04.05.2005
Rising from the grave
Peter Manson takes a look at Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party and other small left organisations at election time
Once the general election came around, the Socialist Labour Party miraculously rose from the grave, narrowly failing to meet president Arthur Scargill's target of contesting 50 seats. In fact the SLP website is still claiming 50 candidates, even though Linda Muir (Hull East) and Ryan O'Neil (Bury North) did not actually make it onto the ballot paper (for what reason I know not). Nevertheless, to stand in 48 constituencies is indeed a minor miracle, given the almost complete disappearance from the British political scene of Arthur's party. Until the last couple of weeks, the SLP website lay virtually abandoned, and its ever more occasional newspaper Socialist News made up for the absence of anything approaching a substantial or up-to-date article with extra large type and huge pictures (often of Scargill himself). There are no more than a dozen or so actually functioning branches and real membership is down to something like 200 - mostly inactive - individuals (at its height, in 1997, it was well over 2,000). Arthur Scargill: miracle The SLP did not contest last year's European or Greater London Authority elections and you might have been forgiven for believing that it would not feature on May 5 2005 either. In the circumstances then, 48 candidates represents a huge effort by a tiny number of people - persuading members to stand as paper candidates, collecting nominations, organising the printing of manifestos, etc. True, in 2001 the SLP managed 114 candidates, but with even fewer members now (its last remaining organised and semi-active internal grouping, the ultra-Stalinites around Harpal Brar, were expelled/resigned just over a year ago) it did not seem likely Scargill would be able to stand more than a handful of token candidates this time. Nowhere has the SLP been able to seriously campaign and many candidates will not even have set foot in their constituency. For example, in order to make a showing in Scotland, Scargill had to nominate Doris Kelly from Bolton (Glasgow North East) and Ian Johnson from Yorkshire (Glasgow Central). There just were not enough willing SLP members north of the border to give him the five candidates he wanted for Scotland's proletarian capital. Apart from the logistical problems, what about the money? Where did that come from? Not from individual dues or membership fundraising - that is for certain. No doubt Scargill himself would have paid for some of the deposits out of his own pocket and he may have got a few donations here and there. As for the rest, your guess is as good as mine. Scargill is still honorary president of the National Union of Mineworkers and runs the miners' international union organisation. The North West, Cheshire and Cumbria Miners Association affiliates its 3,000 retired members to the SLP - not that many of them know it (those that are still alive, that is). And Scargill has developed contacts with those fine proletarian internationalist governments of Libya and North Korea (and previously with 'socialist' Serbia too). As usual, Scargill ignored any approaches from other left groups wanting to avoid a clash. In fact he seems to have gone out of his way to stand candidates against them. However, where there was no Labour or serious left candidate calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, the Weekly Worker recommended an SLP vote. While Scargill's politics are a mix of Stalinism, reformism, legalism and nationalism, he does take a relatively principled stance on the key issue of Iraq. Although he thinks, "Arms expenditure should be cut by two-thirds" and condemns the invasion and occupation of Iraq as "unlawful", he states unequivocally: "The Socialist Labour Party would bring all the troops home from Iraq now" (SLP election manifesto). Thus we advised our readers in 30 constituencies to give an (extremely) critical vote to the SLP. Elsewhere, where Socialist Labour stood against the small but real forces (as opposed to an organisation that starts and ends with one fantasising individual) represented by the Scottish Socialist Party, Socialist Party or working class Respect candidates, we voted for the latter. We took a similar attitude to another rump group, the Workers Revolutionary Party, which stood 10 candidates. As with the SLP, it made a point of opposing other left organisations, but in the six constituencies where the WRP candidates were the only ones who could be regarded as 'anti-war working class', even they could be given critical support. Apart from its ultra-sectarianism, another similarity the WRP shares with the SLP is its propensity to seek sponsorship amongst the most despicable of forces. Amongst those to have helped keep its daily News Line afloat in the past have been Gaddafi's Libya and Saddam's Iraq. Perhaps it is still hoping for a Ba'athist comeback when it states: "Only the victory of the insurgency can end the occupation and restore Iraq's national sovereignty and independence" (News Line editorial, April 25). Of course, our tactic of voting only for anti-war working class candidates was not aimed at either the SLP or the WRP. We were attempting to draw a class line around the key issue in British politics, the issue that continued to dominate the general election campaign right until the last day: Iraq. Our intervention sought to politically divide those few Labour candidates who were prepared to take a principled stand in favour of an immediate and unconditional withdrawal from the rest of the Blairites and equivocators. It also sought to drive a wedge between the "secular socialists" and the non-working class "muslim activists" in Respect. None of the candidates we supported critically stood on a rounded, principled, working class platform. All of them were opportunists of one sort or another. But it is essential for communists to intervene in a way that is most likely to take forward the struggle for genuine Marxism at a time when our forces are so meagre. So, whatever other illusions the candidates we supported laboured under (UN peacekeeping on the one hand, or islamists and Ba'athists on the other); whatever absurd and pathetic postures they took up on a whole range of positions; if they were politically working class and demanded the immediate and unconditional removal of UK troops from Iraq, that was enough to earn our critical support. We did not therefore recommend a vote for the Socialist Party of Great Britain's sole candidate, Daniel Lambert, in Vauxhall. The SPGB, along with its World Socialist Movement 'international', is entirely propagandist, its sole demand being for an abstract 'socialism', detached from the real struggles of the workers and oppressed. It cannot even bring itself to support the end of the Iraq occupation: "Unlike the shameless and confused opportunism demonstrated by much of the left wing, who actively pursued a nationalist stance in siding with Iraqi rebel forces against the US, the World Socialist Movement maintains its principled positions of advocating the end of capitalism and the establishment of socialism as the solution to the present conflict, as to all similar ones" (www.worldsocialism.org/news/iraq7a.html). Peter Manson
Worker