29.09.2010

CNWP: dead men's shoes

Phil Kent examines the continuing project to replace the Labour Party

The September 26 extended steering committee of the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party is, I believe, the first for a rather long time. Launched in March 2006 with much fanfare and a couple of hundred or more attending, the CNWP has become a ghostly affair. The steering committee had 22 comrades present. But they represented decline. Not growth. Essentially, the meeting proved to be a debate between the minuscule remnant that calls itself the Socialist Alliance and Socialist Party in England and Wales tops.

The SA argued that the CNWP was going nowhere. Worse, people were being tempted back into the Labour Party. Pete McLaren - CNWP press officer and the leading figure in the SA - quoted his experience in Rugby. The local Labour Representation Committee was making progress in persuading people to rejoin Labour. He went on to frustratedly complain that people were not joining the CNWP because they didn’t know what they were joining or which direction it was going in. People were more likely to join if the CNWP made a clear commitment to a party project as soon as possible. He proposed, on behalf of the SA, a motion for a six point plan to provide the CNWP with a federal democratic constitution, which should be discussed at the next CNWP Conference. Steve Freeman, also of the SA, criticised the motion because it did not mention programme - a necessity, in his view, for a party project to succeed - but was otherwise in full agreement.

Both SA speakers expressed doubts about the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition - the electoral front supported by Bob Crow and which joined SPEW together with the Socialist Workers Party in the May 2010 general election. In particular its lack of commitment to internal democracy and the incompetent way it was launched - setting itself up only two months before polling day. Dave Church, from Walsall Democratic Labour Party and the SA, admitted that he had defended the undemocratic nature of Tusc on the grounds that it was impossible, given time constraints, to organise in any other way - but, he said, this is not going to be an acceptable excuse next time. He called for SPEW to vote against the SA motion - out of common honesty. He felt sure that they had no intention of implementing any of it - if it was agreed. None the less the SA motion was carried unanimously along with an anodyne SPEW motion dismissing the Labour Party as unreclaimable, opposing the cuts and the BNP, calling for a democratic republic and scrapping Trident. Uncontroversial, except, as Steve Freeman pointed out, it did not say anything about the bankers. Just a sloppy oversight; but perhaps an indication that this meeting was called on the fly without much forethought.

While on the subject of forethought, the CNWP is planning a conference in March 2011, but if the TUC calls a national demonstration in that month, as seems likely, the comrades propose to put the conference off until June, when Dave Nellist expects they can get many more people to attend. The SA motion will be been allocated a slot where it will be debated and voted on. If passed it will be taken to the founding conference of the new workers party - for which there is no proposed date.

Hanna Sell, SPEW’s deputy general secretary, gave a little speech which concentrated on the Tory cuts and the inevitability of a working class fightback once their enormity was realised. Labour was ideologically committed to the Tory cuts, albeit at a slower rate. She gave examples of Labour councils enthusiastically pushing the cuts through. Amusingly, in Waltham Forest the Labour council has passed a cuts budget with the Tories and Liberal Democrats voting against them. In her opinion there is no way Labour can organise an anti-cuts fightback. Especially, she said, taking into account the derisory vote gained by Diane Abbott, the (not very) left Labour MP, in the leadership election. The Labour left is all but dead, the comrade insisted. Despite the recent increase in Labour membership (many are disgruntled Lib Dems, not leftwing) the overall trend for Labour Party membership is, she insists, still downwards.

The CNWP, on the other hand, was well poised to take part in all (not just socialist) anti-cuts campaigns. The time is coming for the CNWP to step into the dead man’s shoes of Labourism - my words, not hers. In reply to the SA’s frustration at the progress being made, comrade Sell claimed to share it. But it would be impossible to launch a party now as sufficient progress has not been made in winning over the trade unions. Unfortunately the dead man has not taken his shoes off yet.

Clive Heemskirk, deputy editor of SPEW’s monthly journal Socialism Today, led off on the progress being made in SPEW’s top down approach of winning the trade union bureaucracy away from the Labour Party. Tusc, he said has not retreated from its position at the May general election and is preparing to fight Labour at the next general election. It would not support Labour candidates such as John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn. However, Tusc would not stand against them. Towards this end a conference has been called for all Tusc anti-cuts candidates on January 15, where motions will be allowed. So it is unfair to describe Tusc as undemocratic, he maintained.

Dave Nellist, a SPEW councillor, added that at the next CNWP steering committee Nick Wrack - ex-Respect national organiser, ex-SWP and ex-editor of Militant - will be delivering a paper on how to involve independent socialists. Also, the RMT has substantially increased its financial contributions to political work against the Labour Party over the years. Others, like the PCS, might soon follow suit. At the end of the meeting Dave Nellist made another plea for patience, saying that it took Kier Hardy 50 years of campaigning to complete his fight for the Labour Party, but he was hopeful that in as little as five years we might have a new workers party.

Comrade Nellist clarified his organisation’s attitude to the Labour left for me. Citing Coventry, he reported that Diane Abbott received only 31 votes to Dave Miliband’s nearly 300 from constituency Labour Party membership. This was the normal pattern across the country. He did not expect the Labour Party to produce any anti-cuts campaigns. But the project for the CNWP is to replace the Labour Party, not prop it up.