09.01.1997

A load of Bull

Most readers of the Weekly Worker are unlikely to have ever read the Economic and Philosophic Science Review. Count yourselves fortunate.

It is a small, crassly amateur cut-and-paste rant-sheet, compiled by one Royston Bull, chair of Stockport Socialist Labour Party. The origins of this incondite little rag - and the dwindling band of sad people that support it - lie in a split from Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party in 1979. Clearly, the years have not been kind to this little sect. Its political ambitions have faded since the early days when it dubbed itself first the ‘Workers Party’, then - even more enterprisingly - the ‘International Leninist Workers Party’. The ‘party’ was dropped after some time because - as Bull once told me - “we weren’t getting anywhere with it”. He actually seemed genuinely surprised.

Until recently, EPSR supporters constituted a small, eccentric strand within the left of the SLP. There they were tolerated, but not exactly feted given their propensity for sub-literate ‘Marxist-Leninist’ rants and tedious inability to make even one relevant point to the debate everyone else in the room was engaged in.

Regular readers of the Weekly Worker will be aware that events have taken a rather sinister turn, however. The EPSR has turned scab and joined the witch hunters in the SLP (see John Pearson letter reproduced in Weekly Worker December 12 1996). It has openly called for the expulsion of those accused of links with the Communist Party. In the one area where they have some influence - Stockport - EPSR supporters, with Royston Bull at their head, have actually moved to ‘expel’ John Pearson, elected secretary of the branch, for his “active membership of the CPGB ... long after it has been made clear by the SLP that dual membership in a rival party to the SLP is not acceptable” (‘Stockport SLP’ letter to Pat Sikorski, undated).

EPSR supporters happy with this scabbing should now be treated with the contempt they deserve by the all democrats in the SLP, of course.

The battle in Stockport branch rumbles on and it is still far from clear that the national leadership will be happy to associate themselves with the Bullites’ clumsy attempt at a purge. As the legitimate branch secretary, it is reported that comrade Pearson has actually convened a full branch meeting. Bull on the other hand has assembled only his own scanty troops and dubbed this the “Stockport branch”. Whether the SLP national executive committee will agree is far from certain.

The whole episode - disgusting though it is - certainly contains an element of farce. Royston Bull - now presenting himself as hyper-loyal to the SLP leadership and witch hunter general of the reds - actually applied via a personal approach to me for membership of the Communist Party in August 1996! However, when he realised this actually implied disciplined work and duties as well as the ‘right’ to fill the pages of the Weekly Worker with his fuming, plus the promise that Party membership would mean an open full-scale assault on his political positions regarded by the CP majority as repugnant (see below), he very quickly backtracked.

Similarly, he fulminated (Weekly Worker October 31 1996) against our supposed “deliberate fingering” of the International Bolshevik Tendency (see my article, ‘Wretched’, in the Weekly Worker October 10 1996). This article - which took the IBT to task for its opportunist deep-entry burrowing into the SLP and for a crudely inaccurate polemic against our organisation, was - according to Bull - “every bit as bad as the McCarthyite informing and witch hunting which the CPGB accuse the SLP of” (EPSR October 15 1996). By the time of the November 26 issue Bull had a rather different attitude to “deliberate fingering”. He warned “three fucking jerks” accused of being communists, and thus members of an organisation of “miserable turds”, that they “[could] all be named if [they] want further trouble”.

This charmingly florid prose flowed from exactly the same pen - that of Royston Bull - who in July of the same year penned a motion to the Manchester SLP defending one of these ‘fucking jerks’ against “the witch hunting bureaucracy” which was attempting to deprive him of membership. Such “talented, experienced and confident cadre will be crucial for developing ... a powerful socialist movement”, his motion stated.

Before moving on, it is worthwhile drawing attention to another feature of the EPSR world view, a social outlook unlikely to endear them to many in the leadership of the SLP.

Commenting on corruption in the establishment parties and its purported link to homosexual MPs, Bull suggests that “the homosexual disorder is not unethical as such, but its demonic drives can lay sufferers open to a more conspiratorial prevalence of such behaviour” (EPSR October 8 1996). Warming to his theme, Bull continues that

“the politically correct bourgeois press would also like to pretend that homosexual sufferers of retarded emotional-sexual development are not more vulnerable to the attractions of bent freemasonaries of various kinds when the whole of social history would indicate the opposite. Queers figure prominently in this activity ...” (ibid).

Bull works himself into a lather over the networks of “homosexual weirdos” in the Nazi party and the “perverted sexual activity” prevalent in the Monday club, then finally pronounces on the sexual malady of society as a whole:

“Sexual deviations like sadism, paedophilia and homo-sexualism are obviously more widespread and clamour more insistently for ‘acceptability’, but their sickness is self-evident and it is an unhealthy society which itself ignores the potential mischief- making of such strong perverted drives” (ibid).

Clearly, we are dealing here with a very sick little group. Given its treachery, it should now find no allies on the left of the SLP; whether the witch hunters will want to be associated with it remains to be seen. Either way, the EPSR has sealed its lonely fate.

Writing in the Weekly Worker of December 19 1996, SL Kenning suggested that despite the seeming instability of this grouplet there is a “definite continuity. They admire dictators, state power and what they imagine to be the mechanical unfolding of a predetermined history.”

It is this rigid, unMarxist objectivism that links them not simply to their Healyite origins, but also with large sections of the rest of the left and - ironically - with groups like the Fourth International Supporters Caucus. The Communist Party has been criticised by many of these forces - and viciously witch hunted by the Fiscites, of course - for our open fight for the SLP to be a revolutionary party initially and then for the democratic space in the party for revolutionaries to argue their politics.

Instead, most of the left has passively watched the process unfold from the outside, having decided in advance that this complex break from Labour would somehow inevitably produce a social democratic formation.

Even those forces that have actually joined the party have done so with the understanding that they were seeking to form a left of an organisation that was predetermined to be left reformist.

It is precisely this “mechanical unfolding of a pre-determined history” that has led the Bullites into scabbing. According to this view of history,

“to anyone remotely politically coherent, this [that is, a centrist organisation - MF] has always been the inevitable fate of Scargill’s SLP from the start. Completely misguided nonsense about being able to turn the SLP into the revolutionary party will only have misled all would-be members into the wrong approach ... from the beginning, possibly inviting more trouble from witch hunts than might otherwise have arisen” (EPSR September 24 1996).

The ‘possible’ equivocation had gone by November of last year when Bull was happy to declare that “the workers who founded the SLP have the constitution they wanted. Nothing more could be expected” (EPSR November 26 1996).

If indeed “nothing more could be expected”, then those like the communists who have fought for revolutionary politics and democracy within the SLP have simply been guilty of trying to pull a ‘fast one’ on history, or of a “conspiracy to undermine the Socialist Labour Party” and “just asking for trouble”, as Bull puts it (ibid).

Thus despite the EPSR’s palpable wackiness - an assessment that will not prove contentious with comrades, whatever their backgrounds - the common mechanical methodology they share with other left forces should be chastening. In spite of itself, there is actually a sort of shady opportunist logic to the treachery of the Bull-ites.

Comrades who have a version of these type of ‘inevitablist’ perspectives should perhaps ponder this for a while

Mark Fischer