Socialist Alliance: a crisis at a time of great opportunity (continued)
Socialist Resistance in print2000sScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
to build and broaden the Alliance itself today who can only say today what they said yesterday, yes, if they have to be pushed aside they have to be pushed aside! And this is a hard thing to say. It is popular to get up here and say we want unity we want to work with other people, but anyone who has done this work... knows that the precondition of unity with larger forces is that you do not let people who represent very little stand in your way, and when the person who was the chair of the Socialist Alliance in Birmingham wrote in a left-wing paper that he did not want to work with the Muslim community or the CPB, that as far as I was concerned, was the time for people who did want to do that to take on the leadership in that city."
It doesn't come much clearer than that.
In fact there was already a pattern of such actions. At the AGM itself the SWP did not want the AWL's Martin Thomas as a member of the new Executive. Fortunately this was dropped after informal discussion. The AWL position on working with Muslim people is dreadful and their position on George Galloway is scandalous.
But such positions can only be chalBlanged and me mals a nor aly
Organisational means are not only wrong - they are counterproductive. The SWP also refused to support Marcus Strom from the CPB as certification officer, which was fortunately defeated in a vote of the new Executive.
SWP thinking seemed to be that all officers of the Alliance should be supporters of the AGM policy (The CPGB formally voted for the policy, but have not supported it in Weekly Worker). It makes sense for the tasks group, which has been set up to implement the policy, to be made up of people who fully support what was agreed. In fact no one else put their names forward for this anyway. But to extend this approach to officers of the Alliance at national level let alone locally is a recipe for disaster.
The Birmingham takeover had to be challenged at the National Council and it was. But the debate was conducted in a destructive way. Much of the language was designed to polarise the meeting and the Alliance.
All supporters opposed the actions of the SWP in Birmingham and expressed this in their voting at National Council. The resolution from Workers Power was however unsupportable. It had a different agenda, calling for the reopening of the debate on the decisions of the AGM. It was a pretext for a split.
Is soon as the voting was over, A Workers Power announced they
were resigning from the Alliance and promptly whipped out leaflets that justified this (Here's one I prepared earlier). The leaflets said nothing about the Birmingham events, but rejected the basic concept of building an alliance involving those who have reached revolutionary conclusions and those who have not, and which does not have a full revolutionary programme.
An allegation, made repeatedly in the course of the meeting, by Workers Power, the CPB and some of the independents, was that the Alliance was about to form a cross-class alliance with non-working class forces and become a popular front. This, they argued, would preclude defending the issues of lesbian and gay rights and women's liberation.
This charge was based on verbal remarks John Rees was alleged to have made in private conversations and latterly in the CPB account of their discussions with the SWP -in which they said that they had been approached about a 'Peace and Justice campaign.
The SWP must take responsibility for this debate emerging as it did, not just because it had started to float this idea, but because when the rumours started it did not make a clear statement about the political basis of such an initiative. This allowed the debate to gather its own sectarian momentum.
Peace and Justice of course, is just a •name. There could be no, in princepal, objection to it: although it is not a very good name. The issue of principle is what programme is behind it.
However, those who have spun this issue to a ridiculous degree carry responsibility too. They put these rumours into the hands of publications like Tribune who are hostile to the Alliance and allowed them to mount OFFICIAL** UNISON PICKET UNISON Solidarity with teachers and firefighters over pay: the Alliance has consistently supported workers in struggle a political attack on us. Weekly Worker gave
the completely false impression that the
Alliance was dropping its stance on lesbian
and gay and women's issues.
This was completely untrue of course.
The AGM resolution made it clear that any
new initiative would be socialist, and the
first Executive decided that the starting
point for such discussions, as far as the
Alliance was concerned would be the manifesto of the Alliance: People before Profit.
The CPGB were present when this was
agreed, but chose not to report it. Instead
Weekly Worker produced a banner headline: No Compromise on Sexism and
Homophobia - creating the spurious
impression that the Alliance was about to
abandon these principles in order to join a
cross-class popular front. This kind of deadend sectarianism is as damaging to the
Alliance as the packing of a meeting by the
RISON
DECENT
PAY pened in Preston. The local Imam and many Muslims voted for the Alliance with its current programme and for a candidate who is a white Marxist.
Following the movement against the war it would be a serious error to be conservative or resistant to the involvement of Muslims, including those community leaders who have been radicalised against the war and are open to our politics.
The SWP have been right to press this point - even if they have not made the politi cal basis clear. The opposite error is to make dangerous assumptions about the views of Muslim activists.
There are Muslim women's groups and Muslim lesbian and gay groups. It is the Christian right in this country who whip up bigotry over stem cell research and the prospect of gay bishops. This is a new (one from Worker's Power, one from Erdington and one from Lesley Mahmood and Steve Godward) and one was withThis means the meeting took no position on the Birmingham events. This outcome was negative, but less negative than it would have been if the SWP resolution had been passed - effectively endorsing what hapIt is probably too early to tell where this leaves us. If the SWP backs off and the Alliance returns to inclusive norms then the clash will have had the desired effect. If we have more incidents like Birmingham the Socialist Alliance is in very serious trouble.
At any rate a conclusive outcome on the day of the National Council was almost excluded from the start. Theoretically the SWP could have made a self-criticism, but this was never going to happen. Even if the votes on the resolutions that criticised them had gone the other way we would still need to wait to see if the SWP were going to change their ways in practice.
t is important to watch this situation
but the key is taking advantage of the
• political situation to build and broaden the Alliance. To do this we have to talk to those who may well join a broader initia. tive, we also have to build the Alliance itself today.
That means completing the round of successful regional meetings that have been happening over the last couple of months. It means building the campaigr for the Brent East by-election, making sure we have a high profile in the colleges and working for a new trade union initia tive later in the year. Campaigning successes, alongside political development, can start to bring the results we need