NO JOH CHEST JALINGS, JAILINGS dle layers and less class conclass, layers upon which the Liberal Democrats base themleft. This can be achieved by a working class movement on the offensive - something that is But there are even bigger is sues at stake than victory or tion. The question is this: will Party backwards to a situation that existed before the first world war, confronted by two big capitalist Apart from keeping LP members Kinnock's favourite hate figure Dave Nellist MP: witch-hunt against him and the hard left will further damage politics - in a way that it still does today in the United States?
US Democrats
The question is not that posed some in the 'Militant tendency, who maintain that the Labour Party itself is becoming the same as the American Democratic Party. The real question is whether the ruling class, with the help of the 'new realist' labour bureaucracy, can engineer a major electoral shift away from the Labour Party to the Liberal Democrats - thus inflicting a major defeat to inde pendent working class politics.
This may seem a long way off or even incredible, with the collapse of the old Alliance and the blood feuds between the erstwhile Gang of Four.
PHOTO: John Harris ment cannot resist this trend in British politics by passively clinging on to a 'first past the electoral system, peculiar and undemocratic constitutional arrangements. of an archaic British State.
Left alternative
Only a vigorous class strugpressures of class collaboration and a coalition government, not an undemocratic constitutional fraud. Only a vigorous left alternative can inspire the working class and its allies amongst the oppressed and in the middle layers.
This strategy of class struggle and for the maximum extension of democratic rights, is the only way to crush the politics of con-