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IMG Stechford campaign
Every party knows that this yeirs'
council clections are a rehearsal for the coming
General Flection. The Lib-Lab pact is meant to prop up the government until Phase Ill can stagger through, and no more.
The Stechford bye-election result shows what the Labour Party can expect. Their supporters, who suffer their policies not just once every five years but all the year round, have expressed their disgust and disillusion by staying at home.
The next general election whether it comes this autumn or gets held up until 1978
will not just be a formality. The Tory party has the most right wing front bench
since the thirties. The fascist National Front
may well live up to their claim to have replaced the Liberal Party as the third party in British politics. In short, we are headed for a government of the extreme richt.
The most damaging result of the last three years is that the working class has been betrayed by its own leaders. It is the Scanions and Jones who have wielded the chopper, It has been left to militants
like Roy Fraser, who led the Leyland toolroom workers, to gather the threads of rank-and-file opposition. Their militancy has not stopped them being isolated. We think it is necessary
to try and build a united movement out of all strands of opposition around policies which provide a clear alternative to the present right wing lendership.
Socialist clection candidates offer a plitform for a fight back. They show the strength of support for a different way forward. We have been fighting for dass struggle candidates and campaigns. We want candidates based on real experience of strugele. People who will take up the demands of the strike committees, tenants" committees and women's groups, and give them a voice. We reject the traditional politician's campaigns, which descend once a year and then vanish to the council chambers.
In Kelvin ward, posters advertising CIr. Ross's surgeries appeared two weeks before the elections. In Falkirk, students at Callendar Park College told SSI. candidate Dave Fowler that he was the only person seeking clection who had come to talk to them about their struggle against
closure.
The fight for class struggle candidates und socialist clection tactics has to go. into every labour movement party, It is quite possible for constituency and ward Labour Parties to produce anti- Social Contract candidates thouch of course it is a difficult uphill battle. Candidates like Edinburgh's Tom Fenton who is campaigning under the slogan "fight for a Socialist Alternative", against the cuts and the Contract.
But the fact is that very few such candidates have merged. In Glasgow Jimmy Wray, the lone opponent of Labour's policies, was suspended from the Labour group. In Edinburgh attempts to produce a left slate have foundered. Only in Dundee has there been a sizeable challenge to right wing incumbents — and those who unseated them have yet to prove their credentials.
Serious organised opposition to the Labour tight is to be found in the far Left groups, the Communist Party and a few isolated centres of working class resistance. The headlong flight into the arms of the SNP of Sillars" SEP has rendered it incapable of realising its promise of class struggle opposition.
The Stechford byclection showed the potential the far left possesses. The two candidates of the International Marxist Group and the Socialist Workers" Party between them amassed nearly 2%5 of the votes. A united campaign would have Teached four figures and show that a good part of the electorate look on revolutionary socialist policies as a practical alternative.
This is why the SSE has approached the SWP to discuss a joint campaign everywhere it is standing. We do not view the division of the far left as bencficial to the working class or socialism. To face the right wing divided at such a crucial turn in British politics is
criminal.
It is not possible to overcome splits by magic. It needs a lot of political discussion and joint activity. But this does not justify the SWP refusing, as they have until now, any form of co-operation or even discussion. Working from the notion that the purpose of standing in clections is to build a party, they have not understood the chances that a unitied campaign would open up for revolutionary socialism and
its credibility.
In standing seven candidates for the district clections, the SSL is starting the left on the road to a socialist election policy.
MARTIN O'LEARY