Letters

Yorp branch

Since the tragicomic reports of happenings on the Your Party central executive committee (CEC) slowed to a trickle and eventually stopped, with that ill-fated body’s effective disintegration some months ago, I had all but forgotten about ‘Yorp’. Imagine my shock when I received an email imploring me to register for the official first meeting of the Plymouth branch, to be held on Zoom. Seized by morbid curiosity, I decided I had to attend and bear witness.

The meeting was chaired by a YP organiser, who had been involved in running the inaugural party conference of last year - ‘The Many’ slate CEC campaign - and now also served as chair of the Sefton branch. Apart from the out-of-towner chair and myself, the meeting was attended by two other members - one of them an erstwhile CEC candidate on ‘The Many’ slate. We were informed that the Plymouth branch, which encompasses both parliamentary constituencies making up Plymouth, has a total of 186 Yorp members (all of whom were emailed about this first official branch meeting) - of those a mere four registered to attend, and in the end only three attended! A very pale shadow of the now long discontinued proto-branch, which at least managed to get around 15 people to attend in-person meetings regularly, between the founding conference and the CEC election.

The meeting agenda was to discuss the branch priorities and inform us of the nomination process for the five branch officer roles (chair, secretary, treasurer, organiser and workplace liaison) listed in the constitution as required to establish a branch, alongside the attendance of 20% of local members at an inaugural meeting. When I pointed out that we were a few short of the quorum to establish the branch, I was informed the quorum had been ‘interpreted’ as merely requiring 20% of local members to vote in the election for the officer roles on the online ballot; moreover that only the chair, secretary and treasurer needed to be elected for a branch to be established rather than a minimum of the five officer roles set out in the constitution.

We were also told that, while low attendance has been common across branches rolled out so far, the Sefton branch of some 200 members had had an attendance of nine at their meetings, but managed to get at least 40 people to vote online for the officer roles. We’ll have to wait and see how many more people put themselves forward for officer roles and vote for them than attended the inaugural meeting.

It was agreed that the sole priority for the branch was engaging the remaining local members, with the question of member data access being raised and shot down with the familiar refrain that it would have to wait till officers were elected. At this point the other attendee pointed out that it’s a bit of a catch-22 for us to be unable to find and engage with local members until electing officers, but needing to find and engage them in order to have people to elect and vote. It was conceded by the chair that we might be able to contact the official YP email account with a request to contact other local members on our behalf in the meantime - a request repeatedly raised in the proto-branch many months ago, when there actually were many engaged members, and never responded to.

Finally the question of party programme, policies, conference and delegate election was raised, with the chair reassuring us that several committees have been formed on various policy areas. Who got to be on these committees and how, as well as what they actually did, if anything, was left unanswered. Similarly I had to ask three times about the conference before getting any sort of straight answer - something only possible due to being one of only three members in the Zoom meeting.

We were initially told that the conference doesn’t need to be annual, and the membership merely needs to be consulted annually, and that not only won’t there be a party conference this year, but also next year, with a ‘policy conference’ possibly taking place sometime next year instead. I expect this means Karie Murphy intends to put out an online poll sometime soon for what members remain to rubber-stamp her decision to not hold a conference this year (or any other year for that matter).

When I cited the constitution and standing orders explicitly mandating an annual party conference with delegates, and making no mention of ‘policy conferences’, I was instead told that a party conference was actually impossible to hold, as delegates can’t be elected until all branches are set up - which, with their slow, meticulously controlled rollout, should happen sometime in the 2030s.

In the meantime, it seems the substantial treasure trove of member dues, jealously guarded by Karie Murphy, will not be spent on anything as frivolous as party conferences, while she bends or abrogates the rules she for all intents and purposes wrote herself.

The three member inaugural meeting of Yorp concluded with a comment about how, despite the difficulties, it was ‘nice to attend a meeting without 15 SWP members in it’. To which I could only reply that they have better things to do!

Rafał B
Plymouth

Congress tactics

After November 3, many here in the US surely will benefit from an education on the “structural provisions” of the 1787 constitution, as outlined in Ian F’s ‘Revolutionary road to democracy’ (November 5) and summarised at the end as a series of “veto points”: Senate, president, and courts. Without that, there can be no measure of the results.

Yet, regarding the conclusion that “no socialist legislative program is likely to be successful”, one must reply: will socialism be legislated at all? And, if not, how does such an understanding determine attitudes on the House?

For example, on the fundamental question of the state budget, recalling the historical principle of the socialist movement (“not a man and not a penny for this system”) and borrowing a little from Brecht: whose veto is the veto?

On this universal problem of states, we learn from Lenin that even the tsarist duma, with its “insignificant” rights “according to the letter of the law”, in certain conditions possessed a “voice” with “tremendous significance”: “Nobody else could do so much to deprive Stolypin and co of European financial support as the duma can” (‘The duma and the approval of the budget’, written after the famous 1906 French loan). A budget declaration then might also be appended with “an exposition of the socialist view of the budget of a bourgeois class state”.

With the outgoing 119th Congress, we witnessed one government-wide and two partial government shutdowns, connected legislative fights over healthcare and immigration, and continued growth of the annual deficit to nearly $2 trillion in fiscal year 2026 ($218 billion more than in 2025) and the soaring public debt. Yet those shutdowns, like the 2021 attempt to hold the infrastructure bill hostage to Build Back Better, were bargaining over terms within the budget.

Such tactics are hardly equal to the moment.

Sam Moews
USA

Priority reading

As a priority over other books, I’m reading and enjoying Jack Conrad’s USSR: a Marxist post-mortem.

I think Jack has really found his voice in this book, which is very easy to read, and, apart from a few minor typos, I think most people would breeze through it over the more stuffy other books on the subject.

One thing that caught my eye though appears in the chapter, ‘Wages so-called’, under the sub-heading, ‘Quantity and quality’, on page 220. Jack declares that perhaps “Marxists are theoretically underequipped” on the political economy of wage-labour. In the Weekly Worker years ago I came across the criticism that Marx’s Capital wasn’t the finished article, and the footnote at the bottom of the page of the book explains what was really intended.

My argument isn’t a complaint: it’s rather a celebration that Marx’s Capital was produced at all and that its subject is such a large, ambitious topic. I think that only people like Marx and Engels were likely to pull this one off, regardless of this or that shortcoming.

Frank Kavanagh
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Former RCP

I think Paul Demarty writes far too much for his own good, which means the quality inevitably suffers. I suspect that his latest article on the ex-Marxists behind the Reform paper (‘A long old road’ Weekly Worker November 5) was similar to those old ones I used to watch him bang out during lunch breaks a decade ago.

Leaving that family history aside, Paul contends: “A group around Frank Furedi decamped to form the Revolutionary Communist Tendency, whose theorisation of the Soviet Union and satellites was essentially the extremely critical analysis of Hillel Ticktin with the serial numbers filed off …” I think that’s unfair.

I wasted a few years of my errant student life as a supporter of what had become Furedi’s Revolutionary Communist Party in the late 1980s and Ticktin’s influence wasn’t hidden. I was given a photocopy of Ticktin’s ‘Towards a political economy of the USSR’ article to study under the blankets after cocoa and lights-out, and the influence was generally acknowledged. Similarly, in Furedi’s The Soviet Union demystified (1986) the author said: “Of present-day Marxist writers, Ticktin has been the most useful and stimulating.”

I did ask Ticktin about this popularisation (although that’s slightly unfair, as I still rate The Soviet Union demystified) of his work later on and he did concede that Furedi had partly beaten him to the punch on a generalisation of some of his concepts. I was told by RCP adults that The Soviet Union demystified had been one of its best-selling books. That’s difficult to quantify and the RCP’s bureaucratic optimism was always tedious, but Furedi certainly introduced Ticktin to a wider audience.

To be clear, I have zero interest in Spiked and the likes of Furedi, Mick Hume, etc, or of defending the RCP as some ‘good old cause’ of my youth. I am, however, suspicious of endless RCP bashing, as I have written on my blog, because I think it is usually a cover-up for alternative sect idiocies in other groups. I rather suspect that Paul Demarty’s article fits into that groove and the ex-RCP is now easy meat. It’s the apostates who remain Marxists who are more difficult to deal with.

I am interested, however, in Nigel Farage’s almost hypnotic effect on middle-aged women in Hampshire. A vigorous study of such erotic phenomena takes up much of my waking hours, as the dark night of winter descends. I will be writing to Furedi and Hume about this topic, you can be sure.

Lawrence Parker
London

Scrap juries

For England and Wales, it is estimated that 1.4 million women (or one in 14) have experienced rape or attempted rape since the age of 16. Most cases are never formally reported to the police, although a large number are disclosed to close friends, the family, a doctor, therapist, etc.

Officially reported rapes are around 70,000 per annum. Shockingly, only 2%-3% of these result in charges being laid. There are around 1,000 to 1,300 actual convictions a year, so around 1.7% officially reported rapes result in actual conviction. The sheer length of time it takes from the offence being reported to the trial must be a massive (deliberate?) deterrent factor for victims taking it further, and traumatising in itself.

To say that the criminal justice system is failing women at every stage would be an understatement of profound proportions. It has been said that rape and other forms of sexual assault are effectively decriminalised in this country.

The English court system – based on an adversarial procedure, involving highly paid, performative thespian barristers, competing with each other for rhetoric and fake drama to swing juries and to ‘destroy’ complainants - seems the worst possible system to try cases of sexual assault, putting off tens of thousands of real victims from seeking justice and redress.

Many rape and sexual offence cases are inherently one person’s word against another, incapable of meeting the absurd criminal bar of “beyond all reasonable doubt”. Random juries throw a massive element of chance and individual prejudice into the mix. I have never understood how or why 12 randomly selected individuals with all sorts of backgrounds and possibly with their own criminal records are in any way an adequate method for assessing justice.

In some more obvious ‘political’ cases, juries have proved to be of some use, in acquitting in the name of the real public interest and against the direction of the judge: eg, the Clive Ponting case in 1985. Equally, as in a recent example, they are fully capable of committing howlers and ignoring the facts and evidence obvious to most people.

I think we need very radical reform of the court system, including a massive speeding up of cases. We can and should effect this, even this side of any socialist revolution. We could start with radical changes to the way sexual offences are investigated and tried, before applying more widely. If there is to be truly democratic law, it should not be so complex or intricate that only extremely expensive lawyers from certain strata in society are able (or formally qualified) to understand and practise it. If we call for elected representatives of the people to be genuinely ‘of the people’ and only paid an average worker’s wage, then surely this should apply to law practitioners as well as lawmakers.

We should replace the very costly and performative adversarial system with an inquisitorial one, based on objective investigation and trying to establish the true facts. Starting with sexual offence cases, we should replace random juries with appropriately selected panels - the chair should probably be legally qualified and experienced, with, say, two lay assessors. The majority of each panel should ideally be of the same gender as the alleged victim, so they can properly empathise and appreciate what they may have been through. Such panels would be empowered to determine guilt or innocence and to impose appropriate sentences.

Andrew Northall
Kettering

French protests

Comrade Nicolas Girard is sadly mistaken in his letter in the last issue of Weekly Worker (November 5). His false premisses begin with imagining that a front-page picture of students with the superimposed text, ‘Readying for the next stage’, necessarily suggests endorsement of Jean Laurel’s article by the paper’s editors. If he is indeed a regular reader, he must have realised that Weekly Worker articles are not required to adhere to a CPGB ‘line’ in order to be published.

More important, though, is the apparent beam in his own eye over what to do when these overwhelmingly orderly demonstrations are battered and gassed by the thugs in uniform. We know that the most recent Paris demonstration was pushed to the outskirts by ‘les keufs’; and in Lyon, as Nicolas mentions, cops freely exercised their bourgeois right - passer à tabac (to beat up) - demonstrators.

But eliding too far, the comrade then wonders if “Laurel and the Weekly Worker crew” would have railed against street-fighting students in 1968; he then scoffs at guarding petty bourgeois shops and cafés from getting trashed/looted. He could not be more wrong.

Comrade Girard misses two crucial points in short order. First, the defence of our working class and democratic demonstrations is paramount. Weekly Worker articles and those in its predecessor paper, The Leninist, made the point over and over again: strong defence squads and militant marshalling must be a priority for demonstrations, marches, strike pickets and all other public manifestations; certainly, many a British miner on strike in the 1980s agreed. (See R Hardy, ‘Workers’ militias’ The Leninist No8, May 1984: https://bit.ly/3Ujh49B.)

This question comes back to bite our class in the arse time and again. Tragically, others in the supposed revolutionary left utterly fail even to understand the principle of and the need for organised self-defence. Unresisted batterings dispirit our struggle.

Second, and connected with the first point: with a revolutionary perspective, workers’ defence squads, of course, must exercise organisational discipline and prevent attacks on small shopkeepers’ premises on the route of our demonstrations. These petty bourgeois are not the enemy; au contraire, they are potential allies - or at the very least can be kept from flocking into the ranks of reactionary parties - by protecting their businesses in such circumstances. The message becomes: ‘We, not the capitalist state’s forces, are your defenders’.

In fact, during the most recent demonstrations - and something that this comrade raises, but dismisses - police numbers were reduced substantially, while demonstrator numbers were going up: it suggests strongly that small businesses were deliberately made sacrificial lambs, to be served up in the bourgeois media, along with crocodile tears at the rioters’ actions.

Come April, the way things are going, it could be ‘Madame la Présidente’.

Jim Moody
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