17.12.1998

Scargill holds fire

Simon Harvey of the SLP

As I predicted last week, the December 12 national executive committee meeting drew back from attempting any immediate disciplinary action against Scargill’s former courtiers - Pat Sikorski, Brian Heron and Carolyn Sikorski of the Fourth International Supporters Caucus.

Comrades Heron and Carolyn Sikorski were, alongside Terry Dunn and Helen Drummond, the initiators of the ‘Appeal for a special congress’, which demanded a full, two-day gathering, allowing branches and affiliates the right to propose motions and amendments. By contrast the November 14 one-day event in Manchester was a rally-cum-election count. Of course now Scargill deviously claims that, although his constitution provides for the calling of a special congress “upon request by 25% of the membership”, an appeal for such a congress is “not covered by our constitution” (Socialist News December-January). Presumably one quarter of all members must quite spontaneously issue a simultaneous call before the “request” can be considered.

But the proposal for a half-way democratic special congress was not the only reason to cause Scargill’s displeasure with Fisc. Following Pat Sikorski’s ousting from the SLP’s vice-presidency by Royston Bull, the editor of the Economic and Philosophic Science Review, Fisc finally noticed the seemingly unacceptable homophobic contents of the EPSR and conveniently decided that, if the party was to be saved, Bull must be removed at all costs. Comrade Heron, the president of Socialist Labour’s London regional committee (LRC), won it to a crude tactic of bureaucratic blackmail. Unless Scargill took action to override the Manchester congress, using whatever disciplinary means he saw fit, then London would go on strike, refusing to contest next year’s European elections.

Clearly the tactic is doomed to failure. Scargill can simply disband the LRC and put in his own appointees. Or - not for the first time - he can impose his own candidates on London and run a Euro campaign from Barnsley. NEC member Harpal Brar and his supporters - not to mention the two or three EPSR Londoners - will be more than willing to front it. The London membership is down to around 40 active comrades at most and so, with or without Fisc and their allies, the London SLP is hardly in a position to come up with the cash, let alone mount a vigorous election contest. Scargill will have to find a way of subsidising it in any case.

But for the moment the SLP general secretary is biding his time. Not wanting to further alienate prominent NEC comrades like Bob Crow, Joe Marino and John Hendy, he is prepared to build up a case against the Fiscites before moving against them. After all, they are well known throughout the party and have been associated with Scargill’s project from the beginning. And Carolyn Sikorski has just been re-elected onto the NEC. He cannot just void their membership and keep quiet about it, as he did in the anti-communist witch hunt. Therefore Fisc is to be “investigated”.

Socialist News

Perhaps it is Scargill’s need to prepare the ground against Fisc that accounts for the hint of internal polemic in the latest edition of Socialist News. Normally the sight of comrades taking issue with the views of other party members is not considered the done thing. Following in the bad/good old traditions of the left, the SLP leadership believes that disputes about the nature of the working class party is no business of the working class. The illusion of near unanimity is always encouraged.

But in the December-January edition Scargill decides that the best way to begin his anti-Fisc campaign (without naming the Fiscites) is to condemn their action. He writes: “It would be foolish - dangerous - to pretend that in attempting to build what we know will become a mass working class party we don’t encounter serious disagreements amongst ourselves. We have a responsibility to deal with these disagreements in an honest and comradely way, learning from each other as we go along.” What could be more reasonable than that?

Comrade Scargill continues:

“However, it is essential that disagreements on policy or organisation issues be dealt with in accordance with the constitution, and it is a matter of concern that some individual comrades have been circulating what has been described as an ‘Appeal’, calling for a two-day conference, an ‘appeal’ not covered by our constitution. More important, all the issues raised by these individual comrades could have been submitted by CSLPs or affiliated trade unions, and, provided there was support as stipulated by clause VI (2) of our constitution, then that clause which provides for a special congress could have been invoked.”

In other words, “individual comrades” are not allowed to come together “to deal with these disagreements in an honest and comradely way”. Nor can they even ask the leadership to provide a forum for discussion. Such bureaucratic double-speak to justify the banning of genuine debate had previously been reserved for the left. Fisc and their fellow centrists are now most perturbed that the same methods are being used against loyal comrades like themselves.

But the admission of internal differences is not restricted to Scargill’s article. There is even a ‘polemical’ insert into president Frank Cave’s otherwise bland front page report on the November 14 Manchester congress, which, he says, was “crammed full of excellent and inspiring contributions”. In this tiny article, which aims to portray our party as moving ever onwards - bigger, better and more united - an out-of-place sentence in parentheses has been added, Scargill-style: “Of all the day’s speakers, only four suggested the possibility of an electoral pact or an alliance with other left parties - a proposal which the SLP has vigorously opposed since its inception.”

One of the four was of course leading Fiscite Pat Sikorski, who normally graces the pages of Socialist News with at least one article of his own. But for the first time issue 15 of the paper does not contain a single Fisc contribution.

As if to rub in Scargill’s victory over his former courtiers and their replacement by a new bunch of sycophants, this edition carries four articles from the EPSR gang. Bull himself rambles on about how wonderfully cooperative working class communities will be under socialism, while it falls to his partner, Jane Douglas, to fill Carolyn Sikorski’s role as author of the usual mundane piece on the women’s question. But nothing could be further from comrade Sikorski’s feminist approach than that of Douglas, the president of the newly formed North-West region: “If women want equality with men,” she writes, “and more support with the domestic division of labour, then let’s make sure men get to political meetings where there is a chance of raising real socialist awareness and advance.” It looks as though the women’s section might have even less time left than the SLP itself.

Two other EPSR supporters have articles. Dave Coates bemoans the fact that “the Communist Party of the Soviet Union lacked the vigilance and ability to identify and deal with ongoing enemies of the revolution”. He points to the degeneracy that has affected all societies as a result of the USSR’s collapse and adds: “On the whole, of course, capitalism is interested in maintaining a high level of drug and alcohol abuse ...” Giles Barralet Shorter mounts an uncritical defence of Serbia, referring to its “hard-won ‘workers’ state’ traditions”. He condemns the KLA “secessionists” and places scornful quotation marks around the “Kosovo Liberation Army”.

The right to self-determination, women’s equality, gay rights, the legalisation of drugs - in short every democratic demand that workers could use to undermine the capitalist state - are all contemptuously dismissed as a diversion from the EPSR’s vision of Great Leader ‘socialism’.

Dream on, Brian

Despite the marginalisation of Fisc, as evidenced by the latest Socialist News, and comrade Heron’s own conviction that he faces expulsion from our party, the London president continues to act as though the SLP is god’s gift to the working class and no opposition to its wise leadership can be tolerated (unless, of course, he is organising it). He has written to Hackney SLP, haughtily demanding that the comrades call off two meetings.

The first, on the future of the party, to which other SLP comrades were invited, is condemned because “you want to provide your own internal platform in the London organisation”; the second, a debate with the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, is slammed by Heron for lending credibility to the “toy Bolshevism” of groups like the AWL.

He writes:

“By and large such formations are already discredited in eyes of the people who have electorally supported the SLP up to now. The SLP has a base in wider society much larger than any of the far left formations, put together. This is because the SLP stands deliberately as a mass party ...”

As political life outside the Scargill-Bull “mass party” SLP is so unattractive for comrade Heron, one wonders what he will do if he really is expelled. Rumour has it that the Fisc tops are already considering the come-on from the Independent Labour Network of MEPs Ken Coates and Hugh Kerr.