Solidarity 173, 13 May 2010

Everywhere the financial and economic crisis has brought discredit and odium on capitalism, on capitalists, on bankers, and on their snouts-in-the-trough politicians. Nowhere, in the election campaign just past, did that truth find any expression. Nowhere at all near the main flow of the contest was there any socialist critique of capitalism. Nowhere is there a strong movement animated by the conviction that there is a socialist alternative to capitalism, and fighting to win it. Nowhere is there a strong working-class movement armed with the the Marxist view of capitalism's transient place in...

Almost the only non-Labour socialist candidate in the election to do positively well was Eamonn McCann in Derry. He got 7.7% of the poll in the Foyle constituency, more than double the 3.6% he won on a similar platform in 2005. McCann has been a socialist activist in Derry since the 1960s, for most of that time loosely associated with the British SWP. In the election, standing under the banner "People before Profit", he declared: "We stand for the interests of the working class, the marginalised and oppressed. "We believe that it is through organising in communities, workplaces and colleges...

One good thing about the 6 May results: it looks as if George Galloway is finally out of British politics. In 2004 Galloway, expelled from the Labour Party, was offered a troop of activists to sustain him as a political figure by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who founded the Respect movement with Galloway as figurehead. The SWP hoped that Respect would enable them to win over Muslim youth brought onto the streets by the marches against the Iraq war, and so agreed to overlook Galloway's record of friendship with leading figures in Saddam Hussein's regime; of taking money from Pakistan...

The new Tory/ Lib Dem coalition government is committed to cut brutally and deeply into the living standards of the working class - into our wages and into social spending. The Tory commitment to reduce the national debt in the shortest possible time, and to do so while also cutting taxes, implied the most severe cuts. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg has also promised "bold and savage cuts". The Tories as the leading party in government are now in a position to carry out their threats. There will be cuts as savage as the working class will let them get away with. Cuts as in Greece, if they can. We...

Unite put a lot of effort into the general election campaign. In practical terms, it was valuable, for example in helping to push back the BNP in Barking. But it was accompanied by no effort at all to push a distinctive political message, even on issues where Unite has clear union policy. Mailings to Unite members appealed to them to vote Labour on such grounds as trusting in the "experience" of the government as against the untried Tories. On 11 May Unite joint general secretaries Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson put out a statement supporting a Labour/ Lib Dem coalition. If that had come off -...

Pete Willsman is secretary of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and a member of the Labour Party National Executive. He spoke to Solidarity about his views on the election result. On the doorstep I always thought that the talk of the Liberal surge was exaggerated. But the Liberals did even worse than I expected. The Labour Party did slightly worse than I expected. There were definitely more people out working for Labour than the other parties. The unions turned a lot of people out to work for Labour, though after the record of the last 13 years you might expect them not to. I suppose...

Last November, at the Labour Representation Committee conference, left-wing Labour MP John McDonnell told us: "If there is a new Labour leadership election, I will stand again". As we understand it, he is likely to make a formal announcement soon about entering the contest now opened up by Gordon Brown's resignation. McDonnell also put himself forward as a candidate in 2007, when Tony Blair resigned. He told us last November: "Last time we were severely limited by minimal resources, but we did take issues out into the affiliated unions. "We tried to ensure that there was a debate in the...

A general strike on 5 May against planned cuts stopped Greece, and brought onto the streets of Athens the biggest demonstration there since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974. Although Greece's big union federations are closely tied to the governing party, Pasok, they plan further strikes. There is protest within Pasok. On 6 May three MPs were expelled from the Pasok parliamentary group for voting against the cuts. Panicked by the growing Greek crisis, on 10 May the eurozone governments, with the IMF, put together a 750 billion euro (about ｣650 billion) rescue plan not just for...

Greg Albo is a member of the Socialist Project group in Canada, a professor of political economy at York University in Toronto, and a co-editor of the Socialist Register. He spoke to Solidarity about the "Canadian model" of cuts seen in Lib-Dem and Tory circles as a model of how to deal with government financial problems. The Liberal government of Jean Chrétien elected in Canada in 1993 made big cuts. That they were costless is a myth now being put around in discussions among the OECD and G20 governments. The social cost was huge. A big chunk of federal spending in Canada is intertwined with...

Australian state school teachers took it to the brink this month, when their union declared itself willing to defy legal rulings against its boycott of NAPLAN tests (similar to SATS in Britain). But in the end a brutal, unashamedly union-bashing approach from the federal Labor government made the union back down. The tests are going ahead, from 10 May. The New South Wales Teachers' Federation, the largest and historically the most left-wing of the state organisations that make up the federal Australian Education Union, remained defiant longest, but eventually buckled on Thursday night 6 May...