they were defending, have co-incided with the worst results for the Labour Party in 40 years is significant. With the Labour Party in a state of collapse across much of the country and having lost hundreds of council seats, the BNP should have done a lot better.

Since the BNP has tried to recreate itself almost as an external pressure group on the Labour Party, calling on people to vote BNP purely because it is a protest against the mainstream political parties and will result in the government giving local areas more funding, it is important they have failed to capitalise on this.

In London the results have been mixed as well. While it is a step forward for them that Richard Barnbrook won a seat on the Greater London Assembly it was a close run thing, with the BNP winning the seat by 0.3% of the vote when they had expected to win two or three assembly seats. This is an increase of 0.6% on their previous result, not a lot to show for four years campaigning which included the victories in Barking and Dagenham.

Furthermore, their vote in their share of the vote in the Mayoral vote actually decreased during the same period, from 3% to 2.8%.

What was surprising in London was the strong showing of the near moribund National Front who won thousands of votes in the constituencies they were standing in, despite being a party of unreconstructed neo-Nazis. This is the complete opposite of the numbers they've been able to put out on the streets recently, with 17 showing up for a march in South London a couple of weeks ago, so the NF have put in zero effort to achieve this result.

In Cumbria, the results of the local elections were less ambiguous, the BNP performance was disappointing, well it was encouraging for us.

I've stuck up a full analysis of the local results on the Maryport Against Racism site so there's no need to repeat that here, except to say that results must have been very disappointing to an organisation that promised they were going to win council seats this time round.

In Carlisle, a huge BNP campaign involving national mobilisations and lots of news coverage has achieved little noticeable result with the BNP vote being roughly the same as last year, even dropping in some wards.

The BNP branch in Barrow is older than the one in Carlisle but had been noticeably less successful.

I would attribute this to the presence of the Socialist People's Party, a group which originated when four Labour councillors were kicked out for opposing cuts in housing benefits in the mid-1990's. The BNP stood against them this year having long focused on attacking the group, they tried to claim that one of their councillors was illegally holding office because he was born in Iran, and were humiliated at the result as the socialists won all three seats in the ward.

In contrast, after a promising start the socialist left in Carlisle has largely collapsed. In 2000 the Socialist Party stood in their first election in the city and got an impressive 24.5% of the vote, 305 votes. Since the group collapsed in Carlisle for a variety of reasons shortly afterwards there has been nothing since. Instead, the BNP have moved in to fill the vacuum left by rising hostility to mainstream politics.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, the rise of the BNP is punishment for the continued failures of the left.

While last year's results were a disaster and this year's results a disappointment it remains the case that the BNP can win respectable results across the country.

I said at this time last year, there's no need to be complacent. We've got the European elections coming up next year and they're contested on proportional representation with 5% of the vote in massive constituencies needed to win a seat in the European Parliament.

In 2004 Nick Griffin missed out on a seat for the Northwest constituency primarily because their vote in Cumbria was so much lower than elsewhere. They won't make the same mistake again and will push hard to get the vote out in Cumbria.

When it comes to anti-fascism, there are no prizes for coming second.

Local elections

It was only a few days ago that I realised there were actually local elections in Oxford and that I was registered to vote in them.

I've not voted before and, in terms of political engagement, I've never regarded voting as particularly important. It's people's own choice if they want to vote or not but voting is not the way that social and political change is generated.

That said, the polling station is only a few minutes walk from where I'm living so I'll probably have a wander down later this afternoon.

I've always argued that there is little to distinguish the mainstream political parties in Britain and there exists a broad consensus on most major issues but in all the leaflets and other assorted bits of paper I've received it's genuinely surprised me how little there is to distinguish the different groups.

I've not had a leaflet from Labour but the Lib Dems, Tories and Greens all have largely the same on offer, an assertion that they're the best positioned to beat Labour and punish Gordon Brown, vague promises of Green style policies like recycling and air pollution in the city and complaining about the annoying animal rights demonstrators.

I appreciate that councillors don't have much power but without the various party logos and colours on the leaflets it would have been difficult to tell them apart.

If I do have a wander down to the polling station I'll probably spoil my ballot paper or vote Green. The Green Party are a mixed bunch but I've met a few of the Green councillors in Oxford and they're generally sincere reformists and nice people. Seems as good a reason to vote for them as any.

The ward I'm living in must be one of the few places in the country where student politics actually matters. Around 90% of voters here are students and the average age of the electorate is 23, the youngest in Britain.

Two of the parties, Labour and Tory, are fielding students as candidates to capitalise on this, as in previous elections both have done poorly, but I can't imagine either of the two politically connected, Oxford finalists will have much interest in hanging around for three years.

The contest is really between the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, which gives me another reason to vote Green, to keep the Lib Dems out.

If there is something I really detest it's being lied to, particularly by political groups. This is what the Liberal Democrats in Oxford have done.

I'm involved in the Oxford Living Wage Campaign and prior to the elections we asked all the parties standing in Oxford what their position on the Living Wage was. The Lib Dems replied:

"The Liberal Democrats support a Living Wage. In accordance with our policy the Head of the Head of Human Resources is considering the implications of implementing the Oxford Living Wage. She is incorporating this as part of the implementation of the Single Status agreement. This has been factored into early pay modelling work, and discussions are underway with the Trade Unions."

When a Living Wage motion was brought before the previous council last year the Liberal Democrats voted against it.

Elsewhere in Oxford the Independent Working Class Association are defending their seats and standing in a few more. I wish them all the best because I think they've broadly got the right idea on a lot of things though I doubt very much whether they would want my support.

The Socialist Party is standing a reasonable number of candidates and supporting other independent working-class candidates against the Labour Party.

The BNP and anti-Semitism

I've been meaning to address this in some detail but my internet's been playing up for the last few days.

For the last few years the BNP have moved from toning down their anti-Semitism to stridently denying that they are anti-Semitism.

This is something I've talked about before but now the BNP have published an article on their website attempting to win Jewish votes on the basis of hostility to Islam.

This is an extraordinary U-turn for a party that, until relatively recently, used to publish Holocaust denial material and adhered to traditional Jewish conspiracy theories. Now, they proudly put forward their Jewish councillors and activists.

This is the basis the main argument seems to rest on, that since the BNP have Jewish members and supporters they can't be considered anti-Semitic. As a result of a change in policy and rhetoric, Jewish people are now welcome in the BNP.

This is a rubbish argument. It's a rubbish argument because there have always been Jewish members of far right groups in Britain, regardless of the emphasis they have put on anti-Semitism.

Pat Richardson may be the first Jewish BNP member to win a council seat but that's largely because in the 1980's and 90's the unashamedly fascist BNP won such poor votes.

The BNP have stood Jewish candidates before, in 1994 Paul Maxwell who stood for them in Tower Hamlets was Jewish, they just haven't been elected.

The BNP is not alone on the fascist right in doing this. Had Albert Elder been elected in Eastbourne in 1977 or in Hendon in 1979 then the National Front would have had a Jewish MP.

This may seem astonishing and their motivations for associating with political groups that would happily exterminate them could be met with disbelief but just because someone comes from a minority group doesn't mean they can't be racist, anti-Semitic or fascist. In a way it isn't surprising, there are gay fascists, like Martin Webster, so why can't there be Jewish fascists?

Even when the far right were openly anti-Semitic there were Jewish people active in it so the presence of Jewish people in the BNP today has little connection with its politics.

There has been a definite change in their political emphasis however, and overt anti-Semitism is no longer tolerated and this indicates a second point of why the BNP are so keen to distance themselves from this particular form of racism.

Thankfully, Nick Griffin helps us here by carefully explaining that the switch from anti-Jewish to anti-Muslim racism is based entirely on tactics to win power not on principles.

Opposition to Islam is based on electoral gain, as Griffin tells a branch meeting in Burnley in March 2006:

But we bang on about Islam. Why? Because to the ordinary public out there, it's the thing they can understand. If we were to attack some other ethnic group--some people say 'We should attack the Jews' ... --it wouldn't get us anywhere, other than stepping backwards. It would lock us in a little box, which the public would think 'extremist-crank-lunatics, nothing-to-do-with-me,' and we wouldn't get power... That's the reason for the tactic.

Straight from the horses mouth.

This is an important point, the BNP choose certain people to attack because of their race or religion on the basis that this will help them achieve power.

So, if it became a political advantageous next week to attack Jewish people, deny the Holocaust, etc, there is no reason why they wouldn't shift tactics immediately.

This is, of course, business as usual for Nick Griffin, who has in the past support Islamist governments and advocated practical co-operation with them.

This same trend is evident in their attitude toward Irish people. Attacking Irish people was a key part of racism in Britain for literally decades but has gradually become less socially acceptable. Now, any suggestion that English and Irish people can't and shouldn't live alongside each other, a claim that used to be part of the political mainstream, would be laughed at.

Now, we have implausible sounding students appearing in Mayoral candidates book saying:

"I'm voting BNP because they are the only party who care about the Irish. Our jobs are under threat from economic migrants and only the BNP will stop this. The BNP value the Irish community and will defend their interests."

The BNP have previously shown how much they value London's Irish community by putting Jason Douglas at the head of their list for the GLA elections in 2004. This is a man who was convicted and imprisoned for attacking an Irish pub in Kilburn as part of a fascist mob on the day of the annual Bloody Sunday commemoration.

The BNP now use exactly the same stereotypes and myths previously deployed against Irish and Jewish immigrants, that they represent an 'alien' culture with backward religious practises, they take jobs, have questionable loyalties and are involved with terrorism and other violence, to attack Muslims. It's like they've got a stack of leaflets on problems in Britain with a blank space to add which groups of people they've decided to blame them on this week.

So, in this way, the substance of their fascist politics has remained consistent, even if the tactics change.

Good luck to them

Right now, the biggest public sector strike in decades is going on with around 400,000 people out.

Hundreds of thousands of teachers, civil servants, lecturers, Birmingham council staff and even the Coastguards are out on strike.

Tensions in the public sector have been growing for months, or years in the case of workers at the Department of Work and Pensions, as the government have decided to cap pay rises at 2%, at a time when retail price index inflation is around 4%. So, what public sector workers are being offered is basically a pay cut at a time when prices for basic stuff like food and petrol are rising.

I've been out and about this morning visiting picket lines this morning at the job centre and a sixth form college down the road.

Though it's been pouring with rain this morning in Oxford, people were cheerful on the picket lines and the strike has been solid here, with few going in at either of the workplaces I visited.

There's also a growing recognition that what is happening in different areas of the public sector, pay cuts, job losses and increasing bureaucracy, is happening all over and that what members of different unions are facing is the same struggle against the government.

Hopefully, this won't be the last action the government is facing.

To anyone who was out on strike today, good luck to you.

What is wrong with the Oxford Union?

Serious question.

I know the people who run it want to generate publicity for themselves and get their names in the paper, but are they willing to do by any means necessary?

Last year, they invited BNP leader Nick Griffin and holocaust denier David Irving. This year they've gone and invited disgraced actor Chris Langham to give a talk.

This is a man who was convicted for downloading images of children as young as eight. I would be interested to learn why they think he's an appropriate person to invite.

The Oxford Union describes itself as being:

"the world's most prestigious debating society"

More accurately, it's a place which frequently engages in childish and transparent attempts to be controversial by inviting speakers considered 'notorious' by virtue of their repulsive views.

No change of heart

Just a quick post this one.

Some sad prick has decided it's a productive use of their time in the last few days to pretend to be me on the internet and has been leaving comments in my name on far right blogs and on Youtube.

So just to clarify, if you read something in my name expressing my whole-hearted support for the BNP at the upcoming local elections or demanding immigration be halted immediately then it's probably not actually from me.

This should be obvious but since some odious leftist commenting over at Dave's Part has accused me of openly supporting the far right, an accusation as bizarre as it is insulting, I thought I would make it clear.