12.11.1998

Socialist Party in England and Wales: Extinction looms

The Socialist Party in England and Wales is in crisis - official. The statement reproduced below from dissident Mersey-siders summarily ejected from the SP with no right of appeal is a damning indictment of the regime of Peter Taaffe and his national committee majority. Comrades in the movement should treat with some contempt any subsequent SP leadership professions of ‘democratic unity’ (its pseudonym for its version of ‘democratic centralism’ ie, bureaucratic centralism) or claims to have always practised “full freedom of discussion, genuine, comradely and fraternal debate” in its ranks (Members Bulletin No16, March 1996).

So now, after Merseyside, where next? Taaffe and his faction seem set on a damage limitation exercise in the aftermath of the disastrous de facto Scottish split. For instance, it is not hard to predict that Llanelli SP branch will be next for the axe (see p3). Although Llanelli is not a major SP centre in Wales, its loss would represent another big blow to the morale of an organisation already reeling from the loss of Scotland and the ‘city that dared to fight’. It would leave an active SP presence in just two areas of Wales - Swansea and Cardiff, with attendance at Cardiff meetings in particular described as ‘skeletal’.

Even more potentially dramatic, the seventh world congress of the SP’s ‘international’ - the Committee for a Workers International - meets at the end of this month. The appeal of the Pakistani section, the Pakistani Labour Party, against its recent expulsion, will almost certainly be rejected. This could set in train a very unfortunate sequence of events which would effectively wreck the CWI, with rumours of a French section walkout already rife and the possible declaration of total Scottish separation from the Taaffe-led project, internationally as well as domestically.

Sources tell us that there has already been at least one meeting of some CWI international secretariat members with the dissident PLP and others to discuss the crisis. The talk was of pressuring Taaffe - not in the best of health - to retire on honourable medical grounds, although no particular enthusiasm was on display for his most obvious successor, Lynn Walsh. Thus, if the Pakistani appeal is rejected, Taaffe could be in for more trouble.

Inside the SP itself, no hard oppositional faction has yet cohered. But the Merseysiders and others still in the organisation are in contact informally: as one comrade put it, “quiet links are being made”. The problem for them remains a lack of clear political orientation. There is talk of work in the Socialist Alliances, of producing a magazine - but fighting for what programme? Certainly, the comrades could move to a loose network of SP dissenters (if Taaffe holds back from a full bloodletting) and external activists from the same broad tradition. They obviously have the resources to put something together. Merseyside has its own printshop, office, relatively substantial money reserves and 50 or so stalwarts with a well established political record. They also have the potential to take others out of comrade Taaffe’s organisation nationally - up to 100 cadre have expressed deep dissatisfaction, according to what we are told. If they go, it really would be the end of Taaffe’s “small mass party” pretensions.

Clearly, the Liverpool comrades did not expect to be excluded. Thus, it is perhaps not that surprising that they lack a perspective. The politics of the SP/CWI dissidents in general appear to be a pretty mixed bag, with the central unifying theme being distaste for the SP organisational regime. In the case of Merseyside in particular, this seems to have produced a reaction against the idea of ‘party’ altogether. This is clearly wrong. The logic of this sort of method leads down a slippery slope to dumping the idea of ‘socialism’ itself because of the negative experiences of Labourism in the west and ‘official communism’ in the USSR and Eastern Europe.

Taaffe’s survival strategy appears to be to sit tight, cull dissenters when they pop up, hold onto the Hepscott Road headquarters and wait for better times. Taaffe’s real problem, however, is politics. He has so far refused to address the central programmatic weakness tearing his organisation asunder. Until he or a new leadership does that, surely what remains will not become as politically disorientated, demoralised and resentful of the regime as SP/SML members have in Scotland or Liverpool.

Amid the dull routinism of its former Labourite environment Taaffeism could flourish - his entryist rivals in the shape of Tony Cliff and Gerry Healy having departed by the 1970s. But the harsh world outside Labour Party committee rooms is not conducive to those who are not genuinely revolutionary. Being neither ‘fish nor fowl’ comrade Taaffe’s revolutionary-reformism is ill-adapted to the environment. It is now facing extinction.

Mark Fischer