WeeklyWorker

Letters

No convictions

After eight full days of deliberation, the jury has acquitted Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner, Ellie (Leona) Kamio, Fatema Zainab Rajwani, Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin of the most serious charge they faced - aggravated burglary - for damaging the property where weapons for Israel are produced.

The jury did not convict Charlotte Head, Samuel Corner and Ellie Kamio of violent disorder and acquitted Fatema Zainab Rajwani, Zoe Rogers and Jordan Devlin of the same charge. The jury also “refused to convict” any of the defendants of criminal damage, despite five of them admitting in court to destroying Israeli weapons and equipment belonging to Israel’s biggest weapons firm, Elbit Systems.

Samuel Corner was also not convicted of grievous bodily harm with intent for striking a police officer, or any lower offence available to the jury to convict on. In total, none of the defendants were convicted of a single offence. The defendants were acquitted (or not convicted) of all offences levelled against them, including alleged violent offences. It appears the jury agreed that the defendants’ sole intention was to use items, including sledgehammers, as tools to disarm Israeli weapons to “prevent violence”.

These verdicts put to bed the deceitful accusations from ministers that these brave activists are “violent criminals”. We have said all along: Free the Filton 24! Shut Elbit down! Lift the ban on Palestine Action!

Defend our Juries
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Troubling reports

There are troubling reports of direct interference by Karie Murphy in the current Your Party leadership elections. She apparently leaned heavily on independent candidates to convince them not to stand against Corbyn’s The Many slate. Deborah Faulkes, standing for the central executive committee in the North West, writes in her blog: “… in January, I attended a Zoom meeting for a small subset of a WhatsApp group I belonged to, with staff member Karie Murphy and one other office member, in which those of us who were independent candidates in the CEC elections were asked to stand down in order not to ‘split the vote’ for the Corbyn slate.”

As Murphy is also running Your Party’s HQ, there is more than a touch of ‘conflict of interest’ here. Not only has The Many slate access to all the data, all the money: it basically has HQ running the campaign for it. For comparison, this is the section from the ‘First year organisational strategy’ document (section 6), which was, remember, written by HQ itself:

“i … The elections will be run in an honest and transparent manner, with strict safeguards against nepotism. To this end, the elections will be run by an independent and professional third party.

“ii This team will also manage organisational tasks related to the election of the leader (if relevant) and the central executive committee, ensuring that processes are clear, fair and inclusive. Furthermore, they will work in a transparent manner to facilitate the election and development of the executive leadership team (CEC and leader). This team must be strictly neutral, and must not be candidates or actively support any candidates in these elections.”

As communists, we do not have any illusions that those in power would run things ‘fairly’, but this blatant breach of the party’s own rules really does stink to heaven and we would not be surprised if some members decide to put in official complaints (not that we expect them to go anywhere, seeing as the complaints department is probably run by Karie Murphy too).

In this forthcoming leadership election, which starts on February 9, the choice really could not be clearer. Unless the Grassroots Left wins a majority on the CEC, the Corbyn clique will take the final steps of turning YP into another totally inadequate, undemocratic sham of an organisation in the mould of Momentum.

The very few bits of policy that The Many does come out with underline that: not only does Corbyn want to become the “parliamentary leader” (a position which doesn’t even exist in the constitution), but there are proposals for “members’ policy commissions” and a “socialist leadership programme” to “identify and train up the socialist leaders of the future”. How about we send those little wannabe careerists to sit on the members’ policy commission, where they can decide the policy for us?

Both things are presented as totally “new” initiatives. They really are not. They have been copied straight out of Labour’s and Momentum’s playbook. Jeremy Corbyn surely must remember that it was Tony Blair who outsourced policy-making to the National Policy Forum as a way to gut conference and disenfranchise the members and branches. The fact that he would want to repeat that in Your Party really is a damning indictment.

 

 

Matt Rubens
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Scotland debate

On January 29 I took part in an online debate billed as ‘Socialism and Scottish independence’, chaired by Peter Kennedy of the Forth Valley YP proto-branch. I was up against Richard Green of the Radical Independence Campaign and the debate followed from an article in the online journal Heckle by Green and Bob Goupillot entitled ‘Your Party: forging a new Scottish socialist party’.

The article calls for “a Scottish party which is both unequivocally pro-independence for Scotland and is itself a fully independent Scottish party”. But they somehow claim this is not a nationalist position nor that its aim is to have the forthcoming YP Scotland conference declare UDI.

They spend a lot of the article - as did Richard in his opening remarks - on the very long-in-the-tooth claim that the Labour Party and Labourism are dead. Apparently Corbyn’s leadership didn’t gain traction in Scotland because “he did not understand the national democratic question” and was a “blip”, said Richard.

In reply I proposed that, far from posting yet another funeral proclamation, we needed to recognise that the Labour Party still remains a site for class struggle, even under Starmer, and indeed during the Corbyn era was the most important site for class struggle in Britain since the miners’ strike. The ruling class well understood this.

That supposed ‘lack of traction’ was not something to be celebrated, but a sign of just how deep-fried nationalism has become in the left in Scotland. As Matthew Jones said in the ensuing debate, almost the entire left in Scotland has abandoned the working class and now looks to solve things through a small capitalist state, becoming a recruiting sergeant for the Scottish National Party.

I was surprised that there were very few in the debate taking sides with Richard, but this certainly reflected what they admit in the article: “It is difficult to judge what the balance for and against independence is amongst those who have come together in YP so far.”

The democracy that they claim to hold dear seems to only work one way - from their entirely Scottish nationalist perspective that there must be no “fence-sitting” or “halfway house” on the issue of independence, whatever the forces who have joined what was clearly a British-wide party initiative may think.

We shall see at the forthcoming Scottish conference just how deep-fried that nationalism is and whether there’s a mortal wound for YP in Scotland. It certainly offers nothing to the working class in Scotland except a diversion and a driving down of living standards, just like that other recent nationalist pipe dream - Brexit.

Tam Dean Burn
Glasgow

YP republicans

Republic Your Party put forward a slate of candidates in England for endorsement to enter the election for the central executive committee (CEC) of Your Party. These were - John Tummon (North West), Jordan Craw (North West), Chris Williamson (East Midlands), Steve Freeman (London) and Mike Hope (East of England)

The total number of endorsements for RYP in England was 96. However, these were distributed unevenly between four regions. We failed to secure any candidate for the CEC elections, given the regional barrier of 75 endorsements. We suffered a major setback when Chris Williamson, the candidate for East Midlands, was barred from standing for the CEC. Chris was the former Labour MP for Derby North and was Jeremy Corbyn’s most vocal supporter in the Parliamentary Labour Party. He was victimised for campaigning to make MPs accountable to their members through open selections, and for opposing the Zionist witch-hunt against grassroots activists and prominent members like Ken Livinstone, Jackie Walker and Mark Wadsworth. He was eventually prevented from standing for Derby North in the 2019 general election, even though his suspension from the party had been ruled unlawful by the High Court in October that year.

As a dual member of YP and the Workers Party of Britain, Chris Williamson should have been allowed to stand. In our view, given his record, he would have had every chance of securing the necessary endorsements. However, it should have been for East Midlands members to decide this, not unelected officials.

Republic YP began our campaign without supporters in Scotland and Wales. It was a major step forward, when Republic YP (Scotland) was established and Left Unity (Cymru) endorsed our platform.

Republic YP highlighted three issues:

The Republic YP campaign had some obvious weaknesses. First, we are standing against the dominant ideology of the English left in Labourism (ie, social monarchism and unionism). Second, as a new platform we were unknown to most members. Third, we were hampered by the relatively high barrier (75 endorsements) against standing and the disqualification of our most widely known socialist candidate. Fourth, we did not have information about branches, meetings and members necessary to mount an effective campaign. Fifth, we did not have the social media presence necessary to explain our ideas. Sixth, we did not have the backing of any of the socialist or Marxist groups and newspapers.

As stated, the result of the first stage of the fight for a republican programme was that one of our candidates was barred and four did not achieve the required 75 endorsements. So the struggle enters a new stage, with Republic YP now outside the ‘democratic tent’, where candidates will present their politics.

Before moving to the second stage, we want to thank those comrades who gave us any assistance. This would include Crispin Flintoff for giving RYP an opportunity to make our case, all members of the RYP WhatsApp group who helped us, those independently minded comrades who took the time to consider our proposals, and finally all who gave us their endorsements.

Platforms are plans and proposals for the future of the party, its programme and its constitutional processes. A platform is likely to be ‘permanent’ until its aims are achieved. It puts, or should put, politics first. Politics comes before votes. Votes should be the consequence of a platform winning political arguments for its politics. Opportunism puts winning votes, seats, power and influence before politics.

Slates are a set of candidates standing together for election purposes. Slates dissolve once the election is completed, but platforms will continue. The following platforms put forward a slate of candidates (ie, more than one) across the English regions, Scotland and Wales:

Outside the two main platform/slates, the Democratic Bloc was the largest alternative. The Democratic Bloc says it is not “participating in any slates and we are not running our own slate”. Despite this, 14 candidates were openly identified as Democratic Bloc. DB members secured sufficient endorsements for four of its 14 supported candidates (Eastern England, North West, West Midlands and London).

There were a significant number of self-identified independents standing for the CEC. These are not a platform, but began to cooperate and support each other. In effect the indies became a slate, seeking to act as a third force separate from The Many and Grassroots Left. Crispin Flintoff can be considered the unofficial ‘leader’ of the indies who helped organise to get indie candidates endorsed.

RYP is a republican platform taking inspiration from Tony Benn’s 1992 republican Commonwealth Bill. We are not a Marxist-communist platform. We have support from working class people from both the social democratic and communist traditions. We are not supported or endorsed by any of the Marxist groups in YP, such as the Socialist Workers Party, Counterfire, RS21, Socialist Party, CPGB and Socialist Alternative. (Of course, we are not a sectarian platform and welcome support from any such groups in or outside YP.)

Republic Your Party is a ‘programme and process’ platform. Our central concerns are the democratic programme across the UK and democratic processes inside YP. We are distinguished from ‘sectarian democracy’, whose sole interest is in YP internal democracy. The RYP slate dissolved on January 29, when the endorsement period ended. RYP will continue as a platform, but has no slate of candidates in the CEC election.

Republic Your Party
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Matgamnaites

Looking at the last (January 24) issue of Western Solidarity, the paper of the ‘Atlanticists for Workers’ Loyalism’ (Alliance for Workers’ Liberty), I came across the following curious observation in Matt Cooper’s discussion of the Your Party election: “In theory [the Socialist Unity Platform] could have been a forum for a broad left to cohere. In practice it became dominated by a strange double act: Max Shanly (a former student Labour-left type, now billed as DSYP, but who may not genuinely represent DSYP) and the tiny and previously semi-dormant CPGB (Weekly Worker).”

What on earth could have led Mr Cooper to suppose that CPGB was “semi-dormant”? After all, we continue to publish weekly, while the AWL has gone fortnightly …

The reality is that dishonesty and self-deception is baked into the Matgamna tendency - far deeper than its more recent Zionism and anti-anti-imperialism: going back to their original commitments to following James P Cannon’s 1930s ‘raiding entry’ policy of dishonest manoeuvres to destroy ‘centrist obstacles’ - from the International Socialists (later SWP), to Workers Power, to the Socialist Organiser purported united-front Labour left paper, to the Workers Socialist League … Mr Cooper’s comment is merely a recent example of the normal dishonesty.

 

 

Mike Macnair
Oxford