The right

Crush the saboteurs

Theresa May’s decision to call a snap general election looks more of a no-brainer with each day that passes. The prime minister might have been tempted to let Labour’s right wing continue their wrecking activity until 2020, but that always carried the risk of events intervening at some point – so go for it. Rather just play safe and take advantage of the Labour Party’s weakness – denuded as it is in Scotland, riven by civil war and dogged by dismal poll ratings. It is hard to imagine any Tory prime minister doing anything different.

Of course, various factors affected her decision. One of them being the growing realisation that the Brexit negotiations with the European Union are going to be extremely gruelling. Any delusions about them being a shoo-in have evaporated – reports of the ‘frosty’ No10 dinner with Jean-Claude Junker confirms it.

Another possible, and related, consideration is that Donald Trump seems ready to do a trade deal with the EU ahead of any agreement with Britain following discussions with Angela Merkel – where she purportedly reminded the US president a number of times that he would not be allowed to conduct a unilateral trade deal with Germany. Obviously, Britain is small fry compared to the EU bloc, with the US exporting $270 billion in goods to the EU last year, making it America’s major trading partner – whilst exports to the UK were only worth $55 billion. If Britain does find itself at the “back of the queue” – or not near the front, as Barack Obama warned during the referendum campaign – then the Brexit self-image of Britain as a newly liberated global player cutting ‘free trade’ deals here, there and everywhere is severely punctured. That would put Theresa May in a tricky situation, meaning she needs a solid parliamentary base to weather the inevitable political and economic storm.

At the end of the day though, the prime minister’s calculation was simple – now is the chance to convert a slim majority into an overwhelming one. Don’t dither or dally like Gordon Brown in 2007. Naturally, no-one knows what the exact size of the majority will be. But in betting shop terms, the odds of a Labour victory are pretty slim (perhaps rather generously, William Hill has it on 12 to one).

Some polls suggest that the Tories are on course for a 150 – seat Commons majority – notching up a 17% lead in marginal seats, where Labour have a majority of 15% or less, which would see Labour losing 65 seats to the Tories (representing a swing of 130 seats between the two parties). Other polls put the Tories ahead of Labour in London, Scotland and even on course to win a majority of seats in Wales. The last time that happened was 1859. Another poll has the Conservatives winning 12 seats in Scotland, taking 10 from the Scottish National Party. But one thing we can say for sure is that Theresa May did not call an early election out of “weakness” because she was facing a “rising tide of anger” from the British working class, as suggested by Paula Mitchell of the Socialist Party of England and Wales – maybe she lives on a different planet (The Socialist April 18 2017). Unfortunately, the exact opposite is true – the Tories are going from strength to strength, politically and electorally.

Civil war

As for the Labour Party, the civil war continues. Even though there is an election campaign going on. Tony Blair has refused to endorse Corbyn as potential prime minister and calls for voters to back any candidate willing to oppose “Brexit at any costs” – including “reasonable” Tories and Lib Dems. Peter Mandelson’s think tank, Policy Network, warns that a bad election result for Labour might strengthen Corbyn. Not to be outdone, John Woodcock and Neil Coyle have been talking about the damage being done by Corbyn’s leadership to Labour’s election chances. And, embracing cross-class liberalism, Jon Cruddas, Clive Lewis, Helena Kennedy, Hilary Wainwright, Tulip Saddiq, Paul Mason and Owen Jones have been calling for Labour to step aside for the Greens in Brighton Pavilion and the Isle of Wight (Letters The Guardian April 30 2017).

Meanwhile, rightwing Labour candidates are running campaigns which claim that they put their constituents before their party. Jeremy Corbyn does not get a mention. But that hardly applies to the Tories. They will bang on and on about Corbyn. The idea that you can somehow uninvent Corbyn, make him disappear, is for the birds – people will be asking you about him regardless. The fact of the matter is that Theresa May says she is calling this election not because she wants to massively increase her parliamentary majority (though she is and probably will), but by claiming it is a choice between stability and chaos – between a strong Conservative government and a “floundering, weak and nonsensical Jeremy Corbyn that will put our nation’s future at risk” – essentially making this a rerun of the 2015 election, in which David Cameron campaigned relentlessly about Ed Miliband being in the pocket of Alex Salmond, and so on.

Displaying their confidence, Philip Hammond said that the May government will not be tied to David Cameron’s pledge not to increase income tax, national insurance or VAT. So tax rises are on the horizon. Earlier, infuriating rightwing Tory backbenchers and grassroots activists, Theresa May said she would retain a pledge to allocate 0.7% of national income to international aid and – more significantly – would not commit her government to the so-called triple lock for pensioners, which ensures that the state pension rises by the higher of the inflation rate, average earnings or 2.5%.

Of course, the daft Cameron-Osborne ‘promise’ to achieving a budget surplus by 2020 was ditched long ago – but the recent comments, or non-comments, by both Hammond and May represent another scrubbing away of the past: Cameron and Osborne seem like distant memories now. The distinct message from today’s Tory government is that pensioners are far too well off and should be made to feel guilty about the fact that their pensions have been going up each year – obviously it is their fault that young people cannot get jobs and houses. Therefore punish ‘rich’ pensioners and help out young people.

Utterly idiotic from any rational, economic point of view – if not downright deceitful, though some people might fall for it. But the calculation is that most pensioners who traditionally vote Tory will continue to vote Tory. Who else are they going to vote for? Not the Lib Dems, as most of them voted ‘leave’- definitely not Corbyn’s Labour Party. After all, the Labour right seems to have persuaded the majority of Labour voters – reinforced endlessly by the colluding media – that, although Corbyn may be a thoroughly nice bloke, he is completely incompetent. Not a devil, but more a fool – a bit like Ed Miliband, who could not even eat a bacon sandwich properly. If his own party, or at least the Parliamentary Labour Party, do not think Corbyn should even be the leader, never mind prime minister, then why should you trust him or vote for him? This is the story so far.

Our own expectation, for what it is worth, is that the media and the Tories have plenty of things up their sleeves to use against Corbyn if necessary – multiple examples of his ‘anti-Semitism’, statements on the Soviet Union, pro-IRA sympathies, etc. Pictures of him alongside whoever at some rally, demonstration or meeting. They are just waiting to be deployed if he appears to be making tangible progress in the run-up to June 8.

Stay or go?

Yes, of course, it is possible that Labour will not do quite as badly as we fear – but we strongly suspect that things will turn out badly. We have been going on for some time about the likelihood of some sort of repeat of 1931 and the national government – when Ramsay MacDonald joined a coalition with the Tories and Liberals because at least some in the Labour cabinet refused to sanction cuts, especially to unemployment benefit. As a result, Labour was hammered at the polls, because they faced not only Tories, but Liberals too – who were still a significant force at the time. It is interesting to note that MacDonald did not want to go for an early election, but the Tories forced his hand – wanting to crush Labour, which they did.

What is most crucial is not the actual election result, but what happens after June 8. In other words, will Jeremy Corbyn stay or will he go? History, for about the last 30 years, has been of leaders falling on their sword to make way for someone fresh. We are no wiser than anybody else about what Corbyn will do, but the left should be urging him to stay on and fight the right. But if you look at the Owen Jones version of events, apparently there is a bright younger leftwinger ready to take over from Corbyn. Well, he or she might be bright and younger than Corbyn – but leftwing? Clive Lewis, Rosie Winterton, Jon Cruddas? You must be kidding. There is no-one obviously credible in terms of a sustained history of principled leftwing politics.

Anyhow, replacement candidates for sitting Labour MPs who stand down are being chosen by the national executive committee – so there has been a bias towards safe rightwingers rather than dangerous leftwingers.

Having said all that, the chances of Corbyn staying on as leader has increased due to the recent Unite election – which saw Len McCluskey beat the right’s candidate, Gerard Coyne, albeit on a depressingly low turnout of 12.2%. McCluskey won 59,067 votes (45.4%) and Coyne got 53,544 (41.5%), with Ian Allinson – a member of the Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century split from the Socialist Workers Party – on 17,143 (13.1%).

In our view, it was a wrong call by RS21 to stand a candidate against McCluskey. The fact that Allinson was backed by other sections of the left, including the SWP, shows that they are incapable of strategic thinking. Clearly, the election was far less about actual internal Unite politics and far more of an overspill of the Labour civil war – that was certainly how the Labour right saw it and the media too.

For instance, look at the response to the election result by The Economist. It ran the instructive headline, “The tragedy of Len McCluskey’s re-election as head of Unite” (April 22). The article touchingly claimed that McCluskey’s narrow victory is a “tragedy for the British left”, as it “condemns Unite to another five years of incompetent leadership, while significantly increasing Mr Corbyn’s chances of holding onto the leadership of the Labour Party after losing the general election” – which, of course, is the real point.

Naturally, various MPs and grandees of the Labour right have lined up in the media to attack McCluskey for being far too close to Corbyn – exactly why Allinson’s participation in the election was so mistaken, as he could have been responsible for McCluskey’s defeat. Not that we should have any illusions in the left bureaucrat, Len McCluskey, it goes without saying, but it is far more likely that he will urge Corbyn not to fall on his sword post-June 8.

McCluskey’s Unite – as opposed to Coyne’s Unite – could provide an organisational base for the left to do what they ought to be doing: that is attacking the right for losing the election. Ever since it looked likely that Corbyn was going to win the leadership, the right has conducted a civil war that has continued all the way through. Corbyn’s re-election on an increased mandate did not stop the civil war – no, they just toned it down a bit whilst plotting away.

But once the election is over we should expect an explosion of anger from the right, magnified by the enemy media, the likes of which we have not seen before – more no-confidence motions, more parliamentary harassment and scheming, more attempts to give Jeremy Corbyn a nervous breakdown, and all the rest. Full of vindictiveness, rage in their heart, the right will get the really sharp knives out and fight to retake the party, guided by the slogan, ‘Never again’.

Momentum, The left

Cohering the Labour left

Carla Roberts of Labour Party Marxists reports on the first meeting of the Grassroots Momentum steering committee on April 22 in London

This was a surprisingly positive and constructive meeting. Surprising for a number of reasons. Firstly, the committee was elected exactly six weeks previously at Grassroots Momentum’s first, fractious conference on March 11. And if “a week is a long time in politics”, these six weeks certainly felt like an eternity. Not a single decision has been made and the only thing the majority of committee members had agreed on was to oppose the proposal to intervene at the Momentum ‘conference’ on March 25 with our own leaflet. The rest of the email communications were concerned with an argument over the length of our lunch break (30 minutes, since you ask) and if there should be a pooled fare system (no).

Secondly, Momentum itself is disappearing down the plughole with ever-increasing speed, which naturally has an impact on the left within it. Momentum meetings are becoming smaller and smaller. The demobilisation and depoliticisation of Momentum branches that followed Jon Lansman’s January 10 coup has become even worse in the last 10 days. As if most sensible people on the left weren’t disillusioned enough about Labour’s grim chances at the polls, they then received an email from Team Momentum telling them to stand down.

Yes, there are strict electoral rules and laws on election spending (as a bunch of Tory Party MPs has recently found). But to demand that Momentum branches effectively stop meeting in such a heightened political period – because “public meetings” could be seen as Labour Party campaigning – is adding to the sense of demoralisation. The right continues to fight dirty and with every trick they have, but Momentum is concerned about sticking to the letter of the law. Another trap Corbyn has stepped into, unfortunately.

Thirdly, the GM steering committee is made up of a lot of people who – how to put this nicely – really hate each others’ guts. The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (which has six members and supporters on the SC) have played a deeply disgusting role in the entirely fabricated ‘anti-Semitism scandal’ in the Labour Party, joining into the witch-hunt of Ken Livingstone and, of course, Jackie Walker, who also sits on the GM committee (and also has about half a dozen allies there).

Considering all these factors, I expected a rather fractious, ill-tempered meeting with very little outcome. But I guess we can thank Theresa May for focusing our minds. The snap election, plus the fact that Momentum is playing dead, have actually opened up a space on the left of the Labour Party.

Under the experienced chairmanship of Matt Wrack (leader of the Fire Brigade’s Union), the meeting started with a frank and open assessment of the current situation and the general election. There was a healthy sense of realism evident. Everybody in the room agreed that Labour’s chances of winning the election were pretty slim. To the committee’s credit, nobody voiced the moronic idea peddled by the likes of the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party that Theresa May has called this election because of a weakness of the Tory Party. Matt Wrack for example admitted to being “quite demoralised when I heard about the election”, because clearly Theresa May has called it for one reason and one reason alone: to crush the Labour Party and increase the Tory majority, aided by the entire media establishment.

Speaker after speaker bemoaned the fact that the right wing in the Labour Party continues with its assault on Corbyn and his leadership. Worse, Corbyn continues to let them to get away with it in the vague hope of ‘party unity’. Clearly, the right has not signed up to any truce, as can be witnessed by the dozen or so MPs who have said they would rather not stand again than run under a Corbyn leadership.

John Woodcock MP took the biscuit when he pronounced that he “will not countenance ever voting to make Jeremy Corbyn Britain’s prime minister”.4 In our view, Woodcock should be expelled, along with Tom Watson, Ian McNicol and, of course, good old Tony Blair. Blair has come out the woodwork to call for a “tactical” vote against Labour Party candidates who support Brexit – an offence that would have seen a left-winger expelled immediately by the NEC’s rigged compliance unit. But instead of cleansing the party of its saboteurs, the NEC has decided to prevent Labour Party members from having any say over the choosing of parliamentary candidates – which is of course part of the civil war against the left.

Graham Bash (a member of the Labour Representation Committee) was perhaps the most ‘officially optimistic’ speaker on the day. He thought that “we need to fight to win and we need to give a really positive message. We should say that we can win against the odds. We should not spread demoralisation and fear. Because the cost of failure will be huge and the left will face a carnival of reaction.”

True, of course, it would be pointless to start any fight in order to lose. But other speakers pointed to the fact that “demoralisation” will be equally widespread (or worse) if we pretend that we, for example, just need to point to Corbyn’s “10 pledges” (as committee member Jan Pollock suggested) and hope that it will win Labour the elections. Because it will not.

Most on the steering committee thought that the Labour Party would manage to close the current gap in the polls somewhat come June 8 (difficult not to), but that the Tories would very likely win. Which would of course lead to the next leadership challenge, probably fronted by Yvette Cooper, who has done nothing to dispel those rumours. In this situation, “we must convince Corbyn not to give in, not to step down, but hold on and continue to fight to transform the Labour Party”, said Matt Wrack, to the visible agreement of the meeting.

“Any candidate who is not Corbyn or McDonnell will be a defeat for the left”, comrade Wrack added – though some people later questioned if McDonnell really is still a reliable ally. There aren’t just his various U-turns and cringing apologies – some in the room also have not forgiven him for breaking his promise to send a video message to GM’s launch conference. Clearly, that hope was a bit naive. After all, the Corbyn team (which includes McDonnell) had sanctioned the Lansman coup. Why would he then support an organisation that was founded in opposition to that coup? My guess is that McDonnell nodded his head politely when the request was put to him, but never intended to fulfil it.

In any case, most seemed agreed on the need to continue to support Corbyn and McDonnell when they’re being attacked – but to criticise them when they are attacking socialist principles or continuing to try and appease the Labour right.

The meeting went on to decide a couple of concrete actions:

1. GM will publish a weekly email and launch a website, which will “do what Momentum does not do”, as one speaker put it. The intention is, for example, to publish good, political scripts for phone banking sessions; give people ideas on running stalls; working with other campaigns and encouraging Momentum members to go beyond the official Labour canvassing tactic of simply surveying voting intentions and instead have actual political discussions with people on the doorstep. There has been a suggestion that the website should feature comments on disputed issues like Labour’s apparently “united” climb down over immigration. We have to see if that will be picked up by the small team running the website and email bulletin.

2. GM will organise a post-election conference of the ‘Labour left’ on June 17 (or a week later). The idea is to use this meeting to fight against the likely disillusionment of the Labour left post June 8 and to convey the message that – no matter what the outcome of the elections – the key task remains: to transform the Labour Party to make it fit for purpose.

Detailed plans for the day have yet to be finalised, but the general idea is to have a smaller ‘strategy meeting’ during the day and a bigger rally in the late afternoon. Of course, those details are the place where the devil likes to hide and the preliminary discussions of the seven comrades planning the event have shown a fair amount of disagreements on how to move forward.

  • Should the strategy meeting allow motions to be heard? Or encourage groups to bring general position papers on the future of the Labour Party (that are not up for voting)? Should we invite both? Or should there be a general statement instead? Who is going to prepare it? Will we allow a proper discussion on any amendments?
  • Should only “big names” on the Labour left (LRC, Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and Red Labour) be officially invited? Or should we also include smaller groups like Red Flag, Labour Party Marxists, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Nick Wrack’s Labour Socialist Network, etc? All of them are of course centrally involved in GM and its steering committee.
  • What about Momentum branches? Should only those groups ‘affiliated’ to GM be allowed to send representatives? Or do we want to encourage those in branches with pro-Lansman majorities to come along? How many per branch?

All of these issues are still being discussed. It is no doubt a good idea to get the Labour left together in the same room. Even better if we can actually discuss what we think is the right strategy for transforming the Labour Party. An excellent initiative, in our view. But it should be transparent, politically honest and prepared to openly say what needs to be done to transform the Labour Party in a meaningful way – primarily, to take on the right. Corbyn is being undermined, briefed against and belittled by his ‘colleagues’ every step of the way. Unless we take on the saboteurs, the left will lose this fight and with it the best political opportunity it has had for many decades.

This begs the question as to why we should place such emphasis on the LRC and CLPD. They’ve been around a while, that’s true. But so has cancer. At least one person on the conference arrangements committee wants to make the staging of a conference dependent on the active participating of those groups.

But the CLPD – just like Momentum – has consciously decided to support Corbyn without any criticism. It has given up the fight for mandatory selection. It shows no interest in taking on the right in the party. The recent CLPD AGM voted against condemning Jon Lansman’s coup in Momentum. Why would they want to get involved in an event initiated by GM, an organisation that was founded in opposition to the coup?

We don’t know what the LRC leadership thinks about anything at the moment – maybe even they don’t – but it is probably safe to assume it is along similar lines to those of the CLPD. After all, they have now closed shop and will re-open only after the June 8 election.

The politics of Red Labour are another matter entirely. This group exists only online and does not really have any identifiable politics, as it is made up of people from a variety of political backgrounds. Clearly, while we should invite those organisations to participate in our conference, we should not subordinate ourselves to them or their politics. In particular the CLPD’s ‘strategy’ towards the Labour Party is fatally flawed. And even if the CLPD and LRC agreed to sponsor the conference (very doubtful), it begs the question if they would actually do anything with any motions or statements agreed there. It would simply be empty posturing, not the beginning of a real campaign to consciously and actively transform the Labour Party. So what’s the point?

Democracy and the Labour Party

June 8 – the end of Corbynism?

If a week in politics is a long time, then the June 8 general election is very far off. All sorts of imponderables could be waiting for us between now and polling day. As the quotable Tory Harold Macmillan (purportedly) responded to a journalist who had asked him what is most likely to blow incumbent governments off course – “Events, my dear boy, events”. Who knows what could derail the government party over the coming weeks? We can speculate, but we can’t know.

However, there are three things we are currently certain of:

  1. May was always going to opt for this snap election, despite the naïve complacency of many – left and right – who should have known better. We can take the PM’s own explanation with an unhealthily large pinch of salt – ie, that she settled on it during a short holiday, wrestling with the options as she wandered lonely among the Welsh hills. So, the blather about the difficulties of working with a narrow parliamentary majority or the need for a reinvigorated mandate for Brexit need not detain us long. In fact, and at the risk of outraging the Merseyside readers of this bulletin, The Sun (April 19) calls it right: the election and the anticipated Tory landslide will be a “blue murder” intended to “kill off Labour”.
    So, the coming general election is an expression of the Tories’ relative strength, not their weakness. Our more delusional comrades on revolutionary left who are telling us that May has actually been forced to call this election “because of the government’s weakness in face of a rising tide of anger in British society” perhaps fool themselves, but very few others outside their own ranks.
  2. Evidence that a Labour electoral culling is a realistic outcome is provided not simply in the dire poll results, but also ‘pitter-patter-splash’ noises of a small swarm of rats vacating HMS Labour. 13 Labour MPs have announced that they not be standing again on June 8. Some have given blandly neutral explanations. But, let’s recall the carefully choreographed resignation of two thirds of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet in 2016 and the same year’s 172-40 ‘no confidence’ vote by Labour MPs in the man’s leadership. Are these treacherous elements now happy to fight for Corbyn as this country’s next prime minister? What on earth are they going to say when a question along these lines is put to them by some reasonably astute media hacks?
    Whatever energy Corbyn brought to the launch of the campaign, the party he leads is fatally split and the acid drip of rightwing criticism continues. Lord Kinnock has told BBC Radio 5 Live (April 21) that he is “gloomy about my prospects of living to see another Labour government” and a member of Corbyn’s front bench, John Healey, has “refused to say whether he would mention the leader in his election literature”!The calamitous result of this wrecking operation is likely to be evident in the result of the May 4 local elections, where Labour is expected to lose around 125 council seats. Ominous omens abound for Corbyn.
  1. The Corbyn-McDonnell strategy of conciliation of the party’s right wing, supplemented with the occasional plaintive call for unity, has been an unmitigated disaster.A one-sided war rages in Labour. Leftwing activists are suspended and expelled on trump-charges of anti-Semitism or support for other left parties deemed verboten, their rights as party members flagrantly trampled over in the process. Meanwhile, the Jon Lansman-coordinated coup in Momentum (actively abetted by the likes of Corbyn, McDonnel and Abbott) has demobilised, demoralised and scattered precisely those forces who could have been deployed to counter-attack in the party. Unsurprisingly, reports reach this publication of dramatic declines in the numbers attending Momentum meetings nationally and at the national organisation’s damp-squid Birmingham “inaugural conference” in March. (Unequivocally stamped by LPM’s Carla Roberts as “without doubt the worst leftwing event I have ever attended.”)
Anti-Semitism, Witch-hunts and expulsions

London Communist Forum April 9: Defend Ken Livingstone!

Sunday April 9, 5pm, The Calthorpe Arms, 252 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8JR.

Co-sponsored by LPM and CPGB

Speakers:
Mike Macnair, CPGB
Tony Greenstein, Jewish anti-Zionist

The media fuelled furore over Livingstone’s (admittedly clumsy) remarks on the limited collaboration between some Zionist organisations and the Nazis in the early years of the fascist regime is a profoundly distasteful provocation against the left of the Labour Party. The historical truth is that the Nazis initially explored different policies to deal with Germany’s Jewish ‘problem’. These included social and financial pressures on Jews to emigrate, forced relocation, evictions, measure designed to pauperise the population and confiscate their possessions … and some degree of collaboration with Zionist groups to promote emigration: http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1112/why-ken-livingstone-was-right/

So, Livingstone’s comments were clumsy and historically hazy – but not fantasy, still less ‘anti-Semitic’. The continuing ‘anti-Semitism scandal’ is nothing but the continuation of the right-wing’s coup against Corbyn. Which makes it all the more regrettable that he still choses to follow a path of appeasing the right.

Come along to discuss this complex question.

Momentum

Wasted opportunities galore

Carla Roberts of Labour Party Marxists was appalled by Momentum’s ‘inaugural conference’ and its Duracell bunnies

Momentum’s March 25 “inaugural conference” was without doubt the worst leftwing event I have ever attended. I do not often agree with bourgeois journalists’ take on the left, but a sarky scribe from The Independent does sum up the day quite neatly:

Tom Watson and his allies who fear Momentum should relax … They’re not capable of plotting. In a draughty old, cold ex-factory in Birmingham, no policies were being formulated – far from it – beyond the usual devotionals for Corbyn.1)www.independent.co.uk/voices/momentum-conference-corbynism-corbynites-labour-party-birmingham-jeremy-corbyn-john-mcdonnell-a7650191.html

It really is astounding that the best an organisation with 22,000 members and a database of over 250,000 supporters should come up with is such a lame, apolitical and tiny gathering. Who would have thought 18 months ago that the incredible energy, enthusiasm and pure joy created by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party would be so criminally wasted?

Momentum might claim that 600 people attended the event in a freezing former factory a mile from the nearest train station in Birmingham. But unless they counted people twice as they went in and then left again (for quite a few not a great deal of time passed between those two moments), they have clearly applied the creative counting method so beloved by sects like the Socialist Worker Party. No more than 350 people shivered in the graffiti-covered hall with its (literally) shitty toilet facilities.

Socialist Resistance – which in its usual Johnny-come-lately fashion only recently and only half-heartedly turned its back on Left Unity in order to join the Labour Party and Momentum – has published a rather hyped-up report, according to which there were about 500 people present, which meant “it was standing room only at the plenary sessions”. But the author fails to mention that the organisers had only put out 100 chairs.

Maybe some young, trendy east London hipsters would have felt at home here. But virtually the only young people present were the two dozen or so Momentum employees and volunteers running the thing. For the rest, I would say, that 50-plus was the average age. On paper there might be many young Momentum members, but visit any local Momentum meeting and you will see who is really active within it.

No Grassroots

Mind you, the ‘opposition’ to Jon Lansman’s autocratic rule is not faring much better, I am afraid to say. The steering committee of Grassroots Momentum has so far not managed to meet and it looks like its first gathering will not happen before April 22 – a whopping six weeks after it was elected. And, although the SC continues to squabble over such weighty issues as how long its lunch break will be, a majority did manage to agree on one thing: not to make an organised intervention on March 25. There might have only been 350 people there, but clearly not all of them were loyal and unthinking Lansman supporters. They could and should have been engaged with, at the very least by handing out a leaflet, intervention from the floor and perhaps at a fringe meeting. There certainly was plenty of political space to fill.

But only three SC members (Tina Werkmann, Simon Hannah and Nick Wrack) agreed with the proposal to produce a leaflet, based on the decisions agreed at the Grassroots conference. The rest of the SC opposed or did not comment. This is probably going to be the only time the opposing sides on the SC (anti-Zionism campaigner Jackie Walker and the pro-Zionist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty) will agree on anything.

At the Momentum ‘conference’ itself, the day began and ended with a plenary session held in a big hall in the centre of the factory, with three one-hour-long workshops sandwiched in between. All the rooms for the group sessions had at least one wall missing – curtains were used as substitutes. This meant the noise from other sessions and the stalls area made it difficult to hear people speak.

Hope not Hate presenting a workshop at Momentum’s “conference”

And, when you did hear them, you often wish you had not. A majority of the workshops were run by outside organisations, without being labelled as such. For example, Labour Party Marxists supporters attended workshops that were run by The World Transformed, Talk Socialism and even Hope Not Hate. They were clearly based on ‘training sessions’ that these organisations run on a relatively frequent basis – utterly devoid of any real politics, focusing only on ‘method’ and run by young, overly eager people who reminded me of Duracell bunnies.

They included icebreakers like telling the person sitting next to you what you had for breakfast, shouting “one-word answers” about what you liked or disliked about the European Union ‘leave’ or ‘remain’ campaigns and writing “objectives” on paper plates, then sticking post-it notes onto a flipchart grid. You get the drift. It was really, really grim. Worst of all, any of these workshops could just as easily have been presented to Progress or Labour First.

Turn the other cheek

The speeches in the plenary sessions were hardly more inspiring, although I suppose you could say they did contain some politics – of a certain type.

Speaking in the first plenary, shadow chancellor John McDonnell was – as is now unfortunately the norm for him – more than underwhelming. He claimed that he and Corbyn had transformed the Labour Party into “an anti-austerity party”. I do not know how he squares that with the fact that thousands of Labour Party councillors up and down the country are enforcing the draconian cuts imposed by the Tory government – under the clear instruction of Corbyn himself, who wrote to them in December 2015, asking them to continue to set “balanced budgets” and not rock the local government boat. 2)www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2015/12/jeremy-corbyn-warns-labour-councils-not-set-no-cuts-budgets

McDonnell went on to complain that he was being hammered by the media, “although I’m putting forward the same things that Ed Miliband stood for”. He is right, of course – his ideas for a “national investment bank”, a “cap” on energy price rises and “more council houses” are hardly radical. But worse was to come.

He reserved much of his speech for the need to “work in unity” with the right in the Labour Party and thought it was “striking to see members of Momentum and Progress putting their differences to one side and campaigning together for Labour”. He said he wants Momentum members to “work comradely with everybody else, listen to their views patiently”. He added:

Many people are fed up with all the divisions and splits. I am fed up with all the divisions and splits. If I can offer to have tea with Peter Mandelson, then surely we can all work together in Labour Party branches, whatever groups and political backgrounds we come from. And when you are being provoked, then meet this provocation with comradeship and solidarity.There is so little that divides us politically. There were hardly any political differences in the leadership campaigns, for example.

So there you have it. A statement of utter capitulation to the pro-capitalist Labour right. Such a course totally rules out campaigning for the kind of programme needed to transform the Labour Party into a weapon of and for the working class. A programme that would, of course, include the mandatory reselection of MPs (needed to curb the power of the right), rescinding the barring and expulsion of thousands of leftwingers, the abolition of the compliance unit, making conference Labour’s sovereign body, etc.

Instead, everything has to be subordinated to winning the next election – no matter on what programme of half-baked reforms. We in Labour Party Marxists believe that, unless we are in a position to implement the full minimum programme of Marxism, socialists can achieve much more when we organise as a strong party of opposition. We envisage the taking of power not just in Britain in isolation, but as part of a worldwide movement of working class self-liberation that has Europe as its decisive point of departure.

References

References
↑1 www.independent.co.uk/voices/momentum-conference-corbynism-corbynites-labour-party-birmingham-jeremy-corbyn-john-mcdonnell-a7650191.html
↑2 www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2015/12/jeremy-corbyn-warns-labour-councils-not-set-no-cuts-budgets
Democracy and the Labour Party, The right, Witch-hunts and expulsions

Tom Watson inflicts further damage on Labour Party

There is a real danger that after triggering article 50 Theresa May will follow through with a snap general election, writes Eddie Ford (this article first appeared in the Weekly Worker)

Looking to the future, Tom Watson has shifted the right’s focus from a direct attack on Jeremy Corbyn and his leadership to Momentum and Unite’s general secretary election. Obviously the right wants to see the back of Len McCluskey and a victory for his challenger, Gerald Coyne. Jon Lansman, the chair and effective owner of Momentum, was, of course, taped in Richmond on March 1, and the transcript was carefully released, to full media publicity, just as polling papers were being sent out to Unite members. How convenient.

Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson have issued a joint statement agreeing that groups have a right to influence the Labour Party so long as they “operate within the rules.” But what Watson was trying to do was to influence the Unite election, not expose any wrong doing by Momentum.

So it is worth asking whether or not Watson and Coyne are involved in a Machiavellian plot to shift opinion in Unite and maintain the right’s grip over the structures of the Labour Party, up to and including the Parliamentary Labour Party, in perpetuity. Did brothers Watson and Coyne know about the “secret” Richmond tape before the “shocking revelation” was made public? Were they involved in any way in the taping, in transcribing it or in timing its release to The Observer?

Jon Lansman says he hopes that both Unite and the Communication Workers Union will soon affiliate to Momentum. Nothing sinister in that. They would merely be following in the footsteps of the TSSA and FBU. Doubtless that would mean more money in Momentum’s coffers and more full-timers for Jon Lansman to appoint. A leftwing bureaucracy to rival the rightwing bureaucracy of the hugely well financed – not least thanks to Lord David Sainsbury – Progress faction.

Watson claims Momentum will “destroy Labour as an election force”. Certainly the intervention in Unite’s election and the civil war unleashed against Corbyn – by Iain McNicol, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Watson himself and the vast majority of the PLP – has severely damaged Labour’s chances in a general election.

The by-election results in Stoke and Copeland surely prove it. Yes, Labour won in Stoke Central. But unfortunately this did not represent an endorsement of the Labour Party, nor was Ukip “well and truly stuffed” – a rather silly statement made by the ex-Trotskyist, Paul Mason, who went on to claim that Stoke “shows how to destroy” Ukip (actually it is Theresa May and her pursuit of a hard Brexit that is doing that).1)www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/27/stoke-destroy-ukip-brexit-byelection

Back in the real world though, Labour’s candidate, Gareth Snell, did well to get 7,853 votes (37.1%), as opposed to ‘Dr’ Paul Nuttall’s 5,233 (24.7%) on a very diminished turnout of 38.2% (down 11.7% from 2015).2)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoke-on-Trent_Central_by-election,_2017 But Labour’s vote declined both in absolute and relative terms. In percentage terms we lost 2.2%, while Ukip gained 2.0%. Moreover, both the Tories and Liberal Democrats increased their share of the vote: 1.8% and 5.67% respectively. And, of course, if Ukip were “well and truly stuffed”, it would have seen them come not second, but at the bottom of the list, along with the Monster Raving Loony Party, the British National Party and the Christian People’s Alliance.

True, there had been intense media speculation, ever since Tristram Hunt resigned the seat for his “dream job” of director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, that Stoke Central could fall into the hands of Ukip – for fairly good reasons, it does have to be said. Stoke council, though not the same as the constituency, has been under ‘no overall control’ since 2015, with Ukip at its core. Stoke, of course, notched up the highest Brexit vote of any UK city with 69.7% – hence the exaggerated talk about the “Brexit capital of Britain”, and so on. Generally, Labour’s base in the area has undergone a considerable erosion in recent years, enabling Ukip to make relatively impressive gains in all three of the city’s constituencies at the last general election – for example, closing the gap with Labour to just 2.7% in neighbouring Stoke-on-Trent North.

Overall, you can say that Stoke was not a disaster for either Labour or Ukip – depending on what their expectations were. At Ukip’s recent spring conference, Nigel Farage set the bar very high, describing Stoke as “fundamental” for “the futures of both the Labour Party and indeed of Ukip too” – it “matters and it matters hugely”. By that criterion, Stoke was a failure – but, regardless, for the time being Farage is publicly standing by Nuttall. Only time will tell. Anyway, Stoke was only a “decisive rejection” of Ukip if you were genuinely convinced that it should have been a shoe-in for Nuttall – which was always a dubious proposition.

Copeland, however, is a different matter. Yes, you can talk about special circumstances – such as the importance of the nuclear industry as a major local employer, Storm Doris, and the fairly small size of the Labour majority (2,147). Nevertheless, in terms of the core constituency, Labour has held Copeland3)Or its predecessor, Whitehaven – created in 1832 and renamed Copeland in 1983 since 1935, when it was recovering from the debacle of the 1931 national government. In the end, the Tory candidate, Trudi Harrison, won with 13,748 votes (44.2%) on a much higher turnout than Stoke of 51.33% – amounting to a 6.7% swing to the Tories. Labour slumped to 11,601 (37.3%), down 4.9% – whilst the Lib Dems and Ukip trailed well behind, getting 7.2% and 6.5% respectively (meaning that Ukip’s vote fell sharply by 9%).4)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copeland_by-election,_2017 This represented the first gain for a governing party at a UK by-election since 1982. Copeland also saw the largest increase in a governing party’s share of the vote in a by-election since 1966.

Hence, Labour’s situation is even worse than it first seems, when you remember that by-elections tend to underestimate support for the governing party and reward oppositional parties – an opportunity to give the government a mid-term kicking. This makes it all the more telling, and ominous, that it was May who had the most to celebrate afterwards. If we are to be brutally honest, Labour is in danger of decimation at the next general election.

Revival?

These by-elections raise a number of questions. Firstly, does Ukip have a long-term future? You do not have to be a genius to think it is pure nonsense to believe that Ukip is on the road to replacing Labour as the official opposition or natural voice of the working class. The Labour Party is a historically constituted party based on the trade union movement. True, that movement may have considerably declined over the decades, yet we are still dealing with a membership of six million – not something that will go away easily.

Ukip, on the other hand, is an ephemeral organisation based fundamentally on opposition to the European Union. In that sense, Ukip can only be defined negatively – by what it is against, not what it is for. Now, after June 23 – with Theresa May skilfully appropriating the ‘hard Brexit’ agenda – what actually is the point of Ukip? Maybe to stumble on as a pressure group, making sure the prime minster keeps to her pledge – which is not much of a reason to exist. No wonder Ukip tops are falling out with each other. Arron Banks with Douglas Carswell, Nigel Farage with Douglas Carswell, Neil Hammond with Nigel Farage, etc.

Essentially, in Copeland a big slice of the Ukip vote simply marched into the Tory camp. There is every reason to think that that this pattern will be replicated, to one degree or another, in the general election, as May ploughs ahead with her Brexit plans – EU deal or not, World Trade Organisation rules or not. If Brexit actually happens, which is a real possibility in the new world of Trump, that would further place a question mark over Ukip’s future – with job done, surely time to close shop. Then again, if Marine Le Pen does defy the polls and becomes president of France – not something you can completely dismiss – then the EU will be finished anyway, almost making Brexit redundant. There would be nothing to exit.

What about the Lib Dems? Historically speaking, these should be ideal conditions for a revival after they were punished by voters for getting into bed with the Conservative Party in the coalition government. We have had the unedifying spectacle of Jeremy Corbyn getting out his three-line whip and urging Labour MPs to vote with the Tories to trigger article 50 and proceed with what Labour was telling us would be a catastrophe for the British economy – in which case, surely we should be duty-bound to oppose it? Step forward the Lib Dems, saviours of the country from Brexit darkness. After all, almost half of the electorate voted ‘remain’ and even in Stoke just over 30% came out for continued EU membership. And here is the party that is making opposition to Brexit its core issue. Yet what did they get in the by-elections? In Stoke, their vote only went up 5.7% (to 9.8% – at least they saved their deposit this time) and it was pretty much the same in Copeland – only increasing by 3.8%, putting them on 7.3% of the total vote.

You could argue that we could be seeing another attempt to create a centrist third party – in that the cross-party Open Britain has been backed by Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, John Major and others. Thus John Prescott in the Sunday Mirror says that OB “looks like an SDP mark two”, with Mandelson and Blair “whipping up dissent to split Labour”, just like Roy Jenkins and David Owen did before they launched the Social Democratic Party in 1981.5)www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/after-disappointment-copeland-labour-must-9916059 This is very unconvincing, to say the least. In the 1980s you saw an upsurge of the centre ground – just as importantly, if not more so, for a while it looked as if joining the SDP could possibly be a good career move: it seemed to be going places.

But the situation today is totally different. British politics is increasingly polarised, albeit in contradictory ways, between left and right – and now is being repolarised along Brexit lines, with even more contradictory outcomes. The centre ground is not undergoing a significant revival. In Stoke and Copeland the Lib Dems merely showed that they still exist. Nor does anyone in the Labour Party seriously think that there is going to be another SDP that is going to provide them with an alternative career plan – or dislodge Jeremy Corbyn.

This explains Tom Watson’s reaction to the by-election results at the Scottish Labour Party conference in Perth – he argued strongly that there should be no more challenges to Corbyn’s leadership. Further attacks on Corbyn from the PLP could result in Labour MPs losing their seats (and lucrative careers) – and for what? Corbyn cannot be removed under current circumstances, as the mass membership retains faith in him – that was recently tested with the second leadership contest. Owen Smith, the right’s candidate, for all the backing from MPs and the media, lost badly – therefore to keep openly attacking Corbyn would be self-defeating. That is the calculation of most of the PLP: stick with JC as leader for now and muddle through to the next election, hoping that events might come to your rescue.

Flawed

When you look at opinion polls, what is immediately noticeable is not the growth of the centre – forget it – but the strength of the Tory Party, increasing its standing over this period to almost 1950s levels of support. Recent polls have put the Conservatives on over 40% and Labour as low as 24%. Theresa May continues to be the favoured choice for prime minister, with one poll showing 49% of people preferring her to Corbyn. The Labour leader is backed by only 15% of voters, whilst 36% don’t know.

The last time the monthly Guardian series, for instance, produced a larger Conservative lead was back in 1983, just before the June general election trouncing of Michael Foot. In other words, in terms of popular support, it is the Labour Party that is losing out – in Scotland to the Scottish National Party, and in England and Wales to the Conservatives. Stoke and Copeland just underline the growing ascendancy of the Tory Party.

Needless to say, this poses acute problems for the Corbyn-McDonnell-Milne strategy – which appears fundamentally flawed, as argued by professor John Curtice in The Guardian. Curtice notes that Labour seems to have “misguidedly” decided that its “first priority” is to “stave off the threat from Ukip to its traditional working class vote – much of which supposedly voted ‘leave’ in the EU referendum”. But in so doing, he writes, Labour “seems to have forgotten (or not realised) that most of those who voted Labour in 2015 – including those living in Labour seats in the north and the Midlands – backed ‘remain’”. Therefore the party, he concludes, is “at greater risk of losing votes to the pro-‘remain’ Liberal Democrats than to pro-Brexit Ukip” – with Stoke and Copeland seeming to prove that ‘remain’ voters “must now be Labour’s top priority”.

Instead of ‘respecting’ the verdict of the British people in David Cameron’s botched referendum, Labour needs a clear perspective when it come to Europe. Labour Party Marxists opposes all Brexit calls – even at this stage. However, that implies no illusions in the EU as presently constituted. Yet for socialism to be a viable project Europe must be our decisive point of departure. So we should commit ourselves not to making Brexit a success, but developing links and coordination with working class and leftwing forces in Europe.

Far-reaching

Our main goal should certainly not be the attempt to win the next general election by rebranding Jeremy Corbyn as a populist, courting the capitalist media or striking the latest compromise deal with Tom Watson, let alone going for a “a broad political alliance” with the Liberal Democrats, Greens, Scottish and Welsh nationalists. A well-trodden road to disaster. No, our main goal should be transforming the Labour Party, so that, in the words of Keir Hardie, it can “organise the working class into a great, independent political power to fight for the coming of socialism”.

Towards that end we need rule changes to permit left, communist and revolutionary parties to affiliate once again. As long as they do not stand against us in elections, this can only but strengthen us as a federal party. Today affiliate organisations include the Fabians, Christians on the Left, the Cooperative Party, the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Business. Allow the SWP, SPEW, CPGB, the Morning Star’s CPB, etc, to join our ranks.

Moreover, programmatically, we should consider a new clause four. Not a return to the old, 1918, version, but a commitment to working class rule and a society which aims for a stateless, classless, moneyless society, embodying the principle, “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. Towards that end the Labour Party should commit itself to achieving a democratic republic. The standing army, the monarchy, the House of Lords and the state sponsorship of the Church of England must go. We should support a single-chamber parliament, proportional representation and annual elections. All of that ought to be included in our new clause four (see box).

The PLP’s perpetual rebels are out-and-out opportunists. Once and for all, we must put an end to such types exploiting our party. Being an MP ought to be an honour, not a career ladder, not a way for university graduates to secure a lucrative living.

A particularly potent weapon here is the demand that all our elected representatives should take only the average wage of a skilled worker. A principle upheld by the Paris Commune and the Bolshevik revolution. Even the Italian Communist Party under Enrico Berlinguer applied the ‘partymax’ in the 1970s. With the PCI’s huge parliamentary fraction this proved to be a vital source of funds.

Our MPs are on a basic £67,060 annual salary. On top of that they get around £12,000 in expenses and allowance, putting them on £79,060 (yet at present Labour MPs are only obliged to pay the £82 parliamentarian’s subscription rate). Moreover, as leader of the official opposition, Jeremy Corbyn not only gets his MPs salary. He is entitled to an additional £73,617.6)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leader_of_the_Opposition_(United_Kingdom)

Let them keep the average skilled workers’ wage – say £40,000 (plus legitimate expenses). Then, however, they should hand the balance over to the party. Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Dianne Abbott ought to take the lead in this.

Imposing a partymax would give a considerable boost to our finances. Even if we leave out our 20 MEPs from the calculation, it would amount to a £900,000 addition. Anyway, whatever our finances, there is the basic principle. Our representatives ought to live like ordinary workers, not pampered members of the middle class. So, yes, let us agree the partymax as a basic principle.

Given the huge challenges before us, we urgently need to reach out to all those who are disgusted by corrupt career politicians, all those who aspire for a better world, all those who have an objective interest in ending capitalism. Towards that end we must establish our own press, radio and TV. To state the obvious, tweeting and texting have severe limits. They are brilliant media for transmitting simple, short and sharp messages. But, when it comes to complex ideas, debating history and charting political strategies, they are worse than useless.

Relying on the favours of the capitalist press, radio and TV is a game for fools. True, it worked splendidly for Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell. But as Neil Kinnock, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband found to their cost, to live by the mainstream media is to die by the mainstream media.

No, to set the agenda we need our own full-spectrum alternative.

The established media can be used, of course. But, as shown with the last anti-Corbyn coup, Tom Watson’s latest stunt and the Unite elections, when things really matter, we hardly get a look in. Indeed the capitalist press, radio and TV are an integral part of the ruling class establishment. There are, of course, siren voices to the contrary. Those who think we can win over The Guardian, the Mirror, etc. But, frankly, only the determinedly naive could not have anticipated the poisonous bias, the mockery, the hatchet-jobs, the implacable opposition.

Once we had the Daily Herald. Now we have nothing. Well, apart from the deadly dull trade union house journals, the advertising sheets of the confessional sects and the Morning Star (which is still in the grip of unreconstructed Stalinites).

We should aim for an opinion-forming daily paper of the labour movement and seek out trade union, cooperative, crowd and other such sources of funding. And, to succeed, we have to be brave – iconoclastic viewpoints, difficult issues, two-way arguments, must be included as a matter of course. The possibility of distributing it free of charge should be considered and, naturally, everything should be put up on the web without paywalls. We should also launch a range of internet-based TV and radio stations. With the abundant riches of dedication, passion and ideas that exist on the left here in Britain and far beyond, we can surely better the BBC, Al Jazeera, Russia Today and Sky.

Of course, the Jeremy Corbyn-John McDonnell leadership faces both an enemy without, in the PLP, and an enemy within, in their own reformist ideology. They seriously seem to believe that socialism can be brought about piecemeal, through a series of left and ever lefter Labour governments. In reality, though, a Labour government committed to the existing state and the existing constitutional order would produce not decisive steps in the direction of socialism, but attacks on the working class … and then, as we have repeatedly seen, beginning with the January-November 1924 Ramsay MacDonald government, the re-election of the Tories.

References

History

Jeremy Corbyn’s staff: What was Straight Left?

Lawrence Parker investigates the political origins of Jeremy Corbyn’s director and deputy director of strategy and communications

When Jeremy Corbyn’s campaigns chief Simon Fletcher quit last month, it was widely interpreted as a victory for Seumas Milne. Fletcher was known to have heated exchanges with Corbyn’s director of strategy and communications on a range of issues, including Brexit. Now, Corbyn has signed up Steve Howell to be Milne’s deputy. Howell’s official job description is to help “oversee the leader’s media strategy and to implement the communications grid”. He is taking an indefinite leave of absence from his lobbying agency, Freshwater, to take up his role in the Labour leader’s office.1)Howell founded Freshwater in Cardiff in 1997 after working as a news reporter and producer for BBC Radio Wales. The 19-strong public affairs and PR agency now has offices in Cardiff and London. According to the APPC register, the firm’s most recent clients include the multinational building materials company Tarmac and the personal injury lawyers Thomsons.

There are unlikely to be heated exchanges between Milne and Howell not least because they are old friends and old Straight Leftist comrades. Andrew Murray, chief of staff for Unite and yet another former SL member, recently left the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain to join Labour and is also thought to be in Corbyn’s inner circle.

Origins

Straight Left’s origins lie in the left, pro-Soviet oppositions that emerged in the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1960s. In this period, a definite ‘party within a party’ existed, with figures such as Sid French, district secretary of Surrey CPGB, becoming key leaders. The general critique that came from this faction was a concern over the CPGB leadership distancing itself from the Soviet Union (such as around the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968) and other ‘socialist’ countries; a preference for a more ‘workerist’ identity (for example, the faction would have been happy with the CPGB’s paper remaining as the Daily Worker in 1966) and a concentration on workplaces/trade unions; and a sense that the party was squandering its resources in futile election contests and alienating the left of the Labour Party, with whom it was meant to be developing a close relationship on the British road to socialism (BRS), the CPGB programme.

However, a significant part of the faction felt that the BRS was ‘reformist’ and ‘revisionist’ in all its guises from 1951, counterposing a revolutionary path to the parliamentary road to socialism envisaged in the CPGB’s existing programme. This stance was clouded in ambiguity in many sections of the CPGB’s left, with the default position usually being expressed in a preference for the 1951 version of the BRS that had been overseen by Stalin, as opposed to later versions modified by a ‘revisionist’ CPGB leadership. This opposition suffered a major split in the run-up to the CPGB’s 1977 congress, with Sid French taking away 700 or so supporters to form the New Communist Party (after French realised that the CPGB’s leadership was intent on a reorganisation of his Surrey district, which would have deprived him of his organisational bridgehead).

The rump left opposition in the CPGB coalesced around Fergus Nicholson (other key figures were John Foster, Brian Filling, Nick Wright, Susan Michie, Pat Turnbull and Andrew Murray), who had been the CPGB’s student organiser until 1974. The Straight Left newspaper was launched in 1979, it was edited by Mike Toumazou and had Seumas Milne as business manager. Later a theoretical magazine, Communist, appeared. Membership figures are impossible to guess. However, judging from Communist, the faction did have a wide national infrastructure beyond London through the 1980s and was certainly on a par with, if not in some places more deeper rooted than, the other oppositional stream around the Morning Star (see below).

Factional infighting

The Straight Left group provoked a lot of enmity from its factional rivals in the CPGB. Thus, Mike Hicks, who was involved in the Communist Campaign Group (CCG), set up after the rebellion of Morning Star supporters against the CPGB leadership in the mid-1980s, and later the first general secretary of the 1988 Communist Party of Britain split (both criticised and opposed by the Straight Leftist faction), said in the late 1990s: “Straight Left was neither straight nor left.”2)F Beckett Enemy within: the rise and fall of the British Communist Party London 1998, p234. The accession of a group of ex-Straight Leftists (including Andrew Murray and Nick Wright, who had split from Straight Left to form Communist Liaison in the early 1990s) into the ranks of the Communist Party of Britain contributed to a bitter faction fight in the organisation, in which Hicks was eventually deposed as general secretary, and a strike by Morning Star staff.

Similarly, a CCG document complained: “The individuals grouped around Straight Left have their own newspaper, their own organisation and their own objectives.”3)Communist Campaign Group The crisis in the Communist Party and the way forward (no date but circa 1985). I have been told anecdotally by CPGB activists of the time that Straight Left was thought to have three circles: an inner ‘Leninist’ core; a broader circle of sympathisers in the CPGB; and the ‘softer’ Labourite and trade unionists grouped around the Straight Left newspaper (non-CPGB trade unionists such as Alan Sapper and Labour MPs such as Joan Maynard were on its advisory board). Certainly, the majority of the content of the newspaper was hewn from the same, dry ‘labour movement’ template used by the Morning Star, with little indication that it was the work of communists, apart from its commentary on the Soviet Union and other international matters. (The Communist journal, obviously aimed at CPGB sympathisers, was much more orthodox and harder Marxist-Leninist in tone, with a lot of very interesting commentary on inner-party CPGB matters.)

So Straight Left was a faction and did indulge in political camouflage, but in this it was merely of its time. For example, the CCG’s disavowal of Straight Left’s factionalism was merely an attempt to throw people off the scent from the CCG’s own factionalism (the CCG unconvincingly complained it was not a faction at all; just a group that wanted to follow the CPGB’s rules – which fooled nobody). The CPGB was riddled with factions in the 1980s, not least those grouped around Marxism Today and the party machine.

Similarly, on Straight Left’s broad left camouflage in its newspaper and other forums, this was the modus operandi of nearly the whole far left, from the Morning Star to various Trotskyist groups: ie, communists clothing their politics in everything from trade unionism to feminism and concealing their true aims in the pursuit of mass influence. Again, in hindsight, Straight Left does not strike one as very exceptional in this regard. In retrospect, the enmity aimed at it on these counts stands revealed as the product of mere factional rivalry.

However, another area of criticism aimed at Straight Left may have more mileage in terms of a lasting judgement. The group was deemed by its CPGB factional rivals (both in the CCG and the small group around The Leninist, forerunner of the Weekly Worker) to have a ‘heads down’ approach to CPGB work. In the words of the CCG, such an approach

counsels caution and compliance with the authority of the [CPGB’s] executive committee. It says that if there is disagreement and dissatisfaction with the Eurocommunists [the faction then dominating the party’s leadership], then opposition must be expressed and conducted via the normal party channels. That is to say, we must try at successive congresses to defeat and remove the Eurocommunists.4)Communist Campaign Group The crisis in the Communist Party and the way forward (no date but circa 1985).

This led to such notorious moves as Straight Leftists walking out with the CPGB leader, Gordon McLennan, when he closed down a London district congress in November 1984 that threatened to become a point of opposition to the party leadership. Mike Hicks, in the chair of this meeting, later contemptuously observed that Straight Left “ended up selling Marxism Today [the CPGB theoretical journal much despised by the party’s left in the 1980s for its Eurocommunist proclivities] instead of the Morning Star because the executive told them to”.5)F Beckett Enemy within: the rise and fall of the British Communist Party London 1998, p234

However, what this Straight Left strategy of avoiding open conflict eventually led to, in the context of a CPGB that was being set on a liquidationist course, was it being left somewhat high and dry. SL had built a considerable base in London by the end of the 1980s “by showing a willingness to take on responsibilities at a time when few candidates were to be found”.6)W Thompson The good old cause: British communism 1920-1991 London 1992, p205. This was to be a very hollow victory indeed, given that the CPGB was soon to pass into oblivion and the succession of congresses to win was coming to an end.

Labour Party

In terms of the Labour Party, Straight Left took the BRS injunction of developing an alliance with Labour to effect radical changes to its logical conclusion by arguing that the CPGB should affiliate to the Labour Party and – more controversially for both the left and right of the CPGB – that the party should end its independent electoral work. Thus a typical article in Communist argued:

… it is difficult to see there being much movement against the exclusion of communist trades unionists from the Labour Party until our electoral strategy is based on non-sectarian principles and imbued with a thoroughly consistent and positive attitude to the Labour Party.7)‘40th congress of the Communist Party’ Communist September 1987

Thus Straight Left picked up clearly on the attitude of the pro-Soviet CPGB opposition of the 1960s, which consistently drew attention to the political impact of declining electoral votes on the avowed Labour-communist strategy of the party. However, this opened up Straight Left to jibes of ‘liquidationism’ from both left and right in the CPGB8)For the right wing of the CPGB, see Dave Cook in the pre-congress discussion of 1981(Comment October 17 1981); and, for the left, see Alan Stevens in the same context (ibid). and, in retrospect, isolated the group further.

Soviet Union and ‘socialist’ countries

The Straight Left group, again showing its origins in the CPGB’s pro-Soviet left of the 1960s, took an extremely uncritical view of the Soviet Union and other ‘socialist’ countries, and regarded the actions of the CPGB as a ‘national’ sin against the ‘internationalist’ probity of the Soviet Union’s camp. Straight Left publications were filled with reprints from Soviet agencies such as Novosti and other agencies from the eastern bloc.

Thus, an article in Communist argued:

Communists in the capitalist world are not, in general, in a position to make the judgements that the CPSU is obliged to. Was it right or wrong to intervene in Afghanistan in 1979 to block the spread of counterrevolution? Is it right or wrong to withdraw the Soviet army from there today? The CPGB does not have to answer those questions. Our views are unimportant, and we do not have to live with the sharp consequences of the answers. The CPSU has to make those judgements, and it has the right to expect support and understanding in making them.9)H Sanderson, ‘Socialism today’ Communist September 1988

Neither did this stance seemingly allow criticism of even the most crisis-stricken and sickly military dictatorships of countries such as Poland in the early 1980s. Straight Leftist Charlie Woods, complaining bitterly of CPGB criticisms of the Polish regime in 1983, said:

After all, how would our [CPGB] leadership take it if the over two-million-strong Polish United Workers Party took time off from trying to solve the problems of socialism to remonstrate with our 16,000-member party’s failure to achieve it at all?10)C Woods The crisis in our Communist Party: cause, effect and cure 1983. Woods was a miner and party veteran from county Durham, who was expelled for writing this pamphlet – although he was very much viewed as a ‘fall guy’, with Fergus Nicholson or Brian Topping thought of as the more likely authors

The implication of this little homily being, of course, that those British communists really should not venture to criticise their Polish brethren at all.

Straight Left and gays

The group does not appear to have produced any significant material or statement on what would now be called LGBT questions (and an appeal from myself to its members to produce such a statement to clear this issue up, when this article originally appeared online, yielded nothing).11)This article originally appeared on the Hatful of History blog in October 2015. We are reproducing it here – in slightly amended form Members of the group have claimed that calling their newspaper Straight Left was a boxing metaphor (and some of its members certainly knew a thing or two about physical tussles with gay protestors); while others have suggested that it was recycling an old Sunday Worker slogan from the mid-1920s, when the CPGB was involved with the National Left Wing Movement: ‘Labour’s Straight Left’.

If it was the latter, it was a significant abuse of the slogan. The CPGB had this slogan to differentiate itself from traditional Labour lefts such as George Lansbury and the like: ie, those who were not ‘straight’, who would potentially disown communist allies and cosy up to the Labour right. It was not a slogan that covered the kind of homogenous ‘broad left’ that the likes of Straight Left advocated.

However, slogans can change their meaning with time. To call a newspaper Straight Left when your main factional opponents in the CPGB, the Eurocommunists, are keen on promoting gay rights, only invites some uncomfortable questions about your modus operandi on such issues. It is quite inconceivable that Fergus Nicholson and company were not aware that the name would be interpreted in this negative sense, particularly when it was the production of staunch advocates of the Soviet Union – a state with a problematic relation to homosexuality, to put it mildly.

To call all Straight Left members homophobic would be over-egging the pudding; to state that this group was one that had pronounced problems with homosexuality would not be stretching the truth l

 

References

References
↑1 Howell founded Freshwater in Cardiff in 1997 after working as a news reporter and producer for BBC Radio Wales. The 19-strong public affairs and PR agency now has offices in Cardiff and London. According to the APPC register, the firm’s most recent clients include the multinational building materials company Tarmac and the personal injury lawyers Thomsons.
↑2 F Beckett Enemy within: the rise and fall of the British Communist Party London 1998, p234. The accession of a group of ex-Straight Leftists (including Andrew Murray and Nick Wright, who had split from Straight Left to form Communist Liaison in the early 1990s) into the ranks of the Communist Party of Britain contributed to a bitter faction fight in the organisation, in which Hicks was eventually deposed as general secretary, and a strike by Morning Star staff.
↑3 Communist Campaign Group The crisis in the Communist Party and the way forward (no date but circa 1985).
↑4 Communist Campaign Group The crisis in the Communist Party and the way forward (no date but circa 1985).
↑5 F Beckett Enemy within: the rise and fall of the British Communist Party London 1998, p234
↑6 W Thompson The good old cause: British communism 1920-1991 London 1992, p205.
↑7 ‘40th congress of the Communist Party’ Communist September 1987
↑8 For the right wing of the CPGB, see Dave Cook in the pre-congress discussion of 1981(Comment October 17 1981); and, for the left, see Alan Stevens in the same context (ibid).
↑9 H Sanderson, ‘Socialism today’ Communist September 1988
↑10 C Woods The crisis in our Communist Party: cause, effect and cure 1983. Woods was a miner and party veteran from county Durham, who was expelled for writing this pamphlet – although he was very much viewed as a ‘fall guy’, with Fergus Nicholson or Brian Topping thought of as the more likely authors
↑11 This article originally appeared on the Hatful of History blog in October 2015. We are reproducing it here – in slightly amended form

Refound Labour as a permanent united front of the working class

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