Catching votes
In answering my criticism that the SPGB fails to get across the socialist alternative two reasons were given: lack of funds and the BBC’s refusal to allow the SPGB onto the Open Door programme.
It is deplorable that, through the BBC and its commercial pals, the Government continues to monopolize the broadcasting media in this country and I would say that the BBC’s grounds for turning down the SPGB is highly questionable and ought to be looked into.
But, these problems aside, there is clearly something wrong with the SPGB’s approach to the public. In the May GLC elections the three SPGB candidates managed to net 0.59 per cent of the total number of votes cast in the constituencies of Marylebone, Lambeth and Camden.
This doesn’t leave much evidence of non-party support. So either the Party is failing to make its platform attractive enough to the electorate or the latter cannot, or will not, understand it. Now if the political coherency of the average tabloid daily, popular among the British working classes, is anything to go by the political awareness of our electorate is . . . undeveloped.
So, as straightforward as your present image is (a rare thing in politics) it’s not catching votes. Perhaps the socialist programme is too overwhelming for the average person who has inherited centuries of conscious grovelling to capitalist leadership and wage-slavery. As much as this is inexcusable the SPGB is not going to change it as long as it remain aloof in the higher reaches of Marxist weltanschauung. Start by looking at the wording in your Declaration of Principles: precise it may be but the language resounds with nineteenth century tub-thumping.
Of course you will remind me of the inherent antagonism in the class struggle and the need to attack all the aspects of the capitalist habit. But if the SPGB wants to achieve political legitimacy it’s going to have to adopt fresh ways of approaching us simpletons who haven’t managed to get through every volume of Capital. I hope for everyone’s sake it does.
Jon Lieberman
Oxford
Reply:
We invited you to expand on how the SPGB could, vide your previous letter, “exploit the media and all the other available channels”, and we find your response extremely lame. You say the BBC’s turning us down “ought to be looked into”. By whom? There have been various committees of enquiry into broadcasting; the SPGB has submitted evidence to all of them, and they have often stated that minorities such as ourselves should have opportunities to speak. The BBC has gone on rejecting us. What do you suggest?
You now abandon the other projects you proposed, and draw attention to our poll in the GLC elections as proof that “there is clearly something wrong with the SPGB’s approach”. However, in your first letter you said it was “a fact” that Trotskyists and other left-wing groups “had greater sway” and “leave the SPGB behind”. An article elsewhere in this issue gives election figures for all these groups. In the 1974 General Election they averaged an estimated .065 of the votes cast, and in the GLC elections they did not do conspicuously better than we. Would you now modify your previous opinion?
We hardly need telling that the political awareness of the majority of the electorate is “undeveloped”. Whether or not our language is “aloof” is a matter of opinion; the Socialist Standard frequently receives letters from readers who find it direct and comprehensible compared with other political journals. But whatever language is used, we still have to get it into the hands of working people. If you know “fresh ways” of doing this, or otherwise promoting the Socialist case, we should be more than interested to hear about them. Hope isn’t enough; as we asked previously, what are you doing to help get Socialism?
Editors.
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