[A-List] UK politics: left regroupment

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

And not before time, although the antics of the SWP should be watched. Also
of concern is the overriding problem of British social chauvinism, when what
needs to unite any effective pan-UK socialist movement is agreement on the
priority of ending the British state and joining forces with other
like-minded groups within the EU. Ideally Ken Livingstone should also be
there, since he also needs to heed the message of Foot's article: that
socialists can never reclaim the Labour Party and should therefore channel
their energies in a more productive way outside this pillar of British
imperialism.

-----

 The fright they deserve

Paul Foot
Wednesday October 29, 2003
The Guardian

If all the people who have written to the Guardian in the last six years to
protest at the pusillanimous posturing of New Labour turned up tonight at
London's Friends Meeting House they would give the Blair administration the
fright it so roundly deserves. British Politics at the Crossroads is the
theme. The line-up is impressive.

Top of the bill is George Galloway MP, whose eloquent hostility to the Iraq
war is so in tune with mass opinion that he has just been expelled from the
Labour party. His expulsion - by a committee of three - makes nonsense of
the idea that socialists can reclaim the Labour party. "Just you try
reclaiming it," is the message from Labour's bold triumvirate, "and we will
kick you out!" Galloway's detailed response to the trumped-up "charges" was
irrelevant. He had dared to speak up against the Blair administration and he
had to pay the price.

George is not alone on tonight's platform. He's joined by Bob Crow, general
secretary of the RMT union, whose opposition to rail privatisation has just
been so triumphantly vindicated by the sacking of the private rail
maintenance firms; Salma Yaqoob, chair of the Birmingham Stop the War
Coalition, whose supporters hold the key to several Labour seats in the
region; Ken Loach, whose marvellously committed films go on winning awards;
another award-winner, Guardian columnist George Monbiot, whose articles and
books have so mercilessly proved that the New Labour government is a captive
creature of the corporations; and Linda Smith, not the comedian (who
incidentally would also support the meeting) but a leading official of
London's Fire Brigades Union.

New Labour's war party, as it rallies behind the shocking deceptions of its
leaders, will no doubt go on hoping that they can rely on the electoral
support of the left. But can they? There are signs everywhere of a
widespread contempt for the government that is eating away at that automatic
and slightly nostalgic response: "I was born Labour and intend to die
Labour". In all the unions, not just the RMT and the FBU, there is profound
unease not at the principle of giving union money to political parties but
at the granting of that money exclusively to the Labour party which, for the
first time in history, has enthusiastically sustained the Tories' anti-union
laws.

John McAllion, former Labour MP for Dundee East, has left Labour and says he
plans to join the Scottish Socialist party. Last week, in Preston, a meeting
called to support the proposal of the Socialist Alliance councillor Michael
Lavelette to "twin" Preston, which has long radical and socialist history,
with the besieged and battered Palestinian town of Nablus in the West Bank,
drew some 500 people. There is a deep well of solidarity with the
Palestinian people, and Blair-Bush supporters in Preston (if there are any
left) cannot hope to draw on it. For far too long the socialist left has
been side-tracked by sectarianism and/or paralysed by lack of confidence.
The huge anti-war movement has blazed a trail through both.

Tonight's meeting can be a springboard for a new united left that can
intervene effectively at every level, including elections. Indeed, the two
elections next on the horizon, for the European parliament and the Greater
London authority, are to some extent free from the curse of the "first past
the post" system which, as Robin Cook so expertly explains, drives politics
into the centre, rewards consensus, and eventually pisses people off
politics altogether.