24.04.1997

By your friends ...

Among the 65 Socialist Labour Party candidates listed in the general election issue of Socialist News only 63 are in fact contesting. Neither Bill McCaffrey in Westmorland and Lonsdale nor Abdul Aziz in Wakefield were actually nominated. In addition Stan Keable, who is contesting for the SLP in Brent East, does not appear in the Socialist News list. For Arthur Scargill, it seems, comrade Keable is a non-person and Brent Constituency SLP is a non-organisation.

Of the 64 SLP candidates actually nominated there are one or two who might be familiar to some comrades - although up to now they have not been widely associated with Socialist Labour. Most notable are Balkar Singh Sandha, standing in Leicester East, and Harpal Brar, who is contesting Ealing Southall in London. Harpal Brar is the best known SLP candidate who is also a member of the Indian Workers Association. He is the editor of the IWA’s publication, Lalkar.

As we reported last autumn, IWA leaders have been considering taking out SLP cards for several months. The problem was that most were also members of the ultra-Stalinist Association of Indian Communists. In discussions last November comrade Scargill told the Indian comrades that there would be “no problem” about IWA members joining the SLP, but he could not make an exception for the AIC: “If I let one in, I’ll have to let in them all” (see ‘Indian communists look to SLP’ Weekly Worker November 14 1996).

Earlier this year Harpal Brar and his comrades met to finally rubber-stamp their entry into the SLP - in time for IWA members to be nominated for the general election. Whether or not the AIC has been formally dissolved, its politics are alive and well. They are openly expounded in the pages of Lalkar, which likes to report the ‘successes’ of North Korea and believes that everything was going fine in the Soviet Union until Nikita Khrushchev came along.

Having thumbed through its pages, you might come to the conclusion that the IWA has its “own programme, principles and policies, distinctive and separate propaganda”, and is therefore “ineligible for affiliation to the party” (clause II, paragraph 4 of the SLP draft ‘constitution’). But no: at last November’s meeting comrade Scargill assured the IWA that he viewed it as an “anti-imperialist organisation” which contains Labour supporters and even Tories. I doubt whether there are too many of those on Lalkar’s editorial board.

The IWA decision to play a fuller and more active role in British working class politics is a welcome one. We are not afraid of combating their distorted ‘Marxist’ ideas within the SLP. But the question arises: how is it that Scargill is not merely turning a blind eye to his ‘constitution’, but openly flouting it? Clause II (5) states: “A member of the party who becomes a member of and/ or supports a political organisation other than the party shall automatically become ineligible to become or remain a party member.” Perhaps he does not consider “anti-imperialist organisations” to be political.

The truth is that Scargill has always intended to use his banning clauses selectively. Above all he wanted to ensure that Communist Party and Militant Labour (now Socialist Party) members or supporters were excluded. There was never any question that these clauses should apply to adherents of the Fourth International Supporters Caucus (Fisc), whose members helped draft the ‘constitution’. Former general secretary Pat Sikorski, himself a Fisc member, personally gave a verbal assurance to a member of the Stalin Society that her dual membership was fine.

Alan Fox