Letters

Rough neck

I did not reply to Terry Watts (‘Clique politics’ Weekly Worker February 26) quite deliberately. It was not because his article was without merit. On the contrary, he made some valid points about the SLP left. But I was not prepared to be diverted from the main point at issue - the truth of the Stalinist-Yagoda-police-doorkeeper-Sikorski-Rock thesis, and of course John Bridge who lit the blue touchpaper and then retired.

I notice that Terry Watts is more polite. He only connects comrade Rock with Sikorski. Yagoda seems to have been dispatched to the dustbin of history. Better still if John puts the whole thing in the same bin.

My main point was that we are dealing with the policies of definite organisations and their leadership - the Democratic Platform, SLP Republicans, Marxist Bulletin, the ‘exit faction’ and supporters of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Colin Ansell accepts there is a difference between “legitimate exclusions” and “witch hunting exclusions” (Letters Weekly Worker March 19). He claims that I obscure the difference. On the contrary, it is Colin who does this. He simply deals with individuals and not policies. His evidence is all about Lee and whether he was rude, threatening, or accusatorial. Surely all doorkeepers are like that. It is part of the job specification.

Apparently Lee stated (“accused”) that Colin was a member/sympathiser of the CPGB. This does not tell us why he was excluded. Was it because he was a suspected member of the CPGB or because the ‘exit faction’ excluded all who were for staying in the SLP. This included the CPGB. If you are going on strike, it is reasonable to exclude those from the planning meeting who intend to go to work.

Colin was treated on the same basis as the SLP Republicans and the Marxist Bulletin. He was singled out only when he singled himself out by trying to stay in the ‘exit faction’ meeting. The fact that Colin and CPGB sympathisers were present and participated fully without restriction or objection in the first part of the meeting is consistent with this explanation.

Colin should tell us whether he was an ill-disciplined supporter of the CPGB “acting on his own behalf”, or whether he was carrying out the policy directives of the CPGB when he attempted to stay in the meeting.

The key question is the policy of the CPGB and the ‘exit faction’ on the day. Significantly both these organisations have kept totally silent. Colin ignores the key question of policy and focuses on an individual. Lee picked on me. Lee excluded me. Therefore he witch-hunted me. Whether this makes Lee the hunter or the hunted is open to question.

The CPGB (PCC) should now come out and state their policy and stop hiding behind John Bridge. Equally the ‘exit faction’, now called Socialist Perspectives, should state why they excluded comrades Colin, John and Stan. So far they have left Lee to take the flak on his own. They let him ‘hang out to dry’. If both these organisations continue to keep silent we will learn a lot.

Terry Watts is the only person who makes a real defence of the CPGB. He says the CPGB was ignorant of the planned agenda, which all other organisations and the vast majority of participants accepted as sensible. Presumably it was out of ignorance that the sympathizers of the CPGB tried to enter the ‘exit’ meeting or stay in it. Presumably it was out of the same ignorance that John wrote his “offending paragraph”.

Terry Watts may think this is all very “tiresome”. But there are important issues of principle here about how individuals and organisations behave.

Jan Berryman
London

Anti-party leadership

The Socialist Workers Party is possessed of a lamentable duality. It is the largest ‘Marxist-Leninist’-styled organisation in Britain. Its publications attack the Labour government and the membership is mobilised against it - demonstrating at every suitable opportunity: war in the Gulf, tuition fees, benefit reforms, etc.

But at the same time, the SWP is Labour’s most unlikely advocate - calling for Labour votes in elections. True, back in May 1997 the SWP slogan was, ‘Vote Labour or socialist’. In reality, the ‘or socialist’ was added as an afterthought and after hundreds of ‘Vote Labour’ posters had been fly-posted around the country. There was no declaration of support for those politically close to the SWP. The SWP voted for its own enemy rather than act as an organisation of the militant working class which puts into practice an alternative completely independent from bourgeois parties.

For this they must be ashamed. Every benefit cut, every grant abolished and every warpath trod by New Labour carries the SWP vote of approval behind it. The ‘vanguard’ SWP deserted its post in May 1997 and is about to desert it again in this May’s local elections and the London referendum. If there is to be a socialist alternative, the SWP must break with Labourism by ending its electoral ceasefire.

Such a move would not be easy for the leadership - the change of line would upset the equilibrium. But, by not changing line the leadership is stoking up a powder keg under itself. You cannot run campaigns such as ‘stop the fees’ without a membership that positively dislikes New Labour. But then to call for a New Labour vote, means any credibility built on campus, workplace or community risks been thrown away.

Whatever the SWP chooses to do, it is in danger of shrinking if not breaking up into factions and going boom, Workers Revolutionary Party-style. To carry on voting Labour is to run the risk of losing thousands of members, in a conflict that has been brewing longer than the ones over organising methods, lack of programme, the Irish question, etc. Conversely, to change line would be to pick a fight with members who are semi-Labourite. Among those who believe the present line should be set in stone are some of the most prominent members - Paul Foot, for one.

It is possible that the SWP Central Committee could resolve the inherent contradiction in its politics. But I cannot see how. When it comes to this fundamental issue - deciding whose side the SWP is on in the class struggle - Tony Cliff is damned if he does, and damned if he does not. His sectarian project is entering an endgame scenario. The only solution is for a pro-party leadership of the SWP to join or open up to a process of rapprochement which has as its aim a reforged mass democratic centralist party.

The inadequacy of the SWP’s current approach to Labour is demonstrated by its approach to the recent Gulf crisis. The spontaneous economistic and pacifistic outlook of the SWP stands in complete contrast to the Leninist programme. Two slogans stick in my mind: ‘Tell Blair: stop the war’ and ‘Welfare not warfare’

The first slogan is an appeal to Tony Blair via the working class. What makes the SWP think that the working class cannot stop a war by making class war against Blair and his New Labour government? Hence we see in the SWP leadership a lack of belief in the working class as a potential political alternative, a refusal to acknowledge it as a political class and a pathetic hanging onto the coat tails of New Labour.

Where the first slogan is tailist, the second is pure pacifism. To repeat. Revolutionaries are for class war.

This leads me to my final comment - to stress the importance of a party programme with which to guide strategy and tactics, and in particular as a rallying point for SWP dissidents like myself who want to save the SWP for communism.

GA Shanks
Manchester

All fake

Mary Ward, it seems to me, has a hell of a job (Weekly Worker March 5). On one hand showing why all the things suggested as making the Scottish people ‘a nation’ are fake, but then at the same time making out a case - without even the benefit of such things as the tartans and the pipes - as to why Britain, a collection of ruling classes, is actually ‘a nation’.

After all, ‘The Brits’ were the Celtic inhabitants of most of this island before the Saxons and ‘the English’ (the Angles) - through a genocidal war far worse than the Norman’s later did to them - left ‘the British’ clinging to Wales, Cornwall and various lumps of Northumbria and Cumbria.

Mary makes me hold my breath in anticipation of bold revelations, as she launches into unbridled, debunking attacks on ‘Scottishness’. Favourite up front is ‘the kilt’ of course. It is fake, it is English, it is an invention - so Scotland is fake, English and an invention by extension.

But actually what is the truth. The Scots - highlanders in this case - must have worn something. Did not the blokes wear a big blanket effort, called a plaidie, which was wrapped round the body and either hung as a dress, or was wrapped up between the legs tied with a belt. Was not this held in place by muckle big Celtic brooches and was not the cloth more often than not tartan? So where is the myth?

Later the British army, in a turn around, sought to capture the savage Scottish beast and put it at its own disposal, raised Scottish regiments with distinctive tartans - and, incidentally, inventing all the rules on correct kilt protocol, as Scottish clans tended not to have distinctively named tartans until around the same period when it became fashionable. Today, a rising Scottish people wish to identify with the varying visions of ‘Scotland’ and so wear the current version of the kilt. It is hardly “a myth” as such, is it?

I will not bore Mary with the history of Northumbria folk, except to say as a people we frequently have not identified with the notion of ‘Englishness’ let alone ‘Britishness’. I, for one, see far more invention in the notion of ‘the English’ than I do in ‘the Scottish’. Modern ‘Geordie’ (a misnomer) and Northumbrian youth identify with our long and warlike past by wearing the ‘broon ale blue star’ - or black and white football strip shouting, ‘Toon army’. But does that make our distinctiveness a myth?

When it comes down to it Scotland, or Geordieland for that matter, can be a nation if the people of that bit of land want to be, it needs no more no less than that. The same is true in reverse. You can tell us all were British, and more, that British is a nation. But if people do not identity with such a notion, reject such an identity, that is where the argument ends. By the way, four years after Culloden, the Newcastle poor and mining proletariat rose to declare James the true king of Northumbria. Bit late mind, but that was Charlie’s fault for marching down the opposite side of the country - could be that he would not have known what to do with an armed proletarian column in his ranks, so he gave them a body swerve.

Dave Douglass
Doncaster