Alliance must act now to build on election gains

Alliance must act now to build on election gains

The Socialist Alliance emerged from the General Election campaign a stronger and more dynamic organisation than before.

In fact, the campaign itself really created the Alliance as a national organisation, creating local branches of the Alliance in many areas where they didn’t previously exist, and winning many new members.

Now the key challenge is to build on those successes, to ensure the Socialist Alliance can establish itself as a key player in the battles against the neo-liberal policies of this new Labour government both at a local and national level

The Socialist Alliance can build on the success of this year’s debates on demo-cratising the political fund in a number of unions, both by consolidating the gains that have been made and widening them to other unions, as well as by developing the wider fight back against privatisation.

The many people who have come into the Alliance during the election campaign must quickly be made to feel that this is an organisation which offers them a political home, a place for both discussion and activity and one whose priorities they can shape.

The Alliance must also continue to work in a way that reaches out to the increasing numbers of people who will become disillusioned with New Labour as the attacks of the second term take shape – both by trying to win them to the Alliance itself, but at the same time finding ways of working with those who are not ready to make the leap.

But in order to carry out these tasks, the Socialist Alliance to develop the right structures.

It has outgrown its current structures both politically and organisationally. This is why there is going to be a national conference towards the end of the year which can deal with these questions.

A number of issues need to be addressed.

The current membership system which is somewhat chaotic, needs to be simplified. At the minute some people are members of local alliances but not national members, while others have joined nationally and may not know what’s going on in their area.

There should be a unified structure so that people join once and have the rights and responsibilities at both local and national level. This new structure should also be used to go back to those people that we have made contact with either nationally or locally, but not actually signed up and formally recruit them.

Local Socialist Alliances should see themselves, and act, as branches of the national organisation.

There needs to be a strengthened leadership, which has the authority to lead the organisation and involves the different political currents both explicit and implicit within the Alliance.

Such a body needs to be able to react quickly to political events as they unfold, to ensure that the Alliance is involved in the heart of opposition to government attacks. It needs to build the organisation nationally and resource and encourage its local units.

Discussions need to take place about the best way of achieving such a leadership team – as there are a number of different approaches that could be followed.

The Alliance also needs to develop some sort of regular publication that can promote the organisation’s campaigns and report on successes in different areas etc.

This is particularly important for those members who are not members of any other left organisation. It should be produced in a way that would allow it to be used on stalls, at demonstrations or meetings to sell to those who are coming across the Alliance for the first time – therefore needing to be something very different from the current members’ bulletin.

In order to take these steps it will be important to maintain the national office set up during the election campaign and find the material resources to employ staff.

These are some of the issues that the Socialist Alliance needs to explore in the run up to the conference later in the year.

Unfortunately, as Alan Thornett explains below, the first step will have to be to defeat the Coventry and Warwickshire resolution promoted by the Socialist Party, which seeks to delay these vital moves.

Then hopefully it will be possible to concentrate on developing the sort of effective national organisation that can build on the success of the election campaign and be a key part of building a fighting opposition to the neo-liberal offensive.