27.03.2014
Less haste, more politics
Mark Fischer reports on the meeting of Left Unity's leadership, where LU's labyrinthine constitution has been wreaking havoc
For a comprehensive and reliable account of the March 16 meeting of the transitional national council - Left Unity’s interim leadership - readers are again directed to Peter McLaren’s report on the Independent Socialist Network website.1 However, there are some important political points that need to be added to the comrade’s record, as they address issues that will have a direct bearing on LU’s policy conference in Manchester on Saturday March 29.
First, this TNC was smaller than the one that preceded it. This is a general tendency, apparently. Just 33 comrades, representing 22 LU branches, turned out. The absence of leading LUers such as Andrew Burgin, Kate Hudson and Guy Harper - no doubt for perfectly valid reasons - was also noteworthy.
On the same theme, there was clearly some disquiet in the room at the apparent loss of the organisation’s forward momentum when Socialist Resistance comrade Terry Conway reported that, as of the evening before the TNC, just 162 people had registered for the policy conference (the Manchester hall holds around 300). As I have written before, the whole LU project is characterised by ill-advised haste.2 This, of course, is an understandable product of the frustration felt by some sections of the extra-Labour left when it surveys the miserable failures of the unity projects initiated since the mid-1990s.
But some sober reflection and patience would be rather more productive. LU is creating real problems for itself. It has lumbered itself with a complicated constitution that assumes a much larger organisation with intricately combined sections, able to meet binding constitutional obligations on gender quotas, regional representations and so on. For instance, the TNC had to agree that, following conference, LU must re-open nominations for those posts where there were insufficient candidates in the recent internal elections - the appeals committee, the east region, London, the north-east, the north-west, Scotland, the south-east and the south-west. Quite a few of the original places up for election, in other words.
Similarly, this small organisation has attempted to run online elections for a variety of national positions and places on its leadership - a process that was always fraught with the potential for cock-up ... and so it has transpired, unfortunately. Terry Conway’s report on these elections highlighted several quite serious problems. For example, a number of legitimately nominated comrades (including a Communist Platform supporter) had been left off the ballot for the 15 directly elected members of the national council. These were accepted as honest errors and the general feeling of the meeting is that we needed to press ahead with the situation as it now stands - with the exception of the disputes committee election, which will be rerun on the basis of the existing nominations, but with the addition of a comrade whose consent to nomination and election statement had been sent on time, but not to the designated LU address.
Even more seriously, Pete McLaren pointed out to the meeting that the entire election process to the new NC had been run on the basis of the wrong constitution - the version agreed at the LU founding conference3 stipulated that 20 signatories were needed for the nomination, not just two, as stated in the online document. Somewhere along the line in the constitution’s journey onto the LU website, a zero apparently went walkabout. Again, Pete is accurate when he reports that “it was ... recommended that we continue the election process because the error was made in good faith”, but this potentially does not end the matter.
The TNC agreed unanimously with Terry Conway’s proposal that all LUers are informed of the error and the March 29 conference itself takes the final decision on the legitimacy or otherwise of the whole electoral process. The potential for disruption and challenges from understandably disgruntled members should not be underestimated and, as LU is currently in the painstaking process of becoming registered as a party with the electoral commission, a slip like running an entire internal election for an important component part of your national leadership on the basis of the wrong constitution could have damaging ramifications.
The urgent need in LU is to create far more space for thorough-going political discussion and clarification. The time for debate at the TNC itself was very squeezed and - predictably - the three-minute rule will again apply for movers of motions at the March 29 conference (two minutes for movers of amendments, one minute for speakers from the floor - if we are lucky). In this context, perhaps the TNC contribution that best illustrated the mess resulting from LU’s topsy-turvy set of priorities came from comrade Mike Scott.
He made a suggestion for a “forward planning working party” to increase the profile of LU and promote its growth - not terribly radical in itself and readily endorsed by the meeting. However, according to the comrade, “if we stop growing, we will stagnate”. He even put a figure on the required numbers: LU must “aim for 5,000 members by the end of the year” and if we don’t hit it, the organisation will be “in trouble”.
Well, it is a certainty that LU will not have 5,000 members by the end of this year - if you are talking about real, dues-paying, politically activated and organised members, a couple of hundred is more likely. But then the size of the membership is only one way to judge the political health of an organisation. The “trouble” we currently have in LU is political, as perfectly illustrated by the truncated debate at the TNC on the Scottish independence referendum. In that, a clear majority of the comrades in the room agreed with Mark France of Worcester LU (and Steve Freeman’s Republican Socialist Platform) that a ‘yes’ victory would be progressive, as it would lead to the break-up of the UK state and be a blow to the Tory- Lib Dem government. Others declared themselves to be neutral on the whole question.
Exactly the sort of opportunist concessions to petty nationalism that are typical of our contemporary left, in other words. Rather than fret about inflated targets for membership growth and dark warnings of the dire consequences of failure, LU comrades should pay far more serious attention to the core politics of their new formation.
mark.fischer@weeklyworker.org.uk
Notes
1. www.independentsocialistnetwork.org.
2. See my report of the last TNC in the February 13 issue of this paper - particularly my comment that LU “is an organisation in far too much of a hurry”.