The Socialist Labour Party?

I have never voted Labour at a European Election. On each occasion, I have had to hold my nose, but never as hard as I would have had to have held it.

Last time, I voted for No2EU - Yes To Democracy, the party of Peter Shore's old agent, and of the leaders of the Visteon and the Lindsey oil refinery workers, whoever else might have been in it. The time before that, it was Respect, led - again, whoever else might have been in it - by a pro-life Catholic, a Eurosceptic, and a Unionist at least where this island was concerned, who had never been a member of any Hard Left organisation. And the time before that, it was the SLP, with its roots in the old mining areas even if it did have ties to the apologists for Stalin and Mao.

Well, No2EU - Yes To Democracy has become TUSC. Respect has become less and less like Galloway, and more and more like the people with whom he now finds himself associated; it is now by no means clear who is hanging on whose coattails. And the SLP has not rid itself of the Stalinists and Maoists, but of everyone else instead. (Meanwhile, Arthur Scargill's Vicar on Earth is the Labour candidate for a safe Labour seat.) So, even though Neil Clark writes:

If you agree that the banks and financial institutions should always be bailed out by the government, then do not vote for the SLP.

If you agree that the bankers, speculators and hedge fund operators should continue to heap lavish bonuses upon themselves, then do not vote for the SLP.

If you believe that the NHS should continue to be sliced up and hawked off to private enterprise where profit comes first, then do not vote for the SLP.

If you believe that the gap in wealth between a tiny financial elite and the rest of the population should continue to increase, then do not vote for the SLP.

If you agree that British soldiers and innocent civilians should continue to die in foreign wars fought for control of energy supplies, when Britain as an island stands on hundreds of years of coal, then do not vote for the SLP.

If you believe that Britain should have no manufacturing industry of its own and should rely on imports of essential supplies from the most unstable regions of the world, then do not vote for the SLP.

I might also add, if you believe that the wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq were good things, then do not vote for the SLP.

And if you believe that Britain’s railways, public transport, energy and water companies are better off in the private sector, then do not vote for the SLP.

I could not do so even if it were standing here, which it is not. Everything that Neil says is true, of course. And the SLP's work of Farepak is exemplary. But while the SLP is certainly a force against the neoconservative war agenda and its assaults on liberty at home, including against any new Cold War with either or both of Russia and China, it is not even potentially part of the urgently necessary alliance in that cause between the traditional Left and the traditional Right. Having abandoned the pit villages and similar communities for the farther shores of Marxism, it is not a voice of the socially and culturally conservative, strongly patriotic tendencies within the British Left's traditional electoral base.

It therefore does not recognise that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level. Nor is it among those who refuse to allow climate change to be used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

So we must look elsewhere, and indeed to ourselves for the re-emergence of a party the priorities of which included the Welfare State, workers' rights, trade unionism, the co-operative movement, consumer protection, strong communities, conservation rather than environmentalism, fair taxation, full employment, public ownership, proper local government, a powerful Parliament, and a base of real property from which every household could resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State, while having a no less absolute commitment to any or all of the monarchy, the organic Constitution, national sovereignty, civil liberties, the Union, the Commonwealth, the countryside, grammar schools, traditional moral and social values, controlled importation and immigration, and a realistic foreign policy.

That party will restore representation to those who would have voted for Peter Shore's old agent, and for the leaders of the Visteon and the Lindsey oil refinery workers, but who cannot vote for an extension of the personality of Bob Crow. That party will restore representation to those who would have voted for a party of the Left which was able to include pro-life Catholics and opponents of Scottish separatism, among others, but who cannot vote for any of Stalinists as such, Trotskyists as such and Islamists as such, never mind for an alliance of all three of them and nobody else. And that party will restore representation to those who would have voted for a party reflecting the spirit of the old mining and similar communities, but who cannot vote for a reflection of Arthur Scargill's personal journey from there to where he is now.

Let's get on with it.