03.10.1996

Open letter to Patrick Sikorski from SLP member no 1,203

More disturbing details of witch hunting in the SLP have reached the Weekly Worker with this open letter by John Bridge, whose exclusion was reported in Weekly Worker (September 12)

Dear comrade

Your letter dated August 19 1996 reads in its entirety:

“Dear Mr Bridge, As a member or supporter of the Communist Party of Great Britain you are ineligible for membership of the Socialist Labour Party. Please find enclosed your postal order. Please return Socialist Labour membership card no 1,203 which you obtained on the basis of inaccurate information.

Yours sincerely,

Pat Sikorski”.

Since joining the SLP this is the first communication you have sent me. Clearly an arbitrary and unwarrantable decision has been made. Not even a bourgeois court would uphold your action barring me from the SLP. To have no written warning, to dispense with a formal hearing, to have no opportunity to appeal violates every notion of natural justice.

Democracy in our workers’ movement cannot be put off.  If we do not have democracy today, it will never be given tomorrow.

For the SLP leadership to embark upon an anti-communist witch hunt at this crucial historic juncture only plays into the hands of our class enemies. Surely everything should be done to unite all our forces against Blair and his anti-working class government in waiting. In the first edition of Socialist News you rightly call upon “all socialists, communists, pensioners, human rights and environmental activists” to “build a truly socialist party of labour”. I pledge myself to do just that. The SLP should be open to affiliation from trade unions, socialist and communist parties, groups and societies, and all progressive organisations. There should be no bans and proscriptions - that was Keir Hardie’s original Labour Party.

My political background and beliefs are no secret. I have always been perfectly candid about them. You were present at the May 22 1996 North London SLP meeting when and where John Bridge told everyone present that he used to be a member of the CPGB. No one raised any objections to my SLP membership because of this fact. Moreover neither then nor afterwards, could there have been any doubts about my political loyalty to the SLP because, on August 21 1996 John Bridge was elected unopposed to be secretary of Camden branch SLP.

I assume therefore that my former membership of the CPGB cannot be the “inaccurate information” to which you refer.

As to whether or not you are now alleging that John Bridge is a “supporter” of the CPGB, this is a word which is too vague to be meaningful. It is also capable of oppressive use against members when those in office fear that they are about to be out-voted. Then there is the matter of your selectivity. I accuse you of hypocrisy. Patrick Sikorski has been shown in a wide variety of documents - independently of each other - to be a leader of the shadowy Fourth International Supporters Caucus.

Self-evidently the views of all members, considered individually, must sometimes coincide with the politics of some other organisation. For example I agreed with the CPGB’s Weekly Worker whenit urged all partisans of the working class to join the SLP.  I still do. As a democrat I also agree with comrade Arthur Scargill when in November 1995 he attacked Labour Party “modernisers” like Ramsay MacDonald who “were responsible for expelling the Communist Party from affiliation and introducing the bans and proscriptions”.

The SLP application form which I sent to you in February 1996 asked me to “accept” the constitution (note - not ‘agree’). I signed in good faith. But what constitution? I have comrade Scargill’s draft Constitution/rule book dated December 10 1995. In conversation others have told me that there is another version dated January 30 1996 - which I have not been given or seen. However, what is important is not this or that difference between the two, but that both pre-date the founding conference/congress of May 4 - in which I actively participated. As you well know there was no debate or vote for a constitution. Hence neither of the two documents can have any official standing. They must be treated as contributions to the forthcoming constitutional congress.

If that is not the case the whole of the SLP stands in violation of its own purported constitution. After all, clause 6, section 1 states that “government of the party shall be by party congress”. Moreover it is glaringly apparent that the SLP, as minutely detailed in the draft, and the ad hoc SLP as it exists in the real world, are in contradiction. Incidentally that includes the National Executive Committee. Where are the affiliated trade unions, women’s, black/Asian and youth sections? Their nominees are supposed to make up over a half of our NEC. Despite their absence we elected a 20-strong NEC on May 4 - yet the so-called ‘constitution’ specifically states that only “six members” can be “nominated and elected by regional parties” (clause 7, section 2c).

 Since I have been accepted as a member of the SLP - you even quote my card number - and since my subscriptions have previously been accepted, your letter can only be read as a purported expulsion from Socialist Labour.

Please let me know the precise grounds on which you are acting. Who has made the purported decision? When was it made? From what cause or reason was the purported decision made? What right do I have to be heard before any decision is finally made?

Yours fraternally

John Bridge
September 28 1996