Honorary Proletarian

Hello again!  (Is anybody still here?)  As you may know, if you are still there, I’ve been working hard for a while on a little thing called an election campaign, and I decided to give blogging a rest.  Perhaps I was wiser than I knew: here is a good example of why not to blog while standing for election.  It’s not so much a Lib Dem council candidate rhetorically asking “Why is heroin so intrinsically bad” - the answer being obvious to anyone who has ever known a heroin addict - as the tagline “Ramblings of a Geo-Mutualist Liberal Democrat” that is really a bit hallucinatory!  That and the fact he apparently hankers after Hayek, Thatcher’s economic guru, whose Oxford followers want a free market in human body parts.  Jock is thinking of standing for the Lib Dems in the upcoming Holywell Ward by-election, covering half of Oxford University, so students watch this space…

Anyway, we won the local elections, regaining control of Oxford City Council.  This turns out to have been somewhat unusual so will require a bit of explanation.  Suffice it for now to say that by virtue of hard work we got in between the media and the people, with the right candidates and the right policies (within the limits set by local government).  Ultimately electoral success depends on being there on the doorstep, which depends on enthusing the activists, which depends on having the politics to enthuse them with.  It’s grassroots politics, something socialists, of all persuasions, are well-placed to do: Dave Nellist, for example, is an old master.  And those local Labour campaigns with the best results on 1st May were the ones with the highest contact rates.

This sounds like I’m advocating a radical change in direction for both the Labour Party and generally for the labour movement in politics.  In an ideal world, it shouldn’t sound like that, and there are lots of councillors, activists and even a few MPs who really don’t need to be taught how to suck eggs.  But yes I am saying Labour needs to turn about (though I’m not advocating joining the Socialist Party!)  It is time that the organisers and policy wonks, the talkers and debate attenders, realised that the labour movement link is what makes the Labour Party both distinctive and a viable party of government.  We cannot survive as the Liberal Party, or some approximation of it with closer trade union support.  Labour gains its support from being the party of the working class.  If its government keeps on slowly poisoning the grassroots the Party will wither and die.

What is surely evident from the election results aross the country is that “New Labour”, long dead as a coherent ideology, has just breathed its last as a viable electoral project.  There are those who say - and they are the same kind of people who have been saying it for decades - that grassroots democratic socialism cannot win elections.  Now with such a weight of Fabians and Kinnockites and ex-SDPers against me, even if none of them ever won an election, who am I to say that it can?  I can assert, though, with complete confidence, that right now nothing else can.