The Livingstone Mayoralty? What a wasted opportunity.

In many ways Ken Livingstone was an extremely successful Mayor of London, he was after all elected twice, I have no
need to point out his main achievements as he seems to be doing enough on that front without my help. * In all probability his main achievement will be using the 2012 Olympic Games to rebuild a large area of east London, that is unless his successor as Mayor Boris Johnson gets into bed with the developers and city speculators and turns it into another Canary Wharf.

However as far as the political left and rank and file political activism are concerned, from his first day as mayor there was a major flaw in Ken’s strategy. Unlike when he led the GLC, he made no attempt to put together a broad left coalition of the type which made him such a threat to the Thatcher Tory government, that it eventual moved against the GLC and shut it down. For those who at the time did not live in London or the surrounding area, it is difficult to explain what a political weather vane the GLC was for the left. Groups from right across the left progressive spectrum looked to the GLC and gained support from it, thus a thousand left projects bloomed. Nothing of this type of left activism occurred under Livingstone Mayoralty, nor was it encouraged by the Mayor or his small cadre of close advisers.

Indeed in many ways it was positively discouraged, as throughout his periods in office, Livingstone gradually moved away from the left towards London’s establishment. For all his talk of putting together a progressive coalition in reality the coalition he built was a very narrow beast. It basically consisted of what was left of the London Labour Party, the Greens and in the latter period NL and their backers in the City of London. True the level of left wing political consciousness was not at the high level that it was in the 1980s, and the New Labour government had placed checks and balances on the Mayor powers, but Ken is an able and wily political operator, but he made no attempt to play any role in helping to rejuvenate the left, indeed as I have already said he kept it at arms length throughout his time as Mayor.

I have little doubt that what remains of Livingstone’s ‘progressive coalition’ will move effortlessly into the orbit of the new conservative mayor Boris Johnson and in all probability will draw in the Liberal Democrats, who by shamefully refusing to call on their supporters to give their second preference vote to Ken, all but placed themselves in the Tory camp. Thus Ken’s so called ‘progressive coalition,’ will given time morph into a conservative coalition with a tint of green.

The seeds of Livingstone’s move to the centre where planted during his campaign as an independent mayoral candidate. Those who had volunteered to work on his first campaign gathered in an ad agencies basement only to be told Ken was to busy to come down and meet them. His absence was a conscious decision as he had no intention of building a broad left coalition, he simply wanted a group of individuals to do his leg work. Back then the only place he could find such a group was on the non LP left, thus a disparate group of campaigners worked hard to put Livingstone in office. However once there he ditched them and appointed a strange group of people, all of whom owed their position within the Livingstone administration to Ken personally, not one had a base beyond Ken within London's community as a whole.

Thus an enormous opportunity was missed and the entire independent Livingstone Mayoralty was linked to the personality of Ken. Its purpose was two fold, to get him readmitted to the Labour Party and to see him reelected to a second term. In truth in his behavior, despite his fine public record when it comes to opposing imperialism etc, the post GLC Ken behaved more like a conservative politician with a small c. By this I mean all was centered on him. He was the arch apparacik and thus it was to ambitious bureaucrats he looked to maintain him in power. It became clear the last thing Ken trusts is the masses. In his second term, when he talked of building a progressive coalition it was with the leaders of NL, the greens and city of London, not with the rank and file members of the political left and Trade unions. Indeed during his second period in office at times Ken appeared to hate the trade union rank and file. The more so when they quite correctly tipped him bollocks, believing their own standard of living was a higher priority than a good headline for Ken.

There is little Ken did after he was readmitted into the New Labour Party that Boris Johnson will not be willing to live with, which just about says it all. The longer in office the more it became obvious Ken would not be reelected for a third term, for the simple reason that his popularity was based on him being outside the mainstream loop. Indeed Johnson's spin doctors understood this only to well and portrayed their man as a candidate who has an individualistic streak.

What will Livingstone’s legacy be, I fear it will not amount to much, Herbert Morrison as right wing as he was, will still stand tall as London premier mainstream politician who achieved most for London’s working classes, For he built tens of thousands of council houses which made a start at replacing London’s horrendous slums, homes fit for working class people to live in. Perhaps there is a lesson here for future London Labour politicians.

As unfair as it may be, for many leftists Ken Livingstone’s Mayoralty will be remembered for his defense of Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, after Blair lied about the circumstances in which his officers shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube station, south London, shooting him seven times in the head and once in the shoulder.

As to the London Left, during Livingstone’s period in office it has declined and fractured even further, which just about sums up Ken as a political leader. A great bureaucrat yes, but a leader of working class people in struggle, Never!

The Livingstone Mayoralty? What a wasted opportunity.


* http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/09/livingstone.boris

James Connolly Memorial Lecture and Commemoration.

Across Latin America the struggle for social change is gathering momentum despite decades of repression and violence. In fact hundreds of thousands of people are actively involved in the struggle for more radical solutions to their problems, struggles that are shaping the very future of the continent.

This coming Saturday 10th May the annual James Connolly Memorial Lecture will take place in the Teachers Club, 36 Parnell Sq West, at 2-00pm.

The lecture will be delivered by Carlous Wimmer, Vice-president of the Latin American Parliament, and international secretary of Communist Party of Venezuela.

He will deliver his paper on the topic "Workers and the struggle for social change" in Latin America today with particular emphasis on the their effort to bring workers into a central role in the current phase of the Bolovarian revolutionary process in Venezuela.

CONNOLLY COMMEMORATION:
Sunday 11th our annual Connolly Commemoration will take place at Arbour Hill Cemetery at 3-00pm. There will be a laying of wreaths and a short oration from both the Communist Party and the Connolly Youth Movement to honour James Connolly and all the leaders of the 1916 Rising.

After the ceremony we will retire to the Cobble Stone Pub, Smithfield for some light refreshments. You are invited to attend both these events.

Yours in solidarity
Eugene Mc Cartan

Book Review: Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography, by Frances Wheen

I thoroughly enjoyed Francis Wheen's book about the life of Marx, whilst it does not quite go into the detail of Karl Marx: A Biography, By David McLellan, I found it a far more enjoyable book to read, so I thought I would post up a review of Wheen's latest book.

Mick

Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography:
By Frances Wheen

Reviewed by Alex Miller. *

Atlantic Books 2006
130 pages

Frances Wheen, who produced an entertaining (if over-hyped) biography of Karl Marx in 1999, returns to Marx with a biography’’ of the revolutionary philosopher’s most famous and important single work, in the series from Atlantic called Books That Shook The World. Wheen gives a readable account of the genesis of Das Kapital, interweaving the tale of Marx’s personal and political life with brief descriptions of Marx’s earlier works in the lead-up to the oft-promised and oft-delayed publication of his magnum opus in 1867.

Unlike most commentators, Wheen conveys a vivid sense of Das Kapital’s vastly under-appreciated qualities as a great work of literature, infinitely superior in this regard to the bourgeois political economists whose work Marx trounced on purely scientific grounds: ``The book can be read as a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created.’’

Wheen does a good job of destroying some of the myths that surround the book. For example, he recounts how British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson claimed never to have read it, giving up because of a page-long footnote on page 2. As Wheen points out, a glance at page 2 of the book reveals this to be a wild exaggeration.

Another example concerns the familiar claim that Marx’s predictions about the progressive immiseration of the proletariat under capitalism have been refuted by the actual development of capitalism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: “Countless pundits have taken this to mean that capitalism’s swelling prosperity would be achieved by an absolute reduction in the workers’ wages and standard of living, and they have found it easy to mock. Look at the working classes of today, with their cars and microwave ovens: not very immiserated, are they?’’.

Wheen points out that the idea that Marx has been refuted in this way is based on a complete misreading of Chapter 25 of Das Kapital: Marx in fact argued only that under capitalism there would be a relative, as opposed to absolute decline in wages, and Wheen shows that this is in fact ``demonstrably true’’.
In addition, Wheen makes the excellent point that ``immiseration’’ concerns not just the wages workers receive, but how long and how hard they have to work in order to get them.

And in fact: “The average British employee now puts in 80,224 hours over his or her working life, as against 69,000 hours in 1981. Far from losing the [capitalist] work ethic, we seem ever more enslaved by it’’. Wheen quotes Marx’s uncanny prescience regarding this in a passage in Chapter 12: “We may read on one page that the worker owes a debt of gratitude to capital for developing his productivity, because the necessary labour time is thereby shortened, and on the next page that he must prove his gratitude in future for 15 hours instead of 10.’’ So much for the imminent leisure age predicted in the 1970s by apologists for capitalism!

There are parts of the book where Wheen is less convincing. For example, in the chapter on the influence of Das Kapital after Marx’s death, by highly deceptive selective quotation from What Is To Be Done?, Wheen portrays Lenin as laying out an abstract blueprint for the future tyrannies of Stalinism. This is an all too familiar trick, and it is a pity that Wheen succumbs to the temptation to play it.

Also, Wheen objects to the labour theory of value (according to which the exchange value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary amount of labour time required to produce it): “Why do people sometimes pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for a single diamond ring or pearl necklace? Mightn’t these extraordinary prices also owe something to scarcity value, or perceptions of beauty, or even to simple one-upmanship?’’

But this is a weak objection. For one thing, there is a difference between the concepts of exchange value and price. True, Marx and the classical political economists generally held that in the long run, the prices of commodities tend in the direction of their exchange values. However, this clearly does not imply that the price of each and every commodity sold on the market is equivalent to its exchange value.

Moreover, even waiving this point there is a further problem with Wheen’s objection: as almost any modern philosopher of science will attest, empirical explanatory theories are confirmed or disconfirmed on the basis of their capacity to furnish a whole body of predictions. The holistic nature of theory confirmation means that a theory can issue in an inaccurate prediction yet still be confirmed overall if the theory’s predictions on sufficiently many and sufficiently important other matters are sound. So even if the labour theory of value did yield the wrong prediction about the exchange value of a diamond ring, it might still be justified in virtue of its capacity to predict the exchange values of more common commodities or, at a further remove, the long-term qualitative characteristics of the capitalist mode of production.

And, indeed, Wheen acknowledges the greatness of Marx’s achievement in just this regard: despite some wildly over-optimistic predictions about the imminence of socialist revolution, Marx pulled off the remarkable feat of accurately portraying the general shape and qualitative character of globalized capitalism in the 21st century from the vantage point of its infancy in one small part of the world in the 19th century. In this respect, no bourgeois economist or social scientist has ever come near to Marx.

Wheen concludes: “Marx’s errors or unfulfilled prophecies about capitalism are eclipsed and transcended by the piercing accuracy with which he revealed the nature of the beast. While all that is solid melts into air, Das Kapital’s vivid portrayal of the forces that govern our lives – and of the instability, alienation, and exploitation they produce – will never lose its resonance, or its power to bring it into focus. Far from being buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, Marx may only now be emerging in his true significance. He could yet become the most influential thinker of the 20th century.’’
Readers of Wheen’s stimulating book will leave it with the desire to tackle Marx’s masterpiece for themselves: for this especially, Wheen is to be commended.**

*Alex Miller is a member of the Scottish Socialist Party and of the Democratic Socialist Perspective in the Australian Socialist Alliance. Abridged versions of these reviews first appeared in the Australian socialist newspaper Green Left Weekly.

** http://links.org.au/node/394

Labour government by reclassifying Cannabis panders to the most reactionary elements within the media and US government.

The Labour government by reclassifying Cannabis panders to the most reactionary elements within the UK media and US government.

by Mick Hall.

Just how bankrupt of ideas New Labour has become was demonstrated yesterday when the over promoted Home Secretary Jackie Smith, reclassified Cannabis back to a class B drug. Such cowardly and harmful behavior has been par for the course throughout the New Labour governments period in office. For whenever they have come under the lash of the right wing media due to a societal problem they have always use administrative means to appease their reactionary media critics, whilst refusing to confront the core of the problem.

The UK already has some of the harshest laws within the EU against the possession and supply of illegal drugs, yet far from reducing the number of people who take recreational drugs these laws have become part of the problem. Our jails are full to bursting due to these draconian drug laws and thousands of young people are having their lives ruined, not by the drugs and narcotics they experiment with, but due to the governments infantile over reaction.

Rather than looking at the overall picture as people like Professor Colin Blakemore are calling for, the government looks to PC plod and the law to solve the problems of illegal drug use. Which is farcical as history has proved draconian laws have very little affect on the numbers of people taking hard and soft drugs. Indeed Pro Blackmore, the former head of the Medical Research Council, said that cannabis use had fallen since 2004 when the law was liberalized and Cannabis was downgraded to a class C drug; and restoring the drug to class B status would be unlikely to protect those people who were most vulnerable, [such as those with a psychiatric illness] but it would increase their chance of getting a criminal record. He went on to say, “The confusion over cannabis highlights the need for a proper overhaul of the present classification system, which the public neither understands or respects." *

Drug-Scope, the leading drugs information charity, said in a statement that it was disappointed the government had ignored the ACMD's advice: "Unfortunately, the message given by this decision is that drugs policy can be driven as much by political considerations, media headlines and scare stories as by the evidence."

Even the government's own scientific advisers last night warned the Home Secretary, that her decision to upgrade the legal status of cannabis would not work in curbing its widespread abuse. Professor Sir Michael Rawlins, chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), said moving cannabis from class C to class B "is neither warranted, nor will it achieve its desired effect."

The ACMD, the government's own expert body on drugs, decided by 20 votes to three to recommend that cannabis remain a class C drug. Its nine-month review concluded that while more potent, homegrown strains of herbal cannabis, such as skunk, now dominate the British market, the evidence of a substantial link with mental illness remains weak.
Rawlins said that the government had the right to consider other factors but warned that reclassification would make little difference to the levels of consumption: "We know that for people who smoke cannabis, it makes no difference to them whether it is class A, B or C. What is important is a really vigorous public health response."

About the only figure to welcome the reclassification decision was the Tory shadow home secretary, right winger David Davis, which just about says it all, as it is clear Ms Smith and the New Labour government is pandering to the worse of the reactionary media and conservative right wing bigots like Mr Davies. That these New Labour politicians still believe there are votes in cracking down on those who take recreational drugs just shows how little they understand about the constituency they are pledged to serve.

Again the Brown Government is using a societal problem to introduce laws that can and will be mainly aimed at working class people. Once again it will be the working classes and their children who will feel the backlash from this reclassification. Instead of turning the pockets out of working class youngsters and raiding small time inner city dealers, the police should turn their attention to the drug use within the City of London and within public corporations like the BBC. Drug use is allegedly rife in the dealing rooms of the cities major banks and the newsrooms of the mainstream media, but no suggestion of compulsory drug test there, despite the importance to the nation of what goes on in these organizations. Such test are reserved for the underclass that inhabit our prisons or the pupils who attend sink schools

Of course what is really needed is some innovative thinking as far as illegal drugs are concerned, but this is unlikely to happen for two reasons. Firstly neither the Labour Government or Conservative opposition would consider going beyond the strict guidelines set by the US government for its allies as far our drug laws and drug treatment methods are concerned. Secondly far to many influential middle class professionals gain a very good living out of the illegality of recreational drugs and it also allows governments and the home office to have a handy bogeyman about the place when it comes to justifying larger budgets for the police, military and security services.

Berlin Pays Tribute to Gay-Rights Activist Persecuted by Nazis.

We Communists, socialists and Jews were not the only people persecuted by the nazis, the gay and Lesbian community also suffered greatly at these neanderthals hands. The Berlin local government has just recognized the work of Marcus Hirschfeld, one of the first European fighters for Gay rights.

Mick Hall

Berlin Pays Tribute to Gay-Rights Activist Persecuted by Nazis

Berlin renamed a stretch of the Spree River in honor of a gay-rights activist persecuted by the Nazis in the 1930s as the city's biggest hospital opened an exhibition devoted to the sex researcher.
A stretch of the Spree River in central Berlin was named after gay-rights activist and sexual researcher Marcus Hirschfeld in a dedication ceremony on Tuesday, May 6.

On the same day 75 years ago, the Nazis plundered his offices and later burned hundreds of his books.
Hirschfeld had founded the world's first institute dedicated to fighting discrimination against homosexuals. He went into exile in France and died there in 1935.

The stretch of river bank named after Hirschfeld is near his former institute.
According to Germany's Lesbian and Gay Association (LSVD) and the Mitte district of Berlin, where "Marcus-Hirschfeld-Ufer" is located, a bronze monument to Hirschfeld will also be erected along the river.

The Charite hospital also commemorated Hirschfeld with an exhibition which opened on Tuesday at its Medical Historical Museum. Called "Sex Burns," the exhibition focuses on Hirschfeld's work and his persecution by the Nazis.

The tributes to Hirschfeld are "a clear acknowledgment for gays that persecution has taken place and that reparation is necessary," said the head of Germany's Lesbian and Gay Association, Alexander Zinn, said at the dedication ceremony.

"That is a first step in the right direction," he said.

The Nazis declared homosexuality an aberration

Uniting the Anti-Fascists?

Below is a short piece written by anti Fascist campaigner David Landau in which he notes that the whilst there have been some progress in the struggle against the BNP, the fascist tide has not been turned and the anti fascist movement faces challenges after the BNP gained there first seat on the London assembly.

MH

Uniting the Anti-Fascists?

By Dave Landau


Much hard work, some of it good, some of it not so good, was done in
campaigning against the fascists. But the fascist tide has not been turned. Many
reasons some of which are to do with anti-fascists the campaigns. Problems:

Sectarianism Some of activity was done by independent anti-fascist
anti-racist groups, but much was done under the rival umbrellas of Unite Against
Fascism and Hope Not Hate/Together. Clearly there is a problem in being both
united and together! In some parts of the country people are happy link up with
both umbrella's. In places like London however, differences are stronger.
South East Region of the TUC (SERTUC) played the role of a super-umbrella
supporting initiatives of both UAF and Together.

The absurdity of this particular split to me is that there are no substantial
differences - much is at the level of talking up differences or painting the
other in a version that does not reflect the truth. Now I am not for unity at
any price. If, for example, an anti-fascist campaign adopted the Beverley
Hughes/New Labour position that you need stronger immigration controls because
immigration feeds the BNP - yes there are people in the anti-fascist movement
(in my own local campaign) who are otherwise good in many other ways who think
this is the way to take the ground from the fascists - then I don't think that
I could be part of it. But these are not the kinds of differences that
divide the umbrellas (see later on immigration). So one thing that I want to fight
for is to end this silly conflict.

Popular Frontism Both UAF and Together are into engaging with the Tories,
having them on the platform, whilst in some cases not having Left List or
Respect on the platform (not a great loss perhaps but the principle of the thing
when they are standing in the election but you have the Tories up there), an
emphasis on celebrity endorsements, using the phrases like 'Defending the Britain
We Love' (I had to swallow hard to give that leaflet out). Now I am not
dogmatic about who you involve - I was very pleased that the Bishop of Barking put
out a statement asking people to vote against the BNP, some would call this
popular frontism but I don't care. Its when you don't criticize the mainstream
whose policies have created the despair that feeds fascism and whose racism
maintains the framework in which the fascists operate.

We need a movement based on trades unions, grass roots communities and those
under attack from the fascists; the kind of genuine anti-fascist United Front
which stopped the fascists in Cable Street in 1936 and in Lewisham in 1977.

United Fronts are frayed at the edges A theoretical pause. United Fronts
are very dialectical creatures. Whilst we can have a strict definition of the
United Front as an Aristotelean category, going through a series of campaigns
and movements saying 'this one is a united front whilst thats a popular front,
and those lot are bloody 3rd period sectarians', the reality doesn't work like
this. On the one (right) hand our partners in a united front will be class
collaborationists or at least their leadership is. Sometimes the social
democrats, even 'left social democrats', are running the local state. So in order to
form an alliance with them, we have enter popular front type formations and
try and make them into united fronts. On the other (left) hand defeating
fascism is conditional on a fight for a socialist alternative. We can argue that
this is the job of the (non-existent) workers' party which should not foist its
program on a UF. However, a united front in action, can be the embodiment
of that socialist alternative - workers controlling the streets or linking with
other struggles which when added together are all about a socialist
alternative.

Immigration lies at the heart of fascist propaganda now and for always. So
the challenge to the legitimacy of illegality, them and us, national and
racial identities and so forth is fundamental to defeating their ideas. Now, it
would not generally be right to try and impose a position of no immigration
controls on a united front campaign. A mass campaign will necessarily embrace people
who have differing positions on this question (although a Nottingham
Anti-Fascist Conference agreed to sponsor the 29th March Conference against
immigration controls which is great). On the other hand it is down to the socialists and
other anti-racist campaigners to take these arguments up. In particular we
must fight against these campaigns adopting other positions on immigration such
as advocating 'non-racist fair controls'. It was noticable that Strangers
Into Citizens were given a prominent position at the Love Music Hate Racism
Carnival. No One is Illegal, No Borders or Campaign Against Immigration Controls
were not invited to speak or to lead the march - no surprise there then.
SERTUC and Searchlight also work closely with Strangers....

Local Roots One of the big problems when UAF was set up was that it expected
local campaigns to simply fall into line. This was one of the reasons for
the acrimony and whey the Hope Not Hate/Together network coalesced around
Searchlight. UAF put out national material it expected everybody to use. More
recently Hope Not Hate has caught the UAF disease and groups tend to not produce
their own material but instead distribute material produced centrally by
Searchlight. Central material is a useful resource for local groups but we need to
produce stuff which addresses what the BNP is saying locally and relates our
campaign to local issues like a hospital closure or whatever. If the money that
the umbrellas both raise from TUs and other benefactors could be made
available to local groups to produce their material that would be very handy. Not
all of us have a local Trades Council and some of them are broke anyway.

So What Do We Want? The anti-fascist movement needs to re-group, needs to
relate to new forces. In London we face a big challenge with them having a seat
on the London Assembly. In places like Stoke-on-Trent there are similar
challenges. SERTUC or equivalents elsewhere to call a conference of all
anti-fascists to knock heads together but also discuss the POLITICS of the way forward.
Then some genuine differences of substance will come out but will hopefully
be debated constructively.

When Do We Want It? As soon as bloody possible.

Dave

PS Love Music Hate Racism have called a demo tomorrow night (Tuesday)
6pm at City Hall, the first London Assembly meeting with BNP member Barnbrook. Don't know
who else is supporting it but we should be.

BNP gain council seat at Tilbury

Unfortunately the British National Party (BNP} won a council seat in the Tilbury and Thurrock Park ward in Thursdays [1/05/08] local council elections. * This was hardy surprising as Tilbury has been hit hard by the policies of the New Labour Governments. Not least by its refusal to remove from the statute book the anti trade union legislation that was first introduced by Margaret Thatcher. Tilbury is a shadow of its former glory, once a thriving industrial area at the center of which was the Port of London. Which at one time employed thousands of unionized dockers plus many hundreds in the industries that serviced the shipping, ship repairing, transport, ships chandlers etc, all of which operated a close shop policy hence the wage rates were above the UK national average.

Today the Port of London has been totally privatized, even down to the abolition of the Port of London Constabulary; and is now mainly operated by non union labor. Although when the T@GWU closed down their local office it hardly helped instill confidence in the local workforce. Instead of closing its office down the trade union should have used it as a base from which they could recruit new members and raise wage rates in the retail parks like Thurrock Lakeside and Bluewaters and the warehouse complexes that service them that have sprung up on brown build sites in the surrounding areas. With government plans already coming into effect to build a super port down river on the site of the old Shell Haven oil refinery, at Stanford le Hope, the Port of Tilbury’s days are clearly numbered.

To the east of the town in the marshes near where Queen Elisabeth 1 made her speech, “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too,” stood two large power stations. Tilbury A, which has now been demolished and Tilbury B, which is not operating at full capacity and is due to be decommissioned soon. With it will go hundreds of jobs plus those of the construction workers who periodically service and repair its massive generators and boilers. Whilst there is talk of a third Power Station being built on the site, that is all it is, talk!

The people of Tilbury are experiencing something not dissimilar to that which occurred up river at Dagenham, which has failed to recover from the chronic unemployment that was created when Ford Motor Company upped and left without a backward glance leaving social devastation in its wake, When the Labour Government was first elected in 1997 there were high hopes that the area would be rejuvenated, but when this did not occur and the government simply added to their woes Tilbury people became politically demoralized and very angry.

Due to its social desolation the area has some of the lowest house prices to buy or rent in the South east of England. Which in turn has attracted a mass influx of newcomers from overseas which has hardly helped build a sense of community, something that Tilbury was once famous for. Understandably many locals see the newcomers as competitors for the limited amount of council housing, local health care provisions and eduction that is available within the area. To demonstrate how limited some of these resources are, Tilbury people have to travel 14 miles to the nearest general hospital which is situated in Basildon. If you add in the lost jobs and factor in that the political Left has been unable to offer the people of Tilbury a viable political alternative, then as I said at the top of this piece it is hardly surprising that they have voted for the BNP.

That they did not vote for the Conservative or Liberal-Democrat candidates in great numbers is interesting and tells one that by voting for the BNP they are expressing their contempt for all the mainstream party’s, for they have come to believe that these party’s do not have there best interest at heart. Since the 1920s Tilbury has always returned Labour councillors, by voting BNP they are also telling the LP in very clear terms that they no longer regard them as honest brokers.

When the BNP last won a seat in Thurrock in the Grays Riverside ward it came as such a shock to the Labour Party, trade unions and the anti fascist movement that it acted as a wake-up call, which resulted in all of these organizations working hard over the following year within the Grays area. The outcome of this was that the BNP was defeated at the following years election.

Whilst a similar campaign will be needed in Tilbury if the BNP are to be stopped from using Tilbury as a bridgehead into other deprived areas of Thurrock. In itself it will not be enough, for unless the English left can unite within a single political party which will offer the most impoverished section of the working class a viable alternative to the BNP then these people may be lost to the Labour Movement for good. For the BNP have finally woken up to the fact that they can win seats within areas which are made up of socially deprived working class people and lower middle class owner occupiers.

Tilbury Riverside provided the disillusioned and socially deprived working class voters and Thurrock Park the lower middle class owner occupiers. The left will never win over the latter, but unless we regain the trust of the former the nazis will continue to gain support.

* Thurrock's Tilbury Riverside and Thurrock Park ward.
Results.

CANDIDATE
VOTES CAST
OUTCOME
Emma Colegate
British National Party
530
Elected
Paul Martin
Labour
463
 
June Ann Brown
Independent
192
 
Lee Dove
Conservative
144