11.06.1998

LSA controversy

The London Socialist Alliance general meeting on July 5 will surely be important for the whole project. Convened to discuss the way ahead for the LSA, there will be three main motions. I will give a brief comment here on each.

The Socialist Party has put forward a motion which contains dangers if adopted. Essentially it seeks to reduce the momentum of the LSA to a snail’s pace - calling for ad-hoc committee meetings to be held every two months instead of once a month. This, the motion asserts, will allow comrades to “concentrate on the borough alliances”. But the SP’s own experience demonstrates that this will not happen. Hillingdon Socialist Alliance, the only one in London led by the Socialist Party, did not meet for 18 months. As to resources, the SP only send one or two comrades to the ad-hoc committee. Rather than inventing spurious localist excuses in an effort to wind down the LSA, SP ought to give more commitment to the project. That would be very welcome, not least as we face up to the London Assembly and the European elections - the left has a real chance if we get our act together.

The second motion comes from Socialist Outlook, Socialist Democracy Group and Toby Abse. This seeks, among other things, to commit the LSA to green-left politics. But what are green-left politics? Do the comrades believe all green politics are progressive? While partisans of the working class have a clear interest in the environment, it does not mean that greens are our ‘natural allies’. Indeed many green arguments are avowedly anti-worker and neo-Malthusian - people are supposedly the problem.

One example is Chit Chong, the Green Party candidate against whom I stood in Hackney in the May 7 local election. He is a member of the police liaison committee and calls for the racist Stoke Newington police to be tougher on crime. He advocated an eclectic petty bourgeois, small business programme, which made not one mention of the working class. Not that this is surprising, given the anti-technology and reactionary nature of many green thinkers.

Nevertheless green groups and individuals who say they are socialist are welcome to affiliate to the LSA. We need to win leftwing elements to a comprehensive working class programme, which not only safeguards the environment, but puts people first.

The motion submitted by the CPGB tackles LSA organisation. Against the election of a Blair-style mayor for London SA it proposes flexible democracy, whereby affiliated boroughs and organisations have the right to appoint and recall their own delegates - it is they who should elect LSA officers. The CPGB motion also deals with local roots. It argues there is

“no contradiction between building and organising the Alliances in either a bottom-up or top-down manner. Borough SAs [should] have full autonomy to organise their own political campaigns and to implement LSA campaigns as they see fit.”

Indeed the launch of LSA itself has triggered the creation and resurgence of alliances throughout London. But building locally does not mean just being concerned with local problems - it does not mean becoming localist. The events in Indonesia, for example, concern all thinking people in London. Indeed Hackney SA has taken the initiative to hold a public meeting on Indonesia on June 30, which will be the first of many throughout London.

The question of representation on the National Liaison Group has still not been resolved. The LSA ad-hoc committee agreed to select myself as the London representative on March 23 and reconfirmed that decision, after it was disputed by national convenor John Nicholson, on April 21. I have still not been able to gain information about, let alone an invitation to, national meetings. I have written to comrade Nicholson, sent through copies of the minutes of meetings where the decision was made, and left messages on answering machines. Still no reply.

Therefore, despite the initial request of Dave Nellist of the Liaison Group for a representative from London, we are being blocked. London at the moment is surely the most important and active Socialist Alliance in England. We should - as a matter of basic democracy - be allowed to take part in the discussions leading up to the national conference in September. As it stands we are without a voice.

John Nicholson may not want me as the representative, but, in denying the decision of the committee, he is riding roughshod over all of us. I urge local alliances to adopt the motion below and send it to members of the National Liaison Group.

Anne Murphy