27.05.1999

Brar revelation rocks Scargill

Socialist Labour Party general secretary Arthur Scargill was stunned into incoherence at the press launch of the party’s EU election campaign earlier this week.

A supporter of the ‘Weekly Worker’ slate of European candidates read out a statement from a paper delivered in May 1998 to the ultra-Stalinite Workers Party of Belgium by SLP national executive member Harpal Brar. It read: “The SLP honours and cherishes the great achievements of socialism in USSR. It refuses to denounce that legendary communist, Joseph Stalin. For that reason, deservedly in my view, comrade Scargill has been denounced by the counterrevolutionary Trots and revisionist liquidators as a dictatorial ‘Stalinist’ - a badge that I have told him he ought to wear with honour.”

Comrade Brar is an SLP national executive member and a candidate on the party’s London list for the June 10 elections - a position he shares with four other supporters of his Indian Workers Association-Stalin Society faction. It so happened that he was chairing the press launch.

The comrade from the ‘Weekly Worker’ (the name the Communist Party has been forced to adopt because of the ban imposed on the CPGB from standing under its own name by the registrar of political parties) asked Scargill whether this statement - taken from the WPB’s website - was an accurate reflection of the SLP viewpoint: “Does the SLP honour and cherish the achievements of Joseph Stalin?”

Avoiding a direct answer, Scargill rambled on in a most unconfidant and obfuscatory manner about how much you can misrepresent and falsify what is posted on the internet. He was not prepared to answer questions about what one of his candidates “supposedly” had said: “All the candidates agree on our platform on this election and this is the only thing that counts.”

The CPGB comrade asked if Brar would perhaps confirm that the remarks were accurately quoted, to which Scargill replied that he was the speaker, nobody else. “So you don’t deny this pro-Stalin viewpoint?” persisted our comrade. “I am not going to say anything on this.”

This was undoubtedly an embarrassing moment for the SLP general secretary, whose opportunism leads him to play to whatever audience he finds in front of him. Certainly journalists from the BBC, The Guardian, The Independent and others were more than a little interested in the company Scargill keeps. Of the dozen SLP members present, almost all were comrade Brar’s close Association of Communist Workers supporters from Ealing and Southall - the only London SLP branch still functioning.

Scargill was then asked by another CPGB supporter whether the SLP supported the right of Kosova to self-determination. Again avoiding the question, he spoke - at some length - only of his party’s condemnation of the Nato bombing. Pressed by the comrade, he then declared that the question was irrelevant, as Kosova was clearly part of Yugoslavia, whose sovereignty the west was violating.

Earlier Scargill had given a very long, boring speech on the theme of “pulling out” of the European Union (the “Common Market”, as he insisted on calling it). Membership of the EU costs “Britain’s taxpayers” £11million per day, or £4 billion per year, he said - a total of no less than £50 billion since “we” joined in 1973. This was enough for 200 new hospitals, 2,000 new schools ... And so he went on, churning out figure after figure.

The UK’s membership of the EU was apparently solely responsible for Britain’s mass unemployment, and leaving the EU would end it altogether.

Despite the boast of the SLP being the “only socialist party” contesting the EU elections which stood for “getting out”, and the usual mention of trading with Cuba, there was nothing which could be considered remotely Marxist about Scargill’s vision of national socialism.

Alan Fox