Blair, the elections and the left

The crisis in the NHS has contributed to the disillusionment with Labour

The oil crisis is already having a huge impact on the electoral prospects of the Blair government. All talk of an October election, part of which came from government circles, has vanished. The 13-point opinion poll lead on which an early election was supposed to have capitalised has gone. Whether the government can repair the damage of the fuel crisis is now a decisive question in all electoral calculations.

The next two months, the 60-day limit set by the protesters, will be a battleground for all the political forces in the country. The Tories and the right will seek to sustain the limited opinion poll recovery they have sustained as Labour's ratings have fallen. So too will the Liberal Democrats, whose fortunes have risen despite promises of increased taxation, warning us of too easy identification between the cause of the protests and wider responses to the government's role in the crisis. The TUC, in its usually craven way, will be hoping to be rewarded for its loyalty to the government in helping to break the protests.

There is, however, a major problem with the project that all these forces have set themselves. The oil protest, and particularly the popular support which it gathered, was a result of accumulated bitterness and disillusionment with Blair's pro-market policies. The oil companies suffered as much as the government. More importantly, many people have drawn one simple lesson from the protest--French-style direct action works.

In the coming months the left must seek to generalise this anti-corporate sentiment and bolster the mood of resistance that was heightened by the oil blockade. The electoral challenge being mounted by the Socialist Alliance is a vital part of this strategy.

In every corner of the labour movement the inquest on the Blair government will intensify as the election draws closer. Every trade union militant, housing campaigner, environmental activist and anti-racist, plus millions of ordinary workers, will be drawn into this debate in the coming weeks. One of the major agruments inside the Labour movement--especially with Labour's rapid fall in the polls--will centre on whether there is an alternative to Labour.

This debate is part of a much wider argument about opposition to the capitalist system that has dominated the left agenda since the great Seattle demonstration late last year. That demonstration--and the ones that have followed in Washington, Millau, Melbourne and Prague--was about opposition to the rapacious neo-liberal policies of modern capitalism. Blair and Brown have deliberately promoted themselves as international purveyors of just these policies. No revolt against modern capitalism could hope to avoid settling accounts with such prominent Labour spokesmen for neo-liberalism.

Even in the US, with its lack of a Labour Party and the weaker unions, where it might have been possible to imagine that the elemental revolt from below would not necessarily register inside the establishment political system, this has not been the case. Ralph Nader's Green Party backed campaign has reflected the concerns of the protesters inside the electoral process. In Britain it has always been inconceivable that a growing anti-capitalist mood would not clash with the priorities of the Labour government and, by extension, raise the question of an electoral challenge to Labour.

Electoral challenge

The success of the London Socialist Alliance in the Greater London Authority elections, and subsequently in the Tottenham by-election, has posed this issue squarely before the left in Britain. The best of the GLA votes for the LSA were double the best votes that the far left gained in the 1970s, the last time there was a sustained electoral challenge from the far left. The Tottenham by-election, more fiercely contested by New Labour than the GLA elections, saw the LSA come runner-up to the three main parties, pushing the Greens into fifth place. These votes were of a similar percentage to those gained by much longer-standing electoral interventions by the French far left and the Scottish Socialist Party.

The task now before the left in Britain is to reproduce this success on a national scale in a general election. It will be a tough task. General elections are harder fought, and tug at the loyalty of Labour voters with greater force, than by-elections and local elections. But in many areas of the country the organisational break with Labourism is already under way. The LSA itself managed to involve many activists who were loyal Labour Party members only yesterday. Indeed, once a common programme was agreed among the far left, this was the decisive factor in the success of the LSA. In Leeds, Merseyside, Newcastle and Manchester, and in Walsall in the West Midlands, similar left of Labour organisations already exist. Nationally, the framework for drawing together these still disparate forces exists in the Network of Socialist Alliances, whose chair is former MP and Coventry councillor Dave Nellist.

Socialists need to weld these forces into an effective electoral challenge to New Labour at the next election. To do so we will need to be clear on some fundamental issues of strategy and tactics.

Firstly, the scale of the campaign. The left is not strong enough to challenge Labour in every seat. So we must pick our targets. It is pointless, if we want to win the allegiance of current Labour voters, to run against the few remaining Labour left wingers. Better to run against Jack Straw, Stephen Byers and Barbara Roche. The forces of the left will not always be strongest in these areas. In general, however, there should be a view in favour of running where we are strong. The LSA results show that, quite contrary to Labour's prejudice that everything depends on the media, having a locally rooted and active base of supporters is decisive in getting a credible vote.

Secondly, votes matter. No socialist campaign can count its success purely in electoral terms. It matters more if we strengthen the labour movement and the left in the area where we stand. It matters more if we back the local campaigns and trade union struggles in which workers in a particular locality are engaged. But it does also matter, if we are serious about an electoral challenge to Labour, that this work results in people voting for socialists. If the left is going to stand in an election then, unsurprisingly, workers will judge us on whether we can mount a credible electoral challenge. Our supporters do not expect us to win, but they do expect us to do as well as we possibly can. And the evidence of the LSA is that where we do run a campaign in this way the left draws greater support towards it than it does if it looks on the elections as a narrow propaganda enterprise.

There is a great opportunity opening out in front of the left in Britain. It is an opportunity for the first time in a generation to politically shape an emerging radicalised layer of workers. And this opportunity emerges at a time when the organisational ties between the mass of workers and reformist leaders are significantly weakened. Labour Party ward and constituency infrastructure is at a postwar low. Key activists in any locality and campaign are as likely to be independent of, and critical towards, Labour leaders as they are to be members of, or supportive towards, the Labour Party.

This does not mean, however, that reformist ideas will automatically give way to socialist, let alone revolutionary, ideas. Workers can continue to hold reformist ideas long after they cease to be tied closely to reformist organisation. Workers' basic desire to improve their conditions without overthrowing the system ensures this. Reformist organisation must be positively replaced before socialist consciousness can take firm hold.

This battle is by no means exclusively or mainly waged on the electoral front. Protest campaigns, industrial action, and anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles often break workers from reformist ideas as quickly, if not more quickly, than election campaigns. But election campaigns can act as a generalised summation of the balance of class forces, drawing workers into a debate about a political response to the crisis of society, and the forms of organisation and action necessary to overcome that crisis. An election campaign can therefore strengthen the organisation and consciousness of the working class, and assist in building a socialist leadership within the class. In the next year electoral intervention will be a decisive front in the wider battle. To be successful the work must begin immediately.