12.04.2000

Double blow for Taaffe

It can now only be a question of time before more splits tear apart what remains of Peter Taaffe's Socialist Party

The platform appearance on the April 13 London Socialist Alliance of Tommy Sheridan MSP and Coventry councillor Dave Nellist is a humiliating slap in the face for the incumbent Socialist Party leadership. This double blow against the clique around Peter Taaffe and Bill Mullins will embolden those elements of the membership, in particular in the capital, who have rebelled against the SP's sectarian gyrations over the LSA's inspiring electoral challenge. LSA candidate and SP councillor Ian Page has also made his opposition to Taaffe absolutely clear - using the Weekly Worker.

Wally Kennedy - Hillingdon SP councillor - was pencilled in to do the fundraising speech at the rally, but that has been vetoed by his party leaders. Apparently, given the SP's equivocal relationship to the LSA London list, this would not be "appropriate". But then, what about Nellist and Sheridan? How "appropriate" is their active support for the alliance? And what about comrade Page?

The more successful the LSA, the deeper the crisis for the beleaguered SP. The inability of the SP membership to act as one underlines the profound political disorientation it has suffered since being ejected from the Labour Party nearly 10 years ago. Clearly, important sections of the membership have felt profound unease at the attempts to scupper participation in the LSA bloc. Now they are beginning to move from passive to active rebellion.

In order to hold the increasingly divergent organisation together, the Taaffe-Mullins clique has been forced to obfuscate, backtrack and wheedle. At the London membership aggregate of February 24, they had to concede a 'free vote' to their comrades over the LSA. While such a rotten compromise may avoid a sharp conflict in the short term, it can only exacerbate the tendency of the SP to fragment - as the LSA rally on April 13 testifies. Thus, at one end of the spectrum we have those such a Nellist, who openly called for support for the LSA slate at the Socialist Alliance network conference in Leicester on March 25 (see Weekly Worker March 30). The Socialist of March 31 - true to form - avoids 'confusing' its readers by simply not reporting this uncomfortable fact in its account. How can it carry on ignoring the reality of the looming split? Nellist and Sheridan have now added insult to Taaffe's injuries by underscoring their support by agreeing to share the platform of our April 13 mass rally.

At the other pole of the party, we have the leadership-loyal sectarians. Comrades such as Peter Dickenson (erstwhile chair of the LSA), Linda Taaffe and Hannah Sell, who are prepared not simply to argue against support for the LSA, but, as we have reported, actually sabotage pro-LSA motions in the trade union movement.

The SP leadership - understandably - has been shamefaced over its blatant sectarianism. There are three crude lies it has retailed to excuse its actions.

• 'The Socialist Party has consistently supported the Socialist Alliances project.'

The SP has tried to claim that "unlike some" (a peevish dig at the Socialist Workers Party), it has thrown itself into SA work all along. It claims to believe that socialist alliances have an important role to play in the development of a new workers' party, "providing of course they have a correct programme and a correct approach to building support for socialist ideas" (SP statement to January 18 LSA meeting).

In truth, the Socialist Party as a body has acted as a consistent block on moves to develop the socialist alliances. The LSA in its original form was formally established at the initiative of Brent Socialist Alliance - dominated by the CPGB - over two years ago, on February 4 1998. From the very beginning, Taaffe's sect saw the project as a direct rival to its own narrow 'party'-building work. It participated in order to make sure the thing did not take off.

Consequently, it only ever sent one or two comrades along to LSA meetings and events. A few of its activists did some irregular work in some areas. But Hillingdon, along with the other SAs the SP actually did initiate, were inactive by the time of the launch of the LSA. Indeed, by July of 1998, the SP had decided that it had had enough of even the token level of 'unity' the LSA represented. It put forward a motion to the July 5 meeting proposing ad-hoc committee meetings to be held every two months instead of monthly.

This, the motion disingenuously asserted, would allow comrades to "concentrate on the borough alliances" - local bodies that the SP were not active in anyway (Weekly Worker June 11 1998). It was an attempt to wind down the LSA using spurious, localist excuses. Typically, Taaffe's group did not have the guts to honestly state their hostility to the whole project.

Comrades will recognise this brand of mealy-mouthed argument, of course. On January 18 of this year, the SP presented a lengthy resolution which called for the LSA to step down its London list and vote for that of the Campaign Against Tube Privatisation. According to the SP, we should have "only [stood] LSA candidates in the 14 constituencies, which is where we can best build support for socialist ideas". The SP's Paula Mitchell suggested that limiting our intervention to these local constituencies would be to concentrate "on where our strength is" - that is, a re-run of the lame localism it attempted to lumber the LSA with back in 1998 (Weekly Worker January 20).

After emphatically losing the vote on this, a prepared statement was read which unambiguously announced that "the Socialist Party will not participate in the LSA slate".

Thus, according to the SP leadership, the LSA's London-wide campaign, which has galvanised support from thousands across the capital and is an inspiration to thousands more up and down the country, should never have happened in the first place. (I wonder whether Sheridan or Nellist believe this?)

• 'The SP supports the LSA campaign at a local constituency level.'

A gauge of the quality of 'support' and 'participation' of the SP locally is given by its paper's coverage of the meetings and public events of constituency alliances apart from the one London seat where the organisation has an (internally dissident) candidate standing - Ian Page in Greenwich and Lewisham. As an organisation, it is in effect boycotting all other local campaigns in London.

Just take as a sample the six issues of The Socialist between February 18 and March 31. There were five very sparse 'What's on' columns in these papers. Greenwich and Lewisham Socialist Alliance's meeting for March 29 is advertised several times, as is the Leicester March 25 conference.

Not one single other LSA event - either capital-wide or local - is announced. This is typical. The claim that the SP supports the LSA campaign in the constituencies is simply untrue.

• 'The SP has never called for a vote to the CATP against the LSA.'

To placate LSA-leaning members, SP aparatchiks have claimed that the SP have a more nuanced, 'wait and see' position than the stark one attributed to it by the "lying" Weekly Worker. In fact, leading members waged a campaign of passive resistance to and, on occasion, active sabotage of support for the LSA list. As we have reported in the Weekly Worker (March 2), the leadership's disgraceful sectarianism has sparked rebellion from below.

To pacify critics, Taaffe-Mullins loyalists have been forced to spout gibberish. For example, Jim Horton - one of the SP reps on the LSA committee - challenged me to substantiate our observation that the SP called for a vote for the CATP, against the LSA. Presumably, this is the same Jim Horton who wrote in The Socialist (January 11) that "the Socialist Party will not participate in or support the LSA slate" (my emphasis)?

The strains in the London SP are beginning to tell. Now that Sheridan and Nellist have explicitly moved from passive resentment to open rebellion, how long will the organisation remain viable? How can the support of these comrades for the LSA be reconciled with Peter Taaffe's snarl of sectarian spite in April's Socialism Today, that "it is not possible for genuine socialist alliances to be established with the SWP".

In fact, history shows that apart from Coventry - where Dave Nellist has pursued his own, distinctly non-Taaffeite agenda - it has not proved possible to establish any sort of a genuine socialist alliances with leadership-loyal SPers. In truth, the SP has displayed a consistent hostility to the fight for left unity in the capital, an opposition that has actually grown since the project gained new momentum with the whole-hearted commitment of the SWP from November/December of last year.

Above all, the SP is motivated by a fear of being swamped by the SWP. It is explicitly sectarian, in other words. The narrow group interests of the SP come before everything, up to and including the health of the movement itself. In contrast, we have welcome the fact that the SWP - the largest revolutionary organisation in Britain - has broken its self-imposed exile and in cooperation with other left groups is taking up a serious electoral challenge to Labourism.

It is a sad irony of the decline of the SP that everything it holds up as examples of its success and influence - Liverpool, Scotland, electoral successes like those of Nellist, Sheridan or Page - actually become crippling weaknesses and embarrassments for it. In these fraught circumstances, it is not surprising that there are signs of a re-emergence of the organised opposition in London SP that took the form of pre-factional meetings involving 30-40 comrades, but which collapsed before the challenge of mounting a serious political struggle against the Taaffe-Mullins leadership (Weekly Worker May 27 1999). With the principled left critique of the bureaucratic centralist SP regime presented in the Harry Paterson document, 'For democratic centralism' (Weekly Worker March 23), such elements now have the chance to cohere around a Leninist pole of attraction.

They should act quickly. If anything worthwhile is to salvaged out of the wreck Taaffe is making of the once proud SP/Militant tradition, the time to fight is now.