02.03.2000

SP in tailspin

London revolt adds to Taaffe's problems

The Socialist Party in London is in the process of imploding politically.

Incredibly, it is to allow its members a 'free vote' in the Greater London Assembly elections in May. An all-London aggregate of the Socialist Party on Thursday February 24 saw rank and file comrades stage a revolt against the official line of the leadership. Only around 25-30 comrades were present, in sharp contrast to attendances of up to 10 times bigger just a couple of years ago.

Previously, SPers were lumbered with the hopeless position that while the organisation would work in the local constituencies for London Socialist Alliance candidates, at a London-wide level it would support the single-issue Campaign Against Tube Privatisation. The line of Taaffe's increasingly disorientated grouping now is that its members can support, work and vote for whom they like! Dave Nellist's passive rebellion in giving the LSA the go-ahead has had an effect - so has the growing support for the LSA on the ground, as last week's 800-strong rally shows.

Given the near-invisibility of the CATP, in practice this can only mean shamefaced support for the LSA for the bulk of SPers. Characteristically however, Taaffe's beleaguered leadership clique does not have the honesty or politically integrity to say so. It has again illustrated that it has no answers to the decline and disintegration of the group.

Obviously, this latest shift is a desperate attempt to avoid a sharp political fight and possible split. The SP has at least one prominent member who is actually a candidate on the CATP's provisional list for London and who presumably therefore shares its sectarian refusal to even discuss the possibility of a joint slate with the LSA. The SP leadership initially placated these types with support for the CATP list and its attempts to alibi the narrow anti-unity stance of the campaign.

Thus we saw deliberately misleading articles from comrade Jim Horton, one of the SP's main representatives at LSA coordinating meetings, which dishonestly tried to blame the LSA for the failure to achieve unity.

He wrote of the "regrettable" decision of the LSA to "stand a slate against the CATP" (The Socialist February 11 - my emphasis). Apparently, he told his readers, SPers on the LSA "argued that the CATP and LSA should reach an electoral agreement".

"Argued" against whom exactly, comrade Horton? The man is well aware of the fact that repeated approaches from the LSA to the CATP - debated and agreed unanimously by all its constituent elements and reported in this paper - have been continuously rejected. Yet the comrade leads us to understand that SPers on the LSA committee had to argue for such an approach, that they encountered resistance from the majority who then pig-headedly went on to "stand ... against the CATP".

Clearly, sections of the SP are deeply mired in sectarianism. This ugly, anti-working class poison was articulated in Peter Taaffe's initial response to calls for support for the SWP-initiated lobby of last year's Labour Party conference. "Why should we build anything that benefits the SWP?" he asked rhetorically in private conversation with his cadre. It is not hard to see how such an approach could produce the anti-LSA position. After all, what does it matter that the LSA is the most ambitious, viable and exciting left unity project in several political generations? How relevant is it that it tentatively points a way out of the sect impasse that cripples the left? If it brings some 'benefit' in the short term to the SWP in the way of increased paper sales or members, the SP should shun it, according to Taaffe, for a single-issue trade union campaign - read the interests of the SP and the Taaffe-Mullins leadership.

On the other hand, there are layers of the membership on the ground that reject this. This fact - plus the polemical pressure of our open press - forced a clumsy climbdown on the part of the SP leadership around Taaffe and Mullins on support for the Labour lobby (a leaflet on the day refused to back "the lobby", but supported "this demo"). Many SPers outside the leadership have clearly been very uncomfortable with the refusal to support the LSA. Indeed, as we have reported, across the capital SPers spontaneously took different positions. At one end of the spectrum, at a February 11 public meeting, Peter Dickenson, the erstwhile chair of LSA and member of the SP national committee, argued adamantly that the CATP was a "real movement of the working class" and it should be supported against the LSA. He was booed and heckled from the floor. At the other, on February 13, we saw SPer Simon Donovan at a rally in Walthamstow declare his "full support for the local Socialist Alliance candidates and the LSA slate".

Feebly, the leadership attempted to justify its refusal to back the LSA partly by idiotic localism and partly by an overestimation of the CATP.

Jim Horton, writing in The Socialist cited above, asserts without any explanation that socialists should concentrate their efforts locally, as this is where "we can best build support for socialist ideas". This is such a weird idea, it is very hard to even start grappling with it. The GLA election is a contest for the new governing authority in the capital city of a major western power, an important constitutional innovation by a radical, reforming bourgeois politician. In the course of choosing the Labour candidate for these elections, the London Labour Party has torn itself apart, with a big majority of the rank and file effectively voting against the leadership. The possibility of a deep split is posed in this bourgeois workers' party, a schism that puts independent working class politics back on the agenda nationally, not simply in London.

In these circumstances, the notion that socialists can "best build support for socialist ideas" in local constituencies is bizarre. In fact, it has far more to do with the seemingly intractable problems of the SP than with any real assessment of the tasks posed to the movement as a whole. This is what accounted for its mealy-mouthed support for CATP, a stance it has now abandoned in practice, but is too ashamed to admit to. What a mess.

This latest SP political fiasco is a more or less explicit recognition that not only was its previous line utterly sectarian, but that, if it had been pursued, it would have precipitated yet more fragmentation in the ranks - first Scotland, then Merseyside. Where next? Instead of thrashing the question out democratically and openly, thus providing the best conditions to re-unite the ranks, the cowardly leadership has opted for a pathetic fudge.

It has learned nothing from the Scottish debacle. Most SPers that you talk to will admit that their organisation suffered a left-nationalist split with the formation of the Scottish Socialist Party. Yet where was the political struggle against this? Taaffe and his leadership were politically unwilling and theoretically incapable of conducting one.

Thus, the whole of the sorry history of the SP thus far points to the fact that this latest political about-turn will not save it. Quite the opposite, in fact.