Thursday, June 10, 2004
Election Prediction posted by Richard Seymour
Okay, here's how it looks.Heavy Labour losses; modest Tory gains; more substantial Lib Dem gains; substantial Green and UKIP gains; Respect gain a few seats; BNP lose some, gain others; Livingsone takes London on a severely reduced vote.
That's quite a pessimistic surmisal compared to what Respect are saying on their website:
An hour to go until the close of the poll. If you haven't voted, vote now. We are close to a breakthrough, a seachange in British politics. We have been ignored by the mainstream media. They won't be doing that after this weekend.
I'd like to believe that... I just want to say, however, that whatever the result Respect remains a worthwhile project. Someone has to break the political deadlock of "the three main candidates", omnipresent on news programmes, in simpering interviews and in candid camera snatches of the campaign trail. Someone has to make Mark Mardell look like a twit for tossing Tony Blair soft-ball questions like a fan creaming up to a celeb. Someone has to at least try to pull the antiwar Left together, even if the Greens continue to calculate that their soaring success renders a coalition undesirable.
I noticed in The Guardian today:
"The Greens and Respect, the re-badged Socialist Workers Party, are pressing hard from the left in the south."
Yeah, that re-badged Socialist Workers Party which calls for the overthrow of capitalism, armed workers militias to defend a new workers' state, workers' councils to run the new society etc etc.
Still, the more telling detail is that together we are pressing hard from the Left. Even when not in coalition, we appear to be able to do substantial damage to Labour's hold on the Left vote. If the Green leadership were not so inward-looking, so sectional and party-minded, a coalition could have made a much more dramatic impact on the elections. Still, with or without them, Respect must continue to win over trade union branches, Labour members, voters and councillors (MPs too, if ever it were possible). Respect must continue to combine street politics with electoral strategy, even where we occasionally need to remind ourselves that where there is a will there is not necessarily always a way. (This is sacrilege in some parts of the SWP, of course - the worse thing one can be called is a "pessimist", even though Tony Cliff was partial to Gramsci's dictum that one should have "pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the heart").
Suffice to say I shan't stay up with Dimbleby, but I will be dreaming of Respect.