03.06.1999

National socialist farce

Simon Harvey of the SLP

I see the press conference to launch Socialist Labour’s EU election campaign did not quite get the coverage that Arthur Scargill was hoping for. Not considered ‘newsworthy’ enough by the bourgeois media, it merited only 20-second reports on BBC radio and nothing at all in the broadsheets.

Until this Tuesday’s Independent (June 1). The paper gave quite a write-up - but in a way that was not at all pleasing in the general secretary’s eyes. In fact a major component of Mary Braid’s report is discussion of the intervention at the event by supporters of the ‘Weekly Worker’ list.

Ms Braid writes:

“Trust the hecklers at the back to spoil the party. Members of the Communist Party of Great Britain had been outside the hall before the launch, selling its Weekly Worker, advertising its own election launch and generally subverting. Now two of its members were challenging Mr Scargill to denounce Stalin.

“The Weekly Worker’s attacks on Mr Scargill, still the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, have been vitriolic. The SLP, the newest socialist party on the block, is refusing to enter into election pacts with other parties.

“The Socialist Alliance, which proposed a joint socialist list for London, has apparently collapsed partly because Mr Scargill’s party has refused to play ball. The Socialist Workers Party has decided not to run for fear of splitting the vote, but the CPGB is still standing. Driven, perhaps, by the awful reality of its own tiny, and dwindling, membership, the CPGB accuses Mr Scargill of ‘overwhelming, egotistic ambition’.”

She concludes rhetorically:

“Is the SLP not just a seed from which Arthur Scargill can grow a new following after the humbling of the once mighty NUM, and his jettisoning of New Labour? And is his refusal to enter pacts not just evidence that Arthur only plays games where Arthur sets the rules?”

Oh dear. It all seems to have come out in the wash. No doubt our general secretary, furious at this adverse coverage, will attempt to blame it all on the CPGB comrades. But the truth is that The Independent has painted a broadly accurate picture of Scargill and “his” party. He has contemptuously dismissed each and every suggestion of joint work, even though “To cooperate with all socialist organisations” is one of the SLP’s “objects”, enshrined in Scargill’s own constitution. The few remaining anti-sectarians in the party have been ridiculed for proposing that the SLP actually practises what it claims to uphold. In fact several members in London have told me they have been so disgusted at Scargill’s antics, they just cannot bring themselves to vote SLP on June 10 and now intend to back the ‘Weekly Worker’ list.

The press launch was chaired by NEC member Harpal Brar, the contents of whose secret speech - made a year ago in Brussels - I revealed in last week’s Weekly Worker (May 27 -see centre pages for extended extracts from the speech).

The Independent’s headline - “Scargill keeps old Labour flag flying” - served as a stark reminder that, despite the increasing influence of the ultra-Stalinites around comrade Brar, Scargill has not broken with Labourism, but still “maintain[s] illusions in social democracy”, to quote Brar’s own words.

Of course both Brar and Scargill share one big illusion - that of national socialism. Both believe that it is possible to build socialism in a single country, the difference being that Scargill’s national socialism is reformist, while Brar’s is revolutionary. It is none the less reactionary for all that. While both proclaim their internationalism, their socialism is based on the national not the global economy.

Nowhere is this more easily demonstrated than in the SLP’s propaganda relating to the EU elections. Last week’s SLP election broadcast was a prime example. You could have been excused for mistaking it for that of the UK Independence Party. Scargill rolled out the usual reams of figures to show how “we” had lost out as a result of joining the “Common Market”. He was backed up by Brar’s Stalinite comrade in arms, Amanda Rose, who bewailed the fact that membership did not “protect British industry and jobs”, as its backers had claimed it would. She might have been following Scargill’s script, but she made a good enough effort at putting over the dire little Britain chauvinism.

Scargill seems to be living 20 years in the past with his anti-EU propaganda, bemoaning the loss of “our” steel and coal industries, while comrade Rose also mentioned the effect of the EU on British manufacturing - everything “from textiles to typewriters”, she said. Typewriters!

Only the general secretary of the Indian Workers Association, Avtar Jouhl, did not seem to be singing from Scargill’s songbook. But his reference to the “exploiting class” could not do much to give the overwhelming nationalism of the broadcast a working class gloss.

So Scargill has had his five minutes on prime-time TV. No doubt his message will have struck home with some, but it posed a British, not a working class, alternative to the capitalist European Union.

It is the same with his election address. I am told that millions have been printed for distribution by Royal Mail, but there is no sign of any mobilisation of the remaining membership. In London election agent John Hayball began ringing around the numbers he had been given by Barnsley from the national membership list, but soon gave up, finding that most of those who answered were ex-members. There has been no general circular to the whole membership - presumably because that would also be too much of a hit-and-miss.