Audacity, more audacity, always audacity

Sean Thompson looks at the state of the movement and the left, and calls for moves towards the largest possible popular electoral coalition

The general election brought with it hints of change in the glacial landscape of Austerity Britain. The tectonic plates of the formerly featureless plain of the British political landscape are clearly beginning to move and split.

Labour is heading into what could be an existential crisis. Its leadership, squabbling over who should hold the poisoned chalice of Leader are unanimous in their commitment to the ever rightward moving ‘centre’ and their discomfort with any relationship with the trade union movement beyond receiving its money. At the same time the Tories are preparing to change both the number and boundaries of parliamentary seats to permanently disadvantage Labour and to sabotage the trade unions’ political levy collection to bleed Labour of its core funding. Combined with its extinction in Scotland these moves make a Labour majority in 2020 vanishingly unlikely.

The Tories, with only a small majority and a fractious membership still looking over its shoulder at UKIP, are likely to experience at least two internal crises in the coming months, over the EU referendum and the Human Rights Act/European Convention of Human Rights.

The real economy is likely to move further towards stagnation or even into recession by the end of the year, with the ongoing threat of a return of the international financial crisis. And even the continuation of the British state in its current form is under real threat from an astonishing renewal of popular politics in Scotland.

The hegemony of what Tariq Ali has described as ‘the extreme centre’ is beginning to face some stirrings of opposition – and from unexpected (by me anyway) quarters. The trade unions and the far left have largely failed to mount a serious anti-austerity challenge since the May 2010 election. However, since 2010, under the radar responses to the coalition’s vindictive attacks on vulnerable people have been growing – often initiated by social movements, such as UK Uncut and 38 Degrees, or voluntary sector organisations outside the traditional purview of the organised left, such as London Citizens, Citizens UK or the Trussell Trust. In addition, some trade unions have begun to realise that narrow and insular economism plus cheap insurance is not an effective response to the twin threats of government hostility and falling membership – most significantly Unite, whose Unite Community initiative has recruited twenty thousand or more members and initiated the development of local food and clothing banks, claimant support groups and community centres around the country. And at last we are starting to see pockets of self organised resistance, like the Focus E15 Mothers, the New Era tenants and DPAC, that have gained significant popular support and had a discernible impact on public opinion.

But it is two developments that have happened only in the last few months that most clearly indicate the beginning of dramatic changes in the previously apparently unchangeable political landscape.

The first and most important of these is the sum of the extraordinary events in Scotland since last autumn. The referendum campaign galvanised the population across Scotland in the most amazing way. In the words of the Left Project, which has developed from the Radical Independence Campaign: ‘Tens of thousands of ordinary people became active in politics during the long independence campaign. A record number registered to vote, seeing the possibilities and the point of politics for the first time. The resulting Yes movement has become one of the most important political forces in these islands. Together, we dreamed, we learned and we talked of how we could build the society we want. These dreams must not be abandoned. Instead, our diverse nation must find new ways to work together to make them a reality.’

Scotland since September demonstrates earthquakes can happen anywhere and that the world really can be turned upside down. Almost unnoticed (by anyone south of the border) the referendum provided the perfect conditions for a tectonic shift. The pro-independence movement was far broader and more plural than the SNP and proved to be the ideal vehicle for a generalised popular confrontation with the extreme centre, in this case neatly packaged in the joint Labour/Tory/LibDem Better Together campaign. But once the Yes side had been defeated, activists and voters were given a clear second shot in six months time. This rare combination of a genuinely popular and radical social movement with a clear second opportunity following defeat has produced the meteoric ascent of the SNP.

Of course, such an earthquake hasn’t happened in England yet, although a significant number of people on the left, in their desperation for change, have convinced themselves that it has. Unsurprisingly, the ‘Green Surge’ that has seen a dramatic increase in the Green Party membership since last autumn didn’t result in any electoral success on May 7, but it did produce a million votes for a programme significantly to the left of Labour. Today, the Green Party’s membership stands at 67,000, the largest membership of any left of Labour organisation since the 1940s.

But the Green Party is, on its own, incapable of building a mass movement to challenge the Labour Party’s hegemony of the left in England and Wales as the SNP has in Scotland. While its rapid growth is positive in that it has attracted some tens of thousands (particularly of young people) to a left of Labour position, that says much more about the failure of the ‘traditional’ organised left – including Left Unity – to mobilise that constituency than it does about any successful strategy or activity on the part of the Greens. It is largely due to the hollowing out of the Labour Party and the continuing failure of attempts to regroup the far left sects and reshape them into something that has even a nodding acquaintance to reality, that has led the Green Party to become, largely by default, such a pole of attraction for increasing numbers of rootless socialists and a significant number of pissed off young members of the precariat.

It would be a grave mistake to just write off the Greens as ‘middle class’ or, regardless of their policies and their involvement in progressive campaigns, tacit supporters of the status quo. The rapid growth of the party demonstrates that there is a real appetite for a left alternative to Labour abroad, particularly among younger people who find themselves having to deal with low pay, heavy debt and lack of access to decent housing. While it is unlikely that the Green Party, left to its own devices, will break out of its political niche, it has demonstrated that it has considerable potential to grow within it. It is by many times the largest group to the left of Labour in England and Wales and cannot just be ignored.

Our raison d’être is the establishment and political arming of a mass movement of working people capable of overturning the current order, but we urgently need to translate this aim into a plan of action relevant to coming period, rather than the ’60s or ’70s. At the heart of this action plan must be the recognition that the anticapitalist movement that we need is larger and broader than any existing organisation, including LU. So working to build that movement is not synonymous with building Left Unity – ‘building the party’ cannot substitute for building the movement.

Our central focus of activity must be on encouraging and supporting self activity in working class communities, by ourselves if necessary but in concert with others wherever possible. We should recognise that all grass roots activity is potentially political, whether it is standing in local elections, providing practical support to workers in industrial disputes, working with tenants, organisations of young, elderly or disabled people, organising historical or cultural events (like the annual Wigan Diggers Festival), helping to establish local anti-fracking or anti hospital or school closure campaigns or, more ambitiously, organising local community centres, food banks or welfare rights support and advice services like various Unite Community branches around the country. Whenever and wherever popular local resistance emerges we must prove ourselves the most stalwart and reliable of allies, whether it is homeless single mothers in East London or health campaigners on Merseyside.

We need to abandon the old and tired methods of organising and agitating, so beloved by the left sects, like endlessly selling papers that no-one wants to read or organising meetings that no-one except us wants to attend. We must abandon the Dave Spart Speak that so many of us are all too comfortable with and which serves to confirm the perception of many ‘normal’ people that the Left are a bunch of prats. We should be looking at the way Podemos operate in Spain or how Occupy or 38 Degrees in Britain organise and communicate, particularly how they use new media technology and techniques to extend debate and decision making.

Unlike TUSC, which on 8 May claimed that ‘TUSC is making a mark in councils across the country’, Left Unity didn’t make any ludicrous claims about any of its election results – we admitted that they were pretty much all piss poor. In the parliamentary elections our average result was 0.5% and only two candidates got more than 1%. In the local elections our average result was 1.6% (and that is enhanced by a respectable vote of 5.5% in Northampton and an average result of 2.3% in the 8 wards contested in Wigan).

While we can make the perfectly reasonable points that we are very new and very little known, that this was our first excursion into electoral campaigning and that we are in for the long haul rather than being content to be a pop-up party that exists for only a few weeks before elections and then disappears, the results are absolutely in line with the embarrassing achievements of a long line of far left sects in Britain over the last half century. They would be laughable if they were not achieved in the context of the election of the most reactionary and vindictive government in a century, along with the extinction of the Labour Party in Scotland at the hands of a hugely popular SNP and the winning of a million votes by a rapidly expanding Green Party. Our election results should serve to remind us that just wishing for a new mass party of the left that does politics in a new way isn’t enough to make it happen. We can’t just wish a British Syriza into existence, nor can or should we assume that we will be its sole progenitors.

When it comes to electoral activity we need to try to build the broadest possible coalitions at a local level – and that absolutely doesn’t mean wasting our time tail-ending electoral activities that are essentially sectarian party building projects on the part of the Socialist Party and/or the SWP, the main remnants of the left sects that over the past thirty of forty years have succeeded in marginalising and discrediting the socialist project. They are part of the past, part of the problem rather than the solution, and we should leave them behind. Wherever possible, we should try to replicate the excellent example of Wigan Left Unity, where the experience of jointly working on issues on a day to day basis with others on the left in their town, including both the Greens and the constituent elements of TUSC, has led to a de facto local electoral alliance.

In London, the GLA elections next year present an opportunity for a broad based anti-austerity electoral alliance to make a real mark – particularly since they include an element of proportionality. The unexpectedly huge Radical Left General Assembly meeting last month and the unexpectedly large demonstration at the opening of Parliament were both largely made up of young people outside the orbit of the established Left. The popular support for the Focus E15 Mothers, the New Era Estate and West Hendon Tenants’ protests and for initiatives such as Reclaim Brixton and Rabina Khan’s mayoral campaign in Tower Hamlets show that there is a growing, if patchy, grass roots resistance to the growing inequality of the city and the increasing moves towards social cleansing.

We should now, in concert with as many others as possible, be actively trying to assemble the widest possible electoral coalition of organisations and individuals (perhaps under the umbrella of the People’s Assembly?) to take part in the GLA elections. Taking our cue from Podemos, the selection of the 25 regional list candidates could be done electronically on a one person one vote basis like LU’s own internal elections.

One (probably of many) complicating factors is that the Green Party has been modestly successful in GLA elections, currently holding two seats and, with around 11,000 members, probably hopeful of gaining another one in 2016. I would be in favour of approaching the Greens to propose that they join the broad London Anti-Austerity Alliance (or whatever it might be called), at least as far as the regional list is concerned. While, due to the naive sectarianism of the organisation and the puffed-up personal electoral ambitions of most of its leading members in London it would be very unlikely to accept such a proposal, it would certainly not do so unless it was offered at least the first two and probably the first three places on the regional list. However, I think that such an approach would be a worthwhile, because while the Old Guard/leadership of the party, both in London and nationally, would be very hostile to it, it would be much more popular with the 8,000 or so new members who have joined the London party in the last year – and they are very much part of the constituency that can be the base of the broad party of the left that we want to be part of creating.

People are never simply ruled without resistance; at some point they always resist. The political settlement at any time is the current balance of force between rulers and the ruled. Of course, Britain is still a society where the rich and powerful have the advantage of that balance of forces, but we can see what are, or what could be, the fault lines that herald real change. There are crucial weaknesses on our side, most important of which is the residual hegemony of the Labour Party over the labour movement and the consequential failure of the trade union movement to launch a unified offensive against five years of cuts. But that too might be in the process of changing. Mass popular action is still the most effective, the only effective, weapon we have. The most important thing we can do in coming months is focus our work on supporting local communities and developing social movements as they are forced into resistance against a confident and aggressive Tory government.

In London, our work should include an attempt to help build the largest possible popular electoral coalition against the extreme centre of the Tories and Labour. Setting ourselves such a task, particularly given our very modest resources, is clearly demanding in the extreme, but in these times we should remember Danton’s exhortation ‘Audacity, more audacity, always audacity!’