James Turley looks at the unappetising range of candidates in Oldham East and Saddleworth

The background to the January 13 Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election is well-known – Phil Woolas, a particularly odious reactionary even by New Labour standards, scraped home in the seat by a margin of 103 votes last May, only to be stripped of it when it emerged that his campaign involved knowing lies about the personal character of his Liberal Democrat opponent, Elwyn Watkins.

Watkins is once again the Lib Dem candidate – but circumstances have robbed him of what would otherwise be a relatively easy ride, given Woolas’s actions. The electors of Oldham East – that rarest of things, a three-way-swing constituency – will have to decide if punishing the local Labour apparatchiks is more important than punishing the incumbent government, which includes the Lib Dems, of course.

As such, this election offers a peculiarly direct snapshot of the dynamics in British politics as a whole. Woolas may be a special case, but the memory of 13 years of New Labour weighs on the masses all over the country. Labour is confident that they are in with a good chance of keeping the seat, despite everything, by riding the anger which has begun to focus on the coalition government.

Even the date has proven controversial. Ed Miliband complains that January 13 falls in the Christmas holidays – thousands of students, he says, will be disenfranchised. It is obvious who will benefit from that – and indeed, in a break from parliamentary tradition, it is the Liberal Democrats who set the date rather than Labour, the party that lost an MP. Still, it is not hard to imagine thousands of students returning early to punish Nick Clegg.

Speculation is rife, however, that Watkins may be getting a covert helping hand from his party’s coalition partners. The Tories have been persistently accused of soft-pedalling their own campaign. The Guardian claims that a number of Conservative cabinet ministers admit in private that they would prefer Watkins to win “as a precursor to a wider election pact in 2015” (December 28). It will take more than swift denials from Millbank and a visit from David Cameron to dispel these rumours. Indeed, one wonders what the point is of two candidates contesting a seat on effectively the same programme.

As for the Labour candidate, it is no surprise that the would-be successor to Phil Woolas is hardly a leftwing firebrand. Debbie Abrams’ campaign website features the usual array of New Labour platitudes, scolding the government for selling “local people” short and making the “wrong cuts at the wrong time”.

We should be grateful, at least, that British National Party leader Nick Griffin has pulled out of the contest, mercifully sparing us the farcical sideshow of Nazi-chasing that usually follows him around. The BNP has instead chosen to live up to stereotype by running Derek Adams, a former pub landlord. Adams garnered a respectable showing in May in a nearby constituency; here, his prospects are hard to measure.

On the one hand, the far-right vote is split three ways between himself, the UK Independence Party and the English Democrats. On the other, none of the main parties are going into this vote with a clean record. Labour has Woolas; the Lib Dems are the coalition fall-guys. Even the Tories, meanwhile, have begun to fall foul of the bloodhounds in the reactionary press. The Mail on Sunday led with the luxurious Christmas exploits of leading government ministers and asked rhetorically, “Are we all in this together?” (January 2).

Still, as with many developments in bourgeois politics these days, the Tories have the least to lose here. It is the Lib Dems who find themselves on the line in the first instance – a proper kicking in this election will not exactly bolster the faltering ranks, and the risk is real that they will slip from being within 103 votes of the seat in May to a dismal third place in January. At Labour HQ, meanwhile, staffers will be anxiously watching to see whether the Miliband era can produce electoral success. If he fails, the remaining rump of disgruntled Blairites in parliament are clearly not above rocking the boat.

Even the BNP will feel under pressure. The electoral turn it took under the stewardship of Nick Griffin brought many successes; but recently those successes have brought new problems of their own. From Griffin’s public roasting on Question time to the persistent irritation of court battles over admissions criteria, the embarrassments are piling up. Meanwhile, the English Defence League has been muscling in on the football casual scene, though it has yet to run candidates. Throw in the appropriately dictatorial rule of the petty fuhrer Griffin, propped up by cronies (who often turn out to be embarrassments themselves), and the scene is set for a split.

The presence of three candidates from the far right, along with painfully establishment-friendly hopefuls from the main parties, does highlight a certain absence – where is the left? Perhaps some Unite Against Fascism foot soldiers will make it to the constituency to screech hysterically about the BNP; but no political formation currently exists that can put up a deposit and run a credible campaign, at a time when an alternative vision to the bourgeois parties – and the grievance-mongers of the far right – is most sorely needed.

The various self-styled parties and miscellaneous groupuscules on the British left are divided. Because they are divided, they are weak; they may maintain a modest base of support in several major cities, but none operate on a scale that will support a serious organisation on the ground in – for example – Oldham.

One might perhaps have hoped for anti-cuts candidates, either from a local group or a national one. Yet the largest of the national campaigns, the Coalition of Resistance against Cuts and Privatisation, is by its nature a hodge-podge of different forces, including many who have no stomach for putting even mild pressure on Labour candidates to take a harder line against cuts – let alone standing candidates independently. Its competitors include the more or less directionless Socialist Workers Party-dominated Right to Work campaign; and the National Shop Stewards Network, which is in disarray now that the Socialist Party in England and Wales has pushed it into being more explicitly a politically campaigning organisation, from which it can vie for influence in the anti-cuts movement. Neither, needless to say, is in rude health.

SPEW and the SWP at least managed to cobble together a front for the general election last year. But the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition is not destined to last, despite the fact that SPEW is encouraging “local groups, trade unionists and anti-cuts campaigns” to stand candidates in the May local elections under the Tusc banner. The SWP – now looking to pile its resources into RTW and recruitment – is not exactly prioritising Tusc, if indeed it intends to continue to support it at all.

The left’s inability to mount a credible election campaign is hardly surprising. It spent the first decade of this century attempting quick fixes. The relentless pursuit of one objective – attracting disaffected Labourites on the basis of reheated Labourism – has repeatedly failed, and the glimmers of promise that arose from this futile quest all lie in ruins today. The Socialist Labour Party had effectively been destroyed by the turn of the century; the Socialist Alliance, which for a time united most of the major fragments of the far left, if a little uneasily, was forcibly wound up by the SWP to make room for Respect. The latter split, inevitably, when contradictions between the SWP and its partners ruptured spectacularly, and is now dwindling to nothing.

North of the border, the Scottish Socialist Party has gone from being a serious organisation with six MSPs to a pathetic, utterly marginal, nationalist ginger group, in what may be the most undignified political and organisational collapse we have seen since the Workers Revolutionary Party’s implosion in the 1980s. Tusc is merely an acutely farcical iteration of the same pattern.

If the Marxist left united in a truly substantial way – around a Marxist programme, even an inadequate one – we would see our prospects improve markedly. All we would have to leave behind is that which should be abandoned in any case – the aversion to democracy characteristic of sect organisations; the quasi-feudal right for Peter Taaffe or Charlie Kimber to have his word turned into action without interference; the inability to act as a disciplined minority.

Overcoming these sectarian barriers in a democratic fashion would mean we would have a serious shot at forming a fighting organisation, capable of competing for leadership of the growing resistance to government cuts. It would also mean that the people of Oldham would have something better to vote for than a Blair babe from central casting, two government hatchet men and a fascist publican.