Communist Party and Militant prepare electoral challenges against Labour

 

The downfall of the Corbyn project has led to the revival of the far-left's attempts to stand in the elections. First up is the old Stalinist Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star) who announced in their internal broadsheet Unity that:

BRITAIN’S COMMUNISTS are to mount their biggest electoral challenge for years. In the 2017 and 2019 general elections the Communist party worked for a Labour victory and a left-led government.

In the May election thousands of council seats are up for contest along with the Scottish, Welsh and London assemblies. In local contests the first past-the-post system is in place but in the assembly elections there is a mixed system with some seats filled with the FPTP system and some seats elected on a proportional basis.

The elections will be held with many lockdown restriction still in place. Communist Party chair Liz Payne said: ‘COVID-19 restrictions won’t prevent the Party fighting the elections.

At the time of writing the number and areas the CPB is standing in has not been announced.

Meanwhile not to be left out the Socialist Party (the largest of the fragments of the old Militant Tendency) along with the RMT union and Resist (Chris Williamson's new organisation apparently) has revived the much vaunted Trade Union & Socialist Coalition infamous for one of it's candidates polling no votes whatsoever.

Nancy Taaffe from London outlined how "in Sadiq Khan we have a mini-Kier Starmer" planning further attacks on workers

Despite total electoral failure in the past one of their more deluded supporters was reported in the latest issue of The Socialist as saying:

Pete McLaren, representing those socialists that support TUSC and are not members of a constituent part of the coalition, said: "TUSC is a stepping stone in the process of building a mass working-class political party, and has made tremendous strides in the last 10 years."

An odd thing to say about a grouping that has lost two of it's constituent organisations (the SWP and Socialist Resistance) whilst the Socialist Party itself lost around a third of it's members plus nearly all it's trade union representation and influence inside the main civil service union PCS.