07.07.2004

Forward to the jamahiriya

Simon Harvey of the Socialist Labour Party takes a closer look at Dave Roberts, the SLP candidate who is standing against Respect's Yvonne Ridley in Leicester South - and finds a rather distasteful and homophobic past

No doubt many comrades will have been surprised to learn that Respect’s Yvonne Ridley is to be opposed in the July 15 Leicester South by-election by Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party.
The SLP did not contest a single seat in the European Union and Greater London Authority elections on June 10, so comrades might be excused for believing that it is finished. Well, not quite. Amongst the 200-300 largely atomised, isolated individuals who remain members, there are small pockets of what passes for activity. True, after the expulsion in May of the last remaining organised grouping, the ultra-Stalinite followers of Harpal Brar, the SLP is left without much in the way of a national structure. But despite that, a few branches, even the odd region, still hobble along.

That is the case in Leicester, whose comrades formally run the East Midlands region. Or, more exactly, one particular comrade, a certain Dave Roberts, the SLP candidate for Leicester South. Comrade Roberts - who has previously contested the Leicester East constituency, as well as local council elections, for the SLP - is also a member of the national executive and enthusiastically put his hand up to expel the Brarites at the May 8 NEC meeting. 

Roberts has a long history on the left. He was a member of Gerry Healy’s Workers Revolutionary Party in the 1970s: that is, until in the early 80s his then leader and guru, Royston Bull, decided upon what amounted to a split. Bull was a journalist on News Line and organised the WRP’s East Midlands district. In the event he took a slice of the active membership with him and even managed to gain a sprinkling of adherents elsewhere for his grandly titled Workers Party - headquarters: Stockport, Lancs.

Ideologically Bull’s WP combined a millennial belief in the fundamental superiority of the Soviet Union with an equally reassuring mantra that capitalism was on the brink of a final, catastrophic collapse. Basically Bull was moving from cod Trotskyism to what amounted to the same thing - cod Stalinism. Not surprisingly within a few years his WP had more or less lost everything. However, a hard core of faithful disciples remained and they morphed first into the International Leninist Workers Party and then simply took the name of its journal, the Economic and Philosophic Science Review. Having previously dismissed Scargill as a social democrat joker, in 1996 the tiny grouping threw itself into ‘entry work’ in the SLP.

The EPSR is a bizarre, ranting, photocopied weekly, which enjoyed a brief period of relative prominence when Scargill promoted Bull as vice-president in 1998 in order to depose his previous Fourth International Supporters Caucus courtiers - namely Brian Heron, Patrick Sikorski and Carolyn Sikorski - from the leadership. Roberts was voted onto the NEC as part of the clear-out, where he has remained ever since.

The EPSR was notorious within the SLP, not so much for its laughably amateurish appearance - at the turn of the 21st century its typewritten articles were still cut and pasted into place - but for its overt homophobia. Here is what Bull wrote in 1996, for example:

“The homosexual disorder is not unethical as such, but its demonic drives can lay sufferers open to a more conspiratorial prevalence of such behaviour” (EPSR October 8 1996). That’s right - homosexuality is a “disorder”, whose “sufferers” are more susceptible to corruption than the normal, run of the mill bourgeois. After all, their “sexual deviation” arises from “retarded emotional-sexual development” and thus “their sickness is self-evident”.

That last phrase might be spoken when referring to ‘communists’ who can bring themselves to write such words, you might think. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the EPSR’s homophobia was well known throughout the SLP - almost entirely thanks to the exposures carried by the Weekly Worker - king Arthur saw to it that Bull and Roberts were elected. EPSR supporters would vehemently defend such ravings in public - usually denying that there was anything homophobic about them - and to my knowledge Roberts has never attempted to distance himself from them. Presumably he still holds to this vile bigotry.

Immediately after the 1998 NEC elections, Scargill instructed Bull to close down his pathetic little rag. Of course, passionately believing in the lurid nonsense he bashed out on his old Rimington every week, Bull indignantly refused. He did, though, humbly offer to resign as vice-president and carry on as a mere rank and file SLP member. Scargill would tolerate no such temerity and Bull was out on his ear within a couple of months - Scargill declared his membership had ‘lapsed’. That was the end of the EPSR’s brief moment of fame and the entire gang walked out of the SLP.

All except Dave Roberts. At last he had emerged from the deepest depths of sectarian obscurity and he was not about to give up his glorious position - doing Scargill’s bidding. Besides, there was important work to be done: in the absence of a dynamic membership, the SLP would need support from high places if it was to function properly, especially when it came to fighting elections - an expensive business.

It was in this period that SLP delegations were sent to such socialist utopias as North Korea, Serbia and Libya. I don’t know whether Dave drew the short or long straw, but anyway in September 1999 he found himself in Tripoli for an international youth conference. Dave is no spring chicken, so he might have felt a little out of place. But how could he turn down “an opportunity to see first hand and experience the gains of the Libyan revolution” (Workers Party of Belgium website)?

After visiting the National Soap Factory, Libya’s largest, comrade Roberts was apparently so inspired by what he had seen that he delivered the following speech on behalf of the SLP’s NEC, “which was received by rapturous applause”.

He said: “Brothers and sisters, it is a great privilege to be here with you today on the occasion of your celebration of the great Al Fatah revolution. Here in the Great Socialist Jamahiriya, a free land amongst a free people, I bring you socialist and internationalist greetings from the Socialist Labour Party in Britain.

“Many young people who have been involved in the international camps during the last eight years have seen at first hand and marvelled at the great social and economic, political developments you have achieved throughout your 30 years of revolutionary struggle ...

“Those of us fighting for the liberation of our countries from imperialism, and our people from capitalism, pay tribute to the generosity of the Libyan people for the solidarity they have shown to anti-imperialist and progressive movements throughout the world. We hope one day to be able to return to a future celebration of the Al Fatah revolution, and announce that we too have defeated capitalism in our countries and are joining with you in the building of a socialist world. In the meantime we say: Long live the Great Socialist Libyan Peoples Jamahiriya. Long live Muammer Al Gadaffy. Al Fatah forever!”

Who knows - voting SLP in Leicester on July 15 could be the first step in the achievement of a Scargillite ‘jamahiriya’ here in Britain. Then again, perhaps not.