Socialist Alliance structure: SP must move beyond the old sectarian agenda
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SP must move beyond the old sectarian agenda
The Socialist Alliance had a highly successful intervention into the General Election, and greatly strengthened itself in the process. Now it is organising a conference on December 1 to adopt a new constitution which can facilitate its further development and consolidation.
The present constitution of the Alliance developed in an ad-hoc way as the organisation grew and changed, and is no longer adequate to today’s challenges. There are a variety of different positions on how things should develop, but most seek in various ways to consolidate the SA and its structures.
This means reorganising and strengthening the structures of the Alliance at both national and local level. It means a unified membership and financial structure rather than the two tier system which exists at the present time.
The main debate is likely to be with the Socialist Party (SP*) which is opposed to consolidating the SA, and argues instead for decentralisation. The SP has submitted both a proposed constitution and a political motivation for it.
This submission calls for the SA to be a loose association of political organisations (though some aspects would in our view be over-centralised).
For the ISG the new constitution must be based on democratic principles, which unfortunately were not consistently present in the general election campaign. There the Socialist Party successfully engineered fiefdom constituencies, in which they determined all political decisions, including who the candidate was. They demanded this repeatedly, with the implied threat that they might split if they didn’t get their own way.
Nominally the SP was part of the Alliance, but used the SA to promote its own narrow advantage. It contributed almost nothing to the campaign at national level, often drafting its members into those constituencies where it had the candidate, even from other constituencies where there was an Alliance candidate.
These issues had come to a head at the January meeting of the Liaison Committee of the SA, which was only held together by the acceptance of a statement, prepared in advance between the SP and the SWP. This allowed the SP to determine the candidate and have political control in a list of pre-selected constituencies.
This statement overrode the democracy of the local alliances by imposing candidates on them. This was directly contrary to the ‘Coventry protocol’ which had been agreed by the earlier national conference of the SA, and which put candidate selection in the hands of the local Alliances.
The SWP agreed to this in order to maintain the unity of the Alliance. The ISG, along with most of the other left organisations, voted for it for the same reason. But everyone was clear that this was a one off agreement – necessary to get the Alliance through its first General Election campaign.
Whatever else happens at the December conference, this grossly undemocratic imposition of candidates must not be repeated. As a first principle, the selection of candidates must be carried out by properly constituted meetings of local SAs on the basis of a majority vote of those present.
Local SAs might want to make other decisions by consensus, with majority decisions only being taken when this proved impossible, but a formal vote is necessary for candidate selection.
It is important that the SA remains united, and that the SP remains within it: but this cannot be at the expense of basic principles. It is impossible to build an alternative to Blairism without the most rigorous democracy, accepted and carried out by all participants in the SA. The SA cannot be built on the basis of undemocratic decisions bulldozed though under threat.
The constitution put forward by the SP is not only undemocratic but also contradictory. Whilst its general framework is to decentralise the SA at national level, it becomes ultra-centralised by proposing a detailed constitutional structure for local SAs.
There is of course a perverse logic behind the SP proposals. They want to weaken the national structures in order to give themselves maximum room for manoeuvre, whilst finding a way of getting their own candidates in at local level in their priority constituencies. They want to perpetuate the logic of the Liaison Committee statement into the new constitution.
Of course the SP cannot with any credibility propose openly that they be given political control of certain constituencies as a constitutional right. They have, therefore, looked for mechanisms which will give them that – more or less – in practice.
Their answer is to introduce ‘members platforms’ into the Alliance – with a local right of veto.
The SP constitution would oblige local SAs to have in their local constitutions the right of any (minimum of) six members to establish a ‘members platform’ on request.
Once any platforms are established any decisions (including the adoption of candidates) could, at local (not national) level, only be taken unanimously.
In other word each member’s platform would, at local level, have a veto over any decision. In practice any six people could paralyse the decision making process of a local alliance.
Any one member’s platform could frustrate the will of the majority in a local SA to adopt a candidate of its choice. This would also apply pressure for the adoption of a candidate put forward by the vetoing platform. If that does not work it is a short step from there to putting forward another candidate under another name.
At national level platforms would not have the right of veto other than on changes to the constitution – presumably to protect this initial stitch up from future challenge.
This outrageous procedure of local vetos is partly justified, in the SP’s political motivation, by counterposing it to the concept of one-person-one-vote brought in by Neil Kinnock. But the analogy with Labour witch-hunters does not make sense.
OMOV was introduced in the LP in order to use a large passive membership against a smaller active membership, and used postal ballots for that end. It does not mean everyone in the room voting – as the SP implies. It means all those NOT in the room also being entitled to vote. The most democratic procedure is all present voting, providing the meeting has been properly constituted.
The SP attempt to justify their proposals by saying that they want a SA which is ‘federal’ rather than centralised. But of course it depends what is meant by federalism. The Socialist Party use the historical example of the LP between 1900-1918 and quote Keir Hardie at the LP founding conference expounding the right of affiliated organisations to select their own candidates.
But is not true that the early LP had no control over candidates: those selected still needed to be endorsed by the Party. True, a few defied this rule, but that was the requirement.
And the form of federalism of that organisation was shaped by the context. The LP was formed under conditions of a slow break from Liberalism.
It was an unstable mixture of idealists, socialists, disaffected Liberals, and trade union leaders. Many of the later straddled both the Labour and Liberal Parties, and would have preferred to have remained Liberals if they could have only got candidates from organised labour selected.
Trade unions got involved because they felt the need for labour representation, without regard at this stage to particular politics. The Labour Party did not have anything approximating to a socialist (or even social democratic) constitution or political creed until reorganisation and consolidation out of wartime conditions in 1918.
Moreover MPs were not paid by Parliament, so when trade unions paid them a wage, naturally they wanted to nominate the candidates. At the same time the local organisations of the Labour Party were weak or non-existent.
100 years later the idea that the first 18 years of the LP should be our model shows the weakness of the Socialist Party’s politics.
If we want to look at lessons from the early history of the British Labour movement, the model of the ILP would be a better example. The ILP was a conscious break with Liberalism and was socialist in creed from its inception in the early 1890s.
It did, however, consider itself federalist, despite having a centralised decision making process (the supremacy of conference) and central control over the adoption of candidates.
The term ‘federal’ is in any case a much misused concept. The ISG wants a "federalism" in this situation in which the Alliance is an open and pluralist organisation containing not only individuals but organisations coming from different traditions.
These organisations have their own structures and priorities, but work collectively together in a unified organisation – the Socialist Alliance – which needs its own policy-making process and an elected, authoritative leadership to carry this out. Such a structure could not rationally be called over centralised.
The SP falsely imply that it is intrinsic to the idea of federalism that the Alliance should be only a collection of groups mainly doing their own thing but coming together for elections under loose arrangement. This does not hold water.
Unfortunately it is hard not to read into the SP proposals an irrational hostility to the SWP. This is the case even in the election for the national committee, where they propose reserved positions for MPs, MEPs, and councillors (effectively councillors) – which only the SP has – and for trade union NEC members or national officers.
Whilst it would be good to have such people on the EC, it is hard to see how this one factor qualifies them. In any case why national officers and NEC members in the unions rather than other office holders or rank and file activists? Some of the best activists are excluded from such positions by the right wing.
The SP also argues that the SA should support groups of workers who decide to stand in elections themselves, as a protest against new Labour. There is no contest on this.
The SA would be prepared to support (ie not stand against) groups of workers who weren’t ready to join us. The Alliance tried to reach an arrangement with the Campaign Against Tube Privatisation, without success, offering them prominent positions on a joint slate in the run up to the London Assembly.
There was nothing more the SA could do other than withdraw from the election in favour of the CATP – which even the SP did not propose.
What happened in the June by-elections in Hackney was not that the SA decided to stand against a group of UNISON workers, but that the SP organised a group of UNISON workers to support one of their own members as a candidate – against an existing Alliance candidate.
This sort of manipulation created a huge amount of bad feeling. The local Alliance had been deeply involved in the fight against cuts and privatisation, and therefore there was a strong basis for convincing local trade unionists not only to vote for the Alliance but to become involved in it. Unfortunately the SP put their own supposed interests before those of building the Alliance.
There are many challenges facing the Socialist Alliance if it is to succeed in establishing itself as a central part of the fight against Blairism over the months ahead.
To meet this challenge, we need the most effective structures that can give a voice to those who will increasingly be looking for such an alternative.
The Alliance will be stronger if the Socialist Party can be convinced to be a positive part of that alternative: but this will require convincing them to back down from their current extremely destructive positions.
*SP - Socialist Party; an organisation which is composed of supporters of the former Militant newpaper