THE SOCIALIST Labour Party had everything going for it in the Hemsworth by. election. Yet 1,200 votes (5.45 per cent), was hardly worth boasting about.
A mining constituency In Arthur Scargill's heartland, a candi. against pit closures, the NUM candidate debarred from selection by Labour's NEC for the second time in a short period, the Harriet Harman schools Issue exploding just betore polling and the possibility of a "protest vote" in a rock solid Labour seat.
The stage could not have been better set.
But the SLP vote was low, by any standards. It compares poorly, for example, with that of the expelled Militant supporter Dave Nellist In Coventry In 1992.
Blair's Labour Party was not the Issue. Getting rid of the Tories was. Voting Labour was the way to do it.
By all accounts the SLP did not meet the outright hostility which Labour's spokespersons talk of, but there was no enthusi asm for the new party.
In an interview before she was chosen to fight the seat Brenda Nixon spoke of there being little support for the launch In the area "people are just hoping to hang onto their job. But that could change with a Labour government. Workers will start making demands on it, and if they don't dellver, people will, I Glory days? - NUM members from Scorgil's home county of Yorkshire supporting 1992 morch oganst cuts in local services hope, start to use their volces."
This has now been borne out.
The result confirms much of what Socialist Outlook has said since hes was moored. It Is totally out of tune with the mood in the working class that the prime task in the coming general election is to get rid of he cores, By setting up as an alternative the SLP cuts Itself off from been to declare that there will not any ERVICE being able to relate to this feel. ing.
Unfortunately, rather than recognise these realities, it looks as If the SLP will continue on its misguided course, with scary arcanny arter the ren sult that, providing the money Is available, the SLP will stand In all constituencies in the gen-
NO CUT DEFEN