06.05.1999

Scargill fails

Claims to be the left alternative to Blair take a dent on May Day

Arthur Scargill’s hopes of seizing the space on the left of British politics were dealt a blow last weekend. At Saturday’s London May Day march he could only mobilise around 100 people to march behind the Reclaim Our Rights banner and about 40 amongst the ragged Socialist Labour Party contingent.

For over a year the SLP general secretary has been building up May 1 1999 as the day when 100,000 workers would flock to the call of ROR and the United Campaign to Repeal the Anti-Trade Union Laws. Scargill’s lieutenants, Bob Crow and John Hendy, have has been the main movers behind the campaign, and Scargill saw the London demonstration as a decisive moment. Socialist Labour would finally be put on the map. He could at last start to play out his destiny of leading a mass movement … as its labour dictator.

With the SLP now a husk, membership evaporated and party democracy reduced to the whim of one man, Scargill was banking on using May Day as a springboard. SLP membership exists as around 200 atomised individuals, just one tenth of what it was at its peak in 1996-7. If there had been a big turnout last Saturday with Arthur addressing thousands upon thousands from the Trafalgar Square podium, he could have disdainfully dismissed all talk of declining fortunes and pointed to an upturn in influence and a potential influx of new recruits (not least in the form of trade union affiliates to his ‘non-federal’ party).

Speaking just a week before May Day, SLP NEC member Bob Crow, assistant general secretary of the RMT union, told a London public meeting that 800 union branches, 200 union regions and 27 trades councils had affiliated to the United Campaign, of which he is the chair: “At the demonstration itself, a 40-piece brass band will accompany our banner, which will be held up by workers from Magnet, Hillingdon, Liverpool dockers, Sky Chef, etc” (Lalkar May-June).

Well, there was a brass band, and Magnet, Hillingdon and Sky Chef workers were certainly among the 5,000 demonstrators. However, they were not marching behind the United Campaign banner, but up ahead, along with sacked Critchley Labels workers and a dozen or so union branches, just behind the main banner of the official organisers. Here was the self-defining anti-Scargill majority - near 2,000 of them.

Instead of leading such militant workers, Scargill had to be content with following on behind. He walked alongside comrades Crow, SLP president Frank Cave and Vic Turner, the United Campaign president. Comrade Turner was one of the heroic Pentonville Five, jailed in 1972 under Heath’s Industrial Relations Act.

As for the Trafalgar Square rally, Scargill was not even allowed to speak. An alliance of leftwing trade union bureaucrats, Labour leftists and Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star) cadres saw to that. Far from organising and dominating the whole event himself under the auspices of the United Campaign, the best Scargill could do was to get comrades Crow and Hendy - another SLP NEC member, who is the UC secretary - to sit in as representatives on the May Day organising committee. Scargill and the UC were merely tolerated.

He was furious at this snub. The gaggle of SLP members present, who had been led to believe that May 1 would prove to be some kind of turning point - not only for Socialist Labour, but for working class combativity - showed their frustration. As dull speech followed dull speech, Scargill sent instructions for them to move with their banners in front of the barriers below the podium. Around two dozen SLPers chanted, “Scargill! Scargill!” in between the speakers’ contributions. They were not joined by any of the union contingents or groups of workers in struggle.

The rally chair, Anita Halpin of the CPB, used a combination of tactics to deal with the protests. For the most part ignoring them, she occasional made some reference to their ‘rudeness’ in interrupting guest speakers. Ten-minute speeches in Kurdish and Turkish were used to take the wind out of their sails, and when a representative from the Stephen Lawrence campaign came to the microphone she said: “Surely you’re going to be quiet now?”

Tony Benn made a concession to the SLPers when he referred to “the great miners’ strike under the brilliant leadership of Arthur Scargill”. But this only led to renewed chanting of the Great Leader’s name, causing Benn to remark: “Don’t shout at me, comrades. We’re on the same side.” Earlier he had deprecated the lack of unity in the workers’ movement, but, as he did not indicate how this should be overcome, Benn seemed to imply that those protesting must be part of the problem.

After Benn’s speech and more of the “Scargill!” refrain, a comrade from Colne Valley SLP leapt onto the podium and attempted to seize the microphone. He was all but hurled off the two-metre-high platform by union militant and budding heavy John Perry. Subsequently a steward came down to try and calm down the Scargill loyalists: “I’m sure Arthur would understand that this is a London event,” he told them. It was not up to people from outside to lay down who the speakers ought to be. Besides, both Bob Crow and John Hendy, as the United Campaign representatives on the organising committee, had participated in and been fully aware of its decisions.

Comrade Crow was actually an official speaker. But he mentioned neither the United Campaign nor the SLP. He certainly did not use the occasion to demand that Scargill be allowed to address the rally. Perhaps he felt mentally constrained because he was speaking as an RMT representative. Either way comrade Halpin used her position to blow the trumpet of the Morning Star: “Where would we be without it?” she asked in reply to a speaker’s rhetorical complaint that the mass media would surely ignore the May Day march.

The Socialist Labour protest was completely ineffective. Only those near the very front could hear their chants, which were in any case all but drowned out by the public address system. In addition the SLPers held their banners facing the platform, so that those in the Square itself had little idea who they were. Most people would have been unaware that any pro-Scargill protest was actually taking place. Scargill himself made no attempt to walk onto the podium. The stewards could hardly have meted out the same treatment to the NUM leader as to his minions.

Far from showing a growing, confident, viable left alternative, the SLP’s May Day intervention revealed that Scargill’s party has been reduced to a tiny rump of ineffectual and disorientated loyalists. The general secretary has increasingly had to turn to the ultra-Stalinites around NEC member Harpal Brar - five of the SLP’s 10 candidates on its London list for the EU elections are supporters of the Stalin Society and Brar’s shadowy Association of Communist Workers.

Yet, instead of pushing ahead with a united challenge at the June 10 EU elections against bomber Blair and the red-brown politics of Scargill, the economistic left has simply caved in. The Socialist Alliance crumbled, as the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party in England and Wales, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Independent Labour Network and Socialist Outlook all retreated in disarray, using the excuse that - surprise, surprise - Scargill was to head the SLP’s slate in London. They declared themselves to be not ‘viable’ even compared to the SLP.

The Socialist Alliance fights only in the West Midlands, through the efforts of Dave Nellist, who does not share the paralysing cowardice of the majority of his SPEW comrades. Julie Donovan, writing for SPEW in The Socialist, disingenuously tries to blame the collapse entirely on the SWP. Pathetically she promises that SPEW “is still prepared to play a leading part in ensuring there is a strong united left challenge in the London assembly and mayor election in 2001” (April 30). As if giving Scargill a free run on June 10 will weaken him and help unite the left.

Scargill himself still has the aura of a man who actually believes his own claims that he heads Britain’s “fourth biggest party”. Surely, allowing him the opportunity to win perhaps 200,000 votes (ie, less than one percent of the Euro poll), unopposed from the left, gives him the chance to do on June 10 what he could not do on May 1 - make himself undisputed leader of the left wing of the labour movement.     

Fortunately, after the collapse of the Socialist Alliance in London and the North West of England, there remains a left challenge. The Communist Party of Great Britain, though we have been banned from standing candidates under our own name, will be on the ballot paper in both regions as the ‘Weekly Worker’ list.

The manifesto of the ‘Weekly Worker’ will be based on an updated and adapted version of the Socialist Unity manifesto agreed for January’s North Defoe by-election by the CPGB, SWP, Hackney SLP and a Turkish community group.

We have always emphasised that we intend to stand on June 10 in spite of the possibility that our vote would be squeezed. We stand in order to establish an alternative in the minds of at least a section of the workers and youth. We will build on the impact the Socialist Alliance was having amongst some trade union militants before our allies so ingloriously fled.

The working class needs and deserves a revolutionary and democratic alternative to the three warmongering, pro-capitalist mainstream parties, and the would-be labour dictatorship of Arthur Scargill. Those who want such an alternative should politically and financially support our list.

Marcus Larsen
Secretary,
Socialist Alliance in London