19.04.2000

Latest SP turn deepens crisis

The latest Socialist Party somersault on the Greater London Authority elections in May will exacerbate rather than ease the group's problems.

The April 14 issue of The Socialist features an article by Jim Horton, Socialist Party delegate to the London Socialist Alliance. This announces that the SP will now - "with reservations" - be "recommending a vote for the LSA in the top-up list section". Previously, Taaffe's group had "argued that the LSA should withdraw from the list to support the Campaign Against Tube Privatisation and concentrate on the constituency elections".

Foolishly, Horton attempts to present the new line as a perfectly logical and smooth development from the SP's previous anti-LSA stance. This is palpably untrue.

For example, comrade Horton comments in passing that the "SP participates in both the CATP and the LSA" and even that it "has a member on the CATP list". Arwyn Thomas, a leading SPer in the capital, has indeed been left high and dry on the CATP list by the leadership's sudden volte face. In the CATP broadsheet, along with his trade union posts, he is identified as a member of the Socialist Party. The same Socialist Party that will presumably be voting against him and the CATP, of course. As a disciplined member of the SP, the prescribed course of action for comrade Thomas should be to campaign for the rival LSA slate and against the one that he happens to be stranded on. This is totally untenable. Understandably, the comrade is said to be "livid".

Support for the LSA is presented by leading SPers in London as an unfortunate inevitability. First, the SP fought for a joint list of the LSA and the CATP. When that failed, it pressed for the LSA to stand down from the list section in favour of the CATP. Again, no luck. With the nominations closed and the campaign on the last lap, the SP "now have to decide whom we recommend workers vote for" (my emphasis).

This is disingenuous nonsense. As we have reported in these pages, sections of the SP in the capital have been waging an active campaign against the LSA for months now. I wonder, is the fact that comrade Thomas is an active member of the CATP list - a rival slate, openly antagonistic to the LSA - just a result of his personal whim?

Clearly, there has been an internal struggle, culminating in the previous crassly sectarian position being overturned. Reports are that the SP political committee meeting of April 5 decided on the new line. If this is chronologically accurate, it is clear that leading SPers such as Dave Nellist were already in open rebellion against the pro-CATP position. At the Socialist Alliances network conference in Leicester on March 25, he explicitly called for an LSA list vote (Weekly Worker March 30). At the same time, the April issue of the SP's theoretical journal Socialism Today was hitting the streets. This features a noxious article by Peter Taaffe which gave no hint that support for the LSA was feasible under any circumstances. The man went as far as to state that "it is not possible for genuine socialist alliances to be established with the Socialist Workers Party ... if SWP members are elected through the Alliance, and they don't call for a new mass working class party [which they will not, of course - MF], it is likely that they will become an obstacle". It is obvious that Nellist and Taaffe have had sharply counterposed positions on this question, despite the feeble denials from SP apparatchiks.

Given the spineless nature of the Taaffe-Mullins bloc on the leadership and its congenital inability to stand on principle, it is quite obvious that the new line is a damage limitation exercise. The alienation of pro-CATPers such as Arwyn Thomas is judged a price worth paying to keep the likes of Nellist on board. It will however only exacerbate the Socialist Party's contradictions.

In practical terms, the critical 'support' for the SP counts for little - as one leading London SPer put it to me, it is "more critical than supportive". For instance, the Horton piece continues to retail the outrageous falsehood that "the leaderships of both the CATP and the LSA bear responsibility" for the failure to achieve a single list. In fact, as we have reported in the Weekly Worker, it has been CATP leaders such as Pat Sikorski - an infamous sectarian of long standing and once a leading witch-hunter in Scargill's Socialist Labour Party - that have contemptuously rejected the repeated unity overtures from the LSA.

Moreover, the SP has apparently been 'supporting' LSA candidates in the constituencies by refusing to do any work for them and not advertising their local meetings (see Weekly Worker April 13). Incredibly, The Socialist did not even carry an advert for the successful April 13 rally - despite the fact that Dave Nellist and Tommy Sheridan were speaking at it! This blinkered sectarianism speaks of an organisation deeply split over its attitude to the LSA.

Comrade Horton is at pains to emphasise that the SP has 'sympathy' for those people who support the CATP. It "understands that many workers will want to vote CATP" - including Arwyn Thomas, presumably. Clearly, the organisation is unable to achieve unity in its ranks and is attempting to paper over the cracks with these type of anodyne formulations. The question is, will the SP argue with these "workers [who] want to vote CATP" that they are making a mistake, however 'understandable' it is? Will they try to win CATP supporters to vote for the LSA? Clearly, there is no such intention from the leadership - so what good is their 'support'? This new contortion has everything to do with the factional divisions of the SP internally: nothing to do with providing clear, concise, and principled leadership to the movement.

Dave Nellist clearly has a different project to the Taaffe-Mullins bloc. Ian Page was also deeply unhappy over the leadership's grotesque gyrations over the LSA. Leading SPers now more or less openly acknowledge that there is a split looming in Scotland, a fact underlined by Sheridan's projection of a very different party project to Taaffe's at the rally and by his intensive discussions with known London dissidents and one prominent ex-member afterwards.

The fraught nature of relations within the SP are borne out by the brittle and hostile way Taffe-Mullins loyalists interacted with leftists outside the April 13 rally, in particular Communist Party members and supporters. Interestingly, despite not having lifted a finger to build it, a fair sprinkling of loyalist SPers attended. (This was presumably to display their 'practical involvement' to Nellist and Sheridan.) They were not happy being there, however.

Weekly Worker sellers report high levels of verbal abuse - "police liars" and "Stalinist scum" being two of the more polite. One SP comrade in particular took it into his head to try a little half-hearted physical intimidation - much to the amusement of everyone who witnessed it. Personally, I was branded a special branch spy - of course, the comrade who 'outed' me will not have the guts to make such ludicrous accusations publicly. Nevertheless, the tense atmosphere within the SP is evidenced by its members' taut nerves and antagonistic public outbursts.

This is likely to increase, as the manifest absurdities of the group's London line become more apparent, and as the majority of its Committee for a Workers International Scottish organisation finalise the break with the discredited Taaffe-Mullins leadership clique. The April 14 issue of The Socialist also features a mealy-mouthed polemic by Ken Smith against one of the main campaigning initiatives of the Sheridan's Scottish Socialist Party, the call for a Scottish Service Tax. Comrade Smith characterises this as a "mildly redistributive reformist measure rather than a thoroughgoing socialist redistribution of wealth". These criticisms echo the factional broadside from Phil Stott's Dundee-based CWI faction against the majority CWI group in the SSP, which nominally still adheres to the same sect duties and obligations as Taaffe's SP (Weekly Worker March 23).

The strains within the SP make it increasingly unviable as a political entity. There are now rumbles of organised left rebellion in the capital. The revolt must be audacious and happen quickly to have a chance of rescuing anything worthwhile from the wreckage.