Tower Hamlets in East London has two MPs who distinguished themselves by their conspicuous support for the war on Iraq. One of them, Jim Fitzpatrick, a former FBU full time official, was rewarded for his loyalty by being appointed Vice Chamberlain of Her Majesty's Household in the recent Cabinet re-shuffle.
The other, Oona King's, most memorable public comment was that Margaret Thatcher inspired her to go into politics.
Their constituents though were overwhelmingly opposed to the war and there was a large demonstration against the MPs" position. The Socialist Alliance stood a inst Fitzpatrick in the last gen neral election and got almost 2000 wolles and some - achieved votes of 15 • The campaign agair st the war wa the first major breakthroug hat. the left has had in establishing a rea working relationship with sections of the Bangladeshi community, both in the mosques and in some of the socialist groups which operate in the area. This community makes up about 40% of the borough's population. A theme that quickly emerged was the unwillingness of many former Labour voters to vote for the party of imperialist war again. With this comes the question of the nature of the challenge that has to be made against King and Fitzpatrick. Work has already begun on producing a newspaper to be distributed over the summer. It will be a lot less text heavy than a lot of other Socialist Alliance publications.
Posturing After some discussion it was agree that a strategy of declaring, that the Socialist Alliance locally will declare itself the voice of the anti-war move ment is only posturing, Even more wrong would be endorsing a populist candidate with no record of anti-war ar class struggle activity: The Socialist Alliance in Tower Hamlets is adapting some of the methods that were applied so successfully in Preston. By, having exploratory discussions with a range of key individuals and organizations it looks very possible that an electoral challenge to Labour will have a wide range of support behind it.
Certain fundamentals are not for negotiation. The electoral programme has to be secular, anti-war and antiprivatization.
We are only interested in working with people who do not have any shady business dealings. This rules out a significant number of Labour councillors.
Preston demonstrated that people from a religious background were prepared to campaign for a Socialist Alliance candidate on the Alliance's programme and without making any demands that their religious viewpoint be incorporated. (Tower Hamlets Socialist Alliance has two paid up
They are met p for sound anti-t Tower Hamiets So determined to be the focall p anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist politica challenge and that is why it is neces sary to use the connections made in the anti-war movement to give this challenge real clout.
• Conservative Party 18,478 21,288 (vote inc second preference vote) ments.
• Labour Party 13,070 16,427 (vote inc
• Liberal Democrats 8,404
• National Front 2,554
• Socialist Alliance 400
[Note: only the top two candidates' second preference votes are published.]
Our campaign and result raises issues that ernors"
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As well as building a campaigning organisation we have to open up to younger ele.
One example of this is the young girl from a school in North Shields who called me during the end of the campaign and said that we had came second in the school mock mayoral elections, but she said "we would have won if not for the fact the Lib Dem candidate was one of the school gov•