WeeklyWorker

25.03.1999

Urgent appeal

Party notes

The Communist Party is now preparing a legal challenge to the outrageous ruling of the registrar of political parties to prohibit us from standing under our own name in elections. Instead, the Blair ‘franchise’ has been awarded to the so-called Communist Party of Britain, the dull Labourite split from the CPGB dating from 1988 (see Weekly Worker March 18).

‘Justice’ never comes cheap. The CPGB faces a bill of at least £15,000 if the challenge goes all the way to the High Court. We need the support of all readers and friends of the Weekly Worker to help us fight this anti-democratic exclusion. (Cheques, postal orders and cash are urgently required by Party centre.) We are already having to pay out thousands to get the legal ball rolling - money we had earmarked for other, political,purposes, not lining the pockets of a well heeled QC.

Apart from being a form of insidious authoritarianism, the case of the registrar is manifestly absurd and full of legal anomaly. We have been banned from standing under our own name because of the “confusion” this may cause a potential electorate. Yet this has not stopped the registrar, Mr John Holden of Companies House in Cardiff, allowing organisations like the Democratic Labour Party; no less than five organisations with the term ‘socialist’ in their title, one with ‘socialists’; the Liberal Party of Michael Meadowcroft, and the Pro-Euro Conservative Party.

There are three points to make about this “confusion” nonsense. The history of the left - of political organisations in general, in fact - is that of disputed claims to a common heritage. Thus the CPB, for example, poses that it is now “carrying on the finest traditions of the [CPGB]” (What we stand for CPB pamphlet, p3).

Yet for us - despite our common antecedents - it is manifestly absurd that an organisation which envisages socialism arriving “using mass struggle to transform parliament” (ibid p2) is carrying on the “finest traditions” of our Party, constituted in 1920 on the basis of “the soviet idea as against parliamentary democracy” and “the dictatorship of the proletariat” (J Klugmann History of the CPGB Vol 1, London 1968, p37). In other words there is a dispute, contested claims: there is “confusion”.

Second, the electorate should be treated like grown-ups. We would not entertain the idea for a moment that the CPB for example should be deregistered in favour of our organisation, despite our profound disagreements with its politics. We have no intention of competing in a ‘beauty contest’ for the title of ‘Communist Party’. Surely it is in the interests of both organisations that the difference between our parties is patiently explained to potential supporters in the electorate. The idea that the state should step in and resolve through administrative fiat what is essentially a political question is typical of the big brother paternalism of the whole Blairite project.

Third, there is the “moron in a hurry” argument.

In 1978, the publishers of the Morning Star - the Peoples Press Printing Society - challenged the launch of the ‘tits ‘n bums’ rag, the Daily Star. The PPPS suggested that the name of the new paper would be ‘confused’ with their own and would affect sales of its publication (I remember thinking at the time that it would probably push them up). This was rejected by the High Court. It was underlined that when examining any potential “confusion” it was important to look at the type of persons affected, to ascertain their “standard of literacy and education”. It was judged that “only a moron in a hurry would be misled” into confusing the Morning Star and the Daily Star (Morning Star Cooperative Society v Express Newspapers Ltd, 1979).

While we recognise that there is potential confusion between different organisations, the type of person who votes communist or socialist knows why they are doing it. Indeed, one could say such a group of people would be precisely characterised by their propensity to be less confused over the difference. A parallel could be drawn here with the Pro-Euro Conservative Party.

The potential voters for the PECP will be natural Tory voters who will - by definition - be far more likely than non-Tory voters to have followed the developments that have led to the PECP. Thus, a vote for it will almost cetainly be a conscious vote. Only those who do not normally vote Tory might be confused.

Thus, despite the similarity of the names, anyone who looks at the respective politics of the CPB and the CPGB and gets confused would certainly be “a moron in a hurry”. A very big hurry, I would suggest.

This is a question not simply for the CPGB and Peter Taaffe’s Socialist Party (also banned). It is important for the entire left and all democratic opinion. Who knows what splits, realignments and fusions life will throw up in the future? Why should a faceless ‘jobsworth’ in Companies House decide what a mass split from the Labour Party be allowed to call itself? Why should an ‘apolitical’ representative of the state rule on the affairs of the opposition to the government?

We call on readers and supporters to stand up for the rights of working class organisations to define themselves as they see fit, without the interference of Blair’s stooges.

Mark Fischer
national organiser