I've expressed many times my disagreement with the IWCA's politics. Which I think were mistaken, opportunist, workerist, and profoundly reactionery. However history has passed judgement on them by now too. It was a failed initiative - based on set of inaccurated judgements and perspectives. Let it rest in peace.
Yes indeed, you have expressed your disagreement with IWCA politic's or rather what you yourself singularly decided were iWCA politics - without - needless to say without ever quoting the IWCA on any IWCA policies.
But be that as it may, your chief groan, oft repeated is that the IWCA is 'non-socialist'.
Your lazy and concieted assumption being that the IWCA critique of the extant socialist Left/society must necessarily come from the right. Which many not least Labour Lib Dem oppoenents on the ground would regard with astonishment. In fact, when looked at objectively the IWCA take on on society and your much beloved milk and water socialism is from a communist perspective.
Not communism with a 'big C', or even a small one, not communism through the prism of the 20th century or bolshevism, but the communist method of work as outlined by M&E adapted to circumstance.
It is only necessary to look at Eastleigh to see the thinking behind it. At one end UKIP and the other Tusc.The former having clearly been nudged, away from being a largely dormant single issue party (with many less cllrs that the BNP, and indeed less than the IWCA not too many years ago) outside of European elections are now hungrily filling the vacuum. In places like Rotherham, Middlesbro, Barnsley, it indicates as some research does seem to show, they are reaching out to and gobbling up what might previously considered the BNP demographic.
In interviews on Newsnight voters flagged 'immigration' as the main reason why they were voting UKIP. Very visibly it is they rather than the BNP who now represent far-right aspirations electorally.
Of course one problem with 'borrowing' the 'BNP vote', is that you must continue to constantly nurture it, or having both grown and normalised the asset, risk at some critical stage, as a result of you being 'out-radicalised' seeing it return to base.
So that's one side of Eastlieigh.
The other was represented by Ken Loach on
Question Time. He rightly pointed out that UKIP represented 'a protest vehicle for the right' and stated what was needed was for it to be balanced by one on the Left. However he clearly believed that this required no more than a sufficiently loud rallying call - without - the necessity of ever addressing how precisely it would present itself 'on the landings' to what is very clearly now the Left's
former constituency.
62 votes all too accurately reflects the consequences of not making strategy a consideration and where socialism now stands as a result of failing, over a minimum of 20 years to come to terms with what is really happening up and down the country.
To put this in some perspective; 62 votes is also roughly
a tenth of what one IWCA candidate took in a
council ward election in Islington in 2006. The IWCA also came within around a 100 votes of a seat in a neighbouring ward. But for the activists on the ground the 3,000 ticks against the IWCA across just two wards was nevertheless regarded with deep disappointment.
That was because they believed in the project (inseperable from a political belief in the working class itself) and were working to a precise plan, and thus set about their work with a
purpose. Essentially they wanted to be in a position to
compete.
Again could the contrast with Eastleigh be any greater?
Either way what must surely be obvious by now is that
if progressive opinion is ever to seriously get it's act together 'taking note of the IWCA' as a Red Pepper article once put it, 'will be as a good a place to start as any'.
After the Eastleigh humiliation we might ever so tentatively substitute the 'if' with a 'when'.
A poster remarked a couple of years back that the 'IWCA was twenty years too late'. Today, with evidence of the drift to the right beyond dispute, (it's easy to forget that the BNP was still a full 7 years away from it's ist elected cllr in 1995) it might be more convincingly argued the launch was twenty years too early.
Ultimately the choice is straightforward: either you make the necessary adjustments to allow you compete (the 'streets' or 'landings' being one and the same thing) or you fail to do so, and capitulate.
