01.02.1996

Manchester SLP launch

THE DEBATE for or against open membership dominated the first meeting of the SLP in Manchester on January 24. The 70 people who attended from across the north west were invited to join the new parry and set up branches in local areas.

Top table speaker Phil Griffin spoke of the need to break with Labour and the perspective of building a mass working class party with 5,000 members by May. While the SLP is “unashamedly electoral”, he said, members should not expect parliamentary success too soon. The SLP would make its name in campaign work.

Avoiding “questions about the constitution”, the platform insisted that this meeting is to sign up members.” But speakers from the floor would not have the meeting sidelined. They too had come out of a great concern for building a mass combat party of the working class, and a handful of SLP tops should not exclude them.

A speaker from Aslef, the train drivers’ union, said there should be no place for sectarianism in the SLP: “It is like shutting the door before the horse is even in!”

Supporters of Militant and the Workers Revolutionary Party said it was unrealistic to ask comrades to abandon the work and organisations they had spent their lives building. A comrade from the CPGB welcomed the formation of the SLP as a break from Labour and pledged support for Brenda Nixon’s campaign in Hemsworth. He insisted that a combat party of the working class capable of defeating capitalism has to bedemocratic, and has to include all organised class partisans.

The debate will continue in Manchester on Wednesday February 7 at 7.30 at a Communist Party meeting at the Abercromby Hotel, 35 Bootle Street, behind Central Library.

Steve Riley