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Given the proportional election system of the new London Assembly, this should have been a chance for left socialists to elect a few assembly members as a beachhead against the centrism of New Labour. The Greens managed to elect three out of the twenty-five assembly members, but vicious infighting and sectarian proliferation of candidates assurred that none of the far left socialist parties got anywhere. It looks like Scargill, the SWP (IS), Communist Parties and other groups have strongly established their absolute electoral irrelevance in Britain. If they could not win in an election where Ken Livingstone was romping to victory with two thumbs firmly in the eyes of the Tories and Blair's Labour, is there any reason why anyone will take them seriously after this? Any UK folks with other thoughts?
Nathan Newman ----------------------------- Factions blow their chance By Ben Leapman
Extraordinary infighting among five competing socialist factions looks set to ensure that none achieves success in the London elections.
Far Left groups have squandered a unique chance of electoral success on the coat-tails of Ken Livingstone. With the rebel MP streets ahead of Frank Dobson in the polls, there is a huge appetite among Labour-leaning Londoners to cast "safe" anti-Government protest votes.
The 25-member Assembly, to be elected alongside the Mayor on Thursday, appears ripe for fringe candidates to shine. It has few real powers for extremists to abuse. The list voting system means parties need only five per cent support across London to win a seat.
Yet extraordinary infighting among five competing socialist factions looks set to ensure that none reaches that threshold. The combined votes of the far-Left parties may well reach five per cent, but individually it is almost certain that none of them will. The row could come straight from Monty Python's Life of Brian, in which the People's Front of Judea accuse the Judean People's Front of being "splitters".
London's Left-wing factions are proving to be just that. Not one looks likely to have a member of the Assembly come Friday morning.
Four groups support Mr Livingstone for Mayor. The exception is veteran miners' leader Arthur Scargill.
Mr Livingstone, on the other hand, is shunning his former allies and telling supporters to vote Green - perhaps adding to their already realistic chance of winning seats. Front runner on the Left is the London Socialist Alliance, a rare example of co-operation by fringe parties. Their joint slate is headed by Paul Foot, a journalist and leading light in the Socialist Workers Party, the most visible of Britain's Trotskyist parties, with an effective flyposting operation.
Also standing for the London Socialist Alliance is Greg Tucker, South West Trains driver and a former Lambeth Labour councillor, who last year narrowly missed being elected deputy leader of his Rail Maritime and Transport union.
His ally at the RMT was Pat Sikorski, a Northern line driver who unsuccessfully challenged Jimmy Knapp for the leadership. However, Mr Tucker and Mr Sikorski, members of competing Trotskyist factions, have fallen out. Mr Sikorski is standing against the London Socialist Alliance at the head of a rival slate composed entirely of Tube workers, under the banner of Campaign Against Tube Privatisation. Insults have been traded, and the vote inevitably will be split.
It gets more complicated. Mr Sikorski is a former president of the Socialist Labour Party, the breakaway group Mr Scargill founded to oppose New Labour, and which is now putting up its own Assembly candidates.
In perhaps the most baffling split of the campaign, the Communist Party of Great Britain has signed up to the London Socialist Alliance but another faction, the Communist Party of Britain, is standing separately, with Anita Halpin, Stalinist former president of the National Union of Journalists, as its number one candidate.
As if there was not enough choice, gay rights activist Peter Tatchell - whose recent stunts have included following Michael Portillo around and conducting a citizen's arrest on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe - has quit Labour to stand as an independent Assembly candidate.
It all adds up to a recipe for electoral disaster. The five per cent threshold, introduced to block the British National Party, should see off all of these challengers - as well as Damian Hockney of the UK Independence Party and Ram Gidoomal of the Christian People's Alliance, both staging dual campaigns for Mayor and Assembly.
Last week's Evening Standard/ICM poll found the Greens polling seven per cent and winning two seats, with a further seven per cent going to the rest of the fringe parties combined. These include not only the various socialist groups but the UK Independence Party and the Christian People's Alliance. That total may grow. It is quite possible that 10 per cent of the final list vote may go in total to parties that, individually, all fall short of the five per cent hurdle.
That does not mean their votes will have no effect. The more people who desert Labour for the small Left-wing parties, the fewer seats Labour can hope to win. But the beneficiaries of this process will not be candidates flying the varied socialist banners. More "wasted" votes mean fewer effective votes; and under London's system of proportional representation, this will reduce the number of votes needed to elect each Assembly member from each of the larger parties. For any given number of votes they can thus hope to win more seats.
The real winners from the infighting of the far Left will be those whom traditional socialists regard as their sworn class enemies - the Tories and Liberal Democrats.