THURSDAY’S by-election in Barnsley Central constituency didn’t just humiliate the LibDems, it drove a stake through the heart of the Tories’ coalition partner and destroyed any claim by Clegg and Cameron to have even the veneer of bourgeois electoral legitimacy to cloak their plans to lay waste to the Welfare State and pauperise the working class and vast sections of the middle class.
This by-election, called less than a year after the Tory-led coalition assumed office – despite neither party securing a parliamentary majority – saw the LibDems pushed into sixth place with their share falling to 4% of the vote – down from 17.2% at the general election.
Their candidate, who lost his deposit, trailed behind not just Labour but UKIP, the BNP and an unemployed ex-miner who stood as an independent.
As for the Tories, they shared in the LibDems’ humiliation by coming third behind the even more right-wing UKIP.
The Labour Party slightly increased its majority from the May 2010 election, winning by 11,771 votes.
The significance of this result lies in the circumstances under which it was called.
The sitting Labour MP, Eric Illsley, resigned his seat after being jailed for a year when he admitted fraudulently claiming £14,000 in expenses.
The result was strikingly similar to the recent by-election held in Oldham last January.
There, the sitting Labour MP, Phil Woolas, was removed by the law courts after being found guilty of electoral malpractice – lying about his LibDem opponent.
Under ‘normal’ circumstances any party associated with such dubious, and in the case of Illsley downright criminal, practices could expect to see voters deserting them in their droves.
In neither case has this happened, for the simple reason that we live not in normal times but in profoundly revolutionary times.
The votes for the Labour Party were in no ways endorsement of the Labour Party or its leadership.
Everyone and his dog is aware that the Labour Party has no real policy difference with the coalition when it comes to making the working class and middle class pay for the crisis caused by the bankers and the collapse of capitalism.
Workers will not forget that Labour prime minister Gordon Brown did not earn the title of the Bankers Friend for nothing or that the wholesale privatisation of the NHS was enthusiastically embraced by Labour under the guise of the Private Finance Initiative.
What this vote clearly represents is not a turn to Labour but a class vote against the coalition.
It was a vote where working people consigned the LibDems to the dustbin, while Tory voters registered their distrust of Cameron’s ability to effectively hold back the working class by voting for the more right-wing UKIP.
The overall turnout in the by-election – down from 56% at the general election to 36% – shows that the majority of people have no faith in bourgeois elections.
In fact, all the bourgeois parties are driven by the crisis to follow the same policy of smashing the gains of the Welfare State and trying to drive the working class into the gutter.
The message from this by-election couldn’t be clearer; now is the time to get rid of the coalition, to bring it down and with it the capitalist system that it serves.
The demand must be for the leadership of the trade unions to organise a general strike to bring this government down and replace it, not with Labour but with a workers government that will go forward to the abolition of capitalism and the introduction of socialism.
Those leaders who refuse to lead this struggle must be immediately replaced by a new, revolutionary leadership prepared to lead this fight.