Galloway demanded that Blair be tried as a war criminal, that British troops be withdrawn from Afghanistan without further delay. He lambasted the Government and the Labour Party for the ‘austerity measures’ targeting the less well off, the poor, the infirm and the new privatizations of education, health and the post office. It was all this that gave him a majority of 10,000.

...

New movements are now springing up at home, challenging political orthodoxies without offering one of their own. Little more than a scream for help.
Respect is different. It puts forward a left social-democratic programme that challenges the status quo and is loud in its condemnation of imperial misdeeds. In other words it is not frightened by politics. Its triumph in Bradford should force some to rethink their passivity and others to realise that there are ways in which the Occupiers of yesteryear can help break the political impasse

(Tariq Ali)
Meanwhile,in France -

Jean-Luc Mélenchon: This goes to show that the political space occupied by the Front de gauche continues to grow. Our words, our vocabulary, are no longer marginalized, as they were in the decades 1990 and 2000. In 2007, the hegemony of the ideas of the right reached their paroxysm. It was a period when they hammered us with the idea that everything should be managed "like a private enterprise". It was also the moment when the social [2] movement caved in, when the Socialist Party (PS) renounced its singularity with respect to European social democracy by placing in question (abandoning) its central alliance with the communists.
After this crushing cultural victory, Nicolas Sarkozy sought to break the main social fortress by enacting the LRU [3] the objective of which was to deliver the education system to the private market, and by attacking the workers’ fortress, as represented by the railway workers.
Today, the Sarkozy government is up to its neck in a situation it no longer controls. There is no longer any room for a popular renewal of Sarkozysm.

(L'Humanité)

Comrade Tariq seems to be hoping that some new leftist parliamentary alliance will develop from Galloway's stunning victory, one that draws in the "Occupy" activists, and furnishes them with some sort of Marxist "programme of demands". If that happens (and it won't), then it's the beginning of the end for the opposition to the global capitalism steamroller. When will Marxists and Social Democrats - and Greens - learn that playing party politics is playing away? The ruling class makes the rules, and they make them (and ignore them or change them) to suit.The "Occupy" movement seems, to me anyway, to have hit the buffers, to have run its course. But to co-opt it to the "parliamentary road", to ersatz democracy, is tobetray them in the same manner that a Blair or a Milliband would betray them. The Met isn't tooling up, the Tories aren't trashing human rights legislation, to hamstring elected representatives. The enemy is preparing to make war on the people, and the war will be fought on the streets.
Galloway's victory, Mélenchon's rapidly increasing support, are signs of an increasing public awareness of the failures of the capitalist system; a realisation that the puppets kept in charge by a corrupt political structure have no answers to the current economic crisis other than further impoverishment of the majority. To lead a disillusioned population once more into the blind alley of pseudo-democracy is both an act of treachery and an act of political suicide.

"Nescis, mi fili, quantilla ratione mundus regatur." Count Oxenstierna.