The following is the editorial from the British Morning Star describing Sunday's Euro Parliamentary elections. The editorial is different from the setbacks absorbed by the French and Germans. Why?
In those countries, the right wing conservatives run those countries and the combined left and socialist did very poorly in those elections There, the policies of the right wing governments should have received a resounding attack by the peoples' movements. It didn't. Massive voter disatisatifaction resulting in low voting yield those results. While the French United Left party did forge some left unity, it did not get a good voter turnout.
In Britain, the ruling party is the Labour Party. There the Morning Star had a very complicated situation to describe. The failures of the Labor Party results in those set backs.
The ultra right's electoral wins which put them in the European Parliament has been noted by every commentator.
The next period of time, as the world economic crisis unfolds, will be extremely dangerous.
Stay tuned.
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Morning Star
Monday 08 June 2009
It was a good election night for the scumbags of the right wing today.
The fascist BNP scored two seats in the European Parliament, while the UKIP absconders from the Tory Party pushed Labour into third place in the polls across England and their ex-mates in the Tory Party proper pushed Labour into second place in Wales for the first time since 1918.
But let's not be fooled about why this happened.
There was no mass Pauline conversion of working people to fascism. The BNP overall vote increased, it is true, from 808,200 in 2004 to 943,598 this year, but this is hardly a massive movement in terms of an electorate of nearly 45 million.
In fact, BNP fuehrer Nick Griffin was elected to the European Parliament on fewer votes than he polled in 2004. That year, the BNP in the North West polled 134,959 votes. In 2009, they polled 132,194.
He won because the Labour vote plummeted from 576,388 in 2004 to 336,831 in 2009. There was not even much shift towards the Tories or Lib Dems.
The Conservative vote, in fact, fell from 4,397,090 in 2004 to 4,198,394 this year, while the Lib Dem vote fell 2,452,327 to 2,080,613.
But the truly significant figure in this election was the Labour Party vote. That fell catastrophically from 3,718,683 to 2,381,760, almost the same amount that the overall total vote declined. And no amount of chatter about the MP expenses scandal disproportionately affecting the ruling party can explain that.
The Tories' and the Lib Dems' hands are just as dirty as Labour in that regard, if not more so. Undoubtedly, there was a measure of disaffection from Westminster politics from this, but one could reasonably expect that to affect all the Westminster parties fairly equally.
And, again, one might expect UKIP to benefit from not being tainted by the Westminster effluvium.
So, what was it that hit Labour so hard in this election, if all the excuses that its pathetic excuse for a leadership made are irrelevant?
It's a question that isn't that difficult to answer and that answer is the policies.
All the nonsense about Prime Minister Gordon Brown and whether he is the right man to lead the Labour Party to an almost inconceivable victory in the coming election or whether some more palatable political clone should be substituted is really just so much window dressing.
Nobody will reverse the declining fortunes of Labour with the policies of new Labour as their only weapon. Certainly, the government cannot expect many votes from the LDV Vans workers who are facing a jobless future today.
And Business Secretary Peter Mandelson won't be doing Labour any favours with his sit-on-the-sidelines strategies as far as Vauxhall workers are concerned.
The 300 Indesit workers at Kinmel Park in Bodelwyddan won't be rushing to the polls to back Labour either, since the government commitment to EU free market policies has led to it failing to block the transfer of their work to Poland, especially since its supine indifference to the lack of protection for British workers leaves them open to redundancy at the drop of a hat.
But Labour appears to be indifferent to that and, instead, is committed to more of the same old EU-inspired free market nonsense that is costing tens of thousands of jobs every month.
If Labour won't budge, however, it is going to be up to the unions to make it. It's long past time that the unions told Labour that support goes both ways and, if the party wants union support, it's going to have to earn it with policies to benefit workers.
Only then will the rank and file trade union members return to the fold. If you want to win, Mr Brown, remember that someone has to decide the policies, and they're not for you to decide but for the voters.
