20.03.1997

Playing for keeps

Party notes

Scargill’s decision to stand in Newport East, a safe Labour seat in South Wales which has just selected the ex-Tory Alan Howarth as its candidate, may seem to be a little strange to some comrades.

First, it is not particularly a ‘Scargillite’ area. During the Great Strike of 1984/85, the official National Union of Mineworkers apparatus in South Wales was part of the union’s fifth column, the “internal UDM”, as we put it. Despite the fact that the area remained solid to the end, its leadership - in the form of lizards such as Kim Howells - were agitating from very early on for a sell-out ‘settlement’ and an ‘ordered’ return to work.

Today, the wider trade union structures and labour movement in South Wales does not have a particular reputation for militancy. After all, Howarth convincingly won the Newport East nomination at a crowded meeting of local members of the party: shadow Welsh secretary Ron Davies is therefore quite right to reject any notion of “candidates being parachuted in” (Guardian March l7) from outside. The local party appears happy with Howarth, a fact that underlines for Blair that “New Labour is real and the changes in our party go deep” (ibid).

Add to this the fact that the level of struggle and militancy in wider society is not high. Newport - like many parts of South Wales - has a proud history, not least during the high point of Chartism. Yet, contemporary South Welsh society is relatively quiet compared not simply to the past, but to contemporary developments in Scotland for example.

This reflects itself in a weak SLP locally (with Cardiff branch actually under the threat of ‘voiding’). All in all - despite the fact that Scargill is bound to win votes simply because of his stature as a national politician - these are not auspicious signs for the success of the campaign.

Perhaps Scargill’s calculations include the fact that there is talk of Howarth’s complicity in formulating the war policy of the Tories during the Great Strike, a suspicion that he is now at pains to dismiss as “mischievous fabrication”, given his new political home of course. Yet Scargill’s organic connection with 1984/85 is not an unalloyed advantage, as I can testify from personal participation in the Hemsworth campaign. Just as many people told me that they would not vote SLP because of Scargill’s prominence in it as told me they would for the same reason. Militant collective action has been discredited with wide swathes of our class after 15 years of defeat and demoralisation and Scargill’s personification of it in the eyes of the British public - at the moment, at least - is no guarantee of success.

Scargill’s decision to stand may also be in direct contravention of his union’s rule book and - if true - will cause him some problems with the pro-Labour elements of the NUM leadership.

Actually, what all of this underlines is the fact that the man thinks strategically, not his tactical ineptitude. Scargill thus stands in stark contrast to most elements of the left in the party. He has identified a clear space in politics and is aware that if he moves with some panache, dynamism and bravery, he and a party moulded in his image have the potential to fill it. The real risks he is taking now with his party are because he has a clear idea of where he wants to be in two years time - unlike the majority of the British revolutionary left.

This explains also why he has cajoled his organisation into setting itself the aim of 100 candidates in the coming election, why he is so intolerant of the revolutionary left and is seemingly prepared to lop off whole sections of the activists of the party. They are utterly irrelevant to the project Scargill has in mind.

It is more than a shame that the left of the SLP cannot think in the same imaginatively bold way. Despite their relative political sophistication compared to Scargill, they have been content to form the leftwing of whatever spontaneously presents itself - whether that is Labour or the SLP itself - and seem almost incapable of making the imaginative leap between what exists and what needs to exist. Scargill’s relative merit lies precisely in the fact that he is playing for keeps in all of this. The left should take note and think how to apply this lesson in self-belief to its own activity.

Mark Fischer
national organiser