01.02.1996

Where now for SLP?

The Communist Party worked for as big a vote as possible for the Socialist Labour Party’s Brenda Nixon in the Hemsworth by-election despite many disagreements with the platform she stood on. However, the campaign in itself represents something historically significant

AN ADVANCED section of the working class, produced by some of the important battles of the last twenty years, has started to break free from the stranglehold Labour has maintained over us throughout the twentieth century.

Activists in Brenda’s campaign have included ex-miners radicalised by the Great Strike of 1984-85 and the huge upsurge of 1992. Supporters of Women Against Pit Closures have turned out to support the fight, alongside workers who left the Labour Party in protest at the drift to the right.

Communist Party members who canvassed with Brenda reported that the campaign struck a much wider chord in the class. On the doorstep, we encountered many workers attracted to the stand of the SLP. These people know little about the details of the new party’s policies; they are not experts in the differences between ‘new’ Labour and the Scargill-led organisation.

They know the SLP is a party of fighters for the class, a party of people who will stand up for the workers. It is the party of the Brenda Nixons and Arthur Scargills of the world.

That is why there has been sympathy for the SLP campaign. That is why there was so much wavering amongst those working people still committed to voting for the Blair stooge - an insipid ‘new’ Labour nobody, if ever there was one!

They know in their guts that Labour is not their party. They don’t need the sophisticated arguments of revolutionaries to convince them of that. They may prefer Labour to the Tories, but they expect little from Blair - certainly not ‘socialism’, no matter how you define it.

The fact that a section of workers have started to organise to tap into that huge potential is a tremendous step forward. This campaign has shown that a genuine working class alternative can gain a real base amongst the working class in this country. This is the exciting prospect we must all now turn our eyes towards.

So as the dust settles on the Hemsworth battle, what must be done now?

First and foremost, we must clarify what that ‘working class alternative’ actually is. There has been a great deal of controversy around the launch of the SLP about the rights of other organisations to affiliate. Many campaigners in Hemsworth still express a vague anti-left organisation sentiment. One SLP member told us: “These groups will just be interested in selling their own newspapers, convincing people that they are right. The working class would be confused.”

In principle the Communist Party is against an affiliated structure for working class parties (see back-page article on the Scottish Socialist Movement). But surely socialism is about making the working class into the ruling class in society, capable of making responsible and mature decisions about the conduct of the whole world? Workers cannot be treated like children and shielded from the ‘harmful’ political ideas they might come across in the Weekly Worker or Militant.

Opposition to affiliation in fact illustrates that the SLP has made a break from the Labour Party, but not yet from Labourism. The politics of any new organisation of the working class must be clarified in an open, frank and - if necessary - sharp debate. They cannot be simply assumed and then imposed by anyone, no matter how honourable their record in the movement.

Second, that debate must start with the fundamentals. Of course, let’s discuss our campaigning work; let’s talk about what we plan to do practically in the real world. But the key must be a discussion on how socialism will come in Britain - through parliamentary reform, or though working class revolution?

We believe that this question will decide everything for us - what sort of party we build; its structure, discipline and internal democracy; the policies it puts forward to the working class; its attitude to elections, to the trade union struggle, to the fight for women’s liberation.

We are revolutionaries. That is why we say that the party our class needs is a reforged communist party, a mass combat organisation of the proletariat organised for the struggle to overthrow the state. This is a minority view at the moment, but we are confident it is the right way forward.

Brenda Nixon and the activists of the SLP in Hemsworth are to be congratulated not simply on their brave campaign against the might of Labour’s bureaucratic electoral juggernaut. They must be thanked for drawing wider circles into this crucial discussion. We look forward to hearing their views along with the opinions of all in the workers’ movement committed to socialism and working class liberation.