Burying the New Labour Project posted by Richard Seymour

Look, I'll make it simple for you. Ricky Tomlinson says "The resistance to Blair is the only ray of sunshine about at the moment. Arthur Scargill is a friend of mine. Come the election there'll be a little cheque for Arthur and a little cheque for the Socialist Alliance to pay for bits of printing and stuff like that. I just wish the two would get together and form a really, really strong opposition to New Labour."

There needs, desperately, to be unity on the Left. There is an enormous vacuum in leftwing politics since Labour vacated the territory, and noone is filling it. No single party can do it alone. And a collection of splinters doesn't make a battering ram. The proposals for a Unity Coalition to finally send those cadaverous freaks on the Labour front bench to their coffins is, in all honesty, the best thing that has happened to the Left for decades. It is a genuine move to overcome the muck of ages of sectarian nonsense. We have come through a turbulent year of protest, with popular anger reaching unprecedented levels. Blair is unpopular, his policies are unpopular, the Tories are unpopular. Conditions are ideal for a leftist revival on the electoral scene to match that on the streets and in the trade union movement.

Yet, the Communist Party of Britain - to be sure, a small sect, but also the effective owners of the Morning Star - have decided that such unity would be beneath them because, they claim, "It is a narrowly-based front for the SWP which has emerged from the remnants of the failed Socialist Alliance" . I don't buy this explanation, of course. The coalition is being proposed by, among others, George Monbiot and George Galloway representing the Green left and the Old Labour left respectively. Such independent voices are not about to submerge themselves into an SWP front, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. Far more likely, their position reflects their "assumption that it is possible to reclaim the party formed by the trade unions 100 years ago and for which Lenin urged support."

The reference to my namesake is a desperate piss-take, since I believe Lenin's formulation was that one should support reformist administrations "like a rope supports a hanging man" .

More pertinently, what is there to "reclaim"? The Labour Party is moribund, and it has neither the desire nor the ability to attract the kind of membership capable of pulling it in a different direction. As Patrick Seyd has noted, managerial and middle-class occupations are over-represented in its ranks, while the working class is proportionately under-represented. The only organic connection to the working class Labour retains is through the trade unions, whom it treats with contempt. Holding out the starved, dry carrot of reform one day, bashing with the bluntest cudgel the next. Firefighters were, for this government, "the enemy within". They are to be stripped of their right to strike, so that they may not embarrass Mr Blair anymore. Brendan Barber, the TUC General Secretary, hears a few whispers in his ear about cooperation one minute, the next minute some Cabinet hack is briefing the BBC on the latest renunciation of fundamental social-democratic principles.

There is nothing left to reclaim.

This Sunday, there will be a National Convention to launch the alternative to New Labour. Be there.

Declaration and call for a National Convention to found an alternative to New Labour
Sunday 25 January, 10am
Friends Meeting House, Euston Road, London