Same old nonsense.

The latest leftist bandwagon is the People’s Assembly to be held in Nottingham on 18th. May and in London on 22nd. June.  It is supposed to be bringing people together to fight the Coalition Government’s austerity programme.  Will it succeed?

So far resistance to the cuts has been pretty pathetic.  The public sector trade union leaders have mostly capitulated to the Government’s attacks on jobs and pensions.  As for Trotskyist and revisionist “communist” organisations, most of them have been trying to subvert the anti-cuts movement into support for the Labour Party.  This despite the fact that Labour is in favour of cuts in public spending and not one Labour-controlled local council has defied the Government.  In most localities the anti-cuts movement was still born thanks to the Trots trying to divert it into support for Labour.

The People’s Assembly will simply be more hot air directed at trying to ginger up the Labour Party.  One strand will be calls to support the “left” inside the Labour Party so that it opposes austerity measures and adopts more radical policies.  This line, put forward by UNITE, is an old one and generations of experience show that it does not work.  The Labour Party is not a democratic organisation with policy determined by its members, very few of whom are at all radical.  The leaders decide everything and the members do what they are told.

The other strand will be calls for a new left alliance or organisation to stand candidates in elections.  The idea is to put pressure on Labour to move leftwards by challenging it at the polling booths.  This has been tried before with ventures such as Socialist Alliance and Respect.  These sort of candidates usually receive a derisory vote and pose no serious threat to support for Labour.

The participants in the People’s Assembly are the same old, tired leftists who have shown themselves as having nothing new to offer.  The dominant message which will come through, one way or another, is “Vote Labour!”