BRITAIN faces the prospect of a hung Parliament. This is the fourth election in a row where the Tories have failed to win a majority of seats.

The conditions that created the post-war scenario of two massive and broadly equal electoral blocs, able to command the overwhelming majority of votes between them, have vanished.

In 1951 Labour and the Tories commanded 97 per cent. Today they poll around two-thirds and, measured against earlier standards of voter loyalty, “command” even less.

Membership of political parties is at an all-time low and abstention at an all-time high.

Disgust at corruption and privilege and disillusionment with mainstream politicians is widespread.
This represents a debilitating failure of the political system and a crisis of legitimacy.

Even in purely formal terms, Britain’s political system is deeply undemocratic.

The unrepresentative first-past-the-post electoral system denies huge blocs of voters any proportionate representation.

There are 13 parties with elected MPs in the Commons, but little correspondence between their level of electoral support and their parliamentary numbers.

The Greens and Caroline Lucas will be lucky to hold on to their single seat in Brighton, yet in any proportionate voting system they would have up to 50 seats.

Ukip will be lucky to retain the seats of its Tory defectors and even luckier to get Nigel Farage elected. But on present polling figures they would be entitled to nearly 100 MPs.

The antics of Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind illustrate the truth that the Westminster parade of imperialist grotesques is entirely unrepresentative of Britain’s population.

However, their private place-seeking almost obscures the deeper corruption of a Parliament which acts as the unchallenged executive arm of bankers and big business bosses.

Any measure which has the potential to challenge the dictatorship of capital in Britain can hardly find a hearing at Westminster, let alone a majority.

Lenin once wrote that Marxist revolutionaries always stand for democracy “not in the name of capitalism, but in the name of clearing the path for our movement.”

In Britain today, the Communist Party must stand up for a voting system in which the people who favour Farage get what they vote for — and in which Nick Clegg gets what’s coming to him.

Taking this insight from Lenin is not to suggest that democratic advance is tied up with the development of capitalism.

More than a century later, in this era of imperialism, monopoly capitalist power comprehensively negates formal democracy.

But a challenge must be mounted to a system in which the interests and progressive demands of the working class are almost completely unrepresented and the working class itself is all but excluded from public life.

When clear options are placed before them, the people of Britain decisively reject austerity policies.

Most people want energy in public hands. A clear majority want rail and Royal Mail renationalised.

Opposition to the privatisation of state schools and the NHS is almost universal.

Around three-quarters of people want government-imposed controls on energy costs and transport fares. Nearly half want government control of private-sector rents.

Ed Miliband’s proposals to reduce student fees and freeze energy prices paid off immediately, reconnecting with working and middle-class voters. It also disrupted the media refrain that he lacks leadership qualities.

But these were half-measures, lacking any follow-through. They sat uneasily with the “austerity-lite” stranglehold maintained on the Labour Party by the Blairite tendency and expressed in shadow chancellor Ed Balls’s unyielding adherence to Treasury orthodoxy and Tory policies.

Similarly Miliband’s opposition to a military adventure against Syria was grounded as much in a fear of failure as in any principled opposition to the projection of imperial force.

Welcome though they were, such half-hearted stances fail to convince most electors that a Labour government would be radically different.

The latest “Farageiste” ploy is to ramp up the equality issue in a bid to poison the election debate.

This is only assisted by Labour’s dangerously bipartisan approach to migration and the cross-party consensus on the EU.
Miliband’s modest proposal to sanction employers who pay migrant workers lower rates of pay introduced a mild hint of class politics into the discussion.

But bolder policies that tackle low pay, employment discrimination and the anti-union laws which drive down wages and conditions for all workers could begin to detoxify the whole migration issue.

Without a clear appeal to cash-strapped working-class voters and to those sections of the middle class who live on a precipice of precariousness, Labour cannot win convincingly on May 7 and cannot govern effectively afterwards.

A recent Independent on Sunday poll indicated that many voters perceive themselves as occupying the middle ground ideologically, while supporting policies that are the property of the left.

Those policies were usually far closer to the positions of the Greens and the Communist Party than to Labour.
In the forthcoming general election campaign, we communists have a modest but vital role to play.

Where we contest seats and elsewhere, our job is to find ways to place working-class concerns at the centre of the election process and the working class at the centre of politics.

We will present the stark truth that Britain’s crisis is a capitalist crisis. Austerity is working as intended — the rich are getting richer as working people get poorer.

Britain’s many crises cannot be resolved within the framework of the capitalist system. Nevertheless, new policies can begin to unleash the creative power of Britain’s working people.

In rebuilding the role of the working class in political life, communists and socialists begin to transform themselves and the working class itself — the better to become the ruling class.

- This is an edited extract from Nick Wright’s political report to the Communist Party executive committee last weekend.