Letters

Open debate

Mark Fischer’s report on the Socialist Forum ’98 in Glasgow last weekend (Weekly Worker April 23) failed to address some key issues which should interest your readers.

As everyone knows, compared to the SLP, the SSA is a model of democracy, openness and tolerance of different views. However, the proposals our membership is being presented with could, I believe, force us into copying the worst aspects of the SLP regime. And this at precisely the time when the tide is turning in England and Wales in favour of our, rather than Arthur Scargill’s, conception of organisation. We could be in danger of sleepwalking into disaster.

During the forum that addressed the question raised in Alan McCombes’ draft proposals for the creation of a Scottish Socialist Party, I quoted from the Paisley branch motion passed unanimously at last year’s SSA conference. It stated:

“Dual membership gives us the opportunity for constructive dialogue and fraternal debate. This allows us to clarify differences, putting them into perspective, possibly even overcoming some of the most serious. Dual membership is the only viable alternative to a permanent war of sectarian point-scoring and deliberate misinterpretation of what the other is arguing.”

If dual membership was the only alternative to a permanent war of sectarian bickering last year, what suddenly happened to justify its abolition? In reply, Nicky McKerrel, SML executive member, argued that the proposals on the table rule out neither dual membership nor the affiliation of external organisations such as the SWP. At this point I called on Alan Green to either endorse or reject what had just been said, because if Nicky’s reading of Alan McCombes’ draft is the right one, then most of my objections would fall by the wayside. Alan could however offer no help. He did not know whether or not he was proposing to abolish our dual membership constitution! This utter absence of clarity would make a nonsense of any vote we take on this issue.

In his report-back, Alan Green said that of the 10 members who spoke, only two were opposed to the proposal. The impression given of 80% support is absolutely meaningless. I made it clear that if Nicky McKerrel’s interpretation was accurate, I would not strongly object. Because neither our national secretary nor anyone else could provide an authoritative rebuttal, many of those who did not speak to oppose might have been stirred into doing so, had Nicky not tried to give reassurance that the proposals do not mean what I believe they mean. And one of those Alan Green counted as “broadly in favour of the proposals” explicitly stated he was in favour only of changing our name from SSA to SSP, but certainly not in favour of changing our existing structures. Alan McCombes has however categorically stated that, whatever it is he is proposing, it is far more radical than a mere change of name.

Those who have not made up their mind cannot do so until we democratically debate the consequences of the proposed changes. If they mean what the SP executive committee think they mean (and my reading is exactly the same as theirs), then die-hard supporters of the CWI are going to be witch hunted out of the SSA/SSP by ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ supporters of the CWI. The former will be forced, along with the SLP, the SWP and others, to split our potential vote. Before we reach that point though, our organisation will become infested with secret, as opposed to open, factions. We know from the experience of the SLP and the Labour Party before it, that this will give rise to paranoia, bitterness, kangaroo courts and purges. All this will have devastating consequences for us - not least electorally.

Voting in the absence of adequate information is democracy in name only. It would be a farce if the SSA voted at conference on such a life-and-death question when there is not a shred of clarity as to what we are supposed to be voting on. We certainly do not want a repeat of what happened at last year’s conference. The vote then against the CPGB-sponsored active boycott turns out to have comprised two fundamentally opposed groups. It was not until I got a phone call from Alan McCombes in response to a letter in the Weekly Worker that I discovered Alan and I voted for two entirely different motions. While I only discovered this months after the vote, Alan was aware of the divergence in our ideas before it. He has, in my opinion, acted contrary to the spirit of openness, which the dual-membership alliances were supposed to guarantee. As he knows perfectly well, my vote ought not to have been counted as a vote in favour of the SSA restricting its electoral programme to the narrow political patch Tony Blair is willing to surrender to us. I am also convinced that the overwhelming majority of those who voted against the active boycott would have substantially amended the motion, had they an inkling that it was going to be presented in the manner Alan McCombes is now presenting it.

If Alan really thinks conference voted to allow Tony Blair to censor our election manifesto, why did our national council issue leaflets months after the vote calling for the transfer of funds from warfare to welfare, a massive extension of public ownership and other measures ruled out by Blair? If Alan thinks we should become converts to constitutional cretinism, then he would surely want to distance himself from Tommy Sheridan for proposing an illegal deficit budget last year at Glasgow city council. Tommy Sheridan is surely being accused of hypocrisy for rejecting the legitimacy of the constitutional limitations of the council and for his support of illegal strikes and mass picketing to hamper the councillors doing their constitutional duty. The Poplar councillors and the Liverpool councilors are surely being denounced as ultra-lefts, as anarchists, for their decision to break the law, not the poor. The four Renfrew district councillors who were elected as Militant supporters (including the leader of the council, Hugh Henry) must have had right on their side when they voted to bring in the police to smash a joint Paisley SSA-CPB-CPS protest at the £10 million-cuts budget on March 6 last year. Our member who was arrested and taken away in handcuffs for not giving the police his name is surely being told by Alan that he only has himself to blame for engaging in a protest demanding the council sets an illegal budget.

The SSA should adopt a Leninist approach to all elections. We should use them to educate, agitate and organise. We should use them to organise our class and all oppressed groups within, and against, capitalist society. We should use them to promote the interests of our entire class, regardless of nationality or other sectional interest. Those who hold a different view should say so openly and honestly, so the implications of their arguments can be debated within the SSA and beyond.

PS:In the process of editing my previous letter (April 16) down to fit your letter’s page, the impression was given that I had become converted to the CPGB’s use of the term ‘national socialist’. I want to stress that this is not the case. I remain as opposed as ever to the use of it as a description of workers who do believe you can have socialism in one country. Furthermore, contrary to the impression given by Alan McCombes, I personally doubted that he has crossed the Rubicon from Trotskyism to Stalinism on this crucial question.

Tom Delargy
Paisley

Not worth it

I attended a meeting of the Lambeth Socialist Alliance on Sunday April 26. It was held mainly in order to discuss and promote the local election campaign. One of the speakers was Hugh Kerr MEP, who was recently expelled from the Labour Party because he thought it was worth standing up to Blair.

One interesting thing to note was a contribution by a member of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Whilst expressing his support in general for the SA project, he questioned the wisdom of standing left candidates against New Labour. After all, the comrade argued, the SAs can only stand a handful of candidates - and we all know that they will only get a few votes. He cited the example of the Socialist Party candidate in Uxbridge, who got a “terrible vote”. On the electoral plane, the SAs - at the moment - were on a “hiding to nothing”.

Perhaps more importantly for the AWL comrade, was the matter of his New Labour party card. “Is it worth getting expelled from the Labour Party in order stand in elections?” he asked semi-rhetorically.

Well, I have to inform the AWL comrade, yes it is. We need to build the left alternative to Blair now, not wait passively for the “massive struggles ahead”, as another AWL comrade put it. Nor should we wait for the RMT, or any other union for that matter, to come to our rescue and graciously decide to back a left candidate - another ‘strategy’ advocated by AWL comrades.

Marxists should base their analysis on a study of concrete reality - and upon the struggle for what is necessary. Unfortunately this method seems alien to many comrades on the left, doggedly waiting for real life to conform to their theories.

Danny Hammill
South London

Impressive

The coverage of recent events around the CPB/Morning Star have by themselves shown the Weekly Worker to be invaluable. I have also found your perceptiveness about how things would develop in the north of Ireland to be most impressive and particularly helpful.

Whilst, inevitably, there is much to disagree with within its pages, the Weekly Worker expounds some pretty fundamental aspects of the case for socialism, including, for example, the need for it to be global and that the working class must emancipate itself through its own efforts and understanding.

I am pleased therefore to enclose a donation for the fighting fund.

Andrew North
Kettering

Free Zoora Shah

The judgement in Zoora Shah’s appeal against conviction for murder is to be heard on Thursday 30 April 1998, at the High Court in the Strand, London.

In 1992, Zoora Shah killed Mohammed Azam following 12 years of physical and sexual abuse, and economic exploitation. She was convicted of a number of charges, including murder and attempted murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Zoora’s appealed against the convictions of murder and attempted murder in March 1998, on the grounds of diminished responsibility. This was the first time she was able to disclose her history of the sexual violence she had suffered, having been too ashamed and frightened to reveal this at her original trial.

Please show your support for Zoora by attending a demonstration outside the Court of Appeal in the Strand, London at 9.30am on April 30 1998.

Southall Black Sisters
West London