03.07.1997

Socialist Labour’s Blairites

John Stone of the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International and former member of the League for a Revolutionary Communist International condemns the sectarian methods of SLA

The recent conference of the Campaign for a Democratic SLP overwhelmingly voted in favour of censuring comrades in the SLP who produce the journal Socialist Labour Action for fingering comrades on the SLP left. The journal put in jeopardy the future of some comrades inside the SLP.

The only people who voted against the resolution were the few SLA comrades attending. It is time for the SLA to rethink their position.

• It is the second time that a left SLP meeting has censured the SLA for this pro-witch hunt attitude.
• The Vauxhall branch adopted a resolution criticising its secretary for publicly supporting a group which campaigned against the branch’s candidate in the general election. Nobody supported her.
• The SLA has not recruited one single person to its faction. No SLP member wants to support a faction that openly identifies with a group which campaigned for a bourgeois old Conservative Blairite against Scargill and against nearly all SLP candidates.
• The SLA refuses to open up its faction to SLP members who are not pro-Workers Power. Even some ex-WP members are not allowed to join the SLA. If you want to be in that faction you have to be an open supporter of a group which advocates the destruction of the SLP and is against voting for it.
• The only SLP candidate which the SLA unconditionally supported (Terry Burns) was in favour of the SLP official manifesto, is against a democratic-centralist party and against the right of WP to be inside the SLP; he is against voting Labour and in favour of voting for the SLP and Socialist Party; he shares most of the SP’s positions. His ‘revolutionary programme’ does not mention the dictatorship of the proletariat or a workers’ international, but has two pages of Scargill quotations. Burns openly attacked WP and voted to censure SLA at the CDSLP conference.
• The SLA is trying to build a faction which openly rejects the bureaucratic SLP statutes and leadership. However, members of the group in the past completely supported the bureaucratic way in which the left opposition was purged from the League for a Revolutionary Communist International.

The SLA is not only alienating rank and file SLP members, but also all the opposition democrats inside the SLP. They are acting as provocateurs and informers.

If the SLA want to work inside a party, they should be consistent and leave the SLP and join Labour, which they supported electorally. If they want to carry out work inside the SLP they should adopt a less sectarian attitude.

With these attitudes the pro-LRCI people are discrediting themselves inside and outside the SLP.

The SLA must change its positions. It should stop helping the witch hunters and fingering dissidents. It should not help the leadership to expel the left. It should attempt to create united fronts with the left.