BRITAIN: London Socialist Alliance campaign an 'astounding success'
Summarised below are two reports by the LONDON SOCIALIST ALLIANCE (LSA) central office which assess the alliance's performance in the May 4 election for the newly created Greater London Assembly.
The LSA brought together several previously hostile socialist groups. Candidates included Paul Foot and television comedian Mark Steele (both Socialist Workers Party — SWP), London tube worker Greg Tucker (Socialist Outlook), Southwark councillor Ian Page (Socialist Party) and candidates from the Alliance for Workers Liberty and Workers Power. The Communist Party of Great Britain also participated prominently.
The election for the assembly coincided with the election for the new position of London mayor. The LSA called for a vote for Labour left Ken Livingstone, who successfully ran as an independent in defiance of the Labour Party hierarchy, in the mayoral election.
The LSA has had a very significant impact on the London elections: our candidates spoke at hundreds of meetings, our letters made the local and national newspapers, and our representatives found themselves on national television and radio answering the lies of the right and putting forward a clear socialist message.
The LSA distinguished itself from the standard, run-of-the-mill, cynical political campaigns — we ran an activist campaign, a campaign which went onto the [public housing] estates and into the workplaces, a campaign which took up the real demands of working-class people.
In stark contrast, PM Tony Blair's New Labour machine suffered badly at the polls. Many Labour voters were disgusted at [Labour head office's] gerrymandering of the Labour mayoral selection contest [to defeat Livingstone as the official candidate] and disillusioned by the experience of New Labour in power.
Blair's candidate, Frank Dobson, came in a poor third, with just over 12% of the vote. Livingstone received three times Dobson's first preferences and won an easy victory after redistribution of second preferences. Labour supporters voted Livingstone for mayor and for the Green Party or the LSA for the assembly. Many Labour voters stayed away from the polls; the turnout was a miserable 33.6%.
Altogether, some 25% voted for parties other than the big three on the London list. Even in the constituency seats, the total vote for "others" (including the Greens) was up sharply to about 15% (and much higher in some areas).
The Greens received 183,910 list votes [the assembly included seats elected by proportional representation — list votes — as well as single-member constituencies elected on a first-past-the-post basis] and obtained three seats in the assembly.
Principled politics
The LSA received more than 46,500 votes for our constituency candidates (an average of 3.1% of the constituency vote). That was quite incredible for an organisation which had no serious public existence before February and which fought the campaign on principled socialist policies, such as standing up for the rights of asylum seekers while other parties accommodated to the opposition Conservative Party's racist scapegoating.
Cecilia Prosper, with 7% of the vote in the North East (8269 votes), and Theresa Bennett, with 6.2% in Lambeth and Southwark (6231 votes), were the LSA's most successful candidates and retained their deposits. In both constituencies, this meant that in some local council wards they received up to 20% of the vote.
In other significant results, Ian Page polled 4.2% (3981 votes) in Lewisham and Greenwich, Kambiz Boomla received 3.96% (3908) in City and East, and Weyman Bennett scored 3.43% (3671) in Enfield and Haringey.
Even where our constituency vote was substantially lower, the size of the vote relative to the limited campaign we were able to muster in those constituencies meant that we made very substantial headway in certain areas and wards. There was not a single constituency result which those active in the campaign will not be delighted with.
The LSA list vote was disappointingly lower than our constituency vote. This can be explained partly by the fact that many of our voters were confused by the voting system and believed that the their second [list] vote was a second preference, as it was for mayor. The government is entirely to blame for this confusion having failed to mount any advertising campaign to explain how the voting system operated.
Some of our constituency voters may have also calculated that a vote for the Green Party list was more likely to get a candidate elected, particularly given Livingstone's endorsement of the Greens and the plethora of left options in the list vote. Nonetheless, the LSA list vote, at 27,073, was still substantially higher than the votes for any of the other left votes, besides the Greens.
Unity needed
The combined left vote — if we include the list votes for the Campaign Against Tube Privatisation (1%), the Communist Party of Britain (0.4%), the Socialist Labour Party (0.8%), Peter Tatchell (1.4%) and the LSA — was more than 88,895 (5.2%) and, if it had been united, would have elected a socialist candidate to the assembly. We hope that everyone will conclude that the socialist left would have done much better if we had united in one socialist campaign.
Comrades report that the SWP [the largest socialist party in Britain] appears to be very enthused by the LSA votes, which bodes well for the future of left unity in London.
We should take note of the 2.73% list vote for the Nazi British National Party, allowing it to retain its deposit. The BNP vote was less than half the vote they received in 1977 in the Greater London Council elections. Moreover, BNP campaigners had to slink around in the middle of the night to deliver leaflets and kept their "battle vans" on the move for fear of running into militant anti-Nazis.
However, the vote is a warning that the main beneficiaries of the Conservatives playing of the race card, and New Labour's miserable capitulation to it, may be the Nazis. We will need to counter that threat by offering concrete alternatives which address the real needs of working-class people. This reinforces the importance of the future work of the LSA.
The conclusion drawn by the LSA steering committee is that the LSA campaign was an astounding success thanks to the hard work of our candidates and, above all, our many supporters. We believe we have laid the basis for further campaigning under the banner of the LSA in local and national parliamentary by-elections and in the next general election.
To further discuss the election campaign and the LSA's future structure, including left unity, the LSA has called a conference for June 11 at the University of London Union.