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Weekly Worker 547 Thursday October 7 2004
Disappointment and hyperbole
If one was to rely on the press statement issued by Respect’s national
office, it would be easy to imagine that a political earthquake had occurred
in the September 30 Hartlepool by-election.
Headlined “Labour humiliation, Tory disaster, Lib Dem failure”,
the official version of events claims that “Respect and its candidate,
John Bloom, did exceptionally well. We gained a clear fifth place and
established Respect as the largest and best organised left challenge to
the establishment, gaining well over twice the vote for the Green candidate.”
However “clear” this fifth place may have been, the stark reality
is that Respect only attracted the support of one in 55 of the Hartlepudlians
who made it to the polling stations. Compared with recent results in Leicester
South (12.7%) and Birmingham Hodge Hill (6.3%), the 572 votes (1.8%) achieved
in Hartlepool can only be regarded as a disappointment. Socialist Labour
Party leader Arthur Scargill polled 2.4% in the 2001 general election
(although there was much more competition this time round, with some 14
candidates seeking election).
Respect’s analysis of the Conservatives’ performance (beaten
by the United Kingdom Independence Party) may be sound, but this result
was hardly a “humiliation” for Labour. They held the seat, albeit
by only a couple of thousand votes, but their support went down by 18.2%,
compared with falls of 25.2% in Leicester and 27.4% in Hodge Hill. Although
they did not win this one, the Liberal Democrats’ so-called “failure”
involved a 19.2% increase in the share of the poll, which was more than
the boost that gave them victory in Leicester.
Unlike Yvonne Ridley and John Rees, who were parachuted into Leicester
and Birmingham respectively, Respect’s candidate had a high profile
in the local community as a leading figure in progressive campaigns to
protect health services and against the nuclear power industry.
Reflecting on the result, comrade Bloom stated that “a lot more people
wanted to vote for us than actually did”, but Respect’s potential
support had been “squeezed by the Liberal Democrats”, as voters
looked for the most effective way to deliver a protest message to the
government. He felt “it was always going to be difficult” fighting
a by-election in a “tucked away place” like Hartlepool, where
people were reluctant to break with the party loyalties of several generations
than was the case in “more metropolitan areas”.
Obviously this is untrue. There was a defection to the Lib Dems, who captured
the anti-war vote. This left Respect floundering, in the absence of a
significant muslim population. According to the 2001 census, only 0.4%
of Hartlepool’s population are muslims, so appealing to religious
community leaders, as the unity coalition did in the more ethnically-mixed
Birmingham and Leicester elections, was unlikely to make any significant
difference to Respect’s performance. Local issues featured heavily
in the campaign, but comrade Bloom’s strong track record as chair
of the Save Our Hospital group did not produce a ‘Kidderminster effect’
here.
On the positive side, though, comrade Bloom felt that Respect had “built
a good profile” in a town where few had heard of it before. Campaign
coordinator Jill Ruffell agreed with this assessment, reporting that the
Hartlepool branch’s membership had quadrupled during the campaign,
including a number of shop stewards. She estimated that up to 50% of the
electorate would be aware of Respect as a result of the campaign, whereas
only a small proportion would have known of it beforehand. If Respect
had made any mistakes, opined comrade Russell, it was in “not being
tough enough on the other candidates who jumped on the bandwagon”
of the hospital issues after previously showing little interest.
Comrade Bloom identified three stages in turning Respect into a viable
political challenge - namely visibility, credibility and relevance. He
believed that the by-election had achieved the first two of these, but
it would require a lot of hard work to make people believe that the unity
coalition was relevant as an electoral option. “Establishing links
with the working class,” he argued, was “a slow burn”.
The “work between elections is what matters” when seeking to
convert goodwill into active support, so it was essential that Respect
members built on the platform they had established by sustaining their
engagement in the town.
Respect’s attempts to win support among British muslims is entirely
appropriate. At a time when muslims, or indeed anyone suspected of being
one, are being demonised as potential terrorist sympathisers and subjected
to discrimination based on a tabloid-induced panic, it is important that
the left demonstrates its solidarity with the oppressed. However, this
appeal is currently being pitched at imams and self-appointed ‘community
leaders’ among the middle class rather than the working class muslims
who, as in the rest of the UK population, make up the vast majority.
The Hartlepool-based comrades cannot be criticised for this, but there
is a danger that socialists involved in Respect in many areas will become
deskilled and lose their ability to engage with working class communities
because of the constant obsession with appealing to affluent, religious-based
opinion-formers. Although the town has an exceptionally small ethnic minority
population, Hartlepool is perhaps more typical of the constituencies that
Respect will fight in a general election than are Leicester South and
Birmingham Hodge Hill.
Comrades Bloom and Ruffell both felt that the government’s primary
vulnerability came from leftward sentiments among voters (albeit manifested
in Liberal Democrat support in this instance due to the lack of an established
socialist electoral force) rather than the right. The pressure to move
rightwards in the bid to ‘respectabilise’ the unity coalition’s
appeal to floating middle class voters therefore runs the risk of jettisoning
the core socialist values that may appeal to working class people increasingly
disillusioned with New Labour and who may eventually reach the point where
they are prepared to break with previous loyalties.
Steve Cooke
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