18.12.1997

From witch hunt to block vote

Dave Craig of the Revolutionary Democratic Group (faction of the SWP) believes that the SLP left has no cause for despair

The SLP is knackered but not yet dead. That is the message that comes over from SLP congress last weekend. On Sunday Arthur Scargill was trying through his most persuasive oratory to revive party spirits. We need to be more down to earth in explaining why the party is in such a bad state of health.

The first problem is the Blair honeymoon. After May there was huge sense of relief and tidal wave of popularity for New Labour. Now following the Grand Prix smoking scandal, the attack on lone parents and the Geoffrey Robinson fiddling with his tax haven, the mood has started to change. We have seen the first parliamentary rebellion by over 40 Labour MPs.

There are still no mass rebellions, protests or strikes against this capitalist government. New struggles would still find the SLP, despite its obvious weaknesses, well placed to grow. But at present the SLP is like a beached whale. An anti-Blair tide has not yet come in to refloat the party and lead it out into deeper waters. The SLP is high and dry. Its membership is contracting or locked into tiny branches, which are impotent and demoralising. It is not a pretty sight.

The second problem is internal faction fighting. Internal political struggles are natural and inevitable for any party seeking to lead an advanced class. Such battles generate huge energy. Harnessing this energy is what gives a party its strength and vitality to face the future. Whether this process has a positive or negative effect on a party depends on how it is handled.

Internal differences have been dealt with in a negative way. They have been suppressed. This creates an authoritarian internal regime, which flatters the cult of the personality. Opposition to this is inevitable. In its wake comes a very unhealthy situation of fear, suspicion, purge and even physical violence.

This downward spiral will lead to the party imploding. This negative approach has been taken by comrade Scargill. It expressed itself in the voiding of members. It expressed itself in the NEC statement banning members meeting to discuss party issues. It expressed itself in the refusal to accept the subs of some comrades who were behind in their payments. It expressed itself in some highly dubious decisions to rule motions out of order, especially the federal republic amendment from Liverpool Riverside CSLP.

The positive way to deal with differences of opinion is to encourage the open contest of ideas. The SLP needs new ideas and new perspectives in order to arm itself for the upturn in struggle. The present impasse is a golden opportunity for education and debate on matters of programme and tactics. It is the failure of the SLP to adopt the democratic methods of the working class, which has done so much damage and blunted the original high hopes of the militants who joined.

In last week’s Weekly Worker I identified four basic trends in the SLP. First came the right (Scargill supporters and the Stalinists) and the right-centre (ex-Fiscs). This bloc in alliance constitutes the broad right. Second we had the left-centre (republicans) and the ultra-lefts (Marxist Bulletin). This picture needs to be modified by the emergence of some independent democrats.

These comrades formed a united front with the Republicans, under the name of the Democratic Platform. Taken together, the republicans, independents and Marxist Bulletin constitute the broad left of the SLP.

The present situation is characterised by the division of the centre into hostile camps. With this split the party has no centre of gravity. Without a united centre, the party is polarised into broad right and broad left. The centre lacks a common programme and has instead been dominated by the rotten sectarian manoeuvrings and elitist politics of Fisc.

At the end of the first day, Arthur and his broad right chums were looking pretty glum. First came the exposure of the block vote of 3,000 which Scargill had in his back pocket. This guaranteed his victory by a large margin. This was not meant to come out in the open. Yet it did. It was now crystal clear to party rank and file. There was no real democracy in the SLP.

Soon the block vote was used to end the party’s black section. This split the broad right in two. The right-centre walked to the microphone to tender their resignations from leadership elections. This now opened up the whole question of the future direction and nature of the party.

The block vote was one of the most corrupt practices of old Labour, which enabled a few trade union bureaucrats to wield excessive influence. By using it, the SLP right secured their expected victory. What was unexpected was the loss of moral authority in the eyes of many more delegates. Even a loyal Scargill supporter like Terry Dunn was reported to be unhappy about its use.

Instead of winning a decisive victory over the broad left, Scargill won an empty and hollow one. Instead of the broad left being trounced, it gained in moral stature. The struggle for party democracy was now meaningful for all but the most rabid Stalinists.

The next day a damage-limitation exercise brought the Fiscites back into the broad right alliance. The right-centre were now fully exposed. First they had walked out. Then they explained that this was not a sudden move, but the outcome of an ongoing inner struggle. They had not bothered to tell the SLP rank and file about this. Their elitist methods and prima donna behaviour was on full display. So was their bureaucratic behind-the-scenes manoeuvring. They are despised by the right and hated by the left.

On Sunday we saw the attempt to revive the witch hunt in motions 47 and 49 from the Bullites (Economic and Philosophic Science Review) in Leicester East and Bristol East. The first of these motions identified the major threat to the SLP as, not the Tories or New Labour, but the CPGB and Workers Power. These organisations are full of dangerous communists and subversives. Then there was the ‘enemy within’ the SLP who must be purged. Unnamed members “sympathised” with the dangerous organisations.

This was a factional motion in the worst sense of the word. It was about one faction trying to purge its rivals, using the good name of the party. It was a call to start an all out civil war inside the SLP. Naturally the speakers were at pains to tell us that good people had nothing to fear and they would not be interrogated by the Stalinist Thought Police about their sympathies and impure thoughts.

The NEC didn’t support this. Neither did they oppose it. They simply asked Roy Bull to remit, which he duly obliged. Scargill has used the Bullites like the state uses the fascists - they may be good for beating up lefties, but you have to keep them under control. Let the mad dogs off the leash occasionally, then tie them up.

Still, who needs such methods when you have 3,000 bloc votes? We can discern possible moves to a different modus operandi. There were comments from Scargill and other platform speakers which pointed a different way. For example Scargill told congress that there were various platforms and slates urging delegates to vote for different candidates. Comrade Scargill might have condemned these slates and threatened to deal with those who circulated them. Instead he declared that the NEC would circulate its own slate. Good.

Then he acknowledged that there were trends and shades of difference in the party and that this was only to be expected. They were even calls from the platform for a lower level of barracking for enemy speakers. Possibly we are now in transition to a new regime. The old regime would not tolerate dissent. Now we may find that open debate and differences are tolerated, safe in the security of 3,000 block votes. The proof of this pudding will be in the New Year.

But if this transition is not made immediately and clearly signposted, further losses of membership are inevitable.

Events confounded the doom and gloom merchants amongst some sections of the left. Some were saying even before congress that the ‘party is over’ and that we will get a sound hammering, etc. The only issue is which party to join next. Yes, the expected defeats were handed out to the left. Yet what happened has created a different picture. It was a good congress for the broad left (left-centre and ultra-left), as it was a bad congress for the broad right (right and right-centre).

Despite appearances to the contrary the battle for democracy is slowly being won. It is being won as a result of the dogged determination of rank and file SLP democrats to openly publish their views. We mention here the Marxist Bulletin, the SLP Republicans and the Democratic Platform, who published openly their platforms and bulletins. Despite the voidings and exclusions through late payment of subs, and the banning of the Campaign for a Democratic SLP, SLP democrats had fought on against all the odds. Taken overall, the broad left had a creditable congress.

We can also praise the Weekly Worker, which, despite being outside the SLP, has kept up constant exposure of various shenanigans. It has kept both SLP members and the rest of the left more fully informed. Increasingly the left are seeing the Weekly Worker as an ally rather than a rival, or something that would undermine them for the sake of a good story line.

The broad left became more united and more confident than I’ve observed before. It is the kind of feeling you get from taking a principled stand against all odds. There was a solid block of votes for left candidates, and the emergence of the 3,000 block votes gave the minority vote for the broad left (left-centre and ultra-lefts) much greater significance.

I spoke with one of the republicans (left-centre) after the congress. They had formed a joint slate with the independent lefts under the banner of the Democratic Platform. Because of the sectarian politics of the ultra-lefts, it had been impossible to form a joint slate with them. (See Weekly Worker December 11 for correspondence between the SLP Republicans and Marxist Bulletin). Nevertheless he felt progress had been made and thought that the leadership would not be able to avoid the republican question for much longer.

The independent lefts (Swindon, etc) have proved themselves to be stalwart fighters for democracy in the SLP. The problem is that they have no perspective or programme as far as we can tell. They have not consciously thought out whether they are part of the left-centre or ultra-left. A single-issue campaign is very limited. It is likely to lead to demoralisation. It is not surprising that we have heard the biggest cries for abandoning ship and ‘doing an Ian Driver’. That would be a great shame just when real progress is being made.

We never had real democracy under the witch hunt. What will it be like under the block vote? Obviously the same, but different. How different will depend, as always, on the class struggle inside and outside the SLP.