26.05.2004

Divided they fall

The Morning Star's Communist Party of Britain holds its annual congress over the weekend of May 29-30: and are likely to highlight serious divisions. Despite the protests of some CPB members that these are mere personality clashes, Alan Rees argues that they are lodged in the opportunist DNA of the party, and are political, not personal.

Branch and district delegates of the Morning Star's Communist Party of Britain meets for a decisive congress over this weekend. Some have even talked of a split.

The most pressing issue at hand is clear. It is Respect - the unity coalition. On one side, there are the narrowly pro-Labour 'traditionalists' - such as Kevin Halpin, industrial organiser, Anita Halpin a leading figure in the NUJ, and John Foster, international secretary and top dog in Scotland. On the other, there are the 'innovators', grouped around general secretary Rob Griffiths and Morning Star editor John Haylett, but including ex-Straight Leftists like Andrew Murray and Nick Wright, who, flushed by the success of the Stop the War Coalition, are now eager to pressurise New Labour through an electoral challenge from the left. Embittered internal enemies accuse these self-declared hardline Stalinites of going soft on the Socialist Workers Party and Trotskyism.

Respect was the sole question debated by the January 17 special congress after the CPB's executive committee found itself divided 11 to 11 over whether or not to support the 'convention of the left' which founded Respect. The special congress saw a defeat for the innovators by 60% to 40%. A narrow margin, but a huge rebuff for Griffiths and co. These comrades had been assiduously courted by George Galloway, anxious for a counterweight in Respect more in tune with his personal admix of Labourite reformism and soft-focus Stalinism than the majority SWP bloc.

After the special congress there were some significant resignations - or threats of resignations - of pro-Respect CPBers, including from the highest levels. But the main energies of both sides have been concentrated on this weekend's congress. Griffiths and his innovators are determined to get their 'new CPB', and that means effectively reversing the Respect decision. They have been working overtime to ensure that congress goes the right way for them.

On the other side the Halpins, Foster and the traditionalists want to press home their victory. They are also furious that the Morning Star has effectively rebelled against the decisions of the special congress. The way the editor chose to report the results of the special congress was a calculated insult. It got just the briefest of mentions - as an aside in a report of a CPB executive committee meeting on January 19. And looming over this postage stamp article was the image of George Galloway, and a puff for a Respect rally in Oxford that night. Since then, the pro-Respect line has continued. No wonder there are a bevy of branch resolutions calling the editor to account for breaching 'democratic centralism' and demanding he abides by the spirit as well as the letter of the majority decisions.

Whether or not these factions will end up going their own separate ways after this weekend's gathering remains to be seen. Certainly, there is no consensus amongst CPBers themselves about the significance of what is at stake. Some shrug and tell you that the congress will be a mundane, uncontroversial affair; others mutter about dark forces and state-engineered splits.

Whatever the outcome, this is an organisation living on borrowed time. Even if the particular divisions over Respect are patched over, the CPB has a programmatic time bomb ticking away deep in its bowels. In truth, the episodic problems stem from organic flaws - centrally the British road to socialism programme with its auto-Labourism. Tony Blair, New Labour, dumping the old clause four and the invasion and occupation of Iraq and the mass opposition this produced make this an increasingly problematic, not to say unsustainable, strategy.

Differences have increasingly found their way to the surface over recent years. In the Morning Star of July 30 2001, we therefore found a hapless Kenny Coyle, an auto-Labourite at the time, breaking the long-standing tradition against polemic. Not only did he actually mention other political trends outside Labour, specifically those then involved in the Socialist Alliance. "Some critics of the CPB," wrote the comrade, "cannot understand why the party should be so cautious of a formation that is apparently so focused on left unity". In his eagerness to warn his readers that the "main core" of the SA was "far left" groups (horror!), comrade Coyle even broke the ban on mentioning our own organisation.

Polemic is totally out of character for the CPB, an inert sect whose domestic political arena is normally limited to the Labour Party left and the trade union bureaucracy. Clearly, the comrade was responding to objective developments in the wider world, but also to some degree of pressure within his own organisation. Earlier that month, the cooperative that formally owns the Morning Star - the People's Press Printing Society - had passed a resolution that called for "continuing and extending" the Star's coverage of "the plurality and diversity of the left" - no doubt the justification Haylett is now using.

Despite "reservations about some of the formulations" in the motion, leading CPBer Richard Maybin told the assembled shareholders - the vast majority members of his organisation - that the management committee of the PPPS thought it important to accept the "essence" of the motion: the commitment to "seek to report and engage in debate with the growing number of trade unionists, environmentalists and socialists seeking to develop a political space and organisations to the left of the increasingly rightwing Labour Party". To reject the motion "would give out the wrong message": it would contradict the idea that the Star was "the inclusive paper of the whole left" (Weekly Worker June 11 2001).

This limited 'opening up' of the Star came in the aftermath of the Socialist Alliance's modestly successful intervention in the 2001 general election, when it achieved the "highest ever vote for the socialists outside the Labour Party", as the successful motion to the PPPS AGM noted.

Of course, the SWP's subsequent decision to ditch the Socialist Alliance temporarily confirmed the pessimism of the 'traditionalists'. But the 'innovators' still had some wind in their sails. They had been bolstered by the 2001 congress's changes to the party programme - regarded by most comrades as uncontroversial at the time - that changed the organisation's commitment to a Labour government "of a new type" as the sole vehicle for socialist change, in favour of a Labour-communist-socialist majority in parliament.

This formulation undoubtedly gives the innovators room for manoeuvre when it comes to developments like Respect: Yet January's special congress showed them that the CPB majority is not only increasingly aged, infirm and nostalgic for a vanished Stalinist past, but has no particular attachment to the CPB itself. After all, this rump organisation - despite its farcical claims to continuity with the 'official' CPGB - was actually born of a split. For many CPBers, the big wrench in their political lives was walking out of the CPGB - no matter how it was spun as a 're-establishment' at the time. It is doubtful whether there is the same 'glue' of tradition, loyalty and roots to cohere the CPB in hard times. In that sense, the figure of Rob Griffiths is an ironically appropriate general secretary to head the organisation in a period that could see its final implosion.

Griffiths travels very light in terms of the heritage his organisation claims for itself - that of the revolutionary CPGB of 1920. Oddly enough, the comrade actually comes from a left republican, Welsh nationalist background. He was once put on trial for terrorism (and acquitted). Most damningly for many in the ranks of the organisation he now heads, when the man made the transition to 'official' communism in the mid-1980s, he initially distinguished himself by authoring some stinging polemics against the British road to socialism - which the CPB was actually created todefend.

Many people have a 'colourful' political youth to live down, but this last 'sin' has not been so easily forgiven - latent tensions have characterised the organisation ever since he became the general secretary. Griffiths secured his leadership after a civil war in 1998 which cleaved the organisation down the middle. First, the conservative and deeply uninspired general secretary, Mike Hicks - a British roader to his marrow - was dumped by a vote of 17 to 13 by the CPB's political committee. Then the old guard of Hicks, Mary Rosser, Ron Bellamy, Peter Ritman et al, hit back, sacking the Morning Star editor, John Haylett. Finally after the Morning Star strike by workers and editorial staff, Griffiths secured not only the reinstatement of his ally Haylett but succeeded in driving out his opponents.

Today's differences in the CPB are explained away by some CPBers as nothing more than "personality clashes" or "puffed up egos". Not surprisingly then there is an unwillingness to take sides. "The only really viable alternative to Griffiths would be John Foster", one 'traditionalist' comrade told me. "But he ploughs his own furrow up in Scotland. He's very tight with Labour up there."

Possibly true, but not the point. The origin of the CPB's crisis are lodged in its opportunist DNA. It is all about politics, not personalities.