04.12.2014

Positive and realistic

Yorkshire and Humber regional committee met last weekend. Mickey Coulter reports

There is a sense that, at the national level, Left Unity is not producing the rate of progress that many of its most hopeful supporters anticipated in the wake of the Ken Loach appeal and the party’s formation. Indeed attendance at the November policy conference gave us an indication that LU is stagnating or perhaps even worse.

However, the second regional committee meeting for LU branches in the Yorkshire and Humber region at the University of Sheffield’s student union saw a largely positive atmosphere, with plans for greater mutual support and engagement between the two main branches in the region - Leeds (North) and Sheffield - and also with York, which sent members along too. As well as a useful discussion of the London conference, where there was general agreement in our assessment, the meeting also saw the unanimous adoption of a motion to the national council, which is meeting on December 13. This expressed the concern of those present over the actions and remit of the disputes committee and over the twice defeated safe spaces proposals. After the business part of the meeting was completed, there was an ‘educational meeting’ open to the public.

On a less positive note there was brief mention of a matter which had also arisen at the start of the first Yorkshire and Humber regional committee meeting earlier in the year: the less than thriving state of many of the region’s branches. Comrades stated that in the intervening months the situation has deteriorated further, with whole branches ceasing to function in small and medium-sized towns, where Left Unity had not managed to establish a real toehold: places such as Bradford, Doncaster and Huddersfield. Concerns expressed by one comrade that this may be a phenomenon peculiar to our region are clearly unfounded (speak to LU comrades around the rest of the country). A further indication of this is the decision of the London regional committee to reduce the quorum required for all of its branches to a mere five people - a decision also affirmed by our own RC at this meeting.

Matthew Caygill from Leeds (North) branch led off the discussion on the policy conference by offering his own thoughts, most of which were shared by the rest of us. He was pleased, actually, how numbers had held up compared to the Manchester policy conference in March, and also that the ‘merge Left Unity into Tusc’ faction had once again been defeated - these fans of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition just keep on coming back for more! But he also had reservations about many aspects of LU, as reflected at the conference. The party’s constitution continues to be extraordinarily oversized and complex. The conference agenda was clearly overstuffed, so that many items were not reached or were referred back, and the policy documents were often bloated by excessively long preambles.

Comrade Caygill was particularly critical of the handling of the safe spaces document and the anti-democratic shenanigans that had been cack-handedly deployed to try and secure its passage - most memorably the surprise compositing which led to the removal from the voting options of the ‘Party guide to solidarity’, a document that conference had specifically voted to include as an option only the day before against the judgement of the standing orders committee.

On safe spaces, comrade Caygill said that he had voted neither for the SS proposals nor for the alternative code of conduct proposed by the Communist Platform - he expressed the view that we are witnessing a powerful (negative) resurrection of the politics of identity, of which the fatally flawed safe spaces approach is a part. Such was the agreement in the room that, whatever approach the party needs, it is not that of the safe spaces proposals, Kath Owen was actioned to draw up on behalf of the committee a collective statement expressing our concerns to the NC. These concerns were basically of two kinds: firstly, opposition to automatic expulsion for those expressing backward or reactionary viewpoints on gender, sex, race and so forth, which would only allow in the ‘pure’ (and, of course, the pure are seldom quite as free of negative ideas as they might believe), so it is both dangerous and utopian - particularly because this stuff is mixed up with the second cause of concern for the comrades: ie, the marrying of behavioural ideals to a disciplinary process. Those present were firmly of the view that the two should be formulated and operated separately.

Branches

Positive proposals emerged out of the discussion of the state of the larger, more active branches: namely, Leeds, Sheffield and York. Reporting on the activity and health of Leeds branch, Garth Franklin was upbeat, claiming that the handful of comrades in the city were “sinking roots” locally. He was particularly pleased with the attendance at the Leeds meetings featuring members of Podemos and Syriza (indeed, judging from the number of uses by Leeds comrades of the Podemos phrase, ‘circles’, their enthusiasm for these political models remains undiminished). Comrade Franklin was tentatively looking forward to the formation of a Leeds (South) branch - Leeds is, of course, famous for being one of the first LU branches in the country to suffer an acrimonious political schism.

He said that there had been no contact or joint action since then with Leeds (Central) branch, which, he said, was “controlled by Workers Power”. The last he heard was that the branch had put on a meeting advertised as being about the NHS, which then bamboozled the few ‘ordinary people’ who turned up when it turned out to be a discussion on the transitional programme. We cannot comment on the validity or not of the anecdote, but, needless to say, the split is clearly far from being healed. A positive proposal arising from this discussion, however, was the idea that Podemos and Syriza speakers should also be invited to address meetings in Sheffield and York - hopefully such meetings will see critical engagement with their ideas. Other proposals were made for greater cooperation between regional branches.

The 2015 general and local elections was a major item up for debate. Leading the discussion was guest speaker Yassamine Mather, an NC member, supporter of the Communist Platform and Iranian exile. She informed comrades that they would need to confer with the NC if they wished to stand parliamentary candidates, but that branches were free to stand in local elections if they wished. Both provided opportunities to try and build Left Unity. There would be some agreement with Tusc as to where we should stand candidates - Left Unity would not be standing against other socialists (and probably not in marginal seats, added comrade Caygill). The generally held criticism of Tusc was that, in spite of the impressive number of candidates it was likely to stand, it was an undemocratic stitch-up, which emerges only at elections. Moreover, it has either no or dodgy left-nationalist positions on Europe and migration, whereas Left Unity is a democratic party with much superior positions on these two key questions.

No to imperialism

Immediately following the RC meeting was the educational, given by comrade Mather, on the topic of ‘Isis, Iraq and imperialism’.

Beginning with the statement that, for the outsider to the politics of the Middle East, the whole situation there can be confusing, the comrade gave us a whirlwind tour of the history of the region, from Sykes-Picot all the way to the formation of Islamic State (Isis). Ever since the artificial divisions imposed by the British and French (through the plan of the diplomats, Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot) after the collapse of the Ottoman empire, a whole host of national, religious and ethnic conflicts had been created in place of the relative harmony between Sunni and Shia, Kurds, Christians and so on that has been seen in the preceding centuries - the present widespread sectarian conflict is not at all normal, considered historically.

Against secular and labour movements of the region the imperialist powers supported religious dictatorships which then utterly marginalised and in some cases exterminated members of workers’ formations - through legal restrictions and terror these regimes have sought to choke off the space for the re-emergence of the working class. Recent imperialist interventions, particularly the 2003 invasion of Iraq, laid the ground for the growth of IS, as did the pouring in of weapons by US allies like Saudi Arabia to the various groupings in or around the Free Syrian Army. This, combined with the hostility of the Sunni population of northern Iraq to their corrupt Shia majority government, is an explosive combination.

It goes without saying that such western ‘intervention’ has never helped the cause of the working class, resolved the tensions caused by the imposition of artificial borders, dampened down sectarian conflicts or reduced the power of the corrupt dictatorships. Unsurprisingly, the working class of the region despises all those who taint themselves by association with the imperialists and their allies.

The comrade’s excellent, succinct talk was well received by all present and sparked an interesting and wide-ranging discussion.