Some like the stand-up comics who pose as “Count Binface” or “Lord Buckethead” do it for laughs and to raise money for charity. Others take it more seriously like Laurence Fox who is running for the London Mayoralty in what looks suspiciously like a publicity campaign to promote his acting career. He faces competition from Brian Rose, a cranky former American banker who leads the “London Real Party”, who drinks his own pee and promotes conspiracy theories on his popular YouTube channel.
So spare a thought for the band of hapless left social-democrats who are standing in England, Scotland and Wales this week. They range from the absurd “Northern Independence Party” and whatever George Galloway’s followers call themselves these days to old-time Trots and revisionists who have learned nothing over the past fifty years.
The fact that these platforms are rejected time and time again by the same working class these programmes claim to advance, never deters these pseudo-revolutionaries who believe they can change the consciousness of the masses through rhetoric and wild promises.
Some argue that they split the Labour vote and let the Tories in by the back-door. But this misses the point. These people usually only get support from the sort of people who might otherwise vote for Buckethead or the Loonies – a “protest” vote than rarely gets beyond the low hundreds these days.
Standing left candidates without mass support against Labour divides the movement and the class and ignores the obvious fact that the only realistic alternatives are those of the Tories, Scottish nationalists and the Liberal Democrats that have been, and would be, much worse than any Labour administration.
Disaffected Labour voters generally abstain or turn to another mainstream alternative. Past beneficiaries include the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party. At the last elections a significant number even switched to the Tories over Brexit. But few ever succumb to the allure of the self-styled “revolutionary” left. All these left posers do is simply reinforce the erroneous belief that the class collaborationist ideas of social democracy can be defeated by simply imitating it in the countless variations of the British Road to Socialism upheld by the revisionist, pseudo-communist and Trotskyist movements in Britain today. At the same time they reinforce the legitimacy of the Westminster parliament that creates the illusion of the bourgeois “democracy” that we live in today.
There have been exceptions. But they only served to prove the rule. The two communist MPs who sat in the House of Commons during the Attlee era achieved next to nothing. George Galloway, who returned to the House of Commons on his own Respect ticket, achieved even less. That’s possibly why he barely even bothered to attend sessions of that august body.
We can all play games and conjure up imaginary legions beyond the British working class to take us down the revolutionary road. We can all invent a class that is seething with anger and mobilised for revolutionary change that is just waiting for the correct party with the correct formula to lead them to victory. But the real struggle to defeat the class-collaborators and agents within the labour movement is being fought inside the trade unions and the Labour Party today. That’s where we need to be. We are communists. We work with the working class that exists and not the phantom of romantic ultra-leftism.
