06.03.1997

More candidates needed for the general election

SLP: news and information

Wirral South clearly provides an indication of the likely result for the overwhelming majority of our candidates in the general election - not the 100 multiplied by five percent, as Brian Heron would have us believe (Socialist Labour Information December 1996). As workers vote to remove the Tories, our party will be squeezed further and further.

Revolutionaries are not afraid of receiving low results, especially in periods of a reactionary nature, although we are by no means dismissive of them. We sec activity around elections as a tactical intervention to make propaganda for revolution, even when we have our own communist MPs. However, amongst those who maintain an illusion in the role of parliament and bourgeois democracy - which is still widespread in the SLP - such a result must be devastating.

There will be many - including Sikorski, Heron and their comrades in Fisc, who initially called for six candidates - who shake their heads and say, ‘I told you so’- in private of course.

At the February 25 London activists’ meeting, comrade Scargill announced that so far there are 56 SLP candidates for the general election. The number of candidates he claimed as either confirmed or in the pipeline is broken down by locality as follows:

Birmingham 6; East Anglia 2; Lancashire 11; Liverpool l; London (including Brighton and Maidstone) 12; Midlands 9-10; North-East 3; South Wales 2-4; South-West 3; Scotland 2; Wolverhampton 2; Yorkshire 11. This gives a total of 64-67.

As yet, none of the six candidates for Birmingham have been found.

Reports are continuing to come in from around the country that there is money available from party centre to stand candidates. Contact centre if your constituency would like to stand.

Witch hunt

The continuation of the witch hunt in the SLP is having its impact. Although its effect is by no means even, there are certainly areas where the general mood in the party is one of despondency.

This is to be expected; it is the culture that comes with an organisation turning against itself, even to the limited extent that it has so far in the SLP.

These developments are having their impact on the left in the party and amongst the party democrats, many of whom are diving for cover. Instead of standing firm, some are saying, ‘I am not a witch’, rather than confidently declaring, ‘Witches do not exist’. There is clearly an element of this panic in some people’s reaction to the bureaucratic cack-handedness of the leadership, such as around the Brent East prospective candidature of SLP member Stan Keable and the continuing voiding of members.

There are also those on the left who see the recent developments in the SLP as proof that the party has become a ‘Stalinist sect’. This is clearly rubbish, although that tendency certainly exists. This essentially sectarian dismissal of the SLP fails to understand the party’s organic relationship with the crisis of Labourism.

However, despite all these tendencies developing within the poisonous climate of the witch hunt, this cannot lead us to the conclusion’ that: “sectarianism is as much a threat to the SLP as the bureaucratic manoeuvres of the leadership”, as has recently been claimed by one SLP member in a document called Fiction pulped.

Such a claim smacks of sectarian self-preservation above the general interests of combating the witch hunt.

What is crucial now is the unity of the democratic forces in the party. There can be no unity around the formulation quoted above. The only unity for democracy that can survive must squarely lay the blame for the witch hunt in the SLP at the foot of the leadership.

It is not surprising that many people are ducking for cover as the threat of the witch hunt places them in the firing line. Up to now their record in fighting the purge has been seen by them as doing ‘someone else’ a favour, but now the struggle directly affects them. Of course, it always did.

Comrades, now is the time to stand together while the leadership feels weak. Now is the time to confidently state that this party either has a future as an open, healthy, democratic party or it has no future at all for the long-term interests of our class.

Disciplinary procedure

The SLP NEC meets this weekend. We hear that the new disciplinary procedures have been finalised by John Hendy QC and a vote will be taken. However, according to NEC members, it appears that such a disciplinary procedure will not apply to those comrades ‘voided’. It will not apply to those who ‘deliberately falsified’ their application forms. If this is the case, then clearly the NEC is saying that for these comrades there is no party democracy as they were never in the party.

This really makes Hendy’s work an academic exercise. Even with a disciplinary procedure in place, all that has to happen is for the NEC, or increasingly the general secretary alone, to declare someone’s membership application ‘falsified’ and they are air-brushed out of the party.

As this paper reported last week (Weekly Worker February 27), at the London activists’ meeting Tony Goss took a swing at CPGB national organiser Mark Fischer and threatened his own party comrades. Far from viewing this as a disciplinary matter, some people, including NEC members, are expressing the view that this violence was justified. People are asking rhetorically, ‘What do you expect if someone calls you a corrupt bastard?’ Well, most adults would either walk away if it was nonsense or, if they considered the charge seriously, would defend themselves openly in front of the party and in front of the class. Juvenile macho posturing is no answer to such a serious charge.

Members, especially those who witnessed the assault, must call for the NEC to discipline Goss. Failing that, an open inquiry by leading members of the workers’ movement must consider his outrageous behaviour.

The settling of disputes through individual acts of violence has no place in our movement. Those who pursue such action should be tossed out.

Simon Harvey