Towards the end of last year we witnessed the collapse of another
attempt to create a party to the left of Labour. The RESPECT party,
which was founded in 2004, was the latest effort to establish an
electoral alternative to Labour. It succeeded in winning an MP, George
Galloway, as well as a few dozen councillors up and down the country. However, the
whole project soon went pear-shaped.
Tommy Sheridan is facing yet another fight in his colourful career as Scotland's best known
socialist. He has been arrested on suspicion of perjury arising from his widely
publicised defamation case against the News of the World for which he was
awarded £200,000 damages.
It
is fashionable today among some on the left to refer to some golden age of "old
labour". They use this to argue that in the past it was a workers' party but
now it is no longer. The Blairites on the other hand claim that the party was
too "left-wing" to be elected. But there has never been such a golden age. If
you look at the record of Labour governments, they have all been responsible
for cutting living standards and carrying out an imperialist foreign policy.
Andrew Glyn died from a brain tumour on 22 December 2007. He was 64 years old. A fellow of Corpus Christi College in Oxford since 1969, he was a leading socialist economist for all that time.
In 1970, just like today, the Labour Party seemed dead from
the neck up. After six years of desperately disappointing government, Labour
had been unceremoniously bundled out of office. The Tories were back, aiming to
put the boot in to the working class.