25.03.1999

Network of Socialist Alliances conference

No exclusion of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

Saturday’s conference of the Socialist Alliances in Birmingham must decide between an inclusive constitution for democratic socialist unity across the UK state, or rules to exclude comrades from Scotland, Wales (and Northern Ireland).

What’s in a name? There is nothing to choose, it seems to me, between ‘Network of Socialist Alliances’, proposed by the London Socialist Alliance and Nuneaton SA, and the alternative ‘Socialist Alliance’, put forward by Greater Manchester SA. Yet a stench of divisive English nationalism, however, emanates from the GMSA proposal in the ‘membership and subscriptions’ section to restrict membership of the Network to England.

The question of principle embodied in the LSA/CPGB proposal to include comrades in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is very straightforward. What stands in the way of the working class struggle for democracy and socialism is not just the capitalist class, but the capitalist state. The struggle of the international working class for socialism is a struggle to overthrow existing capitalist states, not their parts. The real, actually existing, states - not of our choosing - are the ones against which working class struggle must be orientated.

In our case, the enemy against which we must organise is the United Kingdom state and its New Labour government led by Tony Blair. The only effective way to fight it is for socialists to unite our forces across all parts of the UK. It is naive in the extreme to imagine this proposal offers some kind of support for the state.

Every major class struggle in Britain, from the Chartists to the 1926 General Strike, from the mass political strikes of the early 1970s to the 1984-85 miners’ Great Strike, demonstrates the historically established unity of the British working class. The dissolving of the strongest Socialist Alliances in Britain into the left nationalist Scottish Socialist Party was a breach of this unity, and a weakening of the class. Consolidating this Scottish nationalist division by excluding socialists not “living or working in England” from full and equal democratic participation in the fightback against Blair would mean shooting ourselves in the foot.

Comrades should support the LSA/CPGB motion to keep membership “open to all within the United Kingdom who agree to the rules and accept the objectives of the Network”. Support should also be given to Steve Freeman’s amendment to the Rugby interim agreement, which would also widen the Network to comrades in Scotland and Wales.

Of course, not all socialists in Scotland have joined the SSP. Some belong to the Socialist Workers Party, some to the Socialist Labour Party, to name but two. Our message to them, as well as the SSP itself, must be to unite all of our forces - despite differences, which we must continue to debate – against our common enemy, the UK state and its Blair government.

United we stand, divided we fall!

Ian Farrell