“One of the few exciting stories of this election, largely untold, is the emergence of the Socialist Alliance/Scottish Socialist Party as a credible alternative to Labour,” wrote Mark Steel, expressing the hopes of a section of the London leftwing intelligentsia, in an election day article in the Independent. If he really believed this, when the results came in he must have been as gutted as the Tories.
The SA put up 92 candidates. They got in total around 57,500 votes (i.e. about 625 per candidate). Rather than becoming the fourth party in England, as they intended, they ended up 8th, after the Greens, the UKIP and the BNP. Their only consolation was to have done better than Arthur Scargill’s SLP which put up 114 candidates and only got around 55,000 votes (or about 480 per candidate). It is true that in Scotland the SSP did rather better, with its 72 candidates totalling some 73,000 votes, or 3 percent of the total vote in Scotland.
We are not rejoicing over this failure since we know that it is also a reflection of the popular reception to the word “socialism” which rubs off on us. Of course neither the SA/SSP nor the SLP stood for socialism. Indeed, it was their traditions – respectively, Trotskyism and Stalinism – that have done so much to discredit the idea of socialism by associating it with a state-run economy run by a vanguard party.
The other tradition responsible for discrediting the word “socialism” is Old Labour, but it was precisely as a revival of this that the SA set out to pass itself off as. The SA was an electoral coalition of normally warring (and still mutually suspicious) Trotskyist sects which had come together to create a front organisation which, if it got off the ground, would become a new Labour party which they could then all infiltrate as they did Labour in the good old days. The SA programme was thus consciously constructed to be openly reformist so as to appeal to Old Labourites. In this it succeeded remarkably.
The title of its manifesto People Before Profit encapsulated the reformist illusion perfectly. Just as their other slogan of “Tax the Rich” assumes the continued existence of the rich, so “People before Profit” assumes the continued existence of the profit system but where the government would intervene to try to make it work in the interest of wage and salary workers. As we know from the experience of Labour governments, this can never work.
The profit system can only ever operate in the interest of the class of profit-takers, and any party which takes on the responsibility for managing its political side will inevitably end up doing this on its terms, finding itself obliged by economic circumstances precisely to put profits before people. In the end such a party, far from transforming capitalism into a new society, itself becomes transformed into an ordinary pro-capitalist party. That’s the explanation of the repeated failure of the Labour Party in government and of its eventual transformation into New Labour.
The Trotskyists who drew up the SA’s detailed programme of promised reforms of capitalism showed no imagination. They weren’t even promising anything new, but largely the restoration of reforms that had once existed but had been whittled away by the workings of capitalism since the 1970s. Thus their manifesto of “pledges” (they played the promise game just like any party of conventional politicians) consisted of “say no” to this and “bring back” that. But perhaps, when you’re pretending to be something you’re not, the tendency will always be to overdo it.
There is another possible explanation. That the SA’s reformist programme wasn’t a cynical ploy, but that they genuinely believed in it. In that case they would be genuinely Old Labour reformists. This could be the case but the arguments socialists had with them on the streets and at meetings suggest that they did indeed have a hidden Leninist agenda of violent insurrection led by a vanguard party (but that they couldn’t agree which one of them it should be). So perhaps after all it is reassuring that they did not emerge as a credible, reformist alternative to New Labour.
Adam Buick
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