WHAT THIS ELECTION IS ABOUT FOR SOCIALISTS - 2

The comrades from Socialism in an Age of Waiting, after discursing learnedly and entertainingly on Marx, Engels and Kautsky, come up with three reasons to vote Labour (click here for the whole thing):

• Even the most right-wing and useless Labour MP or government is marginally preferable to the most left-wing and effective Conservative MP or government – if not necessarily from the point of view of any well-paid professional, then certainly from the point of view of most workers in most industries, as has been demonstrated throughout the 77 years since universal suffrage became a reality in this country and Labour supplanted the Liberals.
  
  
• The Liberal Democrats cannot form a government and would have no coherent programme to implement if they did, while voting for them in the hope that they might go into coalition with one of the major parties amounts to little more than voting for one of those parties by proxy. As ever, it really is a matter of Labour or Conservative, a choice between a lesser and a greater evil that is undesirable but, if you want to take voting seriously at all, unavoidable.
  
  
• After the election, a Labour MP is slightly more likely to be responsive to representations (ranging from delegations to protests) emanating from his or her left than any Conservative or Liberal Democrat would be.