This is the SWP assessment on Thursday’s results.
The whole political spectrum moved right in the local and London elections as voters punished New Labour for ten years of privatisation and warmongering.The whole of the left is paying for New Labour’s failure to defend its core working class voters. We now have a right wing mayor and a Nazi presence on the London Assembly. Ken Livingstone is the biggest victim of this shift. But Livingstone also brought this defeat on himself. When he ran against New Labour as an independent after he was kicked out of the Labour Party eight years ago he won by a landslide. When he rejoined New Labour and fought his second election four years ago he got back in with a reduced vote.
But at the end of this campaign with its endorsements from Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Alistair Campbell, the City of London and with Tessa Jowell as his campaign manager, he has been beaten by the Tories. Livingstone sought to bolster his election campaign by creating a huge cross party electoral block. The deal with Brown and Blair on the one hand and with the Greens on the other was the most publicised part of this process. But there was also a side deal with George Galloway and a nod and a wink to vote for the Liberal Democrats in Richmond.
The problem now is that everyone is going down with the ship. The Green vote is cut and Galloway’s vote is below that in 2004 – and too little to win him a career-saving place on the GLA. Even the Liberals have failed to take anything significant from New Labour’s decline.
Of course the Tory tide is the main reason for all this. But the rest of the left’s attachment to Livingstone has prevented them from standing out as a clear alternative to Labour around which a minority could have rallied. The Left List has managed to do this in some local areas but it was too recent an invention to make its full mark on the electoral process. In addition, the Respect name had been established over four years and many people who voted for Respect did so in error, believing that it was the old Respect.
The period opening up is in some ways like that at the end of the 1970s. Then a tired Labour government also paved the way for Margaret Thatcher by adopting anti-union, socially conservative agenda at a time when it was also attacking working class living standards. What is necessary now is not a left that runs the line ‘Labour at any cost’ but a left that stands by working class people and struggles alongside them. This will not necessarily be a primarily electoral struggle. It will be an industrial struggle, an anti-war struggle, an anti-fascist struggle and a struggle on many other fronts that we cannot foresee. This is especially true at a time when the extra-electoral struggle is not declining, as it was in the late 1970s, but rising. But there will still be an electoral dimension.
The Left List votes outside London showed some good examples of effective campaigning. In Preston we got 37 percent and missed electing a second councillor by 70 votes. In Sheffield we came second with 25 percent of the vote. In Manchester we won 12 percent and, in a newly contested ward, nearly 10 percent. In Cambridge and Bolton the vote was around 15 percent. The Galloway operation in contrast has reduced itself to a local party in a couple of areas without even the pretence of being a national organisation. Galloway will not be able to win a seat in the general election if he cannot win more than 11.3 percent in East London. And although Salma Yaqoob’s Sparkbrook ward returned another councillor the vote went down in the neighbouring Sparkhill and Kings Heath wards, both of which would need to
see increased votes for her to win the whole parliamentary constituency of which they are a part.
The Left List does have serious trade union support and a nationwide presence. We must now use this to assist in the rebuilding of an alternative to New Labour that will not be derailed by the surge in Tory and Nazi support at the ballot box.
Liam redux 
Leave a reply to jj Cancel reply