Will Blair delay the general election to help socialists outside New Labour!!!?
by Steve Wallis
2nd April 2005
Note: I wrote this document, printed it off and distributed some photocopies on Saturday the 2nd of April. In the BBC News that evening, it was predicted that Tony Blair will visit the Queen and dissolve parliament on the following Monday morning (the 4th of April). Even though that is the most likely possibility, because Blair would have to come up with credible excuses for postponing the elections if he put it off past the 5th of May, and that date may have been announced by the time you read this, I make enough important points for it to be worth reading on...
A rumour appeared in the Sunday Mirror that a snap general election would be called on the 24th of February, supposedly due to the timings of Blunkett’s resignation and the election in Iraq. That would have massively wrong-footed socialists, since the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) did not have a Convenor (after Tommy Sheridan’s resignation) until their February conference that I attended in Perth (on the 12th and 13th of February), which would have had to be postponed.
Furthermore, socialists in England would have been held back as far as developing genuine non-sectarian unified organisations, due to the stranglehold the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) still held over us by their leadership of the Socialist Alliance (SA). Although I opposed the SWP and a small number of allies closing down the SA at a conference on the 5th of February in favour of its new front organisation Respect, and counterposed renaming the SA as Democratic Socialist Alliance (DSA) via a resolution I put forward (to distance ourselves from the SWP’s bureaucratic control and Stalinist regimes that have collapsed in the USSR and Eastern Europe), at least the rest of the left is free from that party’s destructive influence. The SWP ran SA branches with committee meetings a week before the regular monthly meetings and with proposers and seconders needed for resolutions, which had to be submitted to the committee meetings. The SWP could then decide whether to mobilise their membership or send just one or two representatives. Proposers and seconders were also required, giving notice, to put yourself forward for election to branch or regional committees.
The SWP’s leadership also undermined the SA project due to limiting its demands to lowest common denominator politics and by refusing to promote it in any serious way, particularly at the most important events. For example, from the platform of the big anti-war demos in London and Manchester, none of the speakers were announced (or announced themselves) as members of the SA, even though some were. Because the SWP prioritised building its own party over building the SA, other organisations involved in the SA did similarly, and it failed to take off. This is in complete contrast to Scottish Militant Labour’s attitude in promoting the Scottish Socialist Alliance (SSA), where the organisation put the interests of the working class above its own interests; this led to the very successful launch of the SSP, in time for the first elections to the Scottish Parliament in 1999 at which Tommy Sheridan was elected. In 2003, the SSP gained five more seats at that Parliament, including Rosie Kane who is in my SSP branch (Glasgow Shettleston).
Timing is very important in politics and the failure of the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform (SADP) to launch a DSA on a national basis at their conference on the 12th of March, but to instead postpone the launch of a new SA (with a name yet to be decided) until a conference in the Autumn is potentially catastrophic. There will undoubtedly be some socialist MPs in parliament, and hopefully not just Respect’s George Galloway (who showed what a nasty piece of work he is by inviting Tommy Sheridan to join Respect and stand against the SSP at the next Scottish parliamentary elections, after Tommy’s resignation from the SSP – Tommy is very genuine so he of course refused to help Galloway’s desire to split the left in Scotland). The SADP will probably not have the credibility to play the leading role in launching a strong SA without anybody in Parliament, and certainly if it has not stood and got a good vote in any elections to Westminster. Undoubtedly, the lack of a serious revolutionary socialist organisation taking a lead (one that used to be the Militant Tendency, which led the 18 million strong mass non-payment campaign that defeated the poll tax and brought down Margaret Thatcher in the case of the SSA and SSP) has enabled infiltrators from conspiratorial organisations on the side of big business to frustrate the genuine people in the SADP.
My document on Mind control and the Greater Manchester Democratic Socialist Alliance launch explains the problems I had in launching the Greater Manchester Democratic Socialist Alliance (GMDSA). For reasons I explain in it, we are not officially linked to the people involved in the Stockport SA/SADP meetings that also take place in the Friends’ Meeting House. I had proposed a candidate (Sabrina Nutter) for Manchester Gorton, but noticed on the web that the SADP had been thinking of standing in Stockport (presumably Jon Pearson). I have heard nothing more about that, and more recently saw a list of organisations planning to stand that excluded the SADP. I am therefore inviting the attendees of those meetings (which I have only managed to get to once) to come to the next meeting of GMDSA on Thursday the 7th of April starting at 7pm, at the Friends’ Meeting House, Mount Street, behind Manchester Central Library. We will need to elect officers for a building society account, and may want to establish a formal membership and try to register a new party name (such as Democratic Socialist Environmental Alliance) if the election has not been called by then. That meeting will decide which constituency or constituencies we will stand in, and elect candidates. I want to become MP for Withington, and know that with my politics and a manifesto based on them, I can achieve it, which would be a huge boost for the working class. I would like to support Sabrina or John, and with my influence in terms of giving them the confidence that they can get a good vote if not win plus financial support (I have sufficient savings from my job developing a simulation/Artificial Intelligence language called SDML used by conspiratorial organisations on the sides of both key classes and society, the working class and big business, to model the past and the present in order to predict the future and determine what you need to do to achieve your desired outcome – see www.socialistststeve.me.uk/sdml.htm) to enable either or both to stand and get manifestos printed so that they can be distributed for free by Royal Mail. [Obviously, I would expect other activists who can afford it to make contributions too.]
I will take copies of my draft manifesto to the above meeting, and I have also booked the Friends’ Meeting House for the following Wednesday (the 13th of April, also at 7pm) at which it can be approved or the text modified. I’ll also have put my manifesto on the web (accessible from a page on my website, www.socialiststeve.me.uk/mp.htm, and via the GMDSA website www.gmdsa.org.uk).
Whatever excuses are officially made for choosing the general election date, the real threat to New Labour does not come from the Tories (or the Liberal Democrats) but from the left. The Tories are regarded as a joke, and there is now so little difference between the three major parties that if we put across our policies in a skilful way, without watering them down too much (as Respect particularly does), we can win a significant number of seats. [The unfair electoral system which I am competing against via my Campaign for Democracy in the UK (www.democracycampaign.org.uk) will not be such a hindrance, now that many fewer people will be inclined to vote Labour to keep the Tories out.] And the longer, Blair (who has a huge stranglehold over New Labour so what he says normally goes) puts off the election, the more seats we will be able to stand in. By taking Labour so far to the right that it is now the main party of big business in Britain, and sucking up to George W Bush particularly over the war on Iraq, he has created a huge vacuum to the left of Labour. In my opinion, he is a revolutionary socialist in disguise! So is Kerry for completely different reasons (being left wing), which I mention as well as him being defrauded by Bush in my page www.socialiststeve.me.uk/us-electoral-fraud.htm).
Note: For details of GMDSA meetings and some initial policies put forward in the launch meeting leaflet, go to
www.gmdsa.org.uk/meetings.html.