How the Greens got Nick Griffin elected

Or, the failure of tactical voting. As one disgruntled Socialist Party member and campaigner for the No2EU coalition writes:

I don’t begrudge the Greens their success; two MEPs, a net increase of zero over the last time while the Labour Party is shedding seats the way a yak on vacation in Bali sheds fur, is respectable; but a lot of their increase in voter share was because the Greens were selling very hard this idea of “vote for the Greens, even if you disagree with them, to keep Nick Griffin out”.

So, a bunch of people on the Left did just that.

And Nick Griffin is currently picking out curtains for a Brussels flat.

[…]

So if I am on the Left but I’m not a Green — for whatever reason, and the possible reasons are myriad — and I’ve just held my nose and voted Green on the promise that it was a necessary step in order to keep out the fascists, and I’m sitting hear reading these electoral results…well, I couldn’t help but feel that maybe I’ve just been had.

Recieved opinion has it that it’s so important to keep out the fascists that leftists should hold their nose and vote for parties or candidates they wouldn’t otherwise. The most famous example perhaps being the campaign to keep David Duke from becoming governor of Louisiana. His opponent had long been accused of corruption so the anti-Duke campaign’s (unofficial) slogan was “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important”. Duke lost, but Louisiana still ended up with a crook for governor…

In the EU elections it was the Greens who, as Edmund writes, campaigned on an anti-BNP platform and which was supported by the Respect party. They failed and and if, like Andy Newman, you can blame the No2EU campaign for this as they “stole” votes from the Greens, why can’t you blame the Greens from taking votes from No2EU?

As the election results make clear, the BNP did not win that much more votes this time then they did in 2004; it’s the collapsing Labour vote which helped the BNP win their two seats. Their voting totals went slightly up while over two million less people voted in total than did in 2004. So while the anti-BNP campaign was focused on getting people already voting to vote Green, it would’ve done better to persuade more people to vote in the first place. The economic crisis, the corruption in parliament and the lack of a credible alternative on the left meant people stayed home because voting was pointless.

Tactical voting campaigns don’t work and this is the best proof of it. Election after election the radical left mounts another campaign to either persuade voters not to go for the BNP or to get them to vote for some party supposedly best placed to stop the BNP. The effect of these campaigns is marginal; in this case non-existent. What’s desperately needed is something to vote for. Voters turn away from Labour in droves while finding the two mainstream alternatives, Tories and Lib Dems just as unappealing. Few but out and out racists want to vote BNP but on the left there still isn’t a credible alternative for Labour. The Greens are decent but like the Lib Dems too centrist, while the various socialist splinters barely register on most voters’ radars. One hopeful sign is the surprisingly strong showing of the Socialist Labour Party, which barely campaigned but still managed to get some 173,000 votes.

What’s needed is a realisation that there are no magic bullet, for English socialists to stop chasing the shortcut to a replacement for Labour, be it Socialist Alliance, Respect or No2EU. The only way socialists can make headway and stop the BNP is to go for the hard slog and build the party from the ground up, to not just campaign against the BNP but to grab the moment and offer a true socialist alternative.