By Ian Rintoul
"A great start!" That's how the convenors of the English Socialist Alliance describe the result of the June general election, the first general election campaign of the Socialist Alliance.
The Socialist Alliance and Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) campaign brought the socialist argument to more working people over the last four weeks than in any general election campaign for several generations", they write.
The combined vote of the Socialist Alliance and the SSP was well over 120,000. The Socialist Alliance averaged 1.75 per cent, while the SSP averaged 3.3 per cent, winning an extra 60,000 votes, saving its deposit in nine of the 10 seats in Glasgow. Two Socialist Alliance candidates won over 7 per cent!
The Tories lost another million votes on top of the 5 million they lost in 1997 and in the process William Hague was replaced as party leader. A result every Socialist Alliance supporter hopes will be repeated for John Howard and the Liberal government here.
But with four years of Blair's New Labour, it was the their record that was on trial. Labour's vote collapsed by 10 per cent among working-class people and the poor. Only 59 per cent of those eligible bothered to vote!
Nearly 3 million fewer people voted Labour this time than in 1997. Two-thirds of people who voted Labour in 1997 but did not vote at all this time said the reason was that the party was "too right wing".
Liz Davies, a former Labour Party National Executive member, resigned to join the Socialist Alliance. She was upbeat about the result.
"Blair was so insistent in pushing the case for privatisation in the New Labour manifesto because it is central to his second term", she said.
"That means there will be a sharp attack on public services. No socialist should think that New Labour's second term will be any better than the first one.
"The main job of socialists in the second term is to be active and to be organising against privatisation whether in health, education, housing or transport. The Socialist Alliance did very well for a political party standing for the first time in a general election. It now has an excellent base to establish itself as a serious electoral force."
Ken Loach, film director and Socialist Alliance supporter, could have been describing Australia when he summed up election night, saying the results "show the Tories are still hated but there is no enthusiasm for New Labour."
The English Socialist Alliance convenors talked about the next step for socialists in Britain, "We must now capitalise on the best experiences of the general election campaign so that we can extend our organisation and prepare for battle with a pro-capitalist Labour government."