Britain: Tories not punished for cuts on 5 May
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The Tories in England and the SNP in Scotland were the big winners in the elections for local councils and devolved administrations on May 5. Cameron was strengthened and Lib Dems humiliated as their vote collapsed while Labour underachieved what should have been possible in current conditions. Although this has created tensions in the coalition, the Tories are the best placed to benefit and intend to do so.
Labour made substantial gains, particularly in the North of England, but did less well than expected for an opposition party with the government implementing massive
The SNP landslide was an historic game changing development - winning an overall majority under an electoral system designed to ensure that this would never
The Scottish Greens increased their vote and maintained their two seats due to the stance they took against the cuts.
The Scottish left suffered from both the havoc reeked by Tommy Sheridan and the resulting split and its aftermath and by the massive squeeze from the SNP. The SSP's vote (at 0.4%) was poor and down on last time whilst Solidarity's vote collapsed to 0.1%. George Galloway, who like Labour ran a pro-union campaign, polled 3.5% - well short of a seat.
The SNP victory sets the scene for a constitutional confrontation with Westminster over Scottish independence, which will be put to a referendum probably towards the end of this parliament. It is an open question which way the vote will go but a yes vote and a break-up of the British state is certainly not excluded as resentment against the coalition in Westminster and its
In the local elections in England Labour made gains in both seats and councils, mostly in the north, retaking control of 26 more councils including Hull, Manchester and Liverpool and winning 800 more seats.
Whilst this fell well short of the gains it should have made in the current political conditions in England as a whole with massive cuts being rammed through it also reflected a significant polarisation between Labour and the coalition parties which contains the possibilities of a fight back against coalition policies.
The Tories, however, held on to and mobilised their traditional South of England support and even made some gains winning 70 extra councillors and three councils whilst driving through a massive package of cuts and austerity.
They managed to manoeuvre the blame for the cuts onto the Lib Dems who were completely trounced right across the board. Tory voters are in any case far more likely to be natural supporters of cuts than Lib
This was partly facilitated by Cameron's racist anti-immigration interventions into the campaign and the nationalism whipped
Imperialism brought in its wake world politics and world economics. This was the objective criterion for launching the
Third (Communist) International. Stalin's counter-revolution brought the communist parties into a treacherous
decline, grabbing onto the coat tails of the leading forces in the liberal left and the institutional apparatuses.
In this book, Pierre Frank explains how the Fourth International, founded in 1938 by Revolutionary Marxist militants, nuclei, currents and organizations, answered the problem of the construction of anti-capitalist, revolutionary
Frank was secretary to Leon Trotsky in 1932-1933, and his book draws on his experience as a central leader of the Daniel Bensaid's appendix explains the following 30 years of the Fourth International life, developing the perspective of establishing a new independent political representation of the working class that takes into account the diversity of
Published by the International Institute for Research and Education as an issue of the Tories not punished for cuts on 5 May up around the referendum by the NO campaign which increased the Tory turnout and vote. The royal wedding was an added
The Lib Dems were taken to the cleaners. They are left licking their wounds and contemplating four more years as human shields for the Tories and with nowhere to go other than to trigger a general election in which they would be wiped out.
Of the smaller parties only the Greens did well, increasing their councillors by 50%, including 10 extra in Brighton where they became the biggest party in a council
This success no doubt reflected the way that Caroline Lucas has taken the party to the left since she has been the leader, the excellent role she has played as an MP (including voting against military intervention into Libya). It also reflects the stand the Green Party has made against the cuts despite the actions of some of their more right wing councillors. The Green Party is fully involved in the Coalition of Resistance
The lesson of this for the rest of the left is that you have to build an election intervention over the long term which can become a recognisable brand and a credible alternative to the establishment
The BNP and UKIP had a bad election. The BNP lost wherever they stood and UKIP won a total of 7 seats after their break though into the European Parliament and a massive media profile. This no doubt reflected the current divisions in the BNP and the batty nature of UKIP but it also reflected the emergence of the Tory Party in its true colors as a hard-line right-wing, racist, neoliberal party akin to - and in some ways to the right of Thatcherism -mopping up right-wing support. The left in the election The performance of the socialist/non Labour left in the election was universally dismal.
The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) stood 174 candidates under its umbrella of which 144 appeared on the ballot paper as TUSC or one of its registered varieties. Overall its results were poor. ThirteenTUSC candidates had good results polling over 10%. These were all, however, people who had past records under various franchises or had personal followings in the locality. There is no evidence that the TUSC label added much or even anything to them. Many TUSC candidates scored no better than unknown or eccentric independents in some cases with no campaign. Certainly TUSC made no impact on the election at a national
The left failed to win a single seat and every existing incumbent who contested a seat lost it. Michael Lavelette lost in Preston, although he polled a good score, as did Ray Holmes in Bolshover - both members of the SWP. Peter Smith standing as Democratic Labour Party lost his seat in Walsall. Socialist Alternative contested The Long March of the Trotskyists We live in an age where everything has been internationalised.
political formations.
Fourth International through to 1979. the working class in defending a resolutely class-based programme. Notebooks for Study and Research and available from Resistance Books.
* Britain every seat in Coventry but only Rob Windsor with a long record had a good score, the others averaged around 2%. Dave Nellist's seat was not up for election
Nor did TUSC make any advances as far as its own democratic functioning of was concerned, in fact quite the reverse. Some of the TUSC leaflets published by local campaigns run by the SP blatantly promoted the SP rather than TUSC. With some all the contact details and recruitment and information referred not to TUSC
The left cannot afford to go into more elections with the only alternative it can present being a TUSC type flag of
We have been confronted, once again, with the reality that a fragmented left cannot make an impact even under conditions of the imposition of a massive programme of cuts and privatisation. Nor can we escape the conclusion that TUSC is not a stepping stone to such a thing but an obstacle to its development.
The conclusion from all this is clear enough. The need for a broad based, democratic, pluralist party of the left has not gone away, in fact the need for it has
The challenge is to put this back on the agenda and to find a way to start to develop something which has democracy at its core and begins to seriously tackle the problems and mistakes of the last 10