24.04.1997

Candidates on our fringe

SLP: news and comment

Socialist Labour’s list of candidates produced in the latest Socialist News makes interesting reading. Apart from the fact that it falls somewhat short of the 100 target set by Arthur Scargill and the National Executive Committee, what strikes me is the heterogeneous make-up.

There are many outstanding and courageous class fighters standing under the SLPs banner. A few have galvanised local support for revolutionary manifestos: Stan Keable in Brent East, outrageously voided by Scargill in the Morning Star, and Terry Burns in Cardiff Central - who, conciliators note, remains officially recognised. On the other hand, there are the weird and wacky.

For example, Ken Rose, standing in Southampton Itchen, is a former Tory who retains Tory prejudices. Then there is Katrina Howse, in Newbury, who stubbornly lives on in a Greenham Common tent after l4 years, though the Cruise missiles went in 1991. But more to the point is the politics.

The right, pro-Scargill wing of the SLP, unites some unlikely, not to say unpleasant forms.

Patrick Sikorski, Hornsey and Wood Green, and Trevor Wongsam, Manchester Gorton, are well known supporters of the Fourth International Supporters Caucus. These Fiscites believe that they are faithful disciples of Leon Trotsky and Ernest Mandel. Nevertheless they have gone along with, and even fronted, the anti-communist witch hunt tragically launched by our former president Scargill (now unelected general secretary/treasurer).

Fisc has travelled a long way since their days in Socialist Outlook. Brian Heron, Fisc’s theoretician, actually venerates the “immensely powerful” British road to socialism - the programme of ‘official communism’ - and dismisses “dual power and British soviets” as “remote abstractions” (Capital and Class No59).

Dave Roberts, Leicester West, has Trotskyite antecedents too. However, though his ideological origins lie in Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party, he and his leader, Roy Bull, now froth and foam against Trotskyists and other revolutionaries - save Fisc, of course - in a manner worthy of Stalin’s abominable prosecutor, Vyshinsky.

Whereas Fisc maintains a completely secretive, cloak-and-dagger existence, Roberts, Bull and co continue to publish an A4 duplicated weekly, pompously titled Economic, Philosophical and Science Review. This little sheet specialises in a never-ending stream of venom against the Communist Party of Great Britain, lavishing praise on the ‘hermit kingdom’ of North Korea, blood-curdling support for the Tiananmen Square massacre and nauseating homophobic attacks on ‘unnatural and perverted’ sexual practices.

Harpal Brar, Ealing Southall, comes from an altogether different tradition: the Maoist milieu. Since the 1960s Brar has distinguished himself by a fanatical defence of the “immortal memory and work” of JV Stalin (Introduction JV Stalin: on the mechanics of class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat Hemel Hempstead 1973, p52). He and his Association of Communist Workers fought an internecine war with other Maoist fragments. No criticism of “Stalin’s alleged errors” from them was brooked. This “anti-revisionist” line was carried into the pages of the Indian Workers Association’s paper, Lalkar, when Brar was appointed editor.

Though the so-called Scargill ‘constitution’ specifically bans SLP members from being in, or supporting, other political organisations, with their own principles and publications, these McCarthyite provisions have thus far been applied very selectively: ie, to communists.

Let me stress that I am not suggesting an extension of the witch hunt. On the contrary such a denial of democracy in the SLP must be ended if it is to develop as a healthy mass workers’ party. Nevertheless the hypocrisy of our top leadership is as staggering as it is damaging. The Bullites freely circulate their EPSR; Brar and other members of the IWA openly sell Lalkar.

Scargill foolishly denies his ‘constitution’ is designed for a federal party. Despite that he contradictorily boasts to the media of applications from unnamed and mysterious trade union bodies. Scargill does not want to honestly admit this contradiction - that trade unions can affiliate but the CPGB, Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, etc, cannot.

Evidently, Scargill is intent on making the SLP into a bonapartist Labour Party mark II. A leader-dominated, social democratic formation with almost exactly the same anti-communist clauses and provisions notoriously introduced by Ramsay MacDonald in the mid-1920s.

The Labour right could always rely on the block votes of trade unions to ‘democratically’ witch hunt communists. Scargill, for the moment, lacks those forces. Hence he imposes a socalled ‘constitution’ with neither debate nor vote. Not content with voiding dozens of members and arbitrarily closing two constituency branches, he also cynically recruits and promotes viciously anti-communist elements.

The idea of a ‘great leader’ naturally appeals to these people. They will be enthusiastic voting fodder at the SLP’s 2nd Congress in October. As for a real purge, that is for them very heaven.

Should we call upon workers to vote for such candidates as Sikorski, Wongsam, Roberts and Brar? The answer must be yes. Not because we like them, but because we recognise what is positive in the party they are members of. I want to see the biggest possible vote for parties which represent a left break with Labour. Together the SLP, SP and the Scottish Socialist Alliance can, with unremitting struggle, be the beginnings of a real alternative to Labourism. Criticise reformist illusions, lack of democracy and double standards ... but vote.

SL Kenning