01.05.1997

Democratic workers’ party needed

The local press in North West London has been paying close attention to Stan Keable and the SLP’s election campaign in Brent East. The Wembley Observer on April 24 carried an article with the cross-head, ‘The row over a leftwing candidate chosen to represent Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party’. Steve Cowan, an SLP member in Ealing, West London, was quoted as spokesperson for Arthur Scargill, saying:

“We particularly wish to disassociate ourselves from attacks in Keable’s literature against Ken Livingstone and from his statements about law and order ... We have no desire to launch an attack on any Labour MP.”

The article goes on to quote the only mention Brent East SLP’s election address makes of Livingstone:

“If Ken Livingstone would support a minimum socialist platform which takes care of the workers I would be willing to stand down and vote for him. But he is standing on Blair’s programme of attacks on the working class.”

Comrade Keable issued this reply to the Wembley Observer:

Dear Editor

I must repudiate the charge levelled against me in the Wembley Observer (‘Candidate row rumbles on’, April 24) that my election manifesto makes “personal attacks” against Ken Livingstone. It does not. Ken and I are on very good terms personally. Our differences are political.

Steven Cowan is a Socialist Labour Party member from Ealing, not Brent, who has left the Labour Party, but evidently not overcome his Labourism. He calls himself a “spokesperson for Arthur Scargill”, but he is not representing SLP policy with his grovelling viewpoint that “We are just a socialist party who do not like Blair.” No, Steve, old Labour was not OK, and the SLP nationally is not calling for a vote for New Labour anywhere.

Ken Livingstone tells me that our views are “very close”, but I say we are kilometres apart. He is a Labourite reformist; I am a communist revolutionary. He supports Blair’s tinkering with the undemocratic constitutional monarchy; I want British troops out of Ireland now, a united Ireland and a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales, including the right of each to secede. He wants British imperialism to cut its arms bill in its own competitive interests; I want to disarm it and overthrow it. He wants to increase council tax; I want to abolish it. He wants immigration controls; I want to smash them, so that no worker is illegal. He supports Labour; I say Labour is a bosses’ Trojan horse inside the workers’ movement and a new democratic workers’ party is needed. The SLP is a step in this direction.

Arthur Scargill has threatened legal action against the Brent returning officer and the Willesden and Brent Chronicle for asserting that I am a member of the Socialist Labour Party. Let him take me to court. The case would be thrown out.

My membership was not voided last year - as Lila Patel of the Stalin Society (yes, amazingly, there is such an organisation!) says. I have been an active SLP member since February 1996. When Arthur Scargill announced in the Moring Star of January 27 1997 that I was not a member, he did this off his own bat. There has been no charge to answer, let alone a hearing or right of appeal, and no National Executive Committee decision that I know of. This was expulsion by leader’s whim, announced by newspaper - and he has still not written to me about it. Since then the whole membership of Vauxhall Branch in South London has been voided, like quite a few members previously.

Arthur is an intransigent fighter for his class, but his bureaucratic method must be rejected. Real socialism cannot be bureaucratically imposed by a benevolent leader. We are fighting hack with a Campaign for Democracy in the SLP, which will meet nationally on Saturday June 14, aiming to make changes at the party’s second congress in October, opening the SLP to affiliation by the Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, CPGB and all socialist and communist groups. All socialists should join the SLP and join the fight for democracy within it.

Yours for socialism,

Stan Keable
Branch secretary and parliamentary candidate for Brent East.