13.03.1997

Socialist News

SLP: news and comment

Hopefully comrades will have read the new issue of Socialist News. This, our fourth issue, is for March and April, so it is effectively our election paper.

Since transferring the production of the paper totally to Barnsley, it seems that comrade Scargill is taking over more journalistic responsibilities. It is good that he has gone into print in analysing the Wirral South by-election.

The article is headlined ‘Party wins votes in Tory heartland’. A seat which now has a Labour majority of around 8,000 can be described as “Tory heartland” by explaining that New Labour “is almost identical to Ted Heath’s old Tories”. Whether this is true or not is debatable, but this is clearly not the point. Our main job is not to understand how Blair can win Tory votes (though that is one of our responsibilities). We need to understand why we did not win Labour voters from Blair to us. We are shirking our responsibility to the party and to the class if we either shrug our shoulders in despair or, as the back page article in the paper has, put an optimistic gloss on the result.

Simon Harvey

Airbrushes and broomsticks

The campaign for democracy continues in our party.

Comrades will be interested to know that CSLPs in Blackley and Trafford (Greater Manchester) recently passed motions in support of the John Pearson defence campaign. The comrades passed principled motions for consideration by the NEC opposing comrade’s Pearson’s ‘voiding’ for (unspecified) “activities incompatible with the constitution of the party” (see Weekly Worker February 13). They continued to recognise his membership pending the establishment of a disciplinary procedure.

What is interesting about this is that Blackley CSLP, which passed the resolution unanimously, is the branch of NEC member Phil Griffin, chief witch hunter in Manchester. Suffice to say that comrade Griffin was absent from the meeting.

An injury to one

I am disturbed to hear that some comrades are adopting the attitude that the responsibility and blame for members being voided lies equally at the feet of the party’s leadership and the ‘voided’ comrades themselves. For example, I hear that some South London members are refusing to defend Barry Biddulph (see Weekly Worker February 27) - who, like comrade Pearson, was voided’ without explanation - on the grounds that he appealed directly to the membership through an open letter. They thought he should have kept quiet about the injustice done to him and humbly write to the NEC requesting an explanation.

Whatever comrades consider to be the validity of an individual’s tactics in response to the invalidation of their membership, the blame for the situation lies squarely with the party leadership. When comrades are effectively ‘airbrushed’ out of membership, given little or no indication of their breach of rules, given no evidence, given no hearing, given no right of appeal before the party as a whole, it is not surprising that members may use open letters as a tactic to take this to a wider audience. Even if you do not agree with this tactic, it is beholden on consistent democrats in the SLP and the workers’ movement as a whole to recognise where this travesty of democracy is coming from and not apportion equal blame between the perpetrators and victims of injustice.

It is no accident that one of the longest standing slogans of our movement is ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’.