Election 2007

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Originally Posted by WeAreRovers

Rock Against Racism? The Anti Nazi league? Anti-Bin Charges Campaign? Stop the War? All of them were/are Trot fronts specifically for bandwagon jumping.

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RAR and ANL were set up by the SWP not us. Stop The War is a UK organisation, I presume you refer to the IAWM? Do you think a socialist organisation shouldn't campaign against the war?

And as for bandwagon jumping, its ridiculous and infantile to suggest thats what we were doing with say, the Anti-Bin Charges, Anti-Water Charges or even the Gama campaign. All were campaigns initiated by us. All were done with the object of winning on the issue (which we did with the water charges and GAMA). In fact after the GAMA thing gained momentum, plenty of others jumped on our bandwagon! When Joe Higgins and Catherine Murphy (Ind) started kicking up a fuss about the Estate Management Fees, the likes of Joan Burton stood on the sidelines to see if the campaign gained any momentum and then when it did, hopped on.
Are you saying that you can't campaign on any issue because if you do you are jumping on a bandwagon? As for your claims of "inside knowledge" from a brief spell involved with us 20 years ago, you come up so wide of the mark that I'm disinclined to believe you. Even if you were so what? I've been a member of the organisation for 10 years so I think my knowledge of how we operate is a bit better than yours. Every time we take on a campaign we fight to win. If there are people involved in the campaign that seem to be politically advanced then yes we try to recruit them. So what? Who cares?

BP - Trots are Trots, very little difference between the factions. While I disagree with his basic arguement, you should have a read of Nick Cohen's What's Left. He tears into all shades of Trots in it and he's spot on.

Then again you'd probably be "disinclined to believe" him too. Choosing to disbelief contrary views is another feature of your average Trot but the bandwagon effect is a standard Trot tactic - regardless of your protestations. :rolleyes:

Note to self - must stop arguing with irrelevant minority political factions. Now where did I leave RSF's email address. :D

KOH

I said I was disinclined to believe you because what you say seems pretty ill informed based on my own personal experience.
I would argue that there are massive differences between the "factions", now more so than ever.

Again you don't answer me when I ask, should Socialists not campaign on issues that effect working class people? I say they are not worthy of the name Socialists if they don't. Bandwagon jumping is where someone else does the groundwork on something and you leap on when there is some momentum behind it. Name a time when we did this.

okay maybe bandwagon jumping is a bit too easy hows about ruth"can you give my bandwagon a jumpstart"Copinger. Lost all respect for her over the Anti-Social behaviour problem in Hartstown all down to statoil opening 24 hours Bull that she started. There's been little scroats running around hartstown long before statoil opened 24 hours. pure and total protest for the sake of protest

Don't know anything about that particular issue. If you have a problem why not send her an email. Her email address is on the Fingal CoCo site.
I know Ruth well and I can tell you she's no sham.

Moderator: I think ye straying off topic but if new one required suggest a Title...

I'll leave it up to WaR and BGR to decide if they want to continue with it. I've nothing else to say on the matter.

Actually, since I have another reply to WaR, maybe the posts on this could be put into the Socialism thread:

This was on the CWI website today.

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Originally Posted by socialistworld.net

‘What’s Left?’ - Not Nick Cohen!
Former ‘radical’ journalist’s diatribe against anti-war movement and Left

Book review by Peter Taffe, General Secretary Socialist Party (CWI England and Wales)
Nick Cohen initially established his left credentials in his baiting attacks on the Blairites in the columns of The Observer newspaper. Yet, even then, he was in the ‘populist’ tradition of many writing for capitalist journals, who while making occasional waspish swipes against the right - including New Labour - possess no political anchor. They can, therefore, swing over just as easily to an opposite political stance when the political winds begin to change.

Paul Johnson - unknown to many, particularly young people today - started off on the left (much more to the left than Nick Cohen) as editor of the then left-wing journal, New Statesman, in the 1960s but ended up as a Daily Telegraph writer and a fervent Thatcherite.

Nick Cohen describes himself as being "on the liberal left". The term ‘left’ has been used since the time of the French Revolution – when the extreme republicans, the Jacobins and the ‘Mountain’ sat on the left of the French revolutionary Convention – to describe broad oppositional movements to the right-wing capitalist establishment.

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Rest of the review