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People Before Profit:
less than meets the eye
The election of two Socialist Workers Party/People
Before Profit candidates at the end of a lacklustre election campaign in
the North of Ireland was like a lightning flash, providing excitement and
colour.
The results was generally welcomed by
political commentators as showing that the Irish peace process had come
of age and that the Stormont assembly had matured to the point where it
could accommodate a socialist presence.
The candidates responded to the publicity
with a great deal of bombast. Eamonn McCann sang The Internationale and
announced that the new movement was neither Orange or Green, but a socialist
movement gathering votes from across the sectarian divide.
It was not long before these claims were
challenged. A Sinn Fein supporter carried out an analysis of transfer
patterns and showed that the PBP vote came almost exclusively from disaffected
Sinn Fein and SDLP voters. It was part of a wider pattern of dissatisfaction
among nationalist voters which involved a fall in the overall vote and
an increase in votes for independents. Evidence of vote transfer from unionist
supporters was vanishingly small.
SWP members defended their organization,
arguing that the vote did not invalidate their non-sectarian policy.
Electoralist alliances
That won't wash. The SWP proclaimed their
neutrality on the Irish national question while at the same time targeting
over many years the two most deprived nationalist constituencies in North.
The Socialist Party, with their own front, Labour Alternative, stood in
unionist areas with derisory results.
So behind the bombast was a very carefully
crafted and exclusively electoral strategy. When we see that the vote came,
not on the back of working class upsurge, but on the back of a substantial
defeat for the working class and the imposition of the Fresh Start austerity
programme, it is necessary to investigate further.
Unlike the majority of socialist electoral
gains these gains for the SWP were not based on an upsurge in struggle
- rather the reverse. What brought victory was a series of alliances. Election
statements were aimed at specific constituencies, but each had less to
say than met the eye.
Don’t mention Sinn Fein
The main constituency was dissatisfied
nationalist voters and this was addressed by statements on the Casement
park scandal, where planning and safety regulations had been set aside
to force through a GAA super stadium. Gerry Carroll decried "poor administration"
but stopped well short of exposing the sectarian sharing out of spoils
and rampant corruption involved in the deal.
In addition in both constituencies there
was a substantial republican vote. The republican groupings do not stand
candidates for Stormont, but are willing to lend their votes. They got
almost nothing in return - a vague statement of concern about prisoners
- but the intervention of Bernadette McAliskey in support of the PBP campaign
was decisive in ensuring this vote.
Finally the PBP campaign appears to have
been the only campaign to voice opposition to the Fresh Start austerity
offensive, but PBP clarified their opposition by saying they would work
with UNITE and UNISON trade union leaderships around campaigns such as
local mental health. As both union leaderships have signed up to Fresh
Start, the statement amounts to nothing more than dancing in the cracks
inside an austerity budget.
Minimalist Programme
These positions translate into a minimalist
programme for the new MLAs. Asked to accept that his election was due to
Sinn Fein's failure to alleviate levels of deprivation in West Belfast,
Gerry Carroll managed to answer without mentioning Sinn Fein. In fact there
are few direct criticisms. Those who see PBP as a left opposition to Sinn
Fein are clearly unaware of the level of collaboration between the groups
on both sides of the border.
However the key alliance in the electoral
jigsaw is the alliance with the left of the trade union bureaucracy. Both
Carroll and McCann are closely involved with the trade unions. They can
be said to be on the left, but hardly be called a left opposition.
So when, in his first speech in Stormont,
Eamonn McCann criticises the Stormont executive for not fighting hard enough
against the cuts, he reinforces the Sinn Fein narrative that the cuts are
"British cuts" and the trade union narrative that we can pressure
and persuade "our politicians" to protect us from austerity and that the
best thing is to keep lobbying and avoid confrontation.
Sinister mantra
But the most sinister mantra is the claim
that PBP are neither Orange nor Green, but socialist. This is quite
a shift to the right for a group that historically defended the democratic
validity of the call for a united Ireland.
Again it is a reflection of the ideology
of the trade union bureaucracy - a neutrality on the national question
that in a heartbeat becomes capitulation to Loyalism and the promotion
of sectarian gangsters to be accepted as representatives of the Protestant
workers they oppress.
So the task of socialists becomes one
of polishing their non-sectarian halos. Sectarianism is yet again
some form of disease from which "all sides" suffer equally and the socialists
are blind to the material base of sectarianism in the structures of the
Assembly they sit in and in the background sponsorship by the British state.
A SWP spin doctor has had the bright idea
that this election can be compared to the election of two of Socialist
Democracy's progenitor People's Democracy councillors during the hunger
strikes. In terms of politics the current programme comes closer to the
rise of the old Northern Ireland Labour Party. There was room for the NILP
in the old Stormont as long as it remained stable. When that political
structure began to decay it vanished like smoke.
Today the excitement around the new political
formation was over in days as yet more crises and instability hit Stormont.
A major part of that instability is the disenchantment among nationalist
workers. The refusal of the two PBP MLAs to recognise the base on which
they were elected and to declare unremitting hostility to the institution
they sit in is an obstacle to the task of building on that resistance. |
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