SOCIALIST Unity has been unique on the far left in using the special facilities provided by a general election to popularise a programme for taking forward the class struggle.
We will measure our impact not in terms of our vote [which will be small], but by the number of people we have launched on the road of independent working class action.
On those grounds SU's campaign bodes well not only for the future of the fight for socialism, but immediately for the prospect of building a unified, democratic revolutionary party in Britain affiliated to a mass revolutionary International.
What has unquestionably been proved is that standing candidates in the election was the first condition for an adequate intervention by revolutionaries. But in that sense, what Socialist Unity has achieved lies far short of what was possible.
Just suppose that the Socialist Workers Party had agreed to a joint slate. That this united campaign had allowed the standing of 50 candidates [quite possible] and thus TV and radio time. Then imagine its broadcast in the wake of the murder of Blair Peach.
Instead of our normal audience of a few thousand, we could have explained to millions the reality of police violence, the lessons of state intervention against mass action, and begun a much-needed dialogue between the revolutionary left and almost all of Britain's two million black people.
Whether the next government is Tory or Labour, we are certain to see a further sharpening of the class struggle. At the same time there will be a polarisation within the working class between the entrenched bureaucracy and a developing class struggle opposition.
We go into these conflicts full of confidence, because revolutionary politics — tested out before the masses in the election period — have already helped to equip part of that opposition with the weapons to carry through that fight.