08.04.1999

Commission results

Party notes

The London Socialist Alliance-initiated commission of inquiry into the violent events on this year’s Bloody Sunday demonstration met on Saturday April 3. The body was convened after comrade Ian Donovan, the chair of LSA and ex-member of the Spartacist League/Britain, launched a violent assault on Eibhlin McDonald, a leading comrade of today’s SL/B with a common history alongside Ian in that organisation.

The concluding statement of the commission is still being finalised, but it is agreed that it will include:

• An unequivocal condemnation of Ian’s actions and a call that he issues an unambiguous repudiation of it to be reproduced in either Revolution and Truth - of which he is editor - or the Weekly Worker (see opposite). This is quite correct. Violence as a method of addressing political differences has no place in our ranks.
• A recommendation that the comrade does not hold public office in the workers’ movement for a period of not less than six months. Again, there can be no argument with this. It is a fair and reasonable sanction for a very wrong act.
• A recognition that comrade Donovan’s action was preceded by a long history of psychological abuse, harassment and a deeply painful passage through an SL/B regime that even the cult-like SL/United States characterised as being animated by “malign neglect” of its comrades (SL/US Towards revolutionary conjuncture 1987 conference document, p66). According to all the evidence presented to the commission, leading the pack in this ill-treatment was comrade McDonald, a charge that goes a long way to explaining the deep antipathy that comrade Donovan still feels for her despite the passage of time. Thus, having pronounced on Ian, the commission suggested similar action be taken against the SL/B by its international leadership. Given the panicked refusal of the SL/B to submit material or take any part in the commission’s proceedings however, the comrades only felt qualified to call on the International Communist League (the SL/B’s parent body) to establish an inquiry into the behaviour of its British section rather than clearly state what punitive action should be taken. Failure to do so by the ICL will surely be seen as condoning the SL/B’s foul, abusive behaviour.

I intend to comment at greater length on both the details of this episode and its general lessons in subsequent Weekly Workers. We will also reproduce large amounts of the evidence submitted to the commission. However, there are a few points to make immediately.

I believe that the commission conducted its business in a dignified and exemplary way. Whatever criticisms there are to be made of its conclusions, the fact that it took place at all is an important gain for our movement. This committee was palpably convened with no particular sectarian axe to grind. It thus carries a wider authority than any one of its constituent parts and is a living example of the type of general proletarian morality we need to consciously develop to self-regulate the affairs of the workers’ movement.

The flimsy allegation retailed by Workers Hammer (SL/B’s paper) that it was a cynically cobbled-together hanging jury for Spartacism is easily dismissed. Its composition was broad and - most tellingly - the decisions of the body can hardly be dubbed an ‘Ian Donovan whitewash’.

Yet despicably, both the SL/B and its estranged child, the International Bolshevik Tendency, claimed that the body could have no honourable purpose. As the IBT put it, “In circumstances where the facts of an incident are not in question ... it becomes a process of seeking an excuse or explanation for inadmissible violence” (IBT e-mail to commission, March 10). Likewise, the SL/B crudely characterise the Bloody Sunday clash as a simple “open-and-shut case of violent thuggery” (Workers Hammer March/April 1999). In other words, for their own reasons, neither one of these symbiotically entwined sects wanted the background to the assault to be investigated. This ‘string ’em up’ approach bears the same relationship to natural justice as do the ethics of a lynch mob. Surely it was correct from the point of view of simple humanity - as well as the wider interests of the workers’ movement - that the incident - so out of character for comrade Donovan - was set in context and thoroughly investigated. Despite our clear condemnation of the attack, there were clearly mitigating circumstances which explain this ‘moment of madness’.

So, the accusation should be thrown back with some contempt against the SL/B and IBT - these were the organisations engaged in a cover-up, not the LSA. Clearly, both felt extremely vulnerable to a dispassionate and thorough LSA investigation into the murky sect world they inhabit.

If anything, the commission should be criticised for the timidity of its conclusions relating to the SL/B. More than sufficient evidence was presented to it to be able to conclude that - whatever the subjective motivations of this woman, who surely joined the movement with the sincerest intention - Eibhlin McDonald has played an utterly despicable and inhuman role in relation to Ian Donovan, behaviour which the left as a whole should find offensive and intolerable. Based on this evidence, the commission should have had no hesitation in explicitly calling for the removal of McDonald from her positions in the SL/B.

After all, this would hardly be a new experience for the comrade. Evidence submitted - and not refuted by the SL/B, despite numerous invitations to do so - described Eibhlin McDonald’s removal from the SL/B leadership in the mid-1980s by an extraordinary executive decision of the international tendency’s leading figure, James Robertson. The reason - as the man himself put it in direct reference to the brutalising regime run by McDonald and one Len Meyers and its effects on Ian Donovan and others - was that

“ostensible Marxist-Leninists are not such if they run their organisations according to the ‘survival of the fittest’ ... people so abused or neglected either die, become disabled or drift away in disgust. This is an elementary moral question for communists” (November 1986).

In the near future, I will be looking in some detail at the evidence presented to the commission and some of the other elementary moral - and political - questions we need to absorb from it.

Mark Fischer
national organiser