10.04.1997

The call for an active boycott

Scottish Militant Labour supports Blair’s parish council

Tony Blair has done us the great service of completely exposing the farcical nature of Labour’s proposed Edinburgh parliament. It will have tax-raising powers, no different from an English or Welsh “parish council”. Powers that in any case will not be used, says the putative autocrat - New Labour is committed to maintaining present levels of income tax throughout the country - the rich have nothing to fear. Crucially, Blair emphasises that “sovereignty rests with me as an English MP... and that’s the way it will stay” (The Guardian April 5 1997).

These contemptible statements rightly provoke outrage amongst democratic opinion, above all in Scotland. They demand the clearest and most determined political response. There can be no vote for any candidate standing on or defending Blair’s manifesto. Scotland must have the right to self-determination - nothing less. Workers have no interest in helping Blair and New Labour to preserve the undemocratic constitutional monarchy. We need the closest voluntary union of workers throughout Britain in the fight for socialism - that is why we raise the minimum demand for a federal republic.

Those who call themselves revolutionaries must do more than condemn Blair’s English chauvinist arrogance and the sham nature of his so-called parliament - which is a travesty even in terms of bourgeois democracy. We must explain that his proposed “rigged referendum”, whereby he hopes to gain consent for his parliament, is a cynical attempt to undermine the popular movement for democracy in Scotland. The people are supposed to vote for their own ball and chain.

Despite this denial of the right to self-determination Scottish Militant Labour is “unequivocally” pledged to vote ‘yes, yes’ in Blair’s “rigged referendum” (their phrase, not ours). The reasoning of SML is typically reformist. Instead of gaining strength by intransigently fighting for the Scottish Socialist Alliance’s founding principle of a sovereign parliament with full powers, the comrades welcome Blair’s sop in the foolish belief that it somehow represents a step forward. Such is the opportunist art of the possible.

In a recent internal document, ‘Referenda statement’, (reproduced here) Alan McCombes argues that this one-sop-at-a-time method is fully in line with SML’s programme. “Supporting a double ‘yes’ vote,” he says,

“is consistent with our general approach towards the national question in Scotland, which is to support any step - no matter how small or inadequate - in the direction of greater autonomy for the Scottish people.”

During the struggle against the poll tax this timid method would have had the comrades urging ‘critical’ acceptance of Thatcher’s various concessions - even in the introductory year the Tories decided to spend £1 billion to keep payments down. That is exactly what the Labour Party did. The cowardly Neil Kinnock and Donald Dewar therefore rounded on those urging non-payment as irresponsible. They were meant to be playing into the hands of the Tories. Tommy Sheridan, convenor of the Scottish Federation of Anti-Poll Tax Unions, was expelled from the Labour Party. Naturally Labour and Scottish National Party councils collected the tax, sent in bailiffs and enforced warrant sales.

Thatcher’s flagship was sunk, not by Labour hot air in parliament, but by the storm of mass defiance and mass resistance. Millions of people across the whole of Britain unitedly boycotted it - they refused to pay. There are lessons of cardinal importance here, both in the fight for self-determination and in the struggle for socialism itself. Comrade McCombes and SML show no signs yet of having drawn any general conclusions from the successes of the anti-poll tax campaign. They might have broken with New Labour. However, they remain tied to Old Labour’s reformist illusions. Their national socialism will come, they believe, through a parliamentary majority.

As would-be responsible and respectable legislators, SML’s leaders oppose almost as a reflex reaction the call for a boycott of Blair’s “rigged referendum” - though, as Lenin pointed out, such a tactic “lies within the bounds of bourgeois democracy” (VI Lenin CW Vol 9, Moscow 1977, p181), comrade McCombes is forced into the most dishonest and contorted formulations. Indeed, what he says unconsciously echoes Kinnock. His case against us is presented in the highlighted section of McCombes’ document reproduced opposite.

Let us be quite clear. The CPGB does not advocate a boycott of Blair’s referendum due to moral disapproval, because it is “rigged”. Nor does proposing a boycott of Blair’s referendum lead us, logically or in any other way, to “advocating boycotting elections”. We can leave such silly posturing to anarchists, ‘left’ communists and Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism radicals.

Comrade McCombes is right to say that to one degree or another all elections under capitalism are rigged against the working class. But as he knows perfectly well, the Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB considers it obligatory under today’s conditions to use parliament and parliamentary elections as a means to spread communist propaganda (see J Conrad In the enemy camp). And, of course, our actions speak much louder than any inept accusation coming from comrade McCombes. The CPGB’s Mary Ward is the Scottish Socialist Alliance’s chosen candidate in Dundee West.

During a gathering revolutionary situation communists could well decide to boycott Westminster elections. If the masses were forming councils of action and defence corps, countenancing participation in a counterrevolutionary election would be to betray the cause of socialism. Naturally any decision to call a boycott is a tactical one, not a moral one. For Marxists the boycott slogan on the one hand or asking for votes in an election on the other hand is not an absolute, but a concrete question.

Hence it is easy to turn the tables on comrade McCombes. Does his refusal to consider a boycott of Blair’s “rigged referendum” logically mean SML would never advocate a boycott of any election? Whatever the answer, only an ignoramus or a charlatan can suggest that the CPGB’s call for a boycott of Blair’s referendum results from some universal principle.

Equating our demand for a boycott of Blair’s referendum with boycotting all elections is sheer nonsense. However much things are stacked against us in parliamentary elections, our candidates have the opportunity of presenting the politics of communism and the necessity for revolution.

For us, it should be stressed, bourgeois elections are not about choosing between who will misrepresent the working class, choosing the lesser evil. Taking on the enemy class on the terrain of elections is a means of promoting independent working class politics. Standing in elections might give us communist MPs who can skilfully exploit parliamentary privilege in order to rain down attacks on the system and its pampered representatives. Either way we get our material delivered free to every household and constituent. We also get the chance of using the mass media and on the day our growing support is measured and announced at the count. So we do not rule out putting up comrades for an Edinburgh parliament. We will decide according to the concrete circumstances.

Blair’s referendum is another matter entirely. It will have two propositions - neither of which have anything to do with consistent democracy. Blair’s referendum is in fact a catch 22, a dictatorial device worthy of a Hitler, Mussolini or Franco. To vote ‘no’ is to vote against democracy. To vote ‘yes’ is to vote against democracy.

Referendums, of course, need not be that way. Citizens of Switzerland can table their own referendum by securing a certain level of support - 30,000 signatures. There is no such right in Britain. Here the state monopolises the power of initiative. Blair and his Millbank cronies have already carefully honed their questions in such a way that the outcome is both certain and, for the system, eminently safe. Blair’s referendum is designed to gain a popular mandate for this “parish council” sop and acquiescence from the Scottish people to their continued oppression.

Must a boycott, as comrade McCombes claims, “relegate the Alliance to the status of a complete irrelevance”? Must it “play into the hands” of the Labour leadership and the Tories? A passive boycott and a low turnout would indeed do that. If we sat dumbly at home throughout the referendum campaign, if the Scottish masses thereby subsided into apathy, then Blair would continue whittling away the powers of this proposed sop to the point of nothingness. But, comrade McCombes, what the CPGB is calling for is nor a gesture, a mere abstention from voting. The CPGB is fighting for what we communists call an active boycott.

What is an active boycott? In 1905 Lenin and the Bolsheviks gave an excellent and very pertinent answer to this question:

“As distinct from passive abstention, an active boycott should imply increasing agitation tenfold, organising meetings everywhere, taking advantage of election meetings, even if we have to force our way into them, holding demonstrations, political strikes, and so on and so forth” (VI Lenin CW Vol 9, Moscow 1977, p182).

Fighting for an active boycott of Blair’s “rigged referendum” is to dramatically lift our agitation. An active boycott means organising political strikes, mass meetings and demonstrations, occupations and civil disobedience. Instead of fostering constitutional illusions in Blair’s sop and meekly lining up to vote for it, our aim is to win the masses to use the most advanced, most militant, most resolute tactics the objective situation allows. SML admits in Scottish Socialist Voice that today the struggle in Scotland is on the rise. Glasgow is “now a city in revolt”, it says (Scottish Socialist Voice March 21 1997).

Far from side-lining the SSA, an active boycott will raise things far higher. It will put us firmly in the vanguard of the struggle for self-determination. The SNP will almost certainly collapse to the right - its continued silence on Blair’s parliament is a clear sign of weakness. Faced by a really proletarian-led movement for self-determination, the SNP will discard all socialist pretensions and leave us with the bulk of its working class following. Again far from playing into the hands of Labour and the Tories, an active boycott will have them running scared and covering their tracks with all manner of democratic and social concessions.

What direction things take in Scotland will at the end of the day be decided by what happens in England and Wales. If the working class movement in the rest of Britain fails to resolutely champion Scotland’s right to self-determination, separatist ideas will grow in attractiveness.

On the other hand, by winning mass support for a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales - which embodies the right to self-determination - the workers in Britain begin to organise themselves as a revolutionary class. That is why the CPGB, unlike SML, is committed to the Leninist principle of ‘one state, one party’. Without co-ordination, discipline and unified tactics throughout Britain the working class is fatally disarmed. The bourgeoisie has its state - we need a reforged Communist Party to fight it.

Jack Conrad