Support Socialist Local Election Candidates

John Pearson

Socialist Alliance members will be standing, under the name Democratic Socialist Alliance and on the manifesto, People Before Profit, in the local council elections on 10 June in Exeter, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Stockport and Walsall.

These election campaigns unite Socialist Alliance comrades who are resolved to continue with the socialist unity project represented by the formation of the Socialist Alliance and with the fight to win the working class to socialist politics. We will be working in association with other socialist election campaigns, mounted by the Alliance for Green Socialism, the Socialist Party, the Liverpool Labour Community Party, the Socialist Labour Party (Liverpool) and several independent socialist candidates.

The need to fight for socialist politics has never been greater. May Day 2004, the international day of working class solidarity, was polluted this year by yet another obscene, anti-working class action of the British Government. On the occasion of the accession of eight new member states, from eastern and central Europe, to the European Union, Blunkett’s Home Office ordered immediate eviction onto the streets and denial of all welfare benefits and means of subsistence to thousands of men, women and children, who had already entered Britain from those countries as asylum seekers. This toll adds to the thousands of other refugees already driven into destitution, or detained behind barbed wire in camps and to the ever increasing numbers of migrant workers, who are forced to perform often dangerous, always grossly low paid work, without basic employment and health and safety protection.

The constant stream of vile xenophobic actions that emanates from Blair and Blunkett’s government; together with their war-mongering; their attacks on wages, job security and the social wage; their privatisation offensive; and the desperate crisis in housing and pensions, are together providing fertile ground for the rise of fascism.

Socialism is the only answer to all of these problems. We have to promote the final reckoning with the tyranny of capitalism, a system one hundred years beyond its ‘sell by’ date, which plunders, pollutes, rapes and despoils the Earth and its population and which distorts our humanity beyond recognition.

The Democratic Socialist Alliance – People Before Profit election campaigns appeal to all socialists for material, financial and political support. This appeal is launched by the Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform, which is co-ordinating support for the campaigns.