25.04.2001

Southwark

Principle or tactic?

At the first meeting of Camberwell and Peckham Socialist Alliance on April 16, a number of practical and political questions were discussed. The meeting was the first since Southwark Socialist Alliance split into two constituency-based groupings ready for the upcoming general election - comrades will be meeting separately for the duration, working autonomously to organise the campaigns for John Mulrenan (Camberwell and Peckham) and Brian Kelly (Dulwich and West Norwood).

Two important political questions were discussed, with varying results. First were the recent anti-fascist mobilisations in Bermondsey. Following the inconclusive outcome of the event on April 6, where over 500 demonstrators massively outnumbered less than 50 fascists, it was reported that when the fascists attempted to repeat the march the following week on Easter Saturday, the numbers were less on both sides. The fascists have apparently not carried out their threat to march "every week", but are now threatening to hold another march on May 7.

There was a discussion in the alliance about how to respond to this, and to the prospect of a fascist election campaign in Bermondsey. A number of comrades felt that we had to have something positive to offer to the working class of Bermondsey, as opposed to the purely negative 'anti-fascism' of the Anti-Nazi League. A number of proposals were made, including the organisation of our own march though Bermondsey to counter the fascists, given the evident inability of the left to simply stop the fascists when they are given massive state protection.

There also was a proposal, passed without dissent, that a letter be written to local trade unions and labour movement bodies, including the 'left' Bermondsey Labour Party, to initiate a united front rally and campaign against racism and fascism in Bermondsey during the election campaign, and that the organisation of a march could take place in conjunction with this initiative.

It was raised by comrade Ian Donovan that what was really required to counter the threat of fascist candidacies in Bermondsey and similar areas was for us to run our own candidates, since the fascists in large measure seek to exploit despair at the betrayals and attacks on the working class by Labour and posture as the 'radical' alternative. A call for a vote to Labour to 'keep the fascists out' would simply reinforce the fascists' 'radical' posture. The comrade noted that since Southwark Socialist Alliance realistically did not have the resources to run a third election campaign, that the organisation of such campaigns should be done on a regional level, and comrades on the London committee should be supporting this proposal.

Unfortunately, in the absence of a concrete proposal of how to do this, there was sympathy for this approach from some comrades, but nothing more was able to crystallise. However, there was muted dissent from the idea from some Socialist Workers Party comrades, and comrade Jane Kelly of the International Socialist Group sharply objected, noting that the Bermondsey Labour Party had selected a "black candidate" with left social democratic politics, the implication being that we should support him.

Of course our organisational inability to stand a candidate in Bermondsey is a product of the embryonic state of our proto-party - as a function of growth and consolidation of the alliance, we will be able to take on such endeavours in the future. There is no reason to panic because we are not able to do everything at once. However, if comrade Kelly's attitude were to prevail, it would severely limit the ability of the SA to use its own political capital and class-struggle potential to undercut the fascists' influence in the working class.

If anything, the Labour Party and its attacks on working people are a recruiting sergeant for the far right, not an obstacle to it, and for us to defer to Labour lefts, who in turn are compelled to defer to the Blairites on any important question, would be to completely neuter ourselves. The fact that such lefts are certainly winnable potential supporters of the Socialist Alliance in the future, as the case of Liz Davies shows, does not mean that we should subordinate ourselves to them in situations where our own presence is desperately required to counter a threat of fascists gaining influence among workers disillusioned with Labour.

That, in fact, is a form of sectarianism - placing the sterile schemas of those who are preoccupied with factional manoeuvres and the conciliation of potential allies within the thin and itself quite politically isolated and cowed layer of the remaining Labour left above the Socialist Alliance's potential to propagate socialist solutions to the problems faced by wider layers of alienated working class people, who in the absence of our intervention are vulnerable to being exploited by 'radical' posturing elements on the far right.

The other question that produced a useful debate at the meeting was a discussion on a motion presented by comrade Steve Freeman, of the Revolutionary Democratic Group, calling upon all Socialist Alliance candidates to refuse to take the oath of office that is compulsory for those elected as MPs if we succeed in winning any parliamentary seats in the current election. To be allowed to take their seats in parliament, MPs have to swear loyalty to the monarch and the crown. This actually produced quite a lively discussion - and there were a range of responses - indeed some supporters of relatively staid groupings as the Alliance for Workers' Liberty and the ISG found themselves, on this issue at least, inclined to side with comrade Freeman's motion.

Comrade John Mulrenan, our candidate for Camberwell and Peckham and a former long-time supporter of the mainstream Labour left, made it clear that he would not be taking any such oath of office if elected. The conduct of Tommy Sheridan on election to the Scottish parliament, where while taking the oath at the same time raised a communist clenched fist in a gesture of mockery that rendered the oath meaningless, was a subject of some considerable discussion.

There were a number of different views of the questions raised aired in the meeting. Many comrades, while sympathetic to the anti-monarchist impulse behind comrade Freeman's motion, felt that he was elevating a rather finely judged tactical question into a question of principle. It was raised in the discussion that if it was likely that such an action as a refusal to take the oath could call into being a mass movement that could force the abandonment of the oath, and thereby the formal fealty of parliament to the crown, then it would be obligatory to undertake this tactic. On the other hand, if such a political situation simply did not exist, to carry out this tactic would amount to a boycott of parliament and using the parliamentary platform.

Comrade Freeman pointed positively to the example of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness to boost his argument, but it was noted that, unlike the situation of socialists in Great Britain, the base that elected the Sinn Féin MPs for the most part considered the British parliament to be the parliament of an imperialist oppressor. Workers in Britain, in the here and now, have a rather different, historically evolved consciousness regarding parliament.

Comrade Freeman, in his motion correctly condemned Tony Benn, who "recently referred to this and admitted that in taking this oath he had actually been lying (to the electorate and the working class). Benn recognises that was an unprincipled act. As a new organisation we should not begin by repeating Benn's lie." Yet, notwithstanding Benn's unprincipled pretence to be a monarchist in the 1960s and 1970s when he was a 'radical' stalwart of the Labour establishment, this implies that it is a principle to refuse to take a parliamentary seat and use the parliamentary platform under anything other than a bourgeois republic.

But in fact is it not as unprincipled to swear loyalty to, say, the bourgeois constitution of the republican United States or France as it is to the constitution of monarchical Britain, personified by the queen? Notwithstanding the importance of democratic demands for re-arming the working class in this period of reaction, if we are not in a position to overthrow such institutions, in order to use the parliamentary platform to denounce the capitalists, communists and socialists may, as they have in the past, be compelled to lie (formally) to the ruling class, while making the forced nature of such formal hypocrisy clear to the masses, to gain entry to parliamentary institutions to agitate against the entire system.

The motion was defeated, though a sizeable minority voted for it. The writer of this article - considering that the idea was not necessarily wrong, although making it into a principle certainly was - abstained.

Ian Donovan