Letters

Tensions emerge

It has never been the attitude of the Weekly Worker to treat the actions and organisational alliances of revolutionaries and militants in our movement with indifference.

For example when already organised comrades join us we have always argued openly that in principle they should not resign from their previous groups or party but rather try to take our politics into those groups. This is not done as a sectarian stunt: precisely the opposite - it is the practice of the CPGB to treat revolutionaries seriously and attempt to win all sections of our class theoretically and in practice to our struggle to reforge the Communist Party of Great Britain.

In this context I must disagree with Socialist Labour Party columnist Simon Harvey in last week’s Weekly Worker. Comrade Harvey seems intent on the SLP bidding farewell to comrades from Socialist Labour Action.

In the post-election period this paper has documented well the sectarian antics of the Workers Power group, which SLA members declare “political sympathy” for.

Ever since the formation of the SLP it has been clear that WP has been at a loss as to how it should react to the formation of the SLP. As Mark Fischer described in the Weekly Worker (May 15), after the publication of Scargill’s draft constitution, the group first wrote off the SLP as a sectarian, parliamentary dead end. Then when its resonance began to show, WP swung right around to give it support - throughout its zigzags of line changes it never got involved in the SLP.

Then in October it wrote: “To all those in the SLP who read this paper, listen to our arguments, respect our record in the class struggle and our ideas: we appeal to you to fight for these ideas within the SLP. We will offer you every support in the fight for a revolutionary SLP” (Workers Power October 1996). Soon after, comrades in the SLP began publishing a journal called Socialist Labour Action, whose political origins in WP were clear.

Later, WP was again to write off the SLP. The opportunist nature of WP’s orientation to the SLP was quite turgidly exposed around the general election. Taking its historically cretinous electoral approach to the extreme, it refused to support any socialist candidates, including SLP candidates, except one - the SLP’s Terry Bums in Cardiff Central. This sectarianism was arguably more logical than its previous approach of only backing socialist candidates when it thought they might get a big vote.

Rather than trying to encourage and politically influence militants who had come together to form the SLP in a reaction against New Labour and its complete bankruptcy for the working class, WP preferred to shout at it from the sidelines because it was not born with WP’s particular world view. It was then safe to carry on voting Labour, in line with the spontaneous actions of a majority of the electorate.

After the election WP did not attempt to conceal its glee at the election of Labour, proclaiming, “Blair’s victory is our victory” (Workers Power May 1997). The task of forging the working class into a political class with its own organisation, independent of the suffocating influence of Labour, is totally beyond the grasp of WP.

But WP’s sectarian manoeuvring went further in this election. Whilst voting New Labour in every other constituency, it supported Terry Burns in Cardiff Central. This paper interviewed Terry Burns (see Weekly Worker May 8). Clearly I have no reason to object to the man - his politics seem quite principled - though I have disagreements over some of Cardiff SLP’s tactics in the general election and Terry’s rejection of democratic centralism. Nevertheless essentially Terry Burns and Cardiff SLP have been principled in arguing for democracy in the SLP and, to one degree or another, revolutionary politics (I do not know the precise views of all members of the branch).

In the run-up to the election WP made great play of the fact that Bums was standing on a revolutionary manifesto and that is why it was able to support this comrade but no other socialist candidate, including the SLP’s candidate in Brent East, Stan Keable, who distributed an openly revolutionary manifesto to every voter in the constituency. On the other hand Terry Burns made it clear in the interview that he was standing on the SLP’s national manifesto, which was distributed to each household. The only ‘revolutionary manifesto’ was a platform agreed by the branch members and was sold during the campaign - about 150 copies, the branch secretary, Peter Ashely, tells us.

So why did WP support only Terry Burns? Why not Stan Keable? Why not other SLP candidates standing on the same manifesto as Terry Burns - Arthur Scargill for one? These questions have never been answered. Indeed the post-election issue of Workers Power continues the curious fable that Burns was standing on a revolutionary manifesto. At the moment I can only assume that it is simply the most petty and narrow opportunism and sectarianism, with WP hoping to gain influence in this one particular branch of the SLP.

So Socialist Labour Action is in a curious position. It has argued, unlike WP, that people should vote for all SLP candidates: as members of the party they can hardly do otherwise. In an attempt to square this position with that of WP however, it has argued that where the SLP is not standing people should vote Labour - not an official position in the SLP, nor a useful one in the context of New Labour and the tentative emergence of a working class opposition to it.

The politics and practice of WP puts those in the SLP who say they sympathise with it in a very difficult position therefore. It is in these circumstances that the comrades can be engaged in debate and organisation amongst revolutionaries in the SLP, attempting precisely to overcome the history of sectarianism in our movement still exemplified by WP and so many other organisations.

Surely then Simon Harvey does a great disservice, not only to members of SLA, but to the whole campaign for democracy in the SLP, as well as the longer term aims of fusing revolutionaries and the class as a whole into one party.

Comrade Harvey quotes Kirstie Paton, an SLA member who was interviewed in Workers Power, declaring the group openly in political sympathy with WP. Given that WP campaigned against the SLP in the election, SLP members are naturally concerned and in certain branches are attempting to remove these comrades from areas of responsibility. However, Harvey ends: “Frankly, SLA is on a splitting trajectory to serve the interests of Workers Power, not the class as a whole. It can only be damaging to the campaign for democracy in the SLP. If SLA want to join Workers Power, I say good luck to them. I urge you to do so now.”

This approach to the SLA surely cannot help to overcome the sectarianism of WP. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish’ is hardly a tactic to win over comrades that are quite winnable for communist organisation. These are no Royston Bulls. They are genuine revolutionaries attached in one way or another to a small and frightened sect. The very fact that they are members of the SLP begins to take them away from that path to the path of mass politics.

Clearly the formation of the SLP has created tensions amongst all organisations on the left. Comrades who have left WP to join the SLP, as well as comrades in WP, are not alone. We have noticed the differing reactions to the SLP and New Labour amongst the most substantial leftwing organisations and the adjustments these groups have made to try and orientate themselves to the new political surroundings. These hold out great opportunities for the left as well as dangers. We could see organisations fragmenting under the weight of sectarian opportunism. Where tensions are evidenced we should positively engage in them, as with the SLA comrades, rather than simply ‘waving them goodbye’.

Incidentally often these tensions will be over “tactical nuances”, as with the discussion at the Manchester democracy meeting on whether an SLP publication should be ‘open’ or ‘for openness’. When Simon Harvey says: “Of course there is no suggestion that issues of security or this or that tactical nuance be revealed,” I take it he is not suggesting that such tactical nuances should not be discussed in full public view.

Linda Addison
London

SSA platform

The assertion of Jack Conrad in the Weekly Worker (May 8) - “Significantly those who stood on principle and advocated communist politics openly before the electorate were not punished. The CPGB’s Mary Ward, fighting Dundee West for the Scottish Socialist Alliance, got nearly twice the vote of the SML comrade in next-door Dundee East” - does not explain the actual circumstances of the Scottish Socialist Alliance’s election results in Dundee.

In Dundee West over the last four years Scottish Militant Labour have built up a tradition of campaigning and contesting local elections in the housing schemes of Ardler and Kirkton three times, receiving between 25% and 35% of the vote. We contested the two seats in Kirkton in 1995, receiving around nine percent of the vote.

There is more of a tradition for voting for socialist candidates in Dundee West, at least in local elections, than Dundee East. This explains the general election results in Dundee much more than whether the candidates in the election were from the CPGB or SML, when both Mary Ward and Harvey Duke stood on the platform of the SSA

Jim McFarlane
Dundee SML

Popular front

The three-year campaign to save Edgware General Hospital, one of the main hospitals in north west London, from Tory government closure has ended in ignominious failure despite a 59,000-signature petition and an over 18% swing against large Tory majorities in Harrow East and four Hendon and Barnet constituencies.

The closure of Edgware was announced last week to the new local Labour MPs by the New Labour minister of health, Alan Milburn. From July 1 1997 it will lose its status as a local teaching hospital, treating acute patients with one of the best post-graduate centres in the UK, and will become a cottage hospital treating mainly elderly and mentally-ill patients.

Former patients will generally be sent to Barnet hospital, a 20 to 25-minute car ride for most Harrow East and Hendon North residents.

On December 30 last year my wife was operated on for a broken hip replacement after a midnight trip from Edgware casualty to the orthopaedic section of Barnet hospital. Two days later, as the local press reported, the ambulances were queuing up in the snow and ice of the orthopaedic forecourt with accident patients from the former catchment area of Edgware.

The popular front-type ‘Hands off our hospital’ campaign, which trawled in all the local Tory, Lib-Dem and Labour Party rightwing MPs, councillors and sundry clerics, was masterminded by the chairman of the Hendon North branch of the Democratic Left party, actively supported by several Labour Party leftists, former ‘official communists’ and former Militant Labour activists.

The whole enterprise was based on the presupposition that Edgware could be saved by putting some modest pressure on the local Tory MPs and, in the run-up to the elections, on prospective New Labour MPs. The campaign was also given supportive coverage in the monthly journal of the Alliance for Workers Liberty and Labour Left Briefing’s front, ‘The Welfare State Network’. I personally and a few Workers Revolutionary Party activists in Hendon North on the other hand proposed a more trade union-orientated campaign.

After the closure was announced, John Redwood, the rightist contender for the Tory Party leadership, accused New Labour of betraying the NHS. I personally predict that all the former Tories, SDPers and the new New Labour yuppies who gave the 18% swing to the New Labour MP for Harrow East, Tony McNulty, will in the next election or by-election be voting for the supporters of this Tory rightist.

Alf Packter
Middlesex