27.05.1999
Scargill’s Stalinist badge
Simon Harvey of the SLP
Harpal Brar's secret speech on SLP
At first sight it appears quite remarkable that Harpal Brar’s tiny band of supporters, grouped around the Stalin Society and the shadowy Association of Communist Workers, could rise to such positions of influence within the Socialist Labour Party.
Less than two years ago the SLP had over 2,000 members, several rival factions jockeying for position, and a sizeable minority layer of democrats and non-sectarian socialists. There was a glimmer of hope that our party had the potential to be transformed into some kind of vehicle for working class advance, despite the efforts of Arthur Scargill and his assorted courtiers to ‘void’ dissidents and stifle independent thought and membership self-activity.
But today there are no more than around 200 individuals on the books. Scargill’s dictatorial regime has succeeded in draining away every ounce of enthusiasm. One by one all the factions have either dropped out or been driven away, as they fell foul of the general secretary’s arbitrary and undemocratic moves to ensure his complete and undisputed control.
All factions bar one. Comrade Brar, editor of Lalkar, journal of the Indian Workers Association, has risen from obscurity to the point where he is now in effect Scargill’s number two. President Frank Cave is in ill health and has never been more than a tame figurehead. The vice-presidency is vacant and Brar - who has that mean and hungry look - is now virtually the only member of the national executive upon whom Scargill can rely. And not only for competence before the media, but for a degree of initiative.
Comrade Brar ably chaired the press launch of Socialist Labour’s campaign for the EU elections earlier this week. Clearly he has his own agenda. Five of the 10 candidates on the SLP’s London list are his supporters, and the Brarites dominate both the youth and women’s section (son Ranjit edits the youth journal Spark and daughter Joti edits Women for socialism).
This new relationship at the top was symbolised by a photograph published on the back page of the April-May edition of Socialist News, the official party paper. Taken by one of comrade Brar’s close followers from his Ealing and Southall branch, the picture shows Scargill and Brar engaged in close conversation on a picket of Downing Street in protest at the bombing of Yugoslavia. Brar is clutching copies of Lalkar to his chest, while just behind them his son Ranjeet, is seen nonchalantly leafing through another Brarite factional publication, Spark.
Brar’s meteoric rise has been possible only due to a refusal to utter a word of public criticism of Scargill, his residual Labourite prejudices and dictatorial appetite. All three publications under his control reek of dour Stalinism and an official optimism that flies flat in the face of reality. The SLP is portrayed as moving ever upwards under the wise guidance of the Great Leader - it is “growing exponentially”, according to an anonymous Spark contributor (No2, undated).
Yet comrade Brar did not at first embrace the SLP. Initially he roundly lambasted it for remaining trapped in social democracy. Soon, however, he began to sniff potential in terms of Association of Communist Workers entryism.
While not a word of criticism from Brar has been seen in his factional journals since he joined the SLP, a year ago he gave a lengthy speech at a seminar organised by the ultra-Stalinite Workers Party of Belgium, sister organisation of the ACW. On this unguarded occasion, he expounded his strategy and how those in the ACW “must do our best to help, to push, the SLP in a Marxist-Leninist direction”.
In his paper, ‘The emergence of the Socialist Labour Party and resistance in the British working class against the onslaughts of monopoly capitalism’, presented to the Brussels May Day gathering of Stalinists in 1998, he writes:
“For comrade Scargill to break with Labour and yet maintain illusions in social democracy - the politics of social democratism - as was only too evident from his Future strategy for the left - was to persist in errors which, if uncorrected, could not but do irreparable damage to the cause of the working class.”
He continued:
“When the chapter on Genesis (clause four in this case) was expunged from it, [Scargill’s] faith was broken and he could no longer stay a member of this church (the Labour Party). He broke away in revolt in order to re-establish the church in its pristine originality. He left to ‘start to build a Socialist Labour Party that represents the principles, values, hopes and dreams which gave birth nearly a century ago to what has, sadly, now [only now! - Brar] become New Labour’.”
Comrade Brar went on to slam the “political and ideological weaknesses of the SLP” and Scargill’s “reformist and Keynesian illusions of the worst type” - his “fatal flaw”. Nevertheless, despite what he called this “comradely critique”, Brar listed the reasons why he considered it necessary for the ACW to work inside the SLP. The final reason is most instructive:
“Last, but not least, unlike the revisionists and Trotskyists, the SLP honours and cherishes the great achievements of socialism in the 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 held out the hope that the SLP, through “the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (ie, the dictatorship by a British Stalin over the proletariat), would “lose its petty bourgeois hangers-on, but also become greatly more capable of serving the interests of the proletariat than at present”.
In fact, he concluded,
“Our decision to join the SLP, notwithstanding its weaknesses as outlined above, has been proven correct by the 2nd Congress of the SLP. Many of the noisy and fractious Trotskyist groups, who had joined the SLP with the purpose of hijacking it, suffered serious defeat at that congress. Their entryist plans in ruins, they left the SLP, shouting abuse at the ‘Stalinist’ Scargill. Their departure gave added strength to the SLP, cleansed as it was of the filthy scum whose constant endeavour is to sap the vitality and self-confidence of the working class; to keep working class struggle within the boundaries of the capitalist system by slandering the all-encompassing and earth-shattering achievements of socialism.”
As a result comrade Brar’s own “entryist plans” have come to fruition beyond his wildest dreams.
Balkans farce
Of the three SLP publications, Socialist News is the only one not yet under Brarite control. Consequently it retains its character as a strange mix of eclecticism and Scargillite official optimism.
One regular columnist has been Guardian journalist and well-meaning left liberal Victoria Brittain. She condemns Nato’s air war in the Balkans from a bourgeois-legalistic, pacifist viewpoint in the April-May edition. “Yugoslavia,” she writes, “is a sovereign state.” It “has done nothing aggressive outside its own boundaries”. The west’s attacks bypassed the UN and were not sanctioned in advance by any national parliament or US congress. They were doomed to failure because they “could not prevent the ethnic cleansing ... but would be likely to exacerbate it”.
Granted, comrade Brittain concedes, “Kosovo has been brutally emptied of its Albanian citizens”, but imperialism went about intervening all the wrong way, showing “no appreciation of Serbian history”. There should have been patient “negotiations on the future of Kosovo and its Albanian population ... under the aegis of the United Nations”. Comrade Brittain recommends that the “peace-keeping forces ... are made up of nations with neutral affiliations” - she comes up with “India, Egypt, Ireland, Norway, Ukraine” as suitable candidates.
And who does our liberal friend look to in order to end the conflict? The international working class? Hardly:
“It is not beyond the capacity of UN secretary general Kofi Annan, Russian prime minister [now ex] Yevgeni Primakov and the pope to devise a form of peace negotiations which would stop the bombing.”
In the May-June issue of Socialist News comrade Brittain is still complaining that the bombing “immeasurably worsened the plight of the Albanian population of Kosovo, accelerating [the] ethnic cleansing”. Yet an unsigned editorial goes further, bemoaning the “refugee crisis created by the bombing” (my emphasis). And on the facing page Dave Coates, one of the shrinking number of supporters of Roy Bull’s Economic and Philosophic Science Review still in the SLP, obscenely implies that the ethnic cleansing has all been in the opposite direction - by the KLA against the Serbs (see Michael Malkin’s article, p5).
So the SLP is against the bombing - but who are we for? Well, either Milosevic or the pope, depending on which page you have open at the time. Of course both Women For Socialism and Spark back the reactionary Yugoslav regime. For Spark the whole issue is black and white - it is simply a case of imperialist expansion: “Kosovo is the glittering prize for which Nato is fighting its dirty war” (No2, undated). Did it say “glittering prize”?
‘Our capitalists’
The latest Socialist News gloats immodestly over the SLP votes in the Scottish and Welsh elections. Darran Hickery claims to be “really delighted” at the one percent return in Wales, while the headline writer brags that “Socialist Labour tops ‘left’ vote in regional lists” in both elections. Chris Herriot, president of the SLP in Scotland, mentions that “token protests were made by a number of MSPs ... at having to swear an oath of loyalty to the queen”. The words ‘Tommy Sheridan’ and ‘Scottish Socialist Party’ fell to the editor’s red pen.
Frank Cave is already looking forward to yet more astounding successes in the EU elections in his front-page article. Stung by accusations of jingoism and little Englandism, Scargill has hit upon the idea of adding “into the world” to the SLP’s slogan of “vote us in to get us out”. This is how comrade Cave’s piece is presented. However, hopes that the reader will be offered an internationalist, working class perspective are soon dashed: “We want Britain free from the endless EU regulations that have strangled thousands of small enterprises (including farming and fishing) which we believe should be sustained in a planned economy.” He is arguing for good, old fashioned protectionism for ‘our’ capitalists, small and not so small - he mentions “shipbuilding, coal-mining and textile industries” that “the ‘Common Market’ has helped butcher”.
Calls for “fair trade” with the rest of the world ring hollow in view of this, and mentioning Cuba as a beneficiary does not do much to give this chauvinism a left gloss. To show he means business though, our Frank is pictured, somewhat incongruously, alongside Fidel Castro on a recent visit to Havana. Castro appears to be offering the SLP president a gift in a large shoe box.
On an inside page an anonymous writer asks: “If a country like Norway - not a member of the EU - can have one of the most prosperous economies in the world outside the EU, why not Britain?” ‘Socialist’ Cuba, capitalist Norway - take your choice.