Sedgefield / Ealing Southall Results
- Thread starter pingupete
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KeyboardJockey
Clowns to the Left of me
JHE said:
Yes yes yes put Galloway's name on the election papers then we can be in no doubt just who NOT to vote for.
Lets hope that this is the end for the mucky divisive communtiarian experiment that is Respect.
Great shame really it should have been so much more than it was.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
pingupete said:
I agree. But similarly the result was bad news for the Greens - you had an established vote there close to what you need across London to keep a GLA member and you lost a third of it. Repeat that in the London elections and you can say goodbye to your representation.
liberty123
New Member
QUOTE=Fisher_Gate]Publicity for Galloway's suspension should have helped the campaign and the Respect candidate had stood previously as an independent in the 2001 General Election winning 2.6% of the vote and more than double the number of votes he got as Respect last thursday. He also stood in a single ward (out of 11 in the constituency) in 2006 (as Respect) and got more votes than last week.
No amount of spin can disguise the fact that this was a lousy result, that should cause a rethink about Respect's electoral tactics. Snap elections are the name of the game these days and the only way of preparing is to have a strong active organisation on the ground contesting as many elections as possible year after year.[/QUOTE]
the fact that galloway got suspended from the house of commons won't necessarily be an advantage since there was a valid reason for banning him in terms of his profiteering from the oil for food charity which the west allowed so iraqi children could get fed. Had it been a suspension of a far right candidate then perhaps the electorate would have been more cynical but a far left candidate has no excuse for running foul of the establishment
No amount of spin can disguise the fact that this was a lousy result, that should cause a rethink about Respect's electoral tactics. Snap elections are the name of the game these days and the only way of preparing is to have a strong active organisation on the ground contesting as many elections as possible year after year.[/QUOTE]
the fact that galloway got suspended from the house of commons won't necessarily be an advantage since there was a valid reason for banning him in terms of his profiteering from the oil for food charity which the west allowed so iraqi children could get fed. Had it been a suspension of a far right candidate then perhaps the electorate would have been more cynical but a far left candidate has no excuse for running foul of the establishment
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Sorry, what inquiry found that?
" his profiteering from the oil for food charity"
" his profiteering from the oil for food charity"
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
It's bullshit isn't it. GG will sue you for liable.
emanymton
A cat politely sat on the flaming gardener.
The SWP seem intent on deluding themselves that the SWP are not a big threat and that RESPECT is doing better at the polls. They tend to mention that RESPECT beat the BNP in the majority of seats where they stood against them. This of course ignores the fact that the BNP stood in a lot more seats while RESPECT just targeted a few select areas where they are relatively strong, or at least believe they are.JimPage said:
During the final rally at Marxism the student speaker announced that the BNP had been chassed of campuses for good. Nice to know that there will never be an active BNP member at a university ever again.
Nigel Irritable said:
We expect to lose a third of our expected vote in byelections or marginal seats, due to the squeeze impact of a specific campaign. I'm quite confident that we will at least hold our two seats and win back another. Even in the scenario you suggest, we would continue to hold at least one seat.
I think it also reasonable to assume that voters are more likely to vote for the Greens in a PR election, as they have done so in previous London Assembly elections. Respect can also expect to do better than 1.6% but the Shadwell council byelection vote will be indicative of how well they can expect the big votes they received in Tower Hamlets and Newham to hold up next year.
It's clear that Labour are taking the contest seriously by putting their former leader up against you. It's very high risk and if Labour win it will be a serious blow. http://www.respectcoalition.org/?ite=1500
emanymton said:
would this be Weyman Bennett, who informed us in 1999, in regards to defeating the BNP," the war has been won and it was us (the ANL) that won it" , the sort of talk which deflected people from tackling the BNP at the time- and has resulted in results like this.
Socialist Worker this weeks completely forgets to mention the BNP result in sedgefield at all
Geoff Collier
Active Member
Fisher_Gate said:
I was in Hull at the time and voted for Pauline Stanton, the Socialist Unity candidate. I think the official line was that the campaign was pointless but we weren't discouraged from voting for her. I seem to remember we also helped with security at a couple of public meetings too.
Fisher_Gate
Active Member
Geoff Collier said:
Ian Birchall, Building "The Smallest Mass Party in the World" (sic), 1981, puts it as follows:
"ANOTHER factor in the development of the organisation was the decision,. in the autumn of 1976, that IS should begin to contest parliamentary by-elections. The first seat chosen was Walsall North, the constituency vacated by runaway Labour MP John Stonehouse. The objective was twofold: firstly, to offer a generalised political alternative to a small layer of people looking for something to the left of the increasingly discredited Labour Government: secondly, to use the opportunity for propaganda to build a local branch of the organisation. The results at Walsall, while not startlingly good, seemed to suggest some validity to this perspective: 1.6% of the poll (more than the Communist Party had got in that seat in October 1974), and some twenty five recruits to the party.
It was on the basis of these developments that the decision was taken that from January 1977 IS should be renamed the Socialist Workers Party.
... by early 1978 it was clear that the electoral strategy had, on balance, been unsuccessful. A total of eight by-elections was contested. In all cases the vote was, as expected, small; but the intervention of the IMG (under the electoral guise of ‘Socialist Unity’) and other far left groups meant that the results were in some cases much worse than expected; moreover, experience showed that it was difficult to maintain those branches built around an election campaign.
The original intention of standing some sixty candidates in the General Election was dropped, and it was finally agreed not to stand any candidates at all. While some experience had been gained, and the possibility of fighting elections in the future remains, the experiment had in general proved negative.
...
The SWP was also approached by the IMG for co-operation in an electoral alliance. The response to this was that at the present time electoral interventions could be only a matter of propaganda, and that united fronts can be fruitful if they are based on specific and concrete demands, not abstract propaganda."
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Where? You have no internal means of discussing it.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
What are they then?
barney_pig
Po-cha-na-quar-hip
Fisher_Gate said:
funnily enough sid had been a founder member of the srg, the original group that became todays swp- full details in revolutionary history vol7 no.1.
'Adrift in the Rapids of Racism (Syd Bidwell 1917-1997),' by John McIlroy
unfortunately not yet online
Fisher_Gate
Active Member
barney_pig said:
Yes, there were a few tribunite Labour MPs around at that time who had flirted with the far left in the 40s and particularly the 50s when the Bevanites were at their strongest. Stan Newens was quite a senior Cliffite, I seem to recollect - he was MP for Harlow at that time and later became an MEP. Audrey Wise, MP in Coventry, allegedly flirted with trotskyism in the 50s, and was one of the first Labour MPs in that parliament to rush off to Portugal to support the revolution.
I was one of the minority of the IMG that opposed running Socialist Unity, in favour of entering the Labour Party entirely, but there were some positive effects from those campaigns. Tariq Ali's campaign in Southall and particularly Raghib Ahsan's in the Ladywood by-election 1977 were among the first where the left brought a positive image of fighting back against racism among the Asian community through an election campaign. For the time, they got quite good results too. It is deeply regretable that nearly 30 years on, Respect is barely able to do much better in the same constituency.
Birchall claims that the Walsall North result was the sole reason that convinced the IS to transform itself into the SWP, but they saw electoral interventions solely in terms of 'building the party' and people saw through it, which was why their votes slumped, whereas the IMG had a much broader political approach to electoral campaigns.
The correct approach at the time of course was to recognise that the Tribunite left (and CP) failed in the 1970s to challenge seriously the right in the Labour Party and that after an election defeat in 1979, the Tribunites would rupture and the battle inside the Labour Party would erupt (marginalising the CP and other forces outside the party). Sadly the IMG was too slow to spot that, the SWP sat it out on the sidelines, while Militant had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time.
emanymton
A cat politely sat on the flaming gardener.
Groucho said:
I would imagine it is widely discussed amongst those members who put in a little extra effort to follow the BNP results. I don’t think you get the full scale of the problem from just reading SWP publications. Note I said many members not all.
The point is that I don’t think the SWP takes the BNP threat seriously enough, defiantly not as serious as they thought it was a few years ago. The fact that they have lost seats in Burnley and don’t seem to growing quite as fast as they where is apparently taken to mean we have some hoe ‘won’ something when the reality is that they have gone from an almost insignificance to a strong minority party.
Also I agree with Butchersapron where is it discussed?
Unless things have changed the only real forum for internal discussion is in the 3 pre conference bulletins which many members won’t get or even read. All other discussion would be hand at various national meetings. Things may have changed it’s been 3 years since I left but from what I can tell from friends still in it’s basically the same.
Incidentally SWP members in areas where the BNP are strong tend to agree with me.
Edited because I forgot to click the quote original in reply box
Divisive Cotton
Now I just have my toy soldiers
Groucho said:
I was a member of the SWP of 8 months and the only thing we ever voted on was which pub to go to after the Wednesday meeting.
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