12.12.1996

Sectarian critic turns putrified witch hunter

Members of the EPSR have turned anti-communist witch hunters who brand those that challenge their particularly nauseating brand of sectarianism as CPGB members. Here we reprint an edited version of SLP member John Pearson’s reply to Roy Bull’s accusations

To: P Sikorski, general secretary
FAO: National Executive Committee
December 3 1996

Dear comrades

Re: Purported resolution of Stockport branch, requesting my expulsion from the party.

The general secretary will by now have received, from the branch chair, a purported resolution of my branch, the Stockport Constituency Socialist Labour Party, requesting the national executive committee to expel me from the party (copy attached). I should like all the NEC members to be made aware of the following circumstances, relating to this “resolution”.

I am the properly elected branch secretary of the Stockport CSLP, having been elected at the annual general meeting. In this capacity, I circulated a notice and agenda for an ordinary meeting of the branch, to take place on November 28 1996. Seven branch members attended the meeting ... At the beginning of the meeting, the branch chair, comrade Roy Bull, distributed copies of the attached motion, of which he was the author and proposer.

He proposed that the ordinary agenda be set aside, in order that the motion for my expulsion from the party could be considered. Comrade Bull then proceeded to address his motion for my expulsion. I interrupted him, stating my objections. I had only just seen, and indeed become aware of, his charges against me. I had had no time to prepare a response to his charges.

I therefore proposed that consideration of comrade Bull’s charges against me be deferred until the next ordinary meeting, a fortnight hence, in order that I could prepare my defence. I also objected to comrade Bull chairing the meeting at the same time as he was proposing charges against another member. Comrade Bull brushed aside my objections, rebuking me for speaking out of turn, when other comrades had indicated a wish to speak. He then called comrade Stephen Hammond to speak.

This comrade proceeded to second the motion for my expulsion ... I stated that, unless my request that the matter be deferred to allow me to defend myself was accepted, then I had no intention to participate in such a “Healyite” charade of justice, and that I would withdraw from the meeting. Two other comrades supported my protests.

Upon this, comrade Bull moved a procedural motion, “that the matter be sorted out tonight”, which he immediately put to the vote, declaring it to be carried by five votes to three. I left the meeting. I learned the following day, from one of the members present, comrade David Wilson, that comrade Bull’s motion for my expulsion had been carried in my absence. This was after an alternative motion from comrade Wilson, which sought to establish a procedure for dealing with comrade Bull’s charges fairly, had been defeated.

I never thought that I would encounter such a disgraceful mockery of fairness and justice within any organisation of the workers’ movement. I was ambushed by comrade Bull and the hard core of his small band of followers ... The proceedings were in the mould of the worst kind of purge “trials” of the former Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party. This was perhaps not surprising, since it is from this tradition that Royston Bull, a former central committee member of the WRP, comes.

... His second charge, that “[my] recent activities have amounted to gross provocations against the SLP, and disruptions of the SLP’s work”, is ridiculous and I would have no difficulty in refuting it, if I had the opportunity to do so.

I feel that comrade Bull is clearly seeking to use bureaucratic purge methods, to pursue the serious political differences he has with me on some of the issues referred to in his text - the open existence and operation of a revolutionary caucus of SLP members; the bans and proscriptions in the party’s draft constitution (an issue upon which he has performed a very recent U-turn); openness and honesty in all party proceedings, etc. Again, it is the Healyite tradition that those comrades who disagree with the ‘correct’ line must be ‘purged’.

I have no doubt that an awareness of the weakness of his second charge is what prompted comrade Bull to press his first charge, that I “continued active membership of the CPGB”. This is pure assertion by comrade Bull. He offers no evidence at all to support this accusation. In order to have a realistic prospect of having me removed from the SLP, he has clearly felt it necessary to cap his case with what he perceives to be the cardinal sin for an SLP member - ie, simultaneous membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The only political organisation I am a member of is the Socialist Labour Party. I am not, and never have been, a member of the CPGB. Bull is a liar! I am committed to the building of, and the success of, the SLP, as all of my activities since I joined in February 1996 will testify. In a contested election, I was elected to the branch committee of the former Greater Manchester branch, at its AGM in April. Comrade Bull was an unsuccessful candidate in the same election. I have worked hard to establish and build the Stockport branch, taking on many duties on an informal basis, prior to becoming branch secretary.

Royston Bull is being a gross hypocrite in falsely accusing me of being a member of another political organisation. He is, himself, the chairman and editor of the group which organises around the weekly publication, Economic and philosophical science review. This group, formerly called the International Leninist Workers Party, was a split from the WRP in the early 1980s.

Comrade Bull self-identifies himself as the founder of the EPSR group and the editor of its paper, within his tirade against me (third column), when he says that an exposure of the actions of the EPSR’s “founder-editor” which appeared in a piece in the CPGB’s Weekly Worker, is “targeting the chairman of the Stockport SLP”. He distributes the EPSR paper at Stockport SLP meetings. It is a characteristically vitriolic publication. Persons, or groupings on the left of politics who disagree with the views printed in the bulletin, are routinely branded “anti-communist”, “false Marxist”, or “Trot”. The invective can become extremely abusive and offensive.

Comrade Bull’s EPSR group is highly unpredictable and prone to U-turns, which makes dubious its claim, in issue no875 (October 15 1996):

“Spread the EPSR, the only possible source of Marxist-Leninist leadership for the moment.” Whilst they presently are disposed to pose as the best SLP leadership loyalists, in the recent past they have sounded a rather different note: “Scargill’s claims to any sort of Marxism at all remain a sick and nasty joke on the working class ...” (no872, September 24 1996); “Scargill still hesitates fully to grasp the greatest lesson of his political life - that the class collaboration days are over ...” (no868, August 27 1996); “The most crass anti-communism continues to dominate some of the branch activity of the Socialist Labour Party, with suspicions growing that seedy local operators have the blessing of leading circles in the party” (no861, July 8 1996); “Scargill’s route leads nowhere”; “Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party has quickly established a bureaucratic club atmosphere throughout its branches, which is no great surprise”; “The ethos is left trade unionism. Scargill has not changed a bit”; “The SLP is very much a party of the old type, which will use every bureaucratic and demagogic trick in the book in order not just to keep its original founders firmly entrenched in the leadership (which is hardly a surprise; it would be astonishing if they did not act like this) - but to ensure that no fundamentally new thinking should clutter up or confuse Scargill’s basic left-syndicalist aims”; “... on these questions, the foundation of the SLP is clearly an utterly doomed enterprise. Not only do they not have any ability or interest to give the working class a lead on all the topical events going on all around them, endlessly manipulated by the capitalist media to perpetually sow reactionary consciousness and prevent the faintest development of any revolutionary socialist consciousness. The SLP founders will clearly have no such understanding or capacity even when they do finally get round to publishing (or getting their NUJ contacts to publish) some sort of regular journal”; “The people round Scargill have an even more dubious background - ex-IMG types basically, it seems, who reneged on Trotskyite sectarianism’s ‘independent’ posturing when it was overshadowed by the apparent entryist success of ‘Militant’ Trotskyism, and sneaked into the Labour Party as well, in a period which must have been approaching reformism’s maximum putrescence and foul deception of the working class. What an inglorious bunch of dishonest crooks, one might be tempted to say”; “... there seems little point in not continuing to challenge the SLP at every opportunity about its clear disservice to the working class by coming onto the scene as the new broom to sweep clean all the old opportunist parliamentary dishonesty, yet keeping quiet about the one truly titanic mess hanging over workers and menacing their lives - the explosive crisis of the capitalist system” (no856, June 4 1996).

“But the SLP’s sad perspective of ‘left’ pressure and parliamentary reformism, backed by endless single-issue, direct action campaigns, is virtually ignored by this CPGB report of the ‘revolutionary’ significance of this first conference - in favour of challenging the SLP on matters which it got basically correct” (no853, May 14 1996).

“One thing hindering and hugely complicating any better developments inside the SLP is the number of anti-theory Marxist philistines sneaking into its ranks. These middle class sects have always given revolutionary understanding a bad name, and they have not got any better since joining the SLP. It will be the duty of genuine revolutionaries to expose these fake ‘revolutionary’ postures inside the SLP in due course” (no851, April 4 1996).

“If there are pernicious, disruptive, sectarian attitudes threatening the successful building of the SLP, let us hear a full explanation of why and how this is so, and let the SLP membership decide if this is so, including honouring the normal democratic rights for any active supporter of the SLP about whom suspicion has been sown [sic]” (excerpt from comrade Bull’s motion to Greater Manchester branch, submitted July 4 1996).

Royston Bull joined the SLP in April 1996 and he was a member when all of these views were published in the paper he edits. Are we to believe that comrade Bull and his followers have resiled all these views in favour of their now proffered role as ‘praetorian guard’ for the SLP leadership’s reputation? Or are we to believe that these are the manoeuvrings of an opportunist entyrist sect, who now see a chance to take over their first SLP branch?

I would urge members of the NEC towards the latter perspective and I would offer the following further evidence. Firstly, I should make it clear that all of those who voted for comrade Bull’s motion seeking my expulsion are associates of his EPSR group. You will note that, whilst they wait for the NEC to pronounce upon whether I am expelled, they have also voted to boycott me. They have followed up this decision by calling an ‘alternative’ Stockport branch meeting, outside of the previously agreed schedule ...

Stockport EPSR is now posing as Stockport SLP - a very worrying development.

Unlike my accusers, I do not regard the formation of the SLP as “an utterly doomed enterprise”, one merely to be ridden for some potential sectarian advantage. I believe that the SLP has the potential to become a mass working class party and a major gain for the class.

I believe also, however, that its development is being constrained by bureaucratic defensiveness in the leadership. I believe in the right of members to criticise leadership errors. I have fought for the lifting of the membership bans and proscriptions in our draft constitution, believing that this is the way to achieve the one united working class party that the SLP should become. I have fought for factional rights and for a party newspaper that promotes debate in order to clarify the correct way forward for the working class. Prior to the ‘coup d’état’ by comrades Bull, Hammond and co, I had won the Stockport branch to all of these views.

Although NEC members may not agree with my views, I hope that they will agree that it is perfectly right and proper that I be allowed to argue such views democratically within the party. I hope that the NEC will refuse to endorse the petition by comrade Bull, and the EPSR, in the guise of the branch ‘resolution’, that Healyite witch hunts and undemocratic purges are the correct way to determine party policy.

Yours in comradeship

John Pearson
SLP member no523