THE coalition with the Tories is proving to be the kiss of death for the LibDems. They are hated, and paying the price for their treachery to students and workers for their policy about-face over £9,000 student fees, as well as for their coalition drive to privatise the NHS and smash the public services.
At the same time, the Tory vote has not collapsed. They are seen as being true to their Thatcherite selves, and doing what they were expected to do. There is anger, but there is little surprise or shock about savage Tory cuts.
The leadership of the Labour Party expected that the collapse by the LibDems would be matched by the beginning of a collapse of the Tory vote.
Labour did gain from the LibDems in major cities in the North, winning control of Sheffield (sitting MP one N Clegg), Hull, Liverpool, Manchester and Stockport, while in the vote for the Welsh Assembly, Labour looks set to take overall control.
However, the Tory vote stood fast.
As the capitalist crisis deepens, class politics are coming into their own, and the men and the women in the middle are being politically destroyed.
The Tory vote held up in England despite the massive hatred felt for the coalition in the working class, and despite the savage cuts in the living standards of the middle class. The Labour Party cannot attract the middle class because under Blair, Brown, and now Miliband, it has embraced Tory policies.
This becomes clear when we look at the situation that has emerged in Scotland where the voting was for the Scottish Parliament.
In Scotland, the SNP (Scottish National Party) looks set to achieve an absolute majority in the Parliament.
Under the system of proportional representation, it was widely believed to be impossible for a single party to achieve such domination.
What happened was not just the collapse of the LibDem vote, but the equally spectacular collapse of the Labour Party.
It lost seats even in its previously unassailable heartland of Glasgow to the SNP, while its leader, Iain Gray, only scraped home by 150 votes and is to resign. All in all, Labour had its worst performance in Scotland for 80 years.
This is a quite stunning result and represents the awareness of Scottish workers that the Labour Party has Tory policies and is no alternative.
The feeling is ‘why not vote for the SNP’ who, in their own populist, opportunist way, have resisted the introduction of tuition fees in Scottish universities and have refused to go along with the ‘modernisation’ of the NHS, or rather its destruction through privatisation.
The vote in Scotland proves, not that the nationalist party has any real solutions to the crisis of capitalism, but that any real opposition and refusal to co-operate with the Tory savage cuts will win overwhelming support.
The current difference between Tory and Labour is over whether Labour cuts are preferable to Tory cuts. There is agreement over tuition fees, the £20bn of NHS ‘savings’ and the privatisation of the Royal Mail.
Labour may now opportunistically say that it no longer supports this policy. However, it brought in the original privatisation bill, and workers know that if Labour were the government, or were to become the government, it would switch its policy back again on Royal Mail privatisation.
The votes in Thursday’s elections show, above all, that the working class will not go along with the Tories or the Liberals, but wants a leadership that is determined to fight this coalition and to bring it down. No worker is under the illusion that the Labour Party wants to do this.
The issue of the hour is building the revolutionary alternative to these reformists: that means building the WRP to go forward to a general strike to bring down the coalition and to go forward to a workers government and a socialist Britain.