Dave Dudley, Leninist Vanguard (personal capacity)
As the forthcoming European elections hoved into view, the Leninist Vanguard organisation faced its greatest crisis since the last defection of revisionist hordes and their bourgeois deviationist ways (which robbed us of vital membership fees). How to contest the elections and retain a visible presence on the British left without losing any costly election deposits (another bourgeois stunt to keep socialists off the ballot paper)?
Fortunately the common dilemma across the left (though we disagree on most political points, we can at least recognise our common lack of public recognition) has been resolved by the intervention of Bob Crow and the RMT union, through its bankrolling of the No2EU platform for the June polls. Yes, Crow is a union bureaucrat and probably a bit too working class (if you know what I mean) and, yes, the Morning Star and their tanky Communist Party of Britain are behind it all. But it is anti-European and something must be done about the EU’s neoliberal assault on our public services and the ever-growing Euro police state, so it is to be welcomed by all (or most) socialists regardless.
The European Commission is a remote faceless bureaucracy, run by people you’ve never heard of, accountable to no one but itself. The Leninist Vanguard Central Committee wholeheartedly endorsed the No2EU platform when invited to do so, establishing a campaign fund to fight these vital elections, though naturally there was no time to ballot the membership on either of these.
However, possibly the real clincher for the committee when discussing the invitation was the fact that No2EU have automatically precluded the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and the Conrad Party of Great Britain from any involvement in the platform. Comrades, welcome to the greatest hope for the British working class to rupture the capitalist project of the Brussels bureaucracy, free from any involvement by sectarian Trots like Chris Harman and Sean Matgamna. The left has learnt the lessons of Respect and the Socialist Alliance and the news that the SWP are to be allowed nowhere near this time must surely gladden the hearts of even the most jaded and meeting-wary leftists, from Hackney to Walthamstow.