16.03.2000

'Stop Livingstone'

Sectarian Scargill's Stalinite slate

Arthur Scargill, general secretary of the Socialist Labour Party, is still set on dragging his shell of a party down to new depths of sectarian madness. Not only is he doing everything in his power to try to prevent the left, organised as the London Socialist Alliance, winning seats in the Greater London Assembly. He has also launched his own 'Stop Livingstone' campaign - effectively playing into the hands of New Labour and the Frank Dobson campaign.

Speaking at a rally in Barnsley to mark the 15th anniversary since the defeat of the miners' Great Strike, Scargill thundered: "I wouldn't support Livingstone if he was standing for mayor of Toytown." After making the obvious observation that 'Red' Ken is not standing as a socialist and is not calling for that shibboleth of reformist national socialism, 'public ownership', Scargill echoed the Blairite line - Livingstone lied to New Labour: "Any 'left' worth his [sic] salt cannot support a campaign around a man who agreed to stand under a selection procedure, then refused to accept the result" (Sunday Times March 12).

This hypocritical moralism is rich indeed - from a person for whom dishonesty is an art form: whether about his shrunken band of followers, which for Scargill is forever growing in size and influence; or about the huge coal mountains held by the National Coal Board in 1984, which for Scargill were mere mole hills. His refusal 15 years ago to break from the Labour Party of Kinnock and Willis and tell the members of the National Union of Mineworkers that without generalised action they would lose fatally disarmed them: they were led to believe that they could win their heroic fight through single-union syndicalism, without any need to organise a political offensive of the whole movement.

And since when has it been a crime to spin falsehoods to the Labour bureaucracy, which throughout its history has plotted, schemed, lied and cheated in order to keep the left - and the working class - in its place? Scargill himself has been a victim of many a dirty deed at the hands of Blair's predecessors and their allies in the union movement.

The NUM president now takes great delight in throwing back in Livingstone's face words he uttered at the time of the SLP's formation: Scargill was labelled a "rat" for leaving a ship that was far from sinking, and his supporters were dubbed "nutters". Scargill now reminds us that the Brent East MP piously declared at that time that, "The struggle for socialism is going to take place inside the Labour Party."

In 1996 it was the duty of all who considered themselves socialist to give critical support to the break from Labour initiated by Scargill, just as today it our duty to take our place in the mass rebellion against Blair that exists around the former leader of the Greater London Council. We encourage such movements despite the inadequacies and weaknesses of those who give rise to them because it opens up new layers of militant workers to the ideas of communism. In the process there is a sorting out. Those who claim to be for the workers are tested. Those who speak about democracy have to prove it. Those who have no theory are exposed as charlatans.

Scargill is thereby already a man of the past. For him there is only one thing left: his ambition to be Britain's very own labour dictator - a possibility which, fortunately for the working class movement, exists only in his addled brain. However, if the SLP is to sink without trace, then in Scargill's sectarian mind every other break from Labour must go down with it. Scargill's SLP serves Scargill, not the general interests of the movement.

His message is clear: no vote for Livingstone. But the SLP itself is not standing for mayor. Even Scargill knows that any candidate of his would be wiped out in the Livingstone deluge. So who to support on May 4? There can be only one answer: back New Labour - either directly by voting for Labour's placeman, or indirectly by staying at home.

As for the London assembly, the Great Leader has, as repeatedly and consistently, ignored all calls for a united left fight. Instead of joining a common list, the SLP rump is to go it alone. However, his two-dozen-strong London membership is, unlike the LSA with its hundreds of active supporters, totally unable to mount any campaign and, with Scargill's financial backers deserting him, does not have the resources to stand in the 14 first-past-the-post constituencies. So Scargill will contest only the 11 proportional representation seats. Whereas our alliance - the CPGB, the Socialist Workers Party, Alliance for Workers' Liberty, Socialist Party, International Socialist Group and Workers Power - is poised to win PR seats, as well as mounting a serious challenge in the constituencies, the SLP is intent on sabotaging the real anti-Blair movement.

Of course Scargill himself is the only well known figure on Socialist Labour's list - he tried his utmost to persuade union leaders Bob Crow and Joe Marino to join him, but they turned him down flat. And Aslef general secretary Dave Rix is now - at least according to the Evening Standard (March 13) - a "former member" of the SLP. In his desperation Scargill has to rely on members of the Stalin Society who run his London region, and has even called up a couple of oddball fans to make up the numbers.

The SLP's leading figure in London is one Harpal Brar, also a member of its national executive. Together with four of his close Stalin Society supporters - daughter Joti, Amanda Rose, Ella Rule and Hardev Dhillon - his faction forms the backbone of SLP list. Brar is editor of Lalkar, officially the bimonthly journal of the Indian Workers Association (GB), but in reality solely a vehicle for his own strange politics. For example the latest issue of his obscure bi-monthly contains an article entitled 'Tibet builds socialism' (March-April).

But the front-page lead, written in Brar's own inimitable style, is called 'London mayor election and the fake left'. According to him, the Labour Party - with its huge parliamentary majority, and still enjoying around 50% support in the opinion polls - is now a "stinking corpse". In a highly amusing passage Brar continues: "Most of its honest members left to form the Socialist Labour Party, which is, with each passing day, becoming a pole of attraction for all those who really desire the advance of the working class. You may keep a diplomatic silence about it, pretending not to have heard of it, but it does exist and is doing well."

As Brar well knows, the party which at its height in 1997 had over 2,000 dues-paying members is now reduced to something like 250 sad individuals - a figure that is decreasing "with each passing day". How else could a Stalinite fossil like himself have gained such prominence?

Having condemned the "revisionist renegades" of the 'official' New Communist Party and Communist Party of Britain for "sowing illusions about the Labour Party", Brar turns his fire on the LSA: "The various counterrevolutionary Trotskyite outfits, especially the SWP, go even further. LSA, a collection of counterrevolutionary riffraff, ... is ... in the field to oppose the SLP and not Labour or Tories, as the LSA pretend." The jokes continue.

Brar then moves on to the culmination of his 'argument': 'Red' Ken, far from representing a potentially leftwing break from Labour, is actually some kind of Bonapartist, not to say neo-fascist, figurehead: "In fact Livingstone is bourgeois to boot and a defender of the interests of British finance capital symbolised by the City ... This alone explains why Livingstone is managing to draw support from the Trots and the Tories alike and has been reincarnated as 'the nation in one person' - with all that this implies."

It is of course not impossible for ambitious reformist politicians to end up on the extreme right - Mosley, Mussolini and even Hitler either started their political life in the working class movement or claimed to be allegiance to it in some way. A little premature in Livingstone's case though, don't you think? Not only is Livingstone's support derived mainly from workers, but he won clear majorities from individual Labour Party and trade union members when they were balloted.

The rant is concluded with Lenin's stamp of approval. He is quoted calling on communists to wage "a merciless struggle against opportunism" and to unmask "the hideousness of National-Liberal-Labour politics and not to cover them up". Obviously, in Brar's view, this rules out even considering voting for reformists - whether they be in the shape of a bourgeois workers' party or a split from it led by a Livingstone (or a Scargill?), no matter what the circumstances.

Lenin's opinion and advice to our young CPGB was, as we know, very different. He regarded the possibility of supporting the Labour Party as a perfectly principled tactic, calling in 1920 for communists in Britain to vote Labour into government - a party which, as Brar states in a headline elsewhere in Lalkar, has put in "100 years of faithful service to imperialism". In fact, he goes on, the Labour Party "right from its inception (not just today) has been a most resolute defender of British imperialism, a purveyor of racism and anti-communism among the working class". Lenin was clearly a "counterrevolutionary riff-raff" himself to have considered it advisable to give support to such a body.

We in today's CPGB follow in the real Leninist tradition. In pursuing the strategic aim of breaking workers from the Labour Party and Labourism, we are prepared to support reformists such as Livingstone, who, despite their own intentions, may well give rise to a movement which furthers that aim. Not surprisingly the Evening Standard reckons that "Livingstone ... could well be the embarrassed" by "endorsements" of the "far-left and communist groups" organised under the LSA (March 15).

The SLP won just under two percent in London in the EU elections of June 1999. On May 4, because of Scargill's hypocritical condemnation of Livingstone and the exposure this paper will ruthlessly carry through against him and his Stalin Society slate, he faces oblivion - a sad end for a man who once had the respect of militants and leftwingers throughout Britain.