11.07.1996

Double standards

SLP: News and comment

Rightfully the huge increases proposed for MPs and ministers caused a furore of protest. Leaders of low paid workers, including Mick Graham of the GMB, strongly criticised the package. While local government workers are being offered 11p an hour, MPs are to be given their biggest pay rises in 30 years.

The reaction among Labour MPs was somewhat different.

Though Clare Short cleverly said she opposed the rises, this would only be until there had been a review of MPs’ work. Other shadow ministers were less circumspect. In the name of the ‘rate for the job’ they want to get their fat snouts into the trough. Even Dennis Skinner said he would back an increase in line with inflation.

Revolutionaries and Marxists have as a matter of principle demanded that representatives of the working class in the bourgeois parliament take no more than the average wage. The balance going to the movement itself. To their credit Militant’s Dave Nellist and Terry Fields automatically docked their wages. Communist Party MPs did the same.

Under socialism delegates to the workers’ councils should not only be recallable. They should get the average pay as a maximum. That was the practice of the Paris Commune in 1871 and the early Soviet Republic - it was Stalin who broke with egalitarianism and deliberately fostered bureaucratic privilege.

The Socialist Labour Party has at the moment no MPs. But our National Executive Committee is committed to fighting 100 seats at the next general election. It is vital that careerists are weeded out. We have had enough of fiery left talkers who, once safely in parliament, become totally divorced from the life and concerns of ordinary workers. Demand therefore that all our candidates pledge themselves to be a workers’ MP on a workers’ wage.

Incidentally that principle encompasses trade union officials. Comrades like Arthur Scargill and Bob Crow should take a lead. As things stand at present, both of them would have to take a big cut in salary if elected to the House of Commons.

As others see us

Readers of this paper will know that Militant Labour is discussing a name change. ‘Socialist Party’ is the likely outcome of their forthcoming deliberations in September. Answering internal objections that “the field is already crowded with organisations with ‘socialist’ in it”, Taaffe and co come up with the following assessment. Whatever its faults in terms of mechanical reasoning, it tells us something valuable about the left in Britain today and by implication our tasks in the SLP.

“Undoubtedly” the existence of the SLP, SWP, etc, “complicates our task” (Internal bulletin May 1996). However ML’s leaders are convinced that its main rivals have organic weaknesses. “If the SLP had adopted a broad open character as we suggested, it could have become a significant pole of attraction for tens of thousands of workers.”

But, “given the narrowness of Scargill’s approach, it will be a relatively small organisation. Moreover, internal upheavals within the SLP are inevitable, given Scargill’s autocratic attitude as well as the limitations of SLP policy.”

What of the SWP? It faces “splits and divisions because they too are incapable of correctly understanding this period, and always seek to emphasise the need to build their organisation, if needs be at the expense of advancing the general movement of the working class.” ML’s “challenge on the electoral field, the proposal for alliances, has already introduced confusion and splits in their ranks”.

“If we act correctly by changing our name, and in good season,” says Taaffe, “then we will be able to make a much bigger impact over a period of time than either these organisations.”

Surely Militant ought to put the interests of the class as a whole above narrow group competition. If the left wing of the SLP can succeed in dumping or substantially altering comrade Scargill’s bureaucratic ‘draft’ constitution and opening our ranks to all militant and socialist workers - including ML, SWP, and CPGB - then together we will constitute the beginnings of a real workers’ party that in due course can challenge capital. And that is the crucial thing.

Old principle?

Scargill’s ‘draft’ constitution is in essence a new version of the old Labour Party one, along with an undemocratic blanket ban on organised communists and revolutionaries. Frankly this stands in sharp contrast with our president’s earlier, much healthier, pronouncements. When he was in the Labour Party comrade Scargill opposed bans and proscriptions. He went on the record supporting the unity of all leftwing groups and tendencies.

In a famous interview in the New Left Review he expanded upon his politics of transforming the Labour Party. This is what he said:

“But you can change the Labour Party in the sense of pulling down the bans and proscriptions. Once you start to have influence, the cooperation and link between the left Marxist groups - all of them - and the Labour Party, you start to determine politics of a different kind” (A Scargill ‘The new unionism’ New Left Review July-August 1975).

Transforming the Labour Party into a vehicle for socialism was always a fantasy. However the unity of the Marxists and the left remains a necessity. Let us apply comrade Scargill’s perspective of “pulling down the bans and proscriptions” ... to the SLP.

SL Kenning