18.09.1997
China, Scargill and ‘Don Hoskins’
Simon Harvey of the SLP
Last week I reported on Don Hoskins’ article in Socialist News (September/October)concerning his particular views on the nature of the Chinese state and his opinion that the violence in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 were “brutal violence against the Chinese state ... under the fraudulent disguise of a ‘democracy movement’”. I pointed out that his views seemed remarkably similar to those of the rabid Economic and Philosophic Science Review - written/edited by Stockport SLP member Royston Bull.
Unlike some other members of the SLP, I am not lucky enough to be sent unsolicited copies of Bull’s wonderfully misnamed journal. However, I recently spoke to other SLP comrades in receipt of this homophobic rag which is given full sanction by the SLP’s leadership.
Interestingly enough, they tell me that Don Hoskins is in fact a pen name of Royston Bull. The last time Bull used the name was in the lead article on November 5 1996 (EPSR 878). Another name Bull uses in EPSR, Joe Harper, has also turned up in the by-line of an article in Socialist News (Issue 7, August 1997). Bull used this name in EPSR 870 (September 10 1996) and875 (October 15 1996). Bull and others in his horrible little group have had an airing in the last three issues of Socialist News.
As I said last week, this SLP member is entitled to hold whatever views he likes. There is no reason why they should not find a place in our paper, as long as other SLP comrades have equal right to openly contest such views. Views which I and, I am sure, many other SLP members consider to be fundamentally against the interests of our class. The SLP has no agreed position on China, let alone the nature of the violence in Beijing and other Chinese cities in 1989. Nevertheless, my feeling is that Bull’s article in all likelihood represents the view of the NEC majority. I doubt if it is shared by the Fiscite minority though.
This fear was reinforced when I heard of how Scargill responded to questions at a recent meeting for the Plasnewydd council by-election which the SLP’s Terry Burns is contesting in Cardiff. In reply to a question about the USSR and eastern European ‘socialism’, Scargill responded that it all started going wrong with Khrushchev (see ‘Khrushchev’s fault’, letters, page 2).
As a trade union leader, Scargill was never called upon to give his full world view as much as he must now as a party politician. As time goes by, his politics are coming more and more into the open - through such public statements and, indirectly, through the views he allows to be published in the party press. A quick look at the names in the acknowledgements for Socialist News over all eight issues will show that, where there were once people from a variety of SLP factions and tendencies, there remain today only unquestioning Scargillites.
Don Hoskins’ (sic) statement that the Chinese bureaucracy is ‘cleverly’ using capitalist production methods towards socialist ends seems even more ridiculous after this week’s 15th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. It is clear from president Jiang Zemin’s speech that the Chinese leadership is about to unleash a wave of privatisations which will make Thatcher look wildly leftist by comparison. Symbolically, China will also soon play host to the IMF and World Bank in ‘liberated’ Hong Kong.
It seems to me that the 15th Congress signals, not the takeover of Hong Kong by ‘red’ China, but the takeover of bureaucratic China by dynamically capitalist Hong Kong.
My fear is that, unless full rights to debate such clearly contentious issues are openly demanded, Socialist News will remain the dull mouthpiece of just one faction in the SLP. Just how ‘Trotskyists’ like Pat Sikorski and Brian Heron must be feeling selling such views, I can only imagine.
Scotland
I have heard that ‘Trotskyist’ was used to describe the CPGB at the Scottish SLP conference held at the end of June. This was contained in the NEC report given by party treasurer Paul Hardman. The irony of this is that ‘Trotskyist’ Brian Heron was originally meant to attend the conference on behalf of the NEC.
From all reports, the main content of the NEC intervention centred on the ‘dangers’ of the CPGB and the Weekly Worker. According to Hardman, the CPGB was out to wreck the SLP. They had been ‘looked into’ and it was known they were funded by a ‘Turkish splinter group’.
That the NEC report concentrated on the CPGB, whose main Scottish activity seems to me to take place in the Scottish Socialist Alliance, confounded almost all of the 20 or so members in attendance.
The SLP has a very low profile in Scottish politics. Despite having RMT union official John Milligan on board along with OILC leader Ronnie McDonald, membership remains low and relatively elderly. Many SLP members in Scotland have sympathies with the Morning Star, particularly in the Ayrshire branch.
It is no surprise therefore that two left motions at the June conference - one in favour of the right of factions and tendencies, the other against the party’s European policy - were defeated. Nevertheless, even John Milligan, who voted against the right of factions, was of the opinion that Scargill has handled the expulsions badly.
Our acting general secretary will be in Scotland next week. He will be speaking at a public meeting in Glasgow with OILC leader Ronnie McDonald and Ayrshire SLP member Louise McDaid at 7.30pm on Thursday September 25, at the Partick Burgh Hall. The meeting is titled ‘Unshackle the unions’.