Posts Tagged ‘Socialist Party’
Heritage Party Beats Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) in key council by-election, Plymouth.
From Barry B.
The Plymouth Herald reports.
Labour romped to victory to retain a seat in a Plymouth City Council by-election following the death of a long serving councillor. The poll was held in the Efford and Lipson ward following the death of Labour politician and former lord mayor Brian Vincent in April.
And the seat remains in the hands of Labour as Paul McNamara was voted in with more than 50 per cent of the votes. He secured 1,204 votes, comfortably ahead of the Conservative candidate Will Jones who came second with 423.
He will serve an 11 month term of the council. The election of Cllr McNamara adds to the majority which Labour hold.
Cllr Tudor Evans’ party hold 31 of the 57 seats on Plymouth City Council. The rest of the composition is Conservatives (16), Green (2), and six Independents, consisting of Free Independents (2), The Independent Group (2), and Independent (2).
But who are the Heritage Party who decisively beat the TUSC (Socialist Party led) candidate? Like TUSC they are pro Brexit ultras, but have other policies as well.
“We are a socially conservative political party in the UK, standing for free speech, traditional family values, national sovereignty & financial responsibility.” More on their site.
“The Heritage Party is a Eurosceptic, right-wing populist and socially conservative political party in the United Kingdom founded in October 2020 when then London Assembly Member David Kurten left the UK Independence Party (UKIP) to form the party.[1] Kurten was also a member of the Brexit Alliance, a Eurosceptic technical group he formed in 2018 with fellow former UKIP member Peter Whittle.”
Socialist Party calls for Left Unity behind Trade Union and Socialist Coalition with attack on the Labour Left, SWP, AWL, Socialist Appeal and the Greens.
20th of April, Enfield Council By-election, TUSC, 1,1%
Brighton: the Argus, today.
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) has announced eight candidates for this year’s council elections, with its overarching policy being to oppose all cuts.
Bedford Today: Wednesday.
Bedford Elections: Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidate pledges to fight increases in council charges and privatisation
The pro-Brexit ultras of the Socialist Party have issued this statement today.
We need a new party to fight for fully funded services and a real pay rise
Vote TUSC on 4 May
We need a new party! And most people agree.
61% of people think the UK “needs a completely new type of political party to compete with the Conservatives and Labour for power”, according to the Edelman trust barometer.
Tories have spent the last decade destroying our public services. Keir Starmer’s Labour promises a government led by him will be one of “fiscal restraint” – code for more cuts….
But in over 250 seats, including every ward in Sheffield, Coventry, Plymouth and Southampton, as well as mayoral candidates in Mansfield and Leicester, and many more places too, working-class fighters are standing as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC).
TUSC candidates, which include many Socialist Party members, pledge to “oppose all cuts”, and “support all workers’ struggles against government policies making ordinary people pay for the crisis, and for inflation-proof pay rises” (see TUSC core policy platform at tusc.org.uk).
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We need a new type of party – a mass workers’ party, armed with a socialist programme. Standing socialist, anti-cuts fighters in the local elections is a step in the process of helping to bring one into existence.
Alas, the pro-Brexit ultras of the Socialist Party seem bereft of new allies, above since the RMT withdrew from their coalition,
This appeared on their site yesterday, and will inspire new friendships and alliances.
Corbyn, the left and the fight for a new mass workers’ party Hannah Sell.
“Seeing this, and the huge gulf between Labour under Corbyn and Starmer, there will also be trade unionists arguing to back candidates outside of Labour. Their numbers would be swelled dramatically if Corbyn in the meantime announces that he intends to contest the next general election as an independent or, preferably, under the banner of a new, democratic party initiated with at least a section of the trade union movement. However, Corbyn’s plans may not become clear until after the Islington North constituency Labour Party has gone through the selection process, and probably been suspended for trying to select him as their candidate.
What approach should Marxists take in this period of flux? Unfortunately, with the exception of the Socialist Party, most Marxist groupings have no way forward to offer. Truth is concrete. Any serious organisation which claims to be Marxist has to have an answer to what should be done next on all the central questions facing the working class, including the issue of political representation.”
There follows an extended, lengthy, if not more, attack on the SWP and the left, (extracts, the rant is long...)
The Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) are a prime example of how to evade this vital question, in the same way as they have during the whole Corbyn era. In response to the Labour national executive decision to ban Corbyn standing for Labour, they correctly point out that, “the routine call from the Labour left group Momentum – that the important thing to do is to stay and fight in Labour – convinces fewer and fewer activists. They can see, painfully clearly, that staying in means mounting no fight at all”. (Time to leave Labour after Corbyn’s ousting, Socialist Worker, 28 March 2023).
Of course, there are also still self-identifying Marxist groupings which continue to argue – against all evidence – that the best way forward is to hunker down in the Labour Party and wait. Having failed to transform Labour into a mass democratic workers’ party with Corbyn as leader, in our view it is totally unrealistic to put that forward as a strategy now when Starmer and his ilk have a stranglehold on the party. Nonetheless, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) for example, urge Corbyn not to stand outside of Labour because: “It would not create a viable working-class socialist political profile against Starmer’s ‘pro-business’ orientation, and it would give Starmer a chance to solidify his control by bundling out left-wingers who back Corbyn”. It will, they argue, just “multiply the many no-hope attempts at electoral splinters”. (Labour’s NEC votes on banning Corbyn, 27 March 2023)
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Supporters of the AWL within the RMT vociferously argued against this position, calling for affiliation to Labour at all costs, as did other groups inside the party. Socialist Appeal was particularly hysterical, saying that we in the Socialist Party were ‘sectarian’ while simultaneously insulting RMT members’ intelligence by suggesting we had “helped to derail the RMT’s affiliation”. In the same article they attacked us for “lectures from the side-lines about how to reclaim Labour” when “members are already doing this, thank you very much” (Reject the Blind Alley of Sectarianism, 21 February 2019). Unfortunately, however, RMT members’ concerns about the failure to transform Labour under Corbyn’s leadership have been totally confirmed. The programme we fought for to transform Labour was never adopted by the leaders of the left who constantly sought compromise with the pro-capitalist right.
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Socialist Appeal, the AWL and the rest bear a share of responsibility for this. They also attempted to limit the struggle to those who held a Labour Party card, rather than seeing it – as both the RMT and the 88,500 who signed up as ‘registered supporters’ to back Corbyn in 2015 did – as a battle to create an anti-austerity party, removing the Blairites and opening the doors to all those who wanted to fight for a left programme. We wholeheartedly threw ourselves into this struggle, including proposing our affiliation to Labour in order to aid the battle against Labour’s right, which was not taken up by any Labour left groupings. We participated in the Corbyn-supporting Momentum grouping until we were excluded by the leadership for not holding Labour Party membership cards, a decision that Socialist Appeal and the AWL did not oppose and, in some areas, were to the fore in implementing.
It is no surprise that Socialist Appeal tries to avoid calling for steps to a new party at all costs. This trend split from the Militant Tendency (now the Socialist Party) in 1991. We had led the magnificent mass movement against the poll tax, with a peak of eighteen million non-payers, which had defeated the tax and led to the resignation of Maggie Thatcher. To give a glimpse of the scale of the victory, since 2010 central government funding of local authorities has been cut by around £15 billion. In contrast, scrapping the poll tax and replacing it with council tax required the Tory government to put an extra £4.3 billion into local government in one fell swoop – in current prices equal to about half of the total amount cut over the last thirteen years.
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The real character of the Green’s leadership was, however, shown clearly when the pro-capitalist wolves were circulating around Corbyn’s Labour leadership. On the grounds of ‘combating a crash-out Brexit’, in August 2019 the Green Party’s sole MP Caroline Lucas came out for a government of national unity, involving all parties including the Tories and the ‘Independents for Change’ group of Blairite MPs – the conscious, if premature, saboteurs of Corbyn. The only proviso set by Lucas was that the cabinet members be women! Unsurprisingly, her Labour choices – Yvette Cooper and Emily Thornberry – were not Corbynites, while Diane Abbott was, at first, mysteriously ‘forgotten’. In the 2019 general election, the Greens had an electoral arrangement with the Liberal Democrats – who were part of the vicious austerity coalition government from 2010-2015 – standing down for them in 40 seats; but stood against Jeremy Corbyn and other left Labour candidates.
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There is more, a lot more, via link above.
Apart from the amusement value of this unbridled attack on the better known groups on the left – the SP rarely publicly acknowledges their existence – the feeble scores for TUSC demonstrate that they are a in weak position to give lessons to anybody.
There is no clear reference to the Communist Party of Britain who are standing candidates, nor to Chris Williamson, who knows what he is backing these days, nor to the Red-Brown Workers Party of Britain.
TUSC to Stand over 270 Candidates in May Local Elections.
Has been known, sometimes, to get votes in double figures.
During the furore over Jeremy Corbyn the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) has not been in the news much. The disaffiliation of the RMT Union means that these pro-Brexit ultras have few allies left, except ‘Iranian state media’ star Chris Williamson, and even he is quiet on this these days.
Yet in council elections TUSC has a few times, scored over ten votes.
The group behind TUSC, the Socialist Party, are a remarkably persistant sect with parallels with the factions that arose within Congregationalism.
Over 250 TUSC candidates to take on cuts councils..
for this year’s local elections the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), which the Socialist Party takes part in, has endorsed over 250 candidates. All candidates pledge to fight for no-cuts needs budgets and campaign with local trade unions, campaigners and residents to get back the money taken by over a decade of Tory austerity to restore the jobs and services we need.
There is still time to stand as a candidate, in order to receive your certificate of endorsement to stand for TUSC, get your application form, which you can find on www.tusc.org.uk, sent to the TUSC steering committee before 4pm on Friday 31 March.
OVER 250 CANDIDATES TO STAND UNDER THE TUSC UMBRELLA IN MAY, BUT THERE’S STILL TIME FOR MORE
The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) steering committee met this week and approved a further batch of candidates to stand in the local council elections in May – taking the total agreed so far to 270, including candidates in the directly-elected mayoral contests in Leicester and Mansfield.
“I very much hope you will be able to accept my application”, said one of the prospective candidates on his form. “Enough is enough. I am a teacher, work in a local school, was born in the ward where I want to stand, and am passionate about changing society for the better. I endorse the core policies platform”, which are the minimum policy pledges which every council candidate using the TUSC name on the ballot paper commits to (see http://www.tusc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Local-election-platform-2023.pdf).
TUSC has a new generation of wits to enliven their campaigns.
Tendance Coatesy 