16.03.2000

Morning Star to stand GLA slate

Damaging split

In a defeat for dogmatic Labourism, but a victory for right sectarianism, the Morning Star's Communist Party of Britain is backing Ken Livingstone for mayor, but splitting the left vote by fielding its own 'communist and progressive' GLA list for May 4. To pile on the confusion the CPB will back Blair's hand-picked New Labour candidates in the 14 first-past-the-post constituencies.

Popular support for Livingstone lies behind the cleavage in the 'official communist' Morning Star camp between programme and reality. The crisis of Labourism in London utterly confounds the revolutionary-reformist British road to socialism programme, which commits the Star's CPB to a parliamentary strategy of achieving national socialism through a series of increasingly leftwing Labour governments. Blair's New Labour, along with European integration, long ago consigned the BRS to the dustbin of failed reformist schemas. Now Livingstone has added further to their woes.

The Star finds itself pulled from above and from below. Campaigning for Dobson against Livingstone would destroy the Star's residual credibility among activists with roots in the labour movement. Failing to back the official Labour campaign, on the other hand, will meet with the displeasure of the Star's financial backers in the trade union bureaucracy. No longer in receipt of Moscow gold, its chosen substitute has been bureaucrat's bronze.

Livingstone's anti-Blair rebellion has, however, thrown the middle-level trade union officials who form the Star's and the CPB's base of support into a quandary. Instead of the 'party' winning the labour movement it is Livingstoneism which is overpowering the 'party'.

For the CPB this represents a particularly bitter pill. Its animosity to Livingstone is longstanding and deep. First there was the acrimonious dispute over the Anti-Racist Alliance - the Star backed the trade union bureaucrats; Livingstone the race relations industry career blacks. Then there is Europe. Livingstone has an explicitly pro-euro stance - he promises to fight "long and hard" for the European single currency - which directly contradicts the imagined British national road to socialism. Defence of the 'rights' and powers of the British state is seen as a necessary precondition for fulfilment of the CPB's parliamentary road. Hence we read: "Ken Livingstone will make a mistake of catastrophic proportions if he makes support for Britain's membership of European economic and monetary union a major campaigning issue" (Morning Star March 14).

Worse, there was Livingstone's opposition to the striking Morning Star journalists in 1998. He backed the defeated Hicks-Rosser faction against the Haylett-Griffiths palace rebels.

Both personal and programmatic objections, however, were put aside in the CPB executive committee last weekend due to popular pressure from below. In a dramatic about-turn, the executive adopted the London district committee plan to give "qualified backing" to Livingstone and to stand itself on the PR list.

Until the executive met, the auto-Labourite majority on the CPB political committee were implicitly anti-Livingstone. Having condemned the rigged selection procedure and reluctantly backed Livingstone's campaign for Dobson to stand down, it nevertheless condemned Livingstone for standing independent of Labour. Apparently this would "divide and disorientate the left in the Labour Party at a time when the party leadership had been thrown onto the defensive" (Morning Star March 6). This meant siding with Dobson, whom Star columnist Andrew Murray had characterised as "an instrument of those forces in the labour movement hostile to socialism" (January 31).

When Livingstone announced his candidature, the Star editorial (March 7) spelled out why he was wrong. His decision "takes the heat off Mr Dobson, Tony Blair and Millbank", because it "provides an alibi for what appears likely to be defeat for Labour in the mayoral election. It also opens the way for expulsion from the Labour Party of any members who openly support Mr Livingstone's candidature."

The Star also throws back into Livingstone's face his own criticisms of Arthur Scargill's split from Labour four years ago. Then he asserted the potential for change in the three main components of the Labour Party - the unions, local party organisations and the Parliamentary Labour Party: "The struggle for socialism is going to be fought out within the next Labour government, and Scargill has opted out of that." Ken should "accept the advice he has doled out to others," the Star concluded.

Fearing the loss of its few remaining loyalists, there was, however, no clear, vocal campaign for Dobson. A sure sign of the political committee's extreme discomfort - desperately holding the BRS line against the floodtide of support for Livingstone from below. Nevertheless the inattentive reader - and most of them are - could not easily detect the backing for Dobson and his official Labour team of candidates.

Comrade Murray, whose 'Eyes left' column had previously pushed equivocal support for Livingstone to become Labour candidate (January 31), now railed against him as an independent. At the same time he could not resist reverting to type and throwing sectarian Stalinite stones at the "Trotskyist" London Socialist Alliance: "The rejection of Blair's diktat by Londoners within and outside the movement should be the springboard for a political revival by the left". Quite right. But it should not be "dissipated in support for an 'independent' Livingstone mayoral campaign which ... can provide no answers to the political problems facing the movement or the electorate as a whole." In other words, only the Labour Party can provide answers. Livingstone has "turned his back on the organisations of the labour movement" (March 10).

Will all this rhetoric now be renounced, as the Star turns on its 'Ken for mayor' campaign? Unfortunately we cannot expect a leopard to change its spots so easily. Like Livingstone, the Star's aim is to save the Labour Party from Blairism.

Murray foreshadows the CPB's decision to field its own sectarian GLA list by claiming that "the decisive vote on May 4 will not be for the post of mayor ... but for candidates for an assembly" - then, displaying his cretinous reformism - "which can start to tackle the real problems that the city faces." In fact the GLA has no powers - the mayor has control of all the responsibilities entrusted to the new London authority.

Murray fumes against Livingstone's non-existent "independent list for the assembly including business people and members of the Tory and Liberal parties". Should he follow this course, he will have "declared war on the labour movement in the name of a cross-class coalition even more sweeping than Tony Blair's". This choice of words makes the decision to support the official Labour candidates in the 14 GLA constituencies all the more curious.

CPBers in Brent and Harrow constituency, for instance, will be called upon to campaign for Labour lord Toby Harris, against Greater London Pensioners Association leader Austin Burnett, the LSA candidate. In Camden it is Helen Gordon, UCLH personnel officer, against Candy Udwin, Inison militant. This position was evidently dictated by the financial limitations of the CPB. Monty Goldman, its treasurer, cannot imagine how the £19,000 deposit to contest all 25 seats "can be raised" by the LSA (£5,000 for the proportional representation list of 11, and £1,000 for each first-past-the-post constituency). Five thousand is all they can manage - the Star and CPB recently moved to much smaller premises.

Surely a much better solution - and there is still time to think again - would be to give real meaning to the 'left unity' slogan so often proclaimed by the 'daily paper of the left', and join forces with the left groups in the London Socialist Alliance - Socialist Workers Party, Communist Party of Great Britain, Alliance for Workers' Liberty, International Socialist Group, Workers Power and Independent Labour Network (leaving aside the half-hearted participation of the crisis-ridden Socialist Party in England and Wales). The LSA door is open. Places for the CPB can still be negotiated.

In the present circumstances of a Livingstone rebellion, but with no Livingstone list, proportional representation offers a united left an unprecedented chance to win seats on the GLA with the potential to transform British politics - an opportunity which may be squandered if left votes are divided between competing lists. Already the principle of unity in action is threatened by the implacable sectarianism of Arthur 'no compromise' Scargill and his Socialist Labour Party list dominated by Stalin Society members, matched by the equally irresponsible, single-issue Campaign Against Tube Privatisation misled by Scargill's former chief witch-hunter, Patrick Sikorski. These people damage the chances of successful left unity, and the CPB is now adding its name to the sorry list.

Andrew Murray ridicules the "celebrity journalists, stand-up comics and others trading under the Socialist Alliance banner", without daring to inform Star readers of its policies. In truth the CPGB and Weekly Worker has many more differences with the left reformist election platform adopted by the LSA than the Star and CPB. We had no part in drawing it up, but accepted it as the joint platform of the campaign, with the same right as all participants to exercise criticism as we see fit. This is the only basis for principled unity.

Nor does the Star tell its readers the names of the organisations in the LSA. In their book, such information is classed as "sectarian". Sufficient to throw about the "Trotskyist" label - the readers do not need to know more than that. Such a paper produces not only a readership, but inevitably also a leadership, ignorant of the realities of political life. Speaking to CPB executive members about their decision to back Livingstone and field their own separate list, I found most of them totally unaware of the existence of the CATP and SLP slates, with only the barest appreciation of the composition of the LSA and none at all of its policies.

Moreover, when they made their decision, they did not appreciate what Millbank already admits - that the LSA is likely to win more than one of the GLA list seats. This election is being fought in conditions where a great deal is possible, comrades. Let us not squander the opportunities open to us and the working class as a whole. There is still time to change course.