WeeklyWorker

10.12.1998

End of the road?

Dave Craig of the Revolutionary Democratic Group examines the state of the SLP

The election of Royston Bull as vice-president of the SLP raises serious questions about the future of the party. For many SLP members, such as London election agent Tony Goss, this was the last straw. The SLP is now facing an internal crisis that could prove to be final.

Raging Bull is a hellfire and brimstone preacher, who edits the Economic and Philosophic Science Review, the bulletin of a small sect called the International Leninist Workers Party. He is an anti-communist witch hunter and homophobe. He used to be the unacceptable face of Stockport SLP. But now, thanks to the backing of Arthur Scargill, he has become the unacceptable face of the whole party.

Let us consider Bull’s attitude not only to gay members of the SLP, but to any member who opposes him. It was Bull who organised the conspiracy to have comrade John Pearson expelled from the SLP. John’s only crime was that he stood in the way of Bull’s total control of the Stockport branch. The vice-president stitched up John, lied about him and acted in a completely unprincipled and undemocratic way to remove him from membership. Of course he would not have got away with this except for the fact that Arthur Scargill had shamefully backed Bull up.

At the 1997 annual congress Bull and his gang were the most rabid witch hunters who sought to stoke up an anti-communist purge with two motions from Leicester East and Bristol East. The first of these motions identified the major threat to the SLP not as the Tories and New Labour, but as the CPGB and Workers Power. These organisations were full of dangerous communists and subversives. The Bullites pointed to the “enemy within”. Unnamed members were accused of “sympathising” with these dangerous organisations.

This was a factional motion in the worst sense of the word. It was about one faction trying to oust 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 Bullite speakers were at pains to tell congress that good people had nothing to fear and they would not be interrogated by the Stalinist thought police about their sympathies and impure thoughts. Of course the NEC did not support this. Neither did they oppose it. They simply asked Roy Bull to remit, and he duly obliged.

Bull’s attitude to communists in the SLP who do not fall into line with him is mirrored by his attitude to gay members of the SLP. Bull has his own hang-ups about homosexuality. He is never one to miss the chance of telling everybody about how he feels on the subject. The Ron Davies affair is the latest opportunity for SLP vice-president to do his bit of investigative journalism. Bull is soon searching round the men’s toilets for evidence of wrong-doing. Having staked out “the men’s bogs all the way from Wales to Clapham Common” and hung around “the bogs behind the Windmill pub”, the vice-president was able to report in the Economic and Philosophic Science Review (November 3) that Ron Davies had been seen there on many occasions. According to the vice-president, Ron “does very little in his spare time except cruise the men’s bogs” where he engaged in “unrestrained homosexual foraging”.

The vice-president feels very sorry for Davies. He sees him as a “sad victim” who was “brutally humiliated” by the need to protect the Labour government from the scandal-mongering Murdoch press. Bull explains that “being homosexual cannot help but constantly be recorded as an aberration. It is always an abnormality.” This, asserts the vice-president, “has nothing to do with homophobia, but with biological reality and with the obvious clinical/social frustrations and deviations which give rise to and result from the homosexual condition”. This condition, says Bull, is “equally clearly not remediable, no matter how enlightened social attitudes become”.

Bull’s view of homosexuality is that of a liberal, not a communist militant. He is in favour of “homosexual tolerance and understanding”. Beneath this ‘tolerant’ view is reactionary prejudice. He lines up behind a notorious reactionary, saying: “Tebbitt’s comment, implying the emergence of secret homosexual mafias in many key institutions, is almost certainly true.”

What the vice-president of the SLP hates most is the struggle for gay rights and gay liberation. It is the “gay rights lobby” that has caused the problem. There would be no place for Peter Tatchell in the SLP. The gay rights lobby refuse “to accept the clinical description of how homosexual orientation arises out of inadequate parenting in the crucial emotional formative years and especially up to the age of five”. They adopt a political stance in which “compensating aggressiveness is substituted instead, which insists that being abnormal is perfectly normal or even as good as or even better than being straight”. Still Bull finds comfort in the fact that not all homosexuals are militant. He says that “many reject this militant irrationalism, and prefer to stay in the closet to actually deal more tolerantly with their own sadness”.

Bull’s opinions on these matters are reactionary-liberal and nothing to do with socialism and communism. All sexuality under capitalism is the product of bourgeois morality - and the needs of the ruling class to control the masses, including their sexuality. All sexuality is distorted, dehumanised, alienated by this system of exploitation. The question is politicised and revolves around relations of power. Communism will liberate humanity, including our sexual, as well as material and cultural, side. The struggle for communism is the struggle against capitalism, including the fight for sexual liberation. The struggle for gay liberation is part and parcel of that struggle.

Not according to Bull. It is not capitalism that is the problem. Homosexuality is a problem of biology from which there is no escape. His vision of communism was made in the USSR circa 1954. It will presumably be more tolerant of gay “abnormality”, but the vice-president and his mates, in charge of a new KGB, will still be outside the “bogs” keeping an eye on things.

Of course Bull is not the central problem. It is Scargill. But the election of Bull shows the mess into which Scargill has landed himself. The whole working class movement is in a sorry state, and that includes the SLP. But it is how you get out of it that is the key to the future. The whole socialist movement can see that Scargill is handling it like a petty dictator, surrounded by a bunch of sycophantic yes-men.

In the Weekly Worker (December 18 1997) I pointed to two main problems facing the SLP: “The first problem is the Blair honeymoon … 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 republican 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.”

Whether the battle of ideas within the SLP is productive or destructive depends on the politics of the rival factions. Shortly after the 1997 congress I wrote an analysis of the contending factions in the 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” (Weekly Worker December 18 1997).

The SLP centre was occupied by those who see the SLP as potentially some kind of communist-Labour party or party of recomposition. I identified some ex-SWP members and the ex-Fiscs holding this position. The ex-Fiscs look to a model like the Italian Rifondazioni. Those in the SLP centre who called for a communist-Labour party, I wrote, pointed out that it “must necessarily have a democratic internal regime. A party with a mixed ideological component could not possibly work without democratic methods and procedures. Hence there is a democratic imperative in the politics of the centre” (Weekly Worker December 11 1997). For opportunistic reasons, the ex-Fiscs seem to have ignored this fact.

I argued: “The present situation is characterised by the division of the centre into hostile camps. With this split the party has no centre of gravity. The centre lacks a common programme and has instead been dominated by the rotten sectarian manoeuvrings and the elitist politics of Fisc” (December 18 1997).

The SLP centre was divided over the witch hunt. The Fiscs supported Scargill’s attacks on the SLP left. The republicans saw this as anti-democratic and opposed it. The Fiscs blocked with Scargill, Harpal Brar and Roy Bull. The republicans formed a united democratic front with the independent lefts, Marxist Bulletin and supporters of the Weekly Worker.

Things have changed since then. Virtually the entire Trotskyist left has exited after the 1997 congress. Many left the party. The Socialist Perspectives group, led by Martin Wicks and Lee Rock, went in one direction. The Marxist Bulletin turned from the Cinderella of the SLP lefts into the pumpkin of the International Bolshevik Tendency. They are now trying to get the CPGB to eat Trotskyist pumpkin pie (I notice that none of this delicious dish is being offered to the RDG).

The witch hunt divided the SLP left and right and split the centre. The witch hunt came to an end at the 1997 congress. We left the regime of the witch hunt to enter the regime of the block vote. I wrote: “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” (Weekly Worker December 18 1997).

The block vote protected Scargill, Brar, Bull and Fisc. Everybody else was excluded by it. Now it has been wielded against Fisc. They have now become shocked and outraged ‘democrats’. The Fisc have now become the main opposition. Yet still their sectarian methods of plotting continue. Not long ago they organised a meeting of ‘democrats’ in Conway Hall prior to the 1998 congress. This was history repeating itself as farce. On the previous occasion - a meeting organised by the Campaign for a Democratic SLP - Terry Dunn was outside alongside the EPSR’s Adrian Greenman taking the names of anybody who attended. Now things are different. When supporters of the SLP Republicans turned up to Fisc’s meeting, their names were not put on any official list. They were simply barred.

Heron and co get up a petition calling for a special congress. Naturally it does not contain any of the republicans. Perhaps the covering letter read: ‘Dear Arthur, we, your most loyal members, humbly beg you to accede to our demands for a special congress. Please note this petition only has on it your most loyal supporters and not any of that other horrible lot that you hate and we helped you witch hunt.’ Of course Arthur was totally contemptuous of this type of crawling sectarian politics.

He wrote back the same kind of letter that he sent to members of the now defunct Democratic Platform. Did you sign this and why? Please reply immediately, etc. Many comrades were shocked and offended. It was OK Arthur writing that kind of offensive letter to that other horrible lot, but not us. We are loyal democrats.

This has been typical of the problems. Fisc have pursued a sectarian political method in which they were prepared to align themselves not on the basis of agreed policies but on expediency. It was previously expedient for them to align themselves with Scargill and Bull, and against democratic methods. Now they have lost out and Bull has taken Sikorski’s seat as vice-president, it is expedient for them to discover that Bull is a homophobe and how important democracy within the party has suddenly become.

What is now to be done? Very soon it will be all over for the SLP. The SLP is degenerating into a Stalinist sect. The only way to fight this is by forming a united front and openly challenging Scargill. Given the current crisis, we need a united front of all democratic forces in the SLP.

Our demands should be: