WeeklyWorker

07.11.1996

Tony Goss and Fisc

SL Kenning looks at latest developments in the Socialist Labour Party

Like flies unto shit, witch hunters attract all manner of embittered failures, would-be sadists and sectarian misfits. The Fiscites readily welcomed the Stalin Society into the SLP. Now they have Tony Goss to front the witch hunt across the whole of London for them.

Brian Heron says his creature is being maligned and defamed by the Weekly Worker. Descriptions of the man as a “thug” and a “bully” are, says comrade Heron, “pure invention” - apparently along with the existence of the Fourth International Supporters Caucus.

So what is the truth about comrade Goss?

SL Kenning has detailed over several issues of this paper how a month before being voted out as South London chair Goss had to be physically prevented from assaulting a comrade. This and the surrounding events were fully documented in the Weekly Worker, which also carried the point-by-point official report sent to the NEC by comrades Ian Driver, Allan Gibson and Paul Ward (see Weekly Worker September 26). So there is no reason to go over the episode once again. All that needs to be noted is that Goss was forced into a humiliating and unreserved apology to the branch for his utterly reprehensible behaviour.

If Goss had not been shielded by Brian Heron, Patrick Sikorski and Fisc, if he slipped into deserved obscurity and took no further part in the witch hunt, then I for one would be content to let the matter rest.

But neither Goss nor the Fiscites have mended their ways. They press on with the McCarthyite campaign to cohere the SLP as a Labour Party mark II. The removal of Goss as South London chair is blamed on a sinister communist-inspired plot. His apology is therefore dismissed as nothing more than a tactical setback. Indeed he has been rewarded for his anti-communism with promotion to “acting London agent”. Some say he is being groomed by Fisc for next year’s NEC elections.

Goss is now doing the rounds of all the London branches in his new capacity. He has also been given the go-ahead to set up a “constitutionally recognised” Peckham branch. Hence he is ideally placed to settle scores with his personal bête noire, SLP councillor Ian Driver.

There is a considerable body in the SLP that wants Driver - who is well known as a militant in the Peckham area - to run against Harriet Harman in the general election. As London agent, and with the eight-strong Peckham SLP in his pocket, Goss can block Driver from above and below.

Of course, Goss has a long track record of violence and corruption in the labour movement. His debt to Fisc and enthusiasm for the witch hunt means we are duty bound to provide further information for comrades.

I have done some research into our comrade Goss. In the 1980s the local press was full of his seedy doings. A Southwark councillor since 1982 and Harriet Harman’s election agent in 1983, Goss burrowed his way into the core of the Labour party-state establishment. By 1986 he was chair of the council’s social services committee - a key post.

Using his connections, he jumped the borough’s 12,000 housing queue. An illegal deal with Labour ILEA member John Mann secured for Goss - and wife and fellow councillor, Ann - a council flat in Cossall Walk, Nunhead. The couple not only queue-jumped, but lived rent-free in their new home for six months. After they were discovered and told to vacate it, he “launched a foul-mouthed attack on the woman who took the decision - Labour council boss Anne Matthews” (South London Press November 14 1986).

A fierce argument about the case led in March 1987 to Goss being charged with causing bodily harm to Chris Hughes, chair of Southwark Labour Party’s local government committee. Giving evidence in court, former Southwark Labour Party treasurer described how Goss hit Hughes “while he was on the floor” and how “several people had to restrain him” (South London Press October 23 1987).

There was by that time a whole catalogue of accusations concerning Goss. The Labour Party NEC inquiry, which eventually expelled him from membership, was given evidence of at least 15 physical attacks and violent outbursts, along with a death threat.

Comrade Heron, by your thug and bully we shall know you.

Workers Power

Some 25 people attended the debate between Workers Power, Labour Briefing and the CPGB on October 30. Though staged by Workers Power under the banner of ‘Labour and the union link’, it was the SLP which proved to be the real issue.

Workers Power found itself trapped in the soggy middle ground. It was attacked by the CPGB as an organisation which calls for workers to vote Labour and save the union link. Yet as the CPGB, Workers Liberty, and a number of revolutionary SLPers pointed out, it does not have the courage to put its opportunist words into practice - where it matters. Workers Power does no organised work in the Labour Party.

On the other hand the latest Workers Power line is that the SLP is “significant” and “well placed to grow dramatically”. But, the CPGB and others said, it abstains from any actual intervention.

So much for Workers Power’s absurd pretension to be a fighting propaganda group. When it comes to the big political questions of the day - around which Workers Power might conceivably make some difference - it responds with passive abstraction. Obviously its leaders are far too busy for the class struggle in their own country. They prefer the easy life of lecturing the masses in Indonesia, Bolivia, Serbia and Russia from afar.

Workers Power’s main speaker attempted to rubbish the Weekly Worker. Amazingly, the comrade claimed the paper was fingering individual members of the International Bolshevik Tendency. This is completely untrue. The Weekly Worker has named no one.

All the Weekly Worker had done is to expose the hypocrisy of the IBT as a body. The IBT demands that everyone - the CPGB was in particular singled out - liquidate their organisations in order to ‘constitutionally’ join the SLP as atomised individuals. Despite that the IBT, like Fisc, secretly maintains its own structures, publications and international discipline and links.

Ironically it was the Workers Power comrade himself who, in his anti-CPGB excitement, publicly named a well known SLPer as a leading member of the IBT.

Given Workers Power’s determination to downplay the SLP during the debate, it is noteworthy that none of its comrades questioned or criticised Socialist Labour Action. Here after all is a publication which could be said to fit into that category of those who “read” Workers Power, those who “listen” to its “arguments”, “respect its record in the class struggle” and its “ideas” (Workers Power October 1996). Workers Power calls for a Labour vote in the general election. Socialist Labour Action says vote SLP wherever it stands.

The difference is clear. The silence significant.

Late but better

Having skipped October, the second edition of Socialist News is out at last. Given what might be called the dialectics of Socialist Labour, comrades will know that revulsion with New Labour means that Tony Blair is the best seller of the paper - the entire 7,000 print run of the first edition was sold. Every time Blair speaks it benefits the SLP and our press. Indeed we are in the strange position where, because branches get no discount on the cover price, comrade Nell Myers tries to talk down orders.

Frankly this is daft. There should be a substantial bulk-order discount - 33% is normal - and branches should be encouraged to up, not down, the number of copies they take.

The second edition is an improvement on the first. Admittedly that is not saying much. The launch edition was very bad. The second edition is bigger and, more importantly, is beginning to find itself. Having recruits like comrades Joe Marino and Jimmy Nolan in the paper is a real fillip.

Unfortunately there are no letters, no polemic, no intended controversy. Most articles remain of the dull, routine, postage stamp variety. In the longer term that is a deadly recipe.

Interestingly however, there would appear to have developed an unintended controversy around the national question - not even the most punctilious editor can prevent political differences coming to the surface, once comrades venture into print.

In September’s Socialist News Jim McDaid was enthusing over the prospect of a “genuinely democratic” Scottish parliament. It would, we were assured, “re-energise the Scottish economy, by investing in housing, health, education and industry, including the power to nationalise key industries, as appropriate.” Clearly the comrade has a narrow, nationalist perspective of Keynesian reform. He is at pains to defend old Labour on Scotland, as against new Labour’s referendum U-turns.

Nowhere does comrade McDaid raise the need for a voluntary union of the peoples of Britain. Nor does he call for self-determination - the right of the Scottish people to freely determine their own future through a constituent assembly with the power to secede.

November’s Socialist News contains a different approach. It is though equally wrong. Dave Proctor dismisses the notion of a Welsh assembly, in essence because it would not be “a socialist structure”. Instead comrade Proctor puts forward the traditional maximalist, reformist idea of “a Socialist Labour government in Britain .... there will then be no need to attempt creation [sic] of our own little socialist enclave.”

We must immediately demand Scottish and Welsh self-determination. We must immediately demand a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales and the unity of Ireland. That is the revolutionary road to socialism.