Bye-Elections (1987)

Rosie Barnes

From the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Greenwich groan

There is one way in which the SDP/Liberal Alliance, self-proclaimed mould breakers of British politics, are set rigidly in tradition. Whenever they win an election they elevate the result into an historic event which will change the face of politics.

So it was in Greenwich where Rosie Barnes, ex-Labour Party and straight out of the Posy Simmonds mould of a Blackheath liberal, won a by-election famous for making an issue over whether the Labour candidate's father had been a drunken wife-basher. Another enduring tradition ensures that elections should concern themselves with such irrelevant nonsense.

The Alliance claimed their victory was evidence that the working class are fed up with the established two party system and are looking for another way, a third party. This does not square up with another well used Alliance ploy, to encourage people to vote "tactically" to keep one party out rather than let another one in. Tactical voting — if it ever happens — could be used to the benefit of the Labour and Tory Parties; it does not indicate any disillusion with the two party set-up but a strong revulsion against one or other of those parties. And there is nothing new, or mould-breaking, in that.

In any case it is the depth of negative thinking to argue that workers should vote for a party they don't really support rather than another which they like even less. That is a cynical misuse of workers' political power to change society. The Alliance, which is a re-arrangement of the failed leaders and policies of other capitalist parties, is bound to feed off the cynicism and disillusion which those failures have nurtured.

The two Davids, then, offer nothing that is new or hopeful. On economic policy they deal in the same sterile ruses of trying to make British capitalism more profitable by holding back wages. On war weapons they concern themselves with trivial debates about which method of mass annihilation they favour.

The authentic mould breakers of politics aim for a fundamental change — for a different social system with none of the desperate social ailments which are the stuff of capitalist politics and of the parties, like the Alliance, which seek power to run the system.

. . . Truro Tremble

In Truro, "tactical voting" had a different meaning for the Alliance. There they urged voters to support the candidate of their choice — because they always assumed they had victory in their pockets. The big issue was the "Cornishness" of the candidates with the Labour man. who comes from decidedly un-Cornwall-like Hillingdon in West London, upstaging the rest by speaking Cornish. A famous victory for the Liberals, they say; a typically cynical and irrelevant contest, we say.