Solidarity 173, 13 May 2010

In terms of which parties won how many seats – a pretty basic criterion for judging the outcome of a general election – 2010 in Scotland was a re-run of 2005. This is a longer version of this article than in the printed paper . In both general elections Labour won 41 seats, the Liberal Democrats 11, the SNP six, and the Tories just one. But Labour did regain two seats last week which it had lost in by-elections after the last general election: Dunfermline and Fife West (won by the Lib-Dems in 2006) and Glasgow East (the third-safest Labour seat in Scotland, won by the SNP in 2008). In both...

Working-class socialists are as yet a small minority, Our ideas get a sympathetic hearing among wide circles of working-class people, but as yet it is a tentative, sceptical hearing. It is a hearing made tentative and sceptical because of people's scepticism, shaped by successive setbacks, about the labour movement being able to mobilise to change society, and because of their disappointments about successive left-sounding political promises. To establish our name, "Alliance for Workers' Liberty", previously absent from elections, as something solid and reliable enough to vote for in this...

The Socialist Campaign to Stop the Tories and Fascists strove to create a socialist voice and presence within the Labour election campaign. The campaign's leaflets criticised the New Labour record unsparingly. They called for labour-movement resistance to the cuts and other pro-capitalist policies promised if New Labour won the election. They agitated for the unions to campaign within the Labour Party to regain a democratic voice there and replace its policy and leadership by working-class alternatives. On the ground, we organised street stalls to distribute our leaflets, attract attention...

May Day in the US was marked by defiant nationwide protests against the recently enacted Arizona law, which made it a crime to be present in the state without legal immigration status and authorized police to question people about their status based on “reasonable” suspicion. Tens of thousands gathered in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Milwaukee, San Francisco and Washington, DC in outrage at a law, now providing a blueprint for similar racist proposals in Utah, Texas, Ohio, Missouri, Maryland and elsewhere, targeting Hispanics and making suspects out of people based on the color of their...