The Hidden Story of the Assembly Election March 22, 2007
Posted by franklittle in Irish Election 2007, Marxism, Northern Ireland, The Left.trackback
Like no doubt very few other people, I awaited the publication of the latest edition of Socialist Worker with a kind of horrified fascination, curious to see how they would spin the results of their two front organisations, Socialist Environmental Alliance (SEA) in Foyle, where their vote went down, and People Before Profit (PBP) in West Belfast, where they picked up seven or eight hundred votes but made little real impact.
The performance of the PBP candidate, Seán Mitchell, gives us this gem:
“Sean’s success in finishing ahead of long established parties like
Alliance and the Workers’ Party was widely regarded as the performance of the election.”
Really. Not Anna Lo taking a seat for Alliance and being the first Chinese woman elected to a parliament in Britain or Ireland? Not the Shinners taking five seats out of six in West Belfast or the DUP continuing to roll over the UUP right across the North? Not the election of the first Green MLA to the Assembly?
No, according to the SWP, a member of theirs who didn’t even have the simple courage or the basic honesty to run under the name of his own party, barely breaking 2% is ‘widely regarded’ as the story of the election. For self-centred arrogance, they really are very, very hard to beat.
in Foyle, where their vote went down
Someone tell Metro Éireann. According to last week’s edition, Eamo “narrowly missed” taking a seat.
And they are famously humourless too-I once (stupidly) joked with a SWP paper seller In London who was loudly proclaiming in that peculiar glottal stop accent they acquire, that their GLA results were a “victory for socialism”-I retorted that it was really a victory for fascism as the BNP had polled more than Respect-and received a withering look of contempt….but there you go…