When I told a friend that I hadn’t been able to get a ticket for Kneecap and Fontaines DC and would instead be going to see the world premiere of the film about the Revolutionary Communist Party’s (RCP) general election campaign, she laughed and said something to the effect of that is not what normal people do on a Saturday afternoon.

Naturally I denounced her as a reactionary peddler of bourgeois lies and immediately threw the cake she’d baked for my birthday into the bin. Something made by a vile tool of the capitalist class would have tasted like ashes in my mouth.

Independent Candidate, directed by Teilo Vellacott, is a documentary about how Fiona Lali won “1,791 votes for revolutionary communism” in the 2024 general election with a fairly creditable 4.1% share of the vote even if she did finish in ninth place just ahead of Steve Hedley whose thick, shouty Belfast accent wasn’t an obvious vote winner.

By way of comparison the Greens got 17.3% of the vote and Galloway’s crew got 7.5%. If there has been a single candidate opposing Labour and genocide they would have been within touching distance of winning the seat.

However, the purpose of the RCP’s campaign was to build the party and make propaganda for communism and revolution. Some of them were better at this than others. An extended early scene features a very intense young cadre doing the Leninist thing of patiently explaining to a woman who’d forgotten her glasses and had to care for her mother why society was so unequal and what the RCP intended to do about it. He had less luck talking to a Stratford voter when making the comparison between ancient Athens and democracy in modern Newham. What motorists and cyclists will have made of his point that potholes prove the need for a revolutionary party was one of the film’s unanswered questions. Several audience members, who seemed to know him, laughed a few times. With or at? I cannot judge. He also seems to have perfected that chopping motion that Ted Grant used when emphasising a point.

Two of the film’s stars were the young men who’d turned up for duty at Bromley By Bow tube station. A hyper-dynamic organiser was issuing instructions on the need to talk to people and shout slogans. They were really not in the mood for shouting through a megaphone at people coming home from work and the organiser commented acidly on their lack of revolutionary zeal. There was probably a fairly brutal self-criticism session afterwards which wasn’t recorded. Let’s hope that they are right now reflecting on the RCP Central Committee report: Forging the general staff of the revolution and how “many of today’s sectarian left-wing groups trace their history back to some of the nonsense coming out of the Fourth International.” (That really is the way they write. It’s only a matter of time before they launch an appeal to buy an armoured train just like Trotsky had.)

Fiona Lali was a good choice as a candidate. Something about her reminded me of Bernadette Devlin when she was on barricades and assaulting government ministers in parliament. She was able to engage with voters and the media in a way that wasn’t as stilted and dogmatic as some of her campaign team. It was pointed out in the film that at the previous election the independent vote amounted to about 300 and the RCP certainly benefitted from the revulsion against Labour. Some voters were definitely attracted by the simplicity and radicalism of their programme and the youthfulness of the campaign. She was 26 at the time and most of the people doing the legwork were around the same age. My guess is that there were at least 150 people in the cinema and most of them were on the right side of 30 as well. That is a real achievement, and the historic leadership of the group have very sensibly decided to put the rising generation centre stage.

There is a slightly millenarian quality to some of the RCP’s propaganda. They are keeping a young membership enthused and very active by constantly telling them that a revolution is imminent and that only they will be able to successfully lead it. Maybe they are right, but they’ve been saying it for years.

The film makers want to get it screened in independent cinemas and no doubt your local RCP branch will be showing it. You don’t have to agree with the RCP’s politics to recognise that it is an interesting record of the absurdities and minor triumphs of radical campaigning and a document of how some young people who were radicalised by Palestine and Corbyn are taking politics seriously.