22.01.2026

As you were

Despite belatedly dumping the ‘gang of four’ over the 2013 rape scandal, the popular frontist politics remains. So does the lack of openness and obsession with secrecy. Paul Demarty looks at the paradox of change and continuity

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The leopard is best known outside literary circles for the bowdlerised phrase, “everything must change, so that everything can stay the same”. This is not quite the original view of Tancredi, Lampedusa’s ambitious Sicilian noble, who hopes to profit from the risorgimento by signing up with Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi. “Unless we ourselves take a hand now,” he warns his uncle, the hero of the novel, “they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

As expected, things have changed - to a point - at the top of the Socialist Workers Party, at its recent conference. Late in the day, four names were removed from the outgoing central committee’s recommended slate, and these were not small fry. Alex Callinicos, Charlie Kimber, Weyman Bennett and Mark Thomas were all veterans of the leading body, and prominent public figures associated with it. Unfortunately for them, this association was double-edged, for they were also in positions of responsibility when the SWP fell into crisis over accusations of rape against Martin Smith in 2013, and played an active role in suppressing the revolt over the resulting cover-up.

We discussed this change at the top when it was announced,¹ and will not rehearse all that again here. We note that, in the post-conference bulletin just sent to SWP members, an even more detailed rationale is offered than they got in December. The fate of the ‘gang of four’ is once more tied to their role in 2013. The bulletin notes that it was:

… a mistake for some comrades to place loyalty to the party leadership or the accused ahead of thinking collectively how best to apply and develop a Marxist approach to women’s oppression and to the culture, norms and procedures required of our organisation. Developing a stronger approach on those questions would have involved addressing issues such as imbalances of seniority, power and age, which have been widely debated in recent struggles.

In order to ram home the point, the authors of this bulletin also provide links to the SWP’s new procedures, which - as we have noted several times - have a distinctly local-government flavour to them, as befits an organisation sometimes nicknamed the ‘Social Worker Party’. Nonetheless, it is at least evidence of some seriousness in relation to the 2013 disaster, which was badly missing at the time under the leadership of Callinicos, Kimber and company.

In fact, more was changed at the conference than the mere names of the people at the top. A motion was passed changing the method of election to the central committee. Previously, this was done strictly according to a slate system. The outgoing CC would propose a slate to be elected at conference. Contesting the election meant coming up with a complete alternative slate of candidates, which was all but impossible (only in the chaos of 2013 itself, so far as we remember, has there been a contested CC election).

But now, any comrade able to obtain 20 nominations can stand, and if there are additional candidates, conference delegates will “vote for as many candidates as they like up to the number on the [CC’s] recommended slate, with those elected being the ones with the highest votes up to the number given by the size of the recommended CC slate”. This is a marked improvement on the old system, though many other defects in the SWP’s organisational structure and culture remain unaddressed. It is also a backhanded acknowledgement that the old norms were proven decisively not to be fit for purpose by the apparent impregnability of the positions of the old guard.

Cloak and dagger

Those lucky enough to be SWP members were apprised of all this (as are those, like us, interested enough to obtain the ‘eyes only’ pre- and post-conference bulletins, which in reality are accessible on Google Drive to anyone with the links, which are circulated widely). Readers of Socialist Worker might be a little flummoxed, however. A small box-out on the CC leadership reads, in its entirety (omitting the list of names):

Delegates at the SWP conference elected the central committee (CC), which leads the organisation on a day-to-day basis … Four long-standing members of the outgoing CC did not restand. The changes to the CC are part of the outgoing leadership’s efforts to renew the organisation more generally.

Ahead of voting for the CC, a session discussed the political lessons of the 2013 crisis, when the party failed two women who raised complaints of sexual misconduct.²

This is so uninformative it is almost comical. The resignations are part of “general” efforts at renewal - nothing to see here. Delegates also discussed the 2013 crisis. What is the connection? We are not told, but, of course, anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knows very well why this peculiar non-sequitur is here.

The ultimate irony is that the SWP’s settling of accounts with its old leadership is clearly part of an effort to, as it were, renew the organisation’s public image “more generally”. The SWP issued a public apology in 2024. It has continued to face opprobrium in the wider movement on account of the sins of 2013, particularly in important sites of intervention like Your Party. This is even explicitly acknowledged in the internal bulletin, with almost disarming humility:

We do not believe their departure from the leadership will prevent criticism of the SWP. But we think it will make clearer to those we seek to work alongside in the struggle, and those joining the SWP, that we recognise and have learnt from our mistakes, that our apology is sincere, and that we as an organisation have sought, and will continue to seek, to change.

I must admit that, once I had read both that and the Delphic Socialist Worker box-out, I was reduced to screaming in frustration at my computer screen, ‘No, comrades: it will not make anything ‘clearer’ if you don’t tell anyone!’ But I cannot believe that this staggering inconsistency is intentional. For my money, it is merely evidence of how bone-deep the SWP’s instinct for secrecy runs. The ‘not in front of the children’ attitude absurdly asserts itself even in communications that only have any real meaning for the ‘children’. This attitude clearly does not leave the building along with the ‘gang of four’ (who, of course, remain members, with Callinicos turning in his regular column on schedule in the same issue of Socialist Worker). It is fortunate, at least, that they are so bad at actually enforcing that secrecy.

Same old

With the changes out of the way, everything else - in true Lampedusan fashion - looks to stay the same. The central task of the SWP, as they see it, is to resist the rise of the far right. This is a familiar emphasis, particularly in recent years, where the SWP has sometimes seemed almost to disappear entirely into its flagship front organisation, Stand Up to Racism.

Having failed to stop the onward march of the right through one front organisation, the SWP now seems to think that perhaps two will work. The new outfit is called Together, and it is not clear from the agreed conference document exactly what distinguishes the two. Together seems, on the face of it, more driven by celebrities than politicians and union leaders. If you’re not sold on the need to stop Reform and Tommy Robinson by Diane Abbott and Matt Wrack, perhaps Paloma Faith will do the job. That would make it, roughly, the Rock Against Racism to SUtR’s Anti-Nazi League.

Yet, of course, the document reminds us, there is already Love Music, Hate Racism as well; and another newcomer, Women Against the Far Right, designed to confront the far right’s exploitation of the grooming gangs scandal. Front organisations multiply in the SWP’s basement, like puppies at a dodgy dog-breeding outfit.

The centrepiece of all this is a March 28 demonstration called in the name of Together. That date is mentioned no less than 16 times in the course of the post-conference bulletin, in several different documents. A counter-demonstration to Robinson’s crew in May is also touted, but, apart from that, one would almost think the end of days was due on March 29, for all that the rest of the year figures in the discussion.

Keeping all these fronts going will require “a bigger and more confident SWP” (I’ll say …). Much of the rest of the bulletin focuses on the recruitment and cadre-isation of recruits. A recurrent theme is the need to achieve a higher level of general education and dissemination of the basics of Marxist theory - which is, of course, perfectly salutary in itself. Yet Marxist theory comes in the end from a man who, in his youth, demanded “ruthless criticism of everything that exists”. And among those existents to be criticised, surely, must be SUtR, and Together, and the great crowd of lesser bodies orbiting the SWP sun.

Over the years, we have often had cause to criticise the SWP’s catastrophism, when it comes to the rise of the right. That is plainly not the order of the day at present. The hour of the SWP’s stopped clock looks to have come. Not only are we threatened by an electoral victory for the far right - whether in the form of Reform or a Tory Party that finally gets its act together in order sufficiently to steal Reform’s clothes: we are threatened by a global shift towards ultra-chauvinist reaction. In America, at present, we have some indications of what that could mean in practice for us.

It is thus more essential than ever that we confront the fact that the multiplication of anti-racist broad fronts has failed to meaningfully obstruct the development of this situation. We need fresh thinking on this matter, which must include serious assessments of the history of the struggle. That is the only worthwhile objective of political education - to create sharper minds, who will all the more pitilessly evaluate our past efforts. The SWP instead uses its perpetual sense of emergency to terminate thought, to bury its activist core in busy work, mobilising a largely passive membership, while the big brains of the CC do the real ‘thinking’, as deemed necessary.

Education in this set-up consists of learning about the impeccable perspicacity of SWP leaders past and present, with the singular regrettable exception of its pre-Martin Smith disputes procedures. The group’s general recent history of stagnation, interrupted by the success of the anti-war movement in the early 2000s and the disaster of 2013, is rendered invisible, and consequently SWP activists are disarmed in political practice.

It is to be hoped that ordinary members cop on to this reality, and facing up to past mistakes becomes more of a habit.

1. ‘Too little, too late’ Weekly Worker December 18 2025: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1566/too-little-too-late.↩︎

2. socialistworker.co.uk/news/swp-conference-2026-resisting-the-right-building-the-left.↩︎