>I agree with you
>that voting Labour or Lib Dem is the best strategy to defeat the
>conservatives,
>however, there are some arguments against it:
>1-It seems (to me, maybe I´m wrong) that New Labour politics are not very
>different from conservative ones.
The major issue of this election is whether the Conservatives will win with a platform of further tax cuts, or Labour with a platform of supporting health and education. This is an important cross roads in recent British bourgeois politics. LAbour is still 17% ahead of the Conservatives on an average of opinion polls.
One of the reason for the emergence of "New Labour" is that the left could not see a way to resist endless Thatcherite attacks on social welfare in the name of tax cuts for which people would vote even if they did not agree with them.
Yesterday 40 protestors trying to blockade oil refineries in Wales gave up because of lack of support in the rest of the state. This is remarkable when the Conservative party is offering 6pence of petrol tax and you consider the size of the petrol tax revolt last summer.
>2-The Brazilian left in the 80´s supported centrist and "left center"
>burgeoise
>paries, in order to help the return of democracy (this tatic was strongly
>under
>taken by the Communist Party). Eventually those parties reached power (1985-
>2001) and made sucessive coalitions with the conservative parties just to
>execute a large liberalization program. Fortunately, people in the left who
>disagreed with this policy built the Worker´s Party, which increased from 1%
>to 15% of the national vote in the 1982-2000 period. The Worker´s Party is
>not a marxist party, but a broad left wing party, including from center left
>to ultraleftist groups, making a (possibly flawed) analogy with your
>country,
>it would be a good opportunity to promote this kind of party, but the first-
>past-the-post system establish that there is not much to gain with this
>tatic. In Brazil we have a proportional system, that is quite rewarding
>for small parties.
Very interesting to hear the comparison with Brazil.
Making successful compromises to win democracy is an important victory. You then had to face an economic "liberalization" programme.
This has been difficult to resist in Britain. We have only now got to the stage where the debate is being turned around and people can see the dangers of running a railway system with everything fragmented by markets.
New Labour has attempted to take an overview of the market process, using it at different times but insisting that the market should be socially accountable.
In the context of Brazilian politics the emergence of the Workers Party under a system of proportional representation counds possible and useful. It would not be in British elections where first past the post occurs. Tactical voting is the nearest people can get to apply proportional representation in such a system. Nevertheless in the regional/national assemblies of Wales and Scotland proportional representation exists. It has helped a culture of dialogue and in turn has helped that culture between more progressive representatives in different parties.
>3-Once the elections are finished, how to assure the turn to left in Britain
>withouth a left party properly? (The fact that LibDems are left to Labour
>proves that the New Labour is hopeless from a socialist point of view,
>isn´t it?)
>
> Alexandre Fenelon
I would not agree that New Labour is hopeless from a socialist point of view. I think it is using its alliance with finance capital to nudge British politics to be more socially accountable. This is not gloriously revolutionary, but it has already made substantial constitutional changes. But nor, would I say, is the strategy that your question assumes - namely that all the really progressive left can do is to find a minority party that is bearable enough to vote for. That is not a strategy for actually changing things.
However if the Workers Party can define a position from which it could lead a coalition which would appeal to a great majority of the population *including* those working people who incorrectly think they are not working class but "middle class" then it might pull off an advance like that of the Party of Democratic Socialism in Italy, until their recent election defeat.
Chris Burford
London