17.10.2001

Carnival ban

Weekly Worker 404 Thursday October 18 2001

Carnival ban

In what should be a salutary lesson for the Socialist Alliance and the left in general, this Saturday?s Respect festival, due to be held in Oldham, has been banned. This anti-racist/anti-fascist carnival had been called by Oldham United Against Racism and the North West Region TUC, and enthusiastically backed by the Anti-Nazi League.

Typically, and no doubt disingenuously, both Oldham council and the police have tried to deflect criticism by playing a ?What me, guv?? game. At the very end of a Manchester meeting of the Stop the War Coalition on October 16, John Baxter of the local Socialist Workers Party announced that the festival had been prohibited under the Public Order Act. Oldham council had stated that it was the police who had requested the order be made. The police were saying that the initiative came from the council.

A spokesperson at the ANL office told us they had just been fobbed off with ?technical reasons? for this ?cowardly decision?, responsibility for which she primarily laid at the door of the council.

Of course it is absolutely certain that political considerations have prompted the council to move against this event, not technical questions of traffic congestion and parking arrangements. The town was earlier this year convulsed by riots of a distinctly anti-fascist/anti-police flavour. As far as the police were concerned, it was an urban insurrection headed by British-Asian youth. This was followed by the June 7 BNP vote, which shocked not only the left, but official society too.

While we must denounce the council?s ban, criticism must also be made of the strategy of the SWP/ANL, the prime movers and shakers behind the Oldham event. Ironically, this outrageous ban highlights many of the fatal flaws in its approach.

First, on state bans. The Oldham ANL branch newsletter attempts to draw some lessons from the past, but only succeeds in scoring own goals. Correctly, it states that ?we must remember that this is not new. The same happened to those who ? fought the BUF in the 1930s and 1940s? (October 16).

True. Militant anti-fascists had their events banned by the authorities, their events declared illegal and broken up by the police. Yet these activists - primarily members of or people influenced by the Communist Party - had delivered the very weapons into the hands of the state that were now being used on them. The left campaigned for state bans on the activities of the British Union of Fascists. The state gave itself the powers to implement such bans ? and used them exclusively against the left.

What about today?s SWP/ANL? Has it learned the lesson?

The SWP has a record, sadly, of uncritically tailing behind or echoing calls upon the bourgeois state to ban demonstrations and marches - but only for nasty racist/fascist ones of course, not ?respectable? anti-racist/anti-fascist festivals. This is not forgetting the Socialist Worker?s notorious demand that the works of the rightist historian, David Irving, should be banned from public libraries, not to mention the Big Brotherish idea that Hitler?s Mein Kampf should only made available to bona fide, duly accredited students.

While calling for prohibitions on dangerous ideas, the SWP comrades display a tendency to fudge what should be the principle of uncompromising opposition to all state bans on marches, demonstrations and - indeed - political organisations, like the British National Party. We have seen this clearly in the Socialist Alliance.

At the SA?s Liaison Committee on July 28, SWP comrades attempted to gut anti-racist and anti-fascist work of any revolutionary content. Workers Power moved a commendable motion on anti-racism and anti-fascism. However, comrade Brian Butterworth of the SWP claimed to be offended by the following statements: ?We oppose any calls on the police or the home secretary to ban fascist marches. Every ban imposed by the state is used against the left and the anti-racists?; and ?Build labour movement support for organised community self-defence against fascists, racists and police attacks?.

WP?s motion really should have been uncontroversial. But comrade Butterworth moved an amendment calling for the above sections to be deleted. The comrade?s tawdry argument was that such calls would be fine if made by a revolutionary party, but not in an alliance. Presumably alliances must by definition be reformist (and electoralist). What a neat division of labour - principled politics for the sect; watered down reformist drivel for the working class. Comrade Butterworth?s amendment was voted through, thanks to the SWP majority at the meeting.

Not long after the July meeting, we found out that the Burnley ANL carnival scheduled for September 1 had been banned. In view of this it was surely clear that calls on the state to act against the extreme right can only rebound on the left. Finally, at the October 6 Liaison Committee meeting, the following wording was agreed by a reluctant SWP: ?The Socialist Alliance will not call on the police or home secretary to ban fascist marches.?

All this points to the obvious fact that we must rethink our general strategy of fighting fascism. For example, the ANL has accused the editor of the Oldham Chronicle of ?pandering to the nazis? because in an editorial of June 11 he wrote the following: ?The political landscape in Oldham has changed and, though the ANL might not like it, it has been changed through the proper democratic process by Mr Nick Griffin and his British National Party campaigning properly and legally and persuading people to vote for them. Mr Griffin and the BNP now has a mandate from 11,000 Oldham residents to represent their point of view ? protesters cannot change that by demonstrating on the streets, but by legitimate opposition at the ballot box.?

While we should be dismissive of this bourgeois journalist?s contempt for direct action and protest, an important point is being made here. In Oldham, the BNP had sufficient ambition to run a political campaign, to present itself to an alienated section of the white electorate with a programme that purported to be a positive answer to the problems it faces. Carnivals, protests and leaflets - no matter how well intentioned - which just say ?no? to the BNP and which merely echo the dominant politics of multiculturalism - are inadequate.

The key task is to start a dialogue with the class the revolutionary left claims to represent - including its most downtrodden layers. The fact that the local SA did not stand in Oldham on June 7 in opposition to all the other bourgeois parties (not simply the BNP) underlines the distance we still have to travel.

This dialogue, engagement and (in a sense) merger is impossible without breaking from the sterile tradition of sect-organisation still dominant on the left. This is the importance of the Socialist Alliance. The key to effective anti-fascist work lies in the success of the struggle to transform itself into a working class party.

The fact that the Oldham festival has now met the same fate as Burnley?s is food for thought. We hope our SWP comrades will finally see the light. They should argue against all state bans and prohibitions. We look forward to our continuing joint work with wiser SWP comrades in the Socialist Alliance.

Danny Hammill