12.11.2009

Confident and boasting of growth

The Socialist Party in England and Wales held its annual school, Socialism 2009, on November 7-8. Tina Becker reports on the opening rally

Socialism 2009 was a pretty good event, so it may seem churlish to quibble over figures. However, the claim on the organisation’s website that “over 1,000” attended its opening rally is just not correct. According to staff at the venue - and they should know - the capacity of Friends Meeting House is 1,000 when the balcony is factored in. And the balcony was decidedly not full.

Left organisations do appear to have precisely this self-defeating impulse to exaggerate their size, influence and genuine implantation in the working class. This adds to the general culture of cynicism the left generates around itself and in this case casts doubt over the claim made at the closing rally that SPEW membership now stands at close to 2,000. It also underlines the fact that the group is essentially not that different from the Socialist Workers Party and its ilk, despite its pretensions and despite its (understandable) smugness when it surveys the slow-motion car wreck its main rival has made of its political work over the last few years.

In general the Socialism event was relatively inclusive - certainly in comparison with the SWP’s paranoid control-freakery at its annual equivalent, Marxism. In the Peter Taaffe session we attended and intervened in (see Soviet 'planning' and bolt-on democracy), some 16 comrades spoke in the discussion. Aside from the CPGB, this included an Alliance for Workers’ Liberty member and an International Bolshevik Tendency comrade. They got to talk for a (generous) five minutes. CPGB comrades reported a pretty relaxed attitude to dissenting views in the sessions they attended.

On the negative side - again, reflecting the general culture of the left - nothing in the way of controversial debates featured on the platforms. For instance, the reported tensions over SPEW’s involvement with a flopped electoral intervention, No2EU, that saw it essentially subordinate its politics to the programme of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain. So the event was not that interesting, to be blunt.

SPEW’s serious orientation to working class militants is clearly one of its strengths. Its patience and dogged application to building is another. However, as our reports show, it is programmatically incoherent and mired in economism and nationalism. In that context, has there ever been a left event where so many self-proclaimed Marxists were wearing poppies? Very disturbing, comrades ...

Opening rally

The opening rally (which took place a full 21 hours before the closing rally), started with an old, animated film about ‘Mouseland’, where mice had always been voting for a government of “big, fat, black cats”.

But because they were cats, they introduced laws that suited - well - cats. The disappointed mice thought they should vote for somebody else - and chose white cats. They were equally disappointed, of course. So after four years they returned to voting for the black cats ... then the white cats again … you get the picture. Until one day, there was a little mouse who had a rather brilliant idea: “Why don’t we vote for a government of mice?”

Old film ends. Insert footage and pictures of SPEW members on the picket line, on demonstrations, on stalls.

I had not seen this film before and was surprised about its rather uninspiring and abrupt ending, so I looked it up on the internet. It is in fact an old election broadcast by the social democratic New Democratic Party of Canada. On YouTube, you can find the film introduced by actor Kiefer Sutherland, who is the grandson of NDP leader Tommy Douglas (www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqgOvzUeiAA).

Funnily enough though, the SPEW comrades deleted the last scene - and surely not for time reasons. This comes just after the clever mouse suggests that they should vote for a government of mice: “Oh, they said, he’s a Bolshevik. Lock him up! So they put him in jail. But I want to remind you that you can lock up a mouse or a man, but you can’t lock up an idea.”

Rather more interesting ending, isn’t it? But clearly one that does not fit with SPEW’s current political trajectory of establishing a Labour Party mark two, led by Bob Crow and any other union leader who will have SPEW on board.

Three such union leaders were on the platform of the opening rally, as chair Judy Beishon reminded the audience at least four times. In their publicity blurb, the comrades had announced that there would be “over a thousand people” present. In fact, with Friends Meeting House less than three quarters full, it was nearer 650 - a figure which dwindled to maybe 400 during the 25-minute-long (!) financial appeal. Bizarrely, you had to be present at the closing rally to find out what the money is actually for: they are aiming to raise £50,000 to be able to stand in 25 seats as part of whatever alliance is put together for the 2010 general election (half of the total was raised at the opening rally).

Brian Caton, general secretary of the Prison Officers Association, was the first speaker. He told the meeting that he had recently joined the Socialist Party after being a Labour member for 40 years. Apparently, there had been some opposition from within SPEW to his membership, as he called on comrades to “come and speak to me directly rather than attack me behind my back”. Unfortunately, SPEW is unable to report the details of this opposition either on its website or in its publications like The Socialist, which is reserved for exciting reports about the fat cats getting fatter while the NHS is getting worse.

So comrade Caton attempted to use his speech to stress his socialist credentials and so persuade the doubters. The problem is that his socialism basically consists of calling for a general strike. The TUC might have refused to debate the POA motion demanding this for the last two years, “but we will come back next year and the year after that with the same motion”. Because at some unspecified point in the past, “when the unions were stronger, Britain was a much better country”.

Matt Wrack, leader of the Fire Brigades Union, made a perfectly adequate speech about the need to put socialism back on the agenda. But he certainly did not endorse No2EU or the new electoral formation, although one or two inattentive SPEW members claim he did so on their blogs. In fact, comrade Wrack did not mention either No2EU or the general election.

Bob Crow spoke passionately about various trade union disputes, before mentioning “a new alliance that is now up and running. Our executive hasn’t had time to endorse it yet,” he said, but promised that there would be “a political party in the form of an alliance at the next general election”. There would be no challenge to John McDonnell or Jeremy Corbyn, he announced, only to “New Labour MPs”.

While he did not speak directly about the programme of the prospective formation, he took up the charge of “having been accused of being a little Englander” and tried to assure the comrades: “It’s not about nationality: it’s about class.” After all, quite a number of SPEW members were unhappy with No2EU’s chauvinist platform, which, on the insistence of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, opposed the free movement of people. I am not sure if he was able to convince SPEW members that the new formation would be any less chauvinistic. In any case, about a dozen people in the hall gave him a standing ovation.

SPEW member Keith Gibson made a fiery, if not always coherent, speech about the strike of the Lindsey oil refinery workers. As a member of the strike committee, he also felt the need to defend himself and his organisation against charges of nationalism and started off by claiming that the strike had “nothing at all to do with racism, but was fought purely and simply on class issues”. Well, not quite. After all, many of the workers on the unofficial picket line at first came out with the demand, ‘British jobs for British workers’. Comrade Gibson pointed out as much later on, when he described how he and his comrades were able to “turn the strike away from the racialist to a working class point of view”, for example by directing leaflets at the Italian workers who were supposed to replace the existing workforce on lower wages.

Despite the good work comrade Gibson did during that strike, the SP seems to have done surprisingly badly in terms of recruitment. Comrade Gibson proudly mentioned that there were “two workers from that strike in the audience here today”, while “one other worker has joined the SP”.

It was left to leader Peter Taaffe to actually mention No2EU for the first time. He endorsed it wholeheartedly and congratulated Bob Crow on taking the lead in establishing another electoral alternative in the 2010 general election. “We need an alternative, because today’s Labour Party is no different to a Stalinist nomenklatura”, which is why all unions should disaffiliate and “prepare for the general strike”.

The Tories are even worse, of course, and the BNP are “knocking on the door” - which is why we need socialism and “not lesser evilism”. Luckily, for comrade Taaffe socialism is “a very simple idea”, because “all you have to do is take the power out of the hands of the 150 biggest British companies and 500 more companies worldwide”. That is a very simple idea indeed. And also utterly idiotic, utopian, economistic, unworkable… and, worst of all, deeply uninspiring.

In fact it is a bit like the clever mouse asking the others to vote for another government to rule over them - this time a mousy grey one. Not even a social democrat like Tommy Douglas thought that this had anything to do with socialism.