10.04.1997

More Bullite rantings from Royston

Members of the Socialist Labour Party should feel some disquiet over the elements that their leadership are prepared not simply to tolerate, but actually to use in the service of the witch hunt.

The charming proclivities of Tony Goss and the Stalin Society have been documented in these pages (Pat Sikorski - supporter of the Trotskyist Fourth International Supporters Caucus apparently thinks it’s “OK” to be a member of both the SLP and the Stalin Society, according to one of its members). The ravings of Royston Bull in his Economic and Philosophic Science Review are - if anything - even more worrying for SLP comrades.

In the March 11 issue, journalist ‘RB’ (no prizes for guessing who this is), replies to the “slander” in the Weekly Worker, “bible of the Trotskyite saboteurs”. It seems we are now guilty of being the “first to resort to fisticuffs when the argument against us ... begins to go well”.

Concretely, Bull claims that the physical attack on Mark Fischer of the Communist Party by leading SLPer Tony Goss (see Weekly Worker February 27) was deliberately misreported by this paper. In fact, Bull writes, “Many eye witnesses swear it was the expelled CPGB/Trot disrupters who started the scuffling ... at London’s Conway Hall, including punches at peace-making NEC members.”

Of course, Bull will not be able to produce a single “witness” to independently verify this. He is an inveterate liar and pro-bureaucracy creep who should be treated with the contempt reserved for scabs in our movement. Yet SLPers should still take note:

• First, that Royston Bull and his little group of pro-Scargill eccentrics openly write, distribute and support the EPSR, ironically at the same time defending the restrictive constitution which is used to ‘do’ others merely on suspicion of sympathising with other organisations. The hypocrisy of the SLP leadership is stunning.
• Second, Bull at least has the merit of putting into print what some leading SLPers have been saying about the Fischer/Goss clash. He suggests that protests are “ludicrous” as “angry scuffles are [not] alien to British labour movement meetings ... they are completely routine”. What kind of organisation is being built where this sort of attitude is tolerated and even repeated by leading party members?
• Third, the image of the SLP is hardly enhanced by not only tolerating such scum, but actually given them some prominence in the party as a bulwark against the left. It would only take one decent bourgeois journalist, determined to do a hatchet job on the SLP, to do a little digging into the backgrounds of some of the unsavoury types our leadership seems determined to surround themselves with for the party’s public image to suffer some real damage.

Worse, I shudder to think what a Jeremy Paxman might make of an issue of the Economic and Philosophic Science Review.

Alec Long