Socialist Labour Party
Scargill founded the Socialist Labour Party on 13 January 1996, although the party was launched officially on 4 May 1996, after the Labour Party abandoned the original wording of Clause IV - the nationalisation of key industries and utilities - in its constitution.
His breakaway party has had little success in the polls. He has contested two parliamentary elections. In the 1997 general election, he ran against Alan Howarth, a defector from the Conservative Party to Labour, who had been given the safe seat of Newport East to contest. In the 2001 general election, he ran against Peter Mandelson in Hartlepool. He lost on both occasions, winning just 2.4% of the vote in the Hartlepool election. In May 2009, he was the number one candidate for the Socialist Labour Party for one of London's seats in the European Parliament.
Scargill has become more politically outspoken since stepping down from the NUM presidency, he is a Communist sympathiser and has gone on record as a supporter of Joseph Stalin, saying that the "ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin" explain the "real world". Scargill had long criticised Poland's Solidarity trade union movement for its attacks upon the communist system in Poland, which Scargill saw as deformed but reformable.
Read more about this topic: Arthur Scargill
Famous quotes containing the words labour party, socialist, labour and/or party:
“I know that the right kind of leader for the Labour Party is a kind of desiccated calculating machine.”
—Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960)
“One is a socialist because one used to be one, no longer going to demonstrations, attending meetings, sending in one’s dues, in short, without paying.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)
“Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“A peace is of the nature of a conquest,
For then both parties nobly are subdued,
And neither party loser.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)