Letters

Compromise

The Scottish Socialist Alliance recall conference which voted last year to set up the Scottish Socialist Party passed a motion on internationalism, calling for the building of links with socialists across the UK, Europe and the rest of the world.

The European elections provide genuine international socialists with an opportunity to put this rhetoric to the test. Given that these elections will take place throughout the UK on the same day, it is nonsensical for socialists to stand on different slates north and south of the border. Let the eight million Londoners and five million Scots and, hopefully, others in the UK all benefit from a coordinated effort by socialists standing on an agreed platform. Let us agree to pool our financial and other resources. Let us all try to coordinate our efforts, not just across the UK, but with those French revolutionaries who stand the best chances of us all of actually getting a member elected.

This would entail a compromise for the SSP since they are, currently, opposed to standing under any other name. But a good case can be made for their doing this in the name of international solidarity rather than narrow nationalism.

Given that this would be to ask the SSP to make a concession to their international critics, I propose that something is offered in return. First of all, I want the SSP to affiliate to an all-UK Network of Socialist Alliances, and I want individual members of the SSP, such as myself, to be allowed, both by the SSP and by the self-appointed Network leadership, to be able to take out dual membership in anticipation of the SSP affiliating as a whole. However, I now think the best strategy for bringing this about is to get them enmeshed in joint, across-the-UK work in the European elections and demonstrating, in practice, that this is more fruitful than nationalistically dividing our forces.

However, in order to maximise the prospects of getting the SSP to agree to this, we need ourselves to be prepared to consider compromises. A recent System Three opinion poll, inevitably lauded by the SSP leadership, suggests that as many as 21% of voters are thinking of voting SSP, and that at least five percent (the very threshold of getting a candidate elected by the list system) were very likely to do so. In such circumstances, socialists outside the SSP would need to think very seriously before presenting an alternative list, one likely to rob socialists of any chance of getting anyone elected. Doing so would play into the hands of New Labour and the SNP. And it would strengthen the hands of sectarians in the SSP in the aftermath of the elections, sectarians who would like an excuse to cut off contact with all component parts of the United Socialists.

The price I think the United Socialists should be prepared to pay in order to guarantee that rank and file SSP members have access to the valuable experience of joint work in the European elections is one which, so far, the SSP’s critics in the CPGB and SWP have not been prepared to countenance. What I am proposing is that, for the elections to the Scottish parliament in four months time, the United Socialists reluctantly agree not to put up an alternative slate to the SSP. Socialists outside the SSP can and should bargain over this. The United Socialists should make clear that they are unhappy that SML went ahead and drafted its SSP constitution prior to bringing on board those socialist groups now involved in the United Socialists.

It should be made clear that in the aftermath of the Scottish parliamentary, local and European elections in a few months time, there will need to be renegotiations involving all those organisations previously excluded. Renegotiations would then take place in the light of our combined experience in all these elections.

Further, given that the SSP have pushed things through, including the selection of candidates, prior to getting any agreement with the other organisations involved in the United Socialists, some concessions will have to be made by the SSP.

Firstly, compromises will have to be given to allow the SWP, and others in the United Socialists, to be placed on the SSP lists. I would propose one token SWP member in Glasgow, and for the lists in other parts of Scotland to reflect the relative strengths of the SSP and component parts of the United Socialists.

Secondly, the terms for standing as a candidate would have to be relaxed. Instead of proposing an independent Socialist Scotland, which current SSP members could still do, candidates from groups not as yet involved in the SSP should merely have to agree to support Scottish self-determination, up to and including the right to secession, and to prove this by advocating a referendum on the subject.

Tom Delargy
Paisley SSP

The answer

Anne Murphy’s result in the Hackney by-election was disappointing. Standing as a Socialist Unity candidate with a much improved (since May) joint programme benefiting from the political realism of comrades from the SLP, SWP and the Socialist Party, her (two percent) vote was a disappointment for all those working towards a united left challenge.

The result contrasts sharply with the 100-plus votes (13%) gained by socialists in Lewisham during a by-election in December for Ian Page and the dissident SP branch. Socialists in Lewisham were able to halve the Green vote, not by labelling them pro-capitalist, but raising environmental issues from a socialist perspective and by years of local joint socialist activity in the borough.

What the result in Hackney suggests is that the programme and platform needs to go much further in relating to the life struggles of working people. Workers will only start voting for socialist candidates after a record of real local campaigning. Comrades in Hackney Socialist Alliance have only just embarked on this work. Those socialists in Hackney with a track record of local socialist campaigning, the Socialist Party, need to be in the forefront of this work.

The by-election in Hackney was always going to be a difficult battle for socialists. The principal protagonists, the Greens and Labour, were able to concentrate all their resources into the ward, maximising their vote, and our vote was squeezed. The surprise was not that Labour regained the seat, but that the Green vote held up, especially in light of the reasons for the vacancy. The level of support for the Green Party in the ward is therefore considerable and has been built up over many years of local campaigning.

This is the lesson the socialist left needs to draw. In the absence of mass political or industrial struggles we need to sink deep roots in the life of local communities. We need to support and initiate local struggles to defend jobs and services. It means not just living in the community, but becoming part of the daily struggles and experience of working people, as local services are slashed, libraries, welfare and legal advice centres are closed and jobs destroyed. It means becoming involved in not just campaigns to prevent the closure of local schools, but standing as parent-governors. It means helping to initiate and sustain local community, tenant and direct action groups campaigning around road safety, homes zones, council housing sell-offs, privatisation of old folks homes, police harassment and traffic-calming measures, and - yes - it does mean campaigning about uneven pavements that make it difficult for people with buggies and are hazardous for the elderly. It means campaigning to save the local swimming pool and indeed the local park from sale and development.

A recent report in the Financial Times suggests that Straw and Blair are supporting the idea of PR for local elections in the face of the embarrassing cronyism and corruption of Labour’s rotten boroughs and by way of throwing a bone to the Lib Dems. Already under first-past-the-post socialist rebels are breaching the castle walls in Glasgow, Doncaster, Hull and Coventry. Even a likely restricted form of PR in local government will form the building blocks for helping to build a workers’ party to the left of Labour.

Local campaigning is the answer. There are no short cuts.

Nick Long
Lewisham

Otherworldly

This is just a quick note for Don Hoskins (Weekly Worker January 21): unless you believe in the thoroughly idealist notion of an afterlife, then it is impossible that “Karl Popper ... has an avowed and open anti-communist agenda”. He is dead.

Unfortunately this is not the only example of Don’s ahistorical ‘otherworldliness’. When he praises Newtonian physics he does so with a voice that echoes to us from some no doubt deeply desired but nonetheless imagined past. The approximations contained in Newtonian physics may well be accurate enough to help Don catch the bus on his way to the local SLP branch meeting, but they are not (so far as we know) as accurate an approximation of the state of the universe as those offered by quantum theory - which is itself being challenged.

Comrades of the EPSR, welcome to the late 20th century.

Ray Hickman
Brighton

Esperanto

I read the article ‘Hurricane of persecutions’ (Weekly Worker January 21) with great interest. It is a long time since I have read material which hits the mark so well. Congratulations and thanks.

You are totally correct that the Soviet Society for International Friendship and Cultural Links (which indeed received instructions from the international department of the central committee of the CPSU) strongly opposed cooperation with the Communist Esperantist Collective (KEK) and even obstructed it: seemingly because of the fact that KEK did not completely subordinate itself to the politics of the Soviet Union, unlike the World Esperantist Peace Movement (MEM), which supported the USSR one hundred percent.

Boris Kolker
Moscow