Letters

Clarification

Just a note of clarification regarding the Bloody Sunday incident. As part of the provisional judgement of the Donovan Commission, the commissioners have asked me to restate my position. I can refer people to the statement that I put out immediately after the incident:

“To the Spartacist League - formal response from Ian Donovan:

“Dear comrades,

“You are entirely correct that violence within our movement has no role to play. I felt angry at the particular debate yesterday and for many events built up over years and I lost my cool and struck comrade McDonald above the eye, unfortunately drawing blood. My reasons for losing my temper with McDonald were more personal than political, but this was a serious mistake that cannot be condoned irrespective of its subjective motivations. I join you in condemning my own misguided action. This will not happen again - of this you can be assured.

“Yours for communism,

Ian Donovan.”

Any statements made since then that appear to detract from this statement are misformulated, and thereby give a wrong impression of my position. While I continue to hold the view that violations of the democratic rights and security of other leftist tendencies and individuals in the workers’ movement by the Spartacists, which happen frequently, should be stopped by the collective action of the left and workers’ movement, acts of individual violence are not admissible in this regard, and nothing I have subsequently posted should be interpreted in this way.

I shall be saying nothing more about this matter until the full conclusions of the commission of enquiry are published. I should say, however, that I have cooperated fully with the commission and I am not displeased with the provisional outcome. I shall not be pre-empting the publication of the full findings, which it is up to the commissioners to present to the workers’ movement.

Ian Donovan
London

Disingenuous

As hard as I try, I find it difficult to feel much sympathy for Militant’s present predicament, regarding its inability to register as the ‘Socialist Party’ for forthcoming elections (‘Fight Blairite ban!’ Weekly Worker March 18).

Peter Taaffe is crying foul play, and has written: “We would never set out to deliberately mimic the name of any other party, because we do not want to cause confusion where it can be avoided” (The Socialist March 12). This statement is totally at variance with the facts.

When Militant announced in 1997 that they were relaunching themselves  the Socialist Party (of Great Britain) contacted Militant, both nationally and locally, informing them that there already existed an organisation called the Socialist Party, and such a name change would only cause unnecessary confusion. From what I can gather, Militant did not have the decency to even reply to these letters. The best response they could come up with was Wally Kennedy (former Militant councillor) telling his local newspaper that Militant was going to call itself ‘Socialist Party’, whereas the SPGB called itself ‘the Socialist Party’. No confusion there then!

It should be pointed out that the whole business owed little to political principle (and even less to the much touted ‘red 90s’), and was more an attempt on their part to carve out a niche between the electoralist SLP and the semi-syndicalist SWP. This lack of principle explains why they have decided to play the ‘numbers game’ when staking a claim for the name ‘Socialist Party’. Taaffe, in the same article mentioned above, asserts that they are 10 times bigger than the SPGB, and yet in an article published in Socialist Democracy (February-March) John Bulaitis (a former member of Militant’s national committee) estimates Militant’s membership at below 400, and recent articles in the Weekly Worker have placed Militant’s numbers below 500. In either case, this means that Militant have a smaller membership than the SPGB.

Peter Taaffe makes great claim for their electoral work, but, if one studies their results in both national and local elections, you find that once you take into account the personal votes afforded to candidates such as Dave Nellist and Tommy Sheridan, it transpires that their vote is as derisory as the rest of the left.

The term ‘ban’ is overstated by Militant. Obviously they should be allowed to contest elections, but they are being disingenuous when they suggest that no confusion is meant when they use ‘Socialist Party’. Could I suggest that they adopt a back-up name like the CPGB have with ‘Weekly Worker’? The ‘State Capitalist Party’ comes to mind; it rolls nicely off the tongue, and it neatly encapsulates the politics that Militant have been espousing for the last 40 years.

Darren O’Neil
Hemel Hempstead

Scargillism

The letter from Delphi (Weekly Worker April 1) spreads confusion on the question of Scargill’s “leading class struggle role in post-war Britain”, supposedly having its continuing “considerable resonance” enhanced by SLP “socialist opposition to Europe”.

Political leadership is precisely where Scargillism has proved its utter worthlessness. Many flocked to, effectively, the NUM banner on its break at last with Labour, 10 years after the betrayal of the miners’ strike. Sadly only the nastiest bureaucratism and ‘anti-theory’ has been ‘independently’ established by the SLP, and the anti-state heroism of the picket line has not even tried to find a political leadership voice.

Without a single major political analysis article by Scargillites in two years, working class political re-education has been left stagnant - deliberately. Articles to Socialist News are rarely encouraged and always dumbed down; discussion and polemics are banned - even a letters column. Trade union journal-type activity reports dominate; the front page lead rarely conveys more than ‘Here we go’ or ‘Capitalism bad, socialism good’; and serious conflicts actually ravaging the SLP, the richest source of political education, do not even get reported, leaving the mass of membership completely in the dark - deliberately.

As a leader of heroic NUM determination and ability to defy capitalist state repression, Scargill could have become a great figure in the break from Labourism. But, by deliberately refusing to let the party’s political development go beyond his own demagogic limitations, bureaucratic ‘constitutionalism’ and anti-theory censorship, he has already become a reactionary, falling far behind the needs of the day.

Scargill’s Euro-election statement, his first published political analysis (such as it is) for two years, reeks of social chauvinism, and Delphi is in the same camp. To describe the EU as “the actual concrete form taken by imperialism in post-war Europe” is a ludicrously nationalistic, one-sided view. The American Marshall Plan/IMF/Nato Cold War domination, tail-ended by Britain, has been the main imperialist driving force overall. The EU became a ruling class challenge, started by six west European states, to that Anglo-Saxon domination.

To caress the notion of “British national sovereignty” while living under a monopoly capitalist ruling class, which is as much a part of the international imperialist system as anything, is social chauvinism. Scorn for EU membership is only not petty nationalism in the context of the revolutionary perspective for the overthrow of the entire imperialist system.

Scargill’s anti-EU electoral statement clearly places Britain still within a capitalist trade war environment, and his arbitrary declaration that “import controls are SLP policy” is in the same context - as the Welsh EU statement in the same copy of Socialist News makes clear, and as do other sections of Scargill’s statement.

At this rate of social chauvinist degeneration Scargill will not remain the British state establishment’s “most dangerous single ‘enemy within’” for much longer. SLP members will have a hard job holding back this ‘left’ petty nationalism.

Royston Bull
Former SLP vice president

Anti-EU

Will ordinary people in the south of Ireland listen to the anti-European message before it is too late? Will they wise up to see the likes of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Irish Labour Party for what they are: the political parties who have organised society to give people low wages, to facilitate politicians who cheat millions, who attack the basic dignity of the unemployed? Will ordinary people ever have the sense to see the need to reject these parties? - for it is the Bertie Aherns, John Brutons, Mary Harneys, Ruarí Quinns and Prionsias de Rossas of the world who have turned the south of Ireland into an elected dictatorship, at the behest of unprincipled multinational capitalism.

The moves to set up a nationwide series of welfare checkpoints have not occurred by accident, for the policy meets with the requirement imposed on the south of Ireland through membership of the EU to reduce state spending on social programmes. Furthermore similar social spending cutbacks are being instigated in the north by the Tony Blair-inspired ‘New’ Labour champions of ‘peace and prosperity’. Whatever became of the promised ‘peace dividend’? What proves ironic, however, is that, while mainstream political groups in Ireland such as the SDLP, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and others condemn the cutbacks, they demonstrate a clear hypocrisy by supporting the very reason why governments across Europe have worked to instigate cutbacks in the first place. This many have done primarily to meet the fiscal requirements in accordance with the conditions governing entry to the EU project as outlined in the Maastricht and Amsterdam treaties.

The Garda welfare checkpoints proposed by Fianna Fáil will be continued by each of the major political parties, once they have themselves achieved office. In a roundabout way exactly the same applies in the case of the SDLP and others in the north. People there should not be fooled when these parties express bogus concerns for the rights of the unemployed, disabled and other marginalised elements in society, while each express support for the politics of the EU.

Gerry Ruddy
IRSP