THE BIGGEST left wing electoral challenge to Labour in over half a century lifts off today, with the public launch of the national campaign of the Socialist Alliance as Britain’s newest and most exciting electoral party.

The Socialist Alliance, uniting for the first time the forces of many left wing organisations which until now had always failed to work consistently together, will be standing over 80 candidates across the length and breadth of England. South East candidates outside London include health campaigner John Lister in Oxford East, and candidates in Hove, Crawley, Portsmouth and Southampton.

London Socialist Alliance candidates won significant support in last May’s elections for the Greater London Assembly, and there have been consistently promising results for Alliance candidates in subsequent local and parliamentary by-elections.

Speaking at the Socialist Alliance Press launch this morning in central London, Oxford East candidate John Lister said:

"The British left seems finally to be growing out of its habit of sectarian politics parodied by Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’. We can offer a serious and consistent alternative to voters across England who are fed up with Labour’s Tory policies.

"It is good that this campaign is getting under way today, at the very point where students across the country are protesting at New Labour’s outrageous imposition of tuition fees and abolition of the remaining grant.

"We are fully committed to the fight to restore free higher education. We say the fees should be scrapped, grants reinstated, and education and other public services should be funded not by poverty-stricken students, but through progressive taxation on high earnings, the wealthy and big business."