Letters

Seismic threat

The April 1 guilty verdicts, in the case of Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal and Stop the War vice-chair Chris Nineham, are extraordinary and shocking, and a huge setback for civil liberties.

The pair have made clear that they will be appealing these verdicts and they have the full support of the Palestine coalition in that. There are significant concerns about the conduct of the six-day hearing, which will be raised during the appeal.

A key part of the defence was that the conditions imposed on the protest on January 18 2025, which prevented a march to the BBC, were unlawful. The defence submitted a detailed legal argument outlining this case. Extraordinarily, in dismissing this argument, district judge Daniel Sternberg informed the court that he was not obliged to give any reasons for his decision.

The substantive issues at the heart of the case were clear. From the stage that day, Ben Jamal explained that a delegation of leaders of the coalition, plus MPs, trade union leaders and members of the Jewish bloc, would walk peacefully in a symbolic protest towards the BBC to lay flowers to mark the corporation’s failures to report the truth of genocide in Gaza. Ben made clear that, if they were stopped by the police, the flowers would be laid at the police line. In the event, as copious video evidence shows, police officers invited the delegation to pass though.

Claims of disorder on the day were simply false. The only moment of violence was when Chris Nineham was brutally pulled to the ground and hauled away by police officers. The logs of the police gold commander, Adam Slonecki, reveal that enormous political pressure was placed on the police by pro-Israel groups to prevent a protest at the BBC.

Today’s verdict raises huge concerns about any further powers granted to the police through the Crime and Policing Bill, which is currently progressing though parliament. It confirms the view, widely held across civil society, that these proposed increased powers represent a seismic threat to democratic freedoms.

The unprecedented charging and now conviction of leaders of a movement that has brought millions to the streets in support of the people of Palestine is designed to chill ongoing opposition to genocide, apartheid and illegal occupation. It will not succeed.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Palestinian Forum in Britain, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Stop the War Coalition, Muslim Association of Britain, Campaign for N
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YP end game

On March 24, after a fruitful and honest conversation regarding the future for Your Party Stoke and Newcastle, we voted to leave YP and explore other options. As a direct result of this we have chosen, as an organised group, to suspend our support for Your Party, pending a further meeting to decide a future direction.

Those who want to continue supporting Your Party locally will be able to get involved with official branches when the national party sets them up. However, there has been a collective feeling within our group for some time now that the national party’s political culture is too toxic. It is obstructing our organising efforts locally, we have lost people who have not wanted to carry on being involved, and we want a positive, outward-looking project to commit ourselves to.

YP members
Stoke

YP conference

Since the defeat of the Grassroots Left in the elections to the central executive committee of Your Party, the Corbyn clique has tightened its grip on the party. They control the apparatus, the membership list and the money, while the left has been frozen out. Any decision that the leadership doesn’t agree with - like YP Scotland standing in the Holyrood elections - is rejected, not by open argument, but by leaden bureaucratic inaction. The left has been gagged and reduced to irrelevance - not through an open purge (at least not yet), but by attrition.

The left is reeling from this defeat and beginning to disintegrate. The Socialist Workers Party has declared YP a failure and thrown in the towel. Many leftists are either quitting or getting bogged down in destructive fights with no clear political basis. Unclear splits among the left are the last thing we need. Demoralisation is already setting in, especially among the hundreds of young activists who worked tirelessly to make Your Party succeed - who built the proto-branches, organised meetings and did the essential work of party-building. We must not allow this generation of fighters to be dispersed. And to prevent that from happening we must answer the difficult questions, starting with how we got here, and what to do next.

The fundamental problem we face is that there is no political force that workers can look to in order to advance their interests. More and more are looking to Reform or falling into apathy. The situation for the left in YP is tough, but we urge comrades not to leave the party. Quitting will not solve anything, but in fact will play into the hands of Corbyn and his clique, who will be gleeful at the sight of the left tearing itself apart or giving up. Instead, we should take a step back, assess the situation we find ourselves in, and decide collectively where to go from here.

The Greens have now occupied the space that Your Party failed to fill. Of course, the Greens have no solutions to the fundamental problems of this country and all Corbyn can offer is a pale version of the Greens. And, while the opening for building a mass socialist party has closed for the moment, we must remember that one positive development came out of YP - it brought together leftists from different horizons and forced us to discuss the way forward and argue about our differences. This in itself was a step forward. As of now, the immediate priority for the left is to focus on what we may call the ‘three Rs’: regroup, rethink and rearm.

To do this, we need to come together and address the problem. We propose holding a conference of the left in Your Party, for the purpose of holding a real, open and democratic debate among the various tendencies and groups about how to go forward. The conference should bring together all of the different perspectives and shades of opinion that exist on the left about where to go from here, have a genuine debate on the proposals raised and decide on the next steps. We think it ought to be held as soon as possible to stop the haemorrhaging of members. Obviously, we cannot do this on our own. We encourage comrades to raise it in proto-branches and Grassroots Left CEC members to take up this proposal and set up an organising committee, whose sole purpose should be to organise a democratic and clarifying conference.

Obviously, a conference will not solve all our problems. But doing nothing is not an option. It will mean the left tearing itself apart or calling it quits, or both. We have a responsibility to try to prevent that from happening.

Eibhlin McColgan
Spartacist League

Divisive YP nats

Carla Roberts reported last week that Jenn Forbes, chair of the YP central executive committee, did not allow an amendment presented by Niall Christie to be discussed (‘Thou shalt not criticise Karie’, March 26). Jenn Forbes is one of the 14 supporters of The Many who now control the CEC. Niall is the only supporter of Republic YP on the executive and the only representative elected for Scotland. It is not an easy place to be.

Scotland was always going to be a test for YP politics. Republicans were reminded of this when the Scottish and Welsh parties were only given one representative on the CEC, with two for each English region. Trouble is brewing, because YP’s English unionists are determined to ‘take back control’ of the Scottish party. The Scottish left are not going to accept such bullying.

The left in Scotland is more advanced than England on constitutional issues, because they have been forced to take such matters seriously. In England, economism and social monarchism is the rule, not the exception. This is not to deny that the working class has many common issues to unite around. Even England’s constitutional ignoramuses should understand the imbalance of a CEC with 22 out of 24 seats from England.

The ‘counterrevolution’ in YP begins with taking down Scotland on behalf of saving the union. The treatment of Niall Christie is just the opening shot. The situation is even worse because the seven CEC representatives from Grassroots Left are all English Unionists. Carla herself voices the prejudices of the Corbyn-TM-CPGB-Grassroots Left defence of ‘Britain’.

All orange-socialists treat the English and Scottish working class like naughty children who cannot unite unless forced to do so by the British ruling class with their unionist constitution. Even Carla, not known as Corbyn’s attack dog, starts barking and biting. She makes clear that the CPGB “do not agree with the comrade’s (Niall’s) politics at all, of course: he is a self-declared Scottish nationalist”.

Niall is a Scottish republican and internationalist. Only English chauvinists would call this ‘nationalism’, whilst being members of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

So, we need to remind readers of the Republic YP platform that Niall endorses: Democratic secular republic. End of the union. An English parliament. For autonomous YP parties in England, Scotland and Wales.

The union legitimises the crown’s claim to sovereignty over Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The controversy here is the demand for an “end of the union”. This comes from a platform which began in England as a democratic demand, which only internationalist republicans recognise, while loyalist unionists and orange socialists condemn it as ‘nationalism’.

No democrat, never mind communist, should give any support whatsoever to the anti-democratic union. It is not nationalism for the English and Scottish working class to unite in hostility to a constitutional order imposed on them by Queen Anne. A similar arrangement was later imposed on Ireland in 1801 until the 1916 Easter Uprising and the Irish revolution.

Carla’s final ‘coup de grace’ against the Scottish working class is to declare, “It is a nonsense to split up our forces into smaller and smaller sections, considering that we are fighting against the British state.” There are two obvious points to make. The theory of class struggle as conventional war, in which one big army of capital lines up in trenches in front of another big army of the proletariat and slogs it out, is false. Guerilla war is different.

But her main rationale against a Scottish republic is because “we are fighting against the British state”. No, you are not. English, or Anglo-British, unionism, surrendered long ago and is flying the white flag. The main problem is not the democratic aspirations of Scottish nationalism, but English chauvinism. All of this is reflected through the constitution of Your Party.

Your Party is a loyalist-unionist party and therefore follows the classic British Labour model of three parties. One is for the British, and two more are subordinate parties for the Scottish and Welsh. There is no English Labour Party because English members are a majority and are overall in charge and therefore brand themselves as British Labour.

The problem is not Niall’s ‘nationalism’, but English chauvinism, which calls itself British (for example, the Communist Party of Great Britain) and claims this is ‘internationalism’. The semi-republican Grassroots Left put up a fight and won seven seats on the CEC. They cannot defeat orange socialism because they are tied to it.

Republic YP may only have one supporter on the CEC but has supporters in England and Scotland. As internationalists we are not going to give up until English chauvinism has been defeated.

Steve Freeman
Republic Your Party

Protest routine

Upon reading the CPGB AGM report I was both surprised and unsurprised to see comments made about Ireland and, more specifically, People Before Profit, by comrade Anne McShane (‘Through the Slough of Despond’, March 26).

I find her comments on the importance of the “politics of protest” quite fascinating, given our shared involvement in the Palestine movement in Cork city (mine being somewhat limited as of late, due to the vagaries of my employment). While the success of the Cork Palestine Solidarity Campaign (at least in comparison to its sister branches elsewhere in the state) cannot be denied, one does have to ask what form this success has taken, and whether it does actually raise the question of the “politics of protest”, as comrade McShane seems to have suggested.

As far as I can see, the success of the CPSC has two forms. Firstly, its ability to hold a weekly rally of between 100 and 300 people every weekend for over two years (which, as we will note later, is a double-edged sword); and, secondly, its admirable, though diminishing, ability to politicise layers of previously unpoliticised people. Both of these successes, though, have their caveats.

The weekly rallies, while impressive, have, as I predicted some time ago, faded into the background noise of the city at large. Their regularity and uniformity has turned the protest from a disruptive display of anger at the unjust and evil actions of genocide being unleashed on the people of Gaza into just another thing people need to factor into their Saturdays - like the lateness of the 220 bus, or the need to cross the street when you approach Daunt Square, so you can avoid the proselytisers. Its edges softened, its politics dulled, the protest has simply become a weekly reminder of what we have thus far been utterly powerless to prevent.

Nonetheless, CPSC has been able to recruit and train a new generation of Palestine solidarity activists, a hefty chunk of whom had not been involved in any sort of political work previously. This is a success, and has to be applauded. However, again this question of the “politics of protest” comes to the fore, given the actual reality of politics in CPSC. As comrade McShane will herself be intimately aware, the committee of CPSC is dominated by a very reformist and sectarian section of the movement, who have ensured that the politics of the organisation more generally have remained quite moderate. It’s here that it is important we are able to take the blinders off and assess CPSC for what it really is: an example of both the successes, but also the very real limitations, of broad, big-tent solidarity movements.

I would note, of course, that PBP recognises this, and our deep involvement, guided by our “ostensible Marxism”, reflects this. We organise coherently as a bloc to fight for the politicisation of debates within CPSC, for the adoption of more radical positions, and for the formation of a more leftwing leadership - and, as a positive side effect of this, are able to recruit people who agree with our approach. I therefore question what exactly it is that comrade McShane takes issue with, and why she believes we do not implement Marxism in our day-to-day work - a claim that seems to me to be completely unfounded.

A final note: I, of course, take absolute umbrage to the comparison made between the Socialist Workers Party of Britain and People Before Profit. While it is true that PBP began its life as the electoral front of the SWP’s sister organisation here in Ireland, it has grown well beyond that, with the Socialist Workers Network now making up simply a (large) segment of a diverse and pluralist party. Our own recent AGM reflects this, both in the motions passed and the leadership elected, where all non-SWN ‘opposition’ candidates were elected - two of whom even topped the polls.

I note, that comrade McShane’s remark may be the result of some editorialising, nonetheless I would one day like to see such inane comparisons, useful as they may be, rubbished in the name of honesty.

Niall McGann
Cork

United fronts

I must commend Jack Conrad on his excellent ‘Fifteen theses on fascism’ in last week’s Weekly Worker (March 26). They are clear, concise and deserve to be widely read. My only comment would be on number 8, where he discusses “the leftist futility of squads or the quagmire of popular frontism”.

The squads haven’t existed in practical terms in Britain since the demise of Antifascist Action a quarter of a century ago. With the modern police mass surveillance culture, the far-right YouTube ‘auditors’ who seek hyperbolic content of clicks and money and the ubiquity of high-definition cameras everywhere (including on personal mobile phones), so-called ‘squadist’ street tactics would be effectively impossible today, even if the left wanted to engage in them.

What is widespread, however, is popular frontism and, with the Green Party becoming the dominant force on the left, I predict it will get even worse. The politically sharp united front traditions need to be preserved and enacted urgently.

Paul O’Keeffe
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Sectarian rubbish

In his article, ‘Misusing the F word’ (March 26), Jack Conrad, adopts the classic sectarian strategy for opposing fascism. He is against any form of unity with the political centre - instead, we are told to provide positive answers to the problems we face: in other words, the socialist programme for revolution. What sectarian, ultra-left gibberish.

We can’t demand that people accept socialism before they are ready to oppose fascism. Also we must not forget that it was an alliance of communists, Labour Party members, anarchists, the Jewish community, liberals and members of various Christian religious denominations who stopped Mosley’s fascists at Cable Street on October 4 1936.

Where has Conrad been all these years? The struggle against the far right in Britain today is not a struggle for power, but rather a struggle for influence. Those on the left who base themselves on ultra-left sectarianism all have one thing in common: they confuse the defensive struggles of the left with the struggle for power. This is the main reason why Trotskyist groups have remained irrelevant sects since the foundation of Trotsky’s Fourth International.

The struggle against British fascism at present - in the defensive stage of the class struggle - means we should create the broadest anti-fascist alliance, just like at Cable Street, without confusing this with the struggle for power. In my view, as far as the defensive stage of the class struggle is concerned, the SWP’s approach is correct, whereas most of the British left remain in a sectarian swamp, when it comes to opposing British fascism.

Tony Clark
For Democratic Socialism

Polanski Alt

The Tapanuli orangutan is listed as ‘critically endangered’, with only around 800 remaining in the wild. Despite the Green Party lauding a monumental surge in membership since the sordid ‘Svengali’, Zack Polanski, became leader, the number of active members appears to be so small that it would probably qualify for a similar form of environmental protection as the desperate Orangutans!

Out of a reported 215,000 members, only around 0.5% showed up at its conference. For a party that prides itself on ‘participatory democracy’, the attendance looked more like ‘participatory minimalism’. Decisions are made by a tiny, self-selecting clique: a Zoomocracy - less a democratic movement, more a detached mailing list.

The conference had intended to vote on the party’s position on Zionism. Even Polanski was himself strategically absent, granting him the political luxury of being both everywhere and nowhere at once. By his absence, the one-man band and face of the ‘Green surge’ gave himself plausible deniability for any future questioning on the party’s stance on issues such as Zionism, not to mention Nato and acceptance of capitalism, for example. Not since he was on stage at a Lib Dem conference, proudly (and cringingly) singing and dancing about their austerity government has he been seen to be so happy as he was upon hearing the party bureaucracy had timed out the vote on Zionism.

Like Jeremy Corbyn before him, Polanski now finds himself cast as the reassuringly familiar face of ‘leftwing populism’ (the aesthetic of insurgency with none of the substance - the rhetoric of moral urgency without material consequence). And, just like Corbyn’s Your Party project, Polanski has the party apparatus to safeguard against the democratic demands of those who see the Greens as a genuine alternative.

As this paper has maintained, the Greens remain an entirely petty-bourgeois party. Despite the increase in dues-paying members, they are a long way from being a vehicle for socialism - far less for communism!

There is a small hope for any readers despairing at the UK Greens appearing to follow the lead of their European counterparts towards acquiescence with the capitalist status quo. For just a small monthly donation, you can sponsor the lesser-spotted Green Party activist in their natural habitat: waiting quietly in a breakout room, existing on little more than snazzy emails, slick TikTok videos and obscure procedural motions. Your support could provide essential resources: a stable wi-fi connection, encouraging more attendees to achieve a quorum, and perhaps even the materialisation of a vote that actually happens.

Act now - before the comrades disappear entirely into the undergrowth of the mailing list and political obscurity.

Carl Collins
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Labour confusion

Despite it being bandied about in the century since his death, Lenin never used the phrase, ‘bourgeois workers’ party’, about the British Labour Party (or any other party). Lenin’s speech to the Second Congress of the Third International in August 1920 deals with the Labour Party question; it is from this speech that the meaning of his words has subsequently been turned into its opposite. In his speech he said: “The Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries - and the worst kind of reactionaries at that - who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie.”

Confusion over the ‘bourgeois workers’ party’ mislabelling is not a translation problem, but is certainly a political problem. The label obfuscates and misleads by pretending that the Labour Party is some kind of a workers’ party, when the Marxist definition for a workers’ party is that of a communist party, whose existence is predicated on fighting for socialism and communism. Working class history and politics show us that the Labour Party was not set up for this purpose, has never espoused or expressed one iota of support for this purpose, and fights venomously against this purpose.

The Labour Party’s ideological basis is bourgeois anti-communism - aided and abetted by trade union leaders, whose role is to ensure labour discipline in the workplace for the British state. So, clearly, it is not a workers’ party at all, but is, as Lenin said in 1920, “an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns”. (The SPD government led by Noske and Scheidemann was responsible for the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in January 1919.)

The descriptor, ‘bourgeois workers’ party’, is something of a shibboleth within today’s CPGB grouping. It bolsters the idea that work within the Labour Party has been and will be necessary, because Lenin said it was. However, Lenin never suggested that Marxists should work as individuals within the Labour Party. Certainly, the British Socialist Party, -the precursor of the 1920-91 CPGB - had been a Labour affiliate. And Lenin was clear that, if the nascent CPGB were affiliated, and if it then made fierce and open criticism of the Labour Party leadership, it would be of benefit in developing revolutionary consciousness. Relating to this, in the very last words of his 1920 speech, Lenin states his best-case scenario: “If the British Communist Party starts by acting in a revolutionary manner in the Labour Party, and if the Hendersons [LP rightist leaders] are obliged to expel this party, that will be a great victory for the communist and revolutionary working class movement in Britain.” One hundred and six years later, it is impossible any time soon that there might be affiliation to the Labour Party of a revolutionary party or of revolutionary groups including the CPGB: snowballs and hell come to mind.

Subsequent authors - most claiming to be Marxist - have transformed his clear words of condemnation of the Labour Party into this oxymoronic ‘bourgeois workers’ party’ to double down on the need to work within it. This false phrase continues to be trotted out to this day for this very purpose. For example, the CPGB slogan for the most recent UK elections, contains the default position to vote Labour: ‘Vote left where you can, vote Labour if you must’. An over-simple slogan without clear condemnation of the Labour Party or hinting at its real nature as a “thoroughly bourgeois party”, to reiterate Lenin’s words.

There are all kinds of valid alternatives for communist groups and parties in elections, depending on political circumstances: standing candidates on a Marxist platform, supporting candidates of socialist parties, supporting candidates of one or other opposing bourgeois parties to gain working class rights, supporting an organised boycott, etc. But merely issuing a slogan, to vote Labour as a fallback position - without further explanation - when a voter has no socialist candidate to vote for, is incorrect politics, as it bears an association with socialism that the Labour Party does not deserve. Following left parties calling for votes for a reactionary candidate in a French presidential election in order to keep out the ‘fascist’, faux shower booths were set up to wash the political taint off leftist voters outside polling stations. Should we aim to copy this?

For those of us who have spent a decade or more working within the left of the Labour Party - to pretty fruitless effect, it has to said to our discredit - there have been plenty of comradely discussions with other labour movement activists. But with the normal US lickspittles fully retaking Labour, breaking with that party has meant for a great many the false dawn of Your Party’s bureaucratic nightmare (aka Corbyn’s wet dream), currently disappearing up its own orifice. Enough to put off hundreds from so-called left politics for life; thousands more have flocked to the Green Party and the faux leftism of the petty bourgeoisie. It’s not a pretty sight.

Agitation and propaganda from outside to scour out of the Labour Party those individuals sufficiently convinced of Marxism to join the fight for socialism and communism is one thing. But unless a Marxist organisation can affiliate without constraints or is somehow built within the Labour Party, there is nothing positive to be gained by calling for a vote for the Labour Party at elections. For the Labour Party is certainly situated well to the right of British politics, with the present Labour government currently in support of the USA/Israeli offensive against Iran and up to its neck backing the Zionist state carrying out genocide in Gaza and stealing land on the occupied West Bank and in Lebanon.

The Labour Party leadership is meanwhile happy to triangulate and continue to move right if self-proclaimed revolutionary groups are suggesting voting Labour, despite every anti-working class, anti-democratic, and inhuman decision and action its government makes and takes. Scurrying along behind the Labour Party is the complete antithesis to what is needed: building a united communist party via its ‘ur-elements’ in Britain’s revolutionary left.

The political movement of the working class is a communist party. Accept no substitutes.

Jim Moody
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Kirov conspiracy

Soviet communist leader Sergei Mironovich Kirov was assassinated in Leningrad on December 1 1934 by a disgruntled, misfit Zinovievite (a member of, or associated with, the routed and dispersed ‘left’ opposition faction), named Leonid Nikolaev. Kirov had been a member of the politburo since 1930, was first secretary of the Leningrad Regional Communist Party and, following the 17th Soviet Communist Party Congress in February that year, had been elected one of four secretaries to the central committee.

Sebag Montefiore has stated that during the civil war, Kirov was “one of the swashbuckling commissars in the North Caucasus … In Astrakhan he enforced Bolshevik power in March 1919 with liberal bloodletting: more than 4,000 were killed. When a bourgeois was caught hiding his own furniture, Kirov ordered him shot.”

Kirov was genuinely popular within the Soviet Communist Party - and among the wider Soviet public as well. Zhores Medvedev described him as part of the second generation of the Soviet Communist Party leadership, who “had emerged during the revolution, the civil war, the devastation and difficult years of the New Economic Policy” and were “far more united” than the earlier personality-fractious leadership. “These (second generation) men generally had complete confidence in each other and a special friendship, akin to that of soldiers welded together by common interests. They made a far better impression with ordinary party members and the Soviet public than, say, the arrogant hauteur of a Trotsky or the learned dogmatism and the intellectual irresolution of such as Kamenev and Zinoviev.”

Although nothing like the same degree as with the JFK assassination, Kirov’s murder spawned a number of conspiracy theories, and there did appear to be a link between the events immediately following the assassination and the later Yezhovshchina of 1937-38 (aka the Great Purge).

The principal conspiracy theories around Kirov were spawned and mixed together by an unholy concoction of Mensheviks, Trotskyists, CIA-funded cold war propaganda channels and US academia, and need to be seen in that very harsh light. One of the original routes of their propagation was Letter from an old Bolshevik by Boris Nikolaevsky, an exiled Menshevik. He claimed he had interviewed Nikolai Bukharin in Paris, who allegedly stated that Kirov headed a moderate faction within the Politburo, opposing an apparent ‘radical’ leadership faction headed by Stalin, and which either was nullifying Stalin’s wishes or was threatening to remove him from office. A nice little concocted fairy tale, but that was all it was. One clue is that Nikolaevsky’s alleged interlocutor talks about one of the Moscow Trials which, at the time Bukharin was in Paris, hadn’t even taken place!

More decisively, Bukharin’s young widow, Anna Larina, in her memoirs, written and published in the Soviet Union during perestroika and glasnost in the late 1980s, which meant she was able to speak freely and openly, bitterly disputed the claim that Bukharin was any kind of source for Nikolaevsky, and held Nikolaevsky responsible for placing Bukharin’s life in danger through his false claims.

Andrew Northall
Kettering