IMAGINE the following scenario. In a certain country the mass party of the working class loses its fourth successive election. As a result the party leader resigns. didates for his post open up a huge, wide-ranging and debate about socialist perspectives, investigating the fundamental causes of the party's defeat.
The party, re-enthused by this flowering of socialist creativity, and buzzing with new ideas and strategies, is determined to learn past lessons and boldly reorganises itself to combat the hated capitalist government, full of confidence and determination.
Sound familiar? Only up until the end of the second sentence; the rest is a dreamland fantasy a million miles away from today's Labour Party.
Next Saturday week, the election of John Smith will be completed. And if the actual election seems to have arrived suddenly, it is because next to nothing has happened between the announcement of Kinnock's resignation and the election itself.
Indeed the only event of significance has been the campaign of Ken Livingstone and Bernie Grant, democratic rules from being official canThe cancomradely Cementing a right-wing succession didates. MPs. prevented by obviously unJohn Smith is the sole surviving MP from the 69 who voted against the party line in 1973 to ensure Britain's entry into the Common Market. All the others are dead or no longer Almost certainly Margaret Beckett will become deputy leader.
In these stitched-up elections socialists can only abstain; there is no political basis for supporting any of the official candidates. Among sections of the left there has been a desperate attempt to find reasons for supporting either Bryan Gould or John Prescott. anything. apace.
But Gould is slap bang in the middle of new realism, a Kinnockite to the core. Prescott has made noises about the importance of the unions, but never once spelt out in detail his conception of the party's links with the unions. In the long term John Smith as leader will only push the party further to the right. Coalitionism is not on the agenda now, but as the next general election approaches pacts with the Liberals will be at the centre of the agenda. The old Kinnockites, bereft of ideas, will be in the long term defenceless against the extreme right wing of the bureaucracy - the Hammonds, Lairds and Jordans - who want to turn the Labour party into a British version of the US Democratic Party, a simple capitalist party.
Eventually only a revival of the left will prevent this development. But in today's conditions a left which sticks to activism in the constituencies will be incapable of rebuilding The response to the election of Smith has to be the building of a fighting and united left across the labour movement, in the Labour Party, the unions and the mass campaigns. Without it, the evacuation of working class politics from the Labour Party will proceed