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The Resistible Rise of the BNP

Ellie Keen — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most shocking results last month was the election of Nazi British National Party (BNP) member Richard Barnbrook to London’s assembly. This was on top of 13 seats the fascist organisation won in councils in England. It also lost three seats, so its net gain was ten, bringing a total of 57 seats.

The BNP often quotes a figure of over 100 seats, but this includes parish councils where it often stands unopposed or without its candidates identifying themselves as BNP members. In ten of its 13 seats the BNP replaced a Labour councillor, showing it can capture seats outside the inner cities where Labour’s base has collapsed.

The BNP has also been given a massive boost with programmes like those featured in the BBC’s White Season and the endless flow of media attacks on immigrants. In many cases, far from challenging such ideas, Labour has been seen to go along with them, most recently in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election.

The BNP won its first seats in South Yorkshire – two in Rotherham; two in Amber Valley and two in Nuneaton and Bedworth, both in the East Midlands; and one in the Three Rivers borough in the Eastern Region. It also came very near to winning a number of seats, including Amber Valley where it lost winning a third seat by just one vote. Nine of the top 20 wards it just missed were in South Yorkshire. The North East also saw some worrying results, when the BNP came within 60 votes of winning in Hartlepool, and polled over 25 percent in Newcastle.

In the 2004 European elections the BNP won 4.91 percent of the vote with 808,200 votes. On the basis of the votes gained this May, it has the potential to win seats in Yorkshire and Humberside, the North West and the Midlands in next year’s Euro election.

But the disturbing headlines about the BNP’s victories are just one part of the story. It’s important to put these votes in perspective. The percentage of the BNP vote rose by only 0.6 percent from 2004 in the London Assembly election. Yet this was enough to push it over the critical 5 percent barrier and win a seat.

However, because of the high turnout of 45.3 percent (up by 8.3 percent from 2004) it meant it won 130,714 votes. It’s worth noting that the total Conservative, BNP and UK Independence Party (UKIP) vote is almost the same as it was in 2004 – around 42 percent. UKIP’s vote collapsed from 8.2 percent to 1.9 percent, with their votes being distributed to the Tories and the BNP.

But the BNP also faces problems. Nationally it is still finding it hard to break into inner city areas – but it is trying. Also its Eurofascist strategy – putting itself across as a respectable political party – is succeeding in winning it seats but also has limitations.

As is the case with all fascist parties, the BNP is pulled in two different directions. One is towards elections, and another to taking to the streets in order to break up and terrorise progressive movements and immigrant areas. This creates tensions in its own ranks. We have seen several cases of this inside the BNP, most recently in Colwyn Bay, Wales. In May three BNP town councillors resigned before even attending a council meeting. One said he did not realise the BNP was a fascist party and didn’t like the fact that he was attacked by the party for helping an Asian family.

On the other hand, we have also seen a section of the party frustrated by the restraints imposed in the quest for respectability, wanting to break out of the straitjacket of elections. That is why we have seen convictions of a number of BNP members for violence. For the BNP to carry out its aim of creating a fascist state, elections will not be enough and it will have to take to the streets.

This is what all classic fascist movements have done in the past. The BNP has made several forays in recent years but has been pushed back by the anti-fascist movement. With its electoral success the pressure will grow for the BNP to capitalise on its gains and take to the streets in the near future.

All this shows the urgency of building against the fascists on many fronts in the coming months. The success of the Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) carnival was proof that there is a real mood to build opposition. The next step is building the biggest possible turnout on 21 June for the demonstration called in London by LMHR and Unite Against Fascism (UAF).

UAF will be calling a series of rallies all over the country, targeting particular places where the BNP has done well. The rallies alone will not be enough to challenge the growth of the BNP. In every city and region it will need local UAF groups involving trade unionists, students and other activists who can build roots to undercut the BNP at a local level.

Next year there will be a Northern carnival, on the same scale as this year’s carnival in London. At the same time LMHR will be trying to reach out to young people and will be holding a series of concerts in Hull, Rotherham, Stoke, Barking and Dagenham. LMHR will also be creating, alongside teachers’ unions, an educational pack for schools to use in developing anti-racist education.

This year’s election results shows there can be no complacency surrounding the BNP. Those who say we can just ignore the BNP and it will go away are playing a dangerous game. This strategy failed in France, as the growth of the fascist National Front shows.

What is needed is a broad based movement that can undermine the BNP at both a national and local level. But that leaves open one important question: how can we build a socialist current that offers people an alternative?

New limbs for the left

Ellie Keen — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:14:10 +0000

New Labour is now reaping what it has itself sown: a cumulative weakening of the values of social solidarity, public service and altruism, which provide the invisible bedrock on which the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party ultimately depend.

From Peter Mandelson’s celebration of the ‘filthy rich’ and Tony Blair’s contempt for public sector workers, through to Gordon Brown’s present refusal properly to reward public servants and his insistence that ‘public service reform’ means contracting out these services to private business, self-seeking individualism has been valorised and public service ethics denigrated.

Brown’s overarching strategy has been to make Britain a fast-growing economy competing on the terms set by finance-led global capitalism and to stealthily engineer a trickle down to the deserving poor. As we know this has meant being soft on the super rich, while achieving a micro redistribution from the better off to low-income families.

This formula could more or less appear to work when the economy was buoyant. But as soon as this speculation-led growth began to falter New Labour’s uncritical attachment to the priorities of the City as the chosen instrument of economic expansion has become visibly paralysing.

As growth slows the government has less money to spend on tackling poverty or investing in services; and it dare not borrow more or tax the wealthy because to do so would torpedo its Thatcherite economic model. New Labour is consequently disarmed by the new Tory rhetoric of fairness, combined with a strong anti-statism, because it has neither a strategy for social justice nor a confident vision of the positive role of the state – and still less an overarching vision that brings them together.

And the two do go together. Seriously redistributive and green taxation is only politically possible if the state has real legitimacy – in other words, if there is a popular belief, grounded in experience, that the money paid in taxes is returned in responsive services that users feel are theirs.

The British state won this legitimacy throughout the post-war decades of reconstruction, building the welfare state and enjoying its first benefits. The result was a 20-year or so social democratic consensus legitimating taxation and redistribution. The delivery of these social benefits, however, was via an unreformed mandarin state, whose most powerful links with civil society were predominantly with business. These administrative hierarchies were imitated throughout the pubic sector. The result was a daily experiences of state institutions, from universities and the education system through to local government and even the health service, that was contradictory and frustrating – unresponsive to growing expectations and a new diversity of demand.

The social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s were one response. Arguably one reason for the significance and lasting memory of Ken Livingstone’s GLC was that it was one the few politically successful experiments in translating the diffuse but creative radicalism of the 1970s into a popular political programme. It was cut short in its prime. We all know what happened then.

But perhaps now, after the May Day election debacle, the significance of what didn’t happen is coming home to roost for New Labour. The Labour Party didn’t grasp the importance of the GLC experiment, in all its messiness, in illustrating the possibility of transforming, opening up and democratising state institutions – and translating this onto the national level. This – and many similar experiences internationally – could have been the basis of a direct challenge to Thatcher’s privatisation and her reverse, Hood Robin, approach to redistribution. Indeed, Norman Tebbit saw the threat when he remarked of the GLC on the eve of its abolition: ‘This is modern socialism and we will kill it.’

The belief in values of social solidarity and in the possibility of bringing state institutions, international as well as national and local, under active democratic control – along with addressing the problem of corporate power – is still there and generating new kinds of political initiatives on the ground. How can they be strengthened and built on?

At times like this, when all the mainstream focus is on Westminster politics, the left (especially the English left) has to guard against attacks of ‘phantom limb syndrome’ – the pervasive assumption that the old labour movement levers of power connecting local activists with national politics are still effective or could become so. It’s a syndrome reflected in the endless debates about what to do about Gordon Brown, the calls on the party to do this or that, and so on. The truth is that New Labour (and the global economy) has all but destroyed these traditional levers, weak as they already were.

The left needs to attach new limbs by looking beyond its existing, inbred networks and engage in the variety of new (and often local) struggles and initiatives. These are organised through communities, geographical or otherwise, as well as (and more often than) workplaces. They relate to cultural symbols and identities more than narrowly political ones.

Many socialists are already working in this way to considerable local or issue-specific effect. There is a need to strengthen the exchange between them to give innovative content to the long-term political vision of a new kind of political force – and I consciously do not use the word ‘party’, for now.

Hammering the BNP

Ellie Keen — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:25:15 +0000

It feels very odd to find any comfort from the local election results, but there is one outcome worthy of a small sigh of relief. The British National Party did not do as well as it might. It is true that it got Richard Barnbrook, its most personable, if absurd, figurehead, onto the London Assembly. But overall the party had a net gain of just ten councillors across the country, when it was hoping for, and many of us were dreading, some two or three assembly members and 40 more councillors.

It seemed that the BNP had everything going for it. It was exploiting the pumped-up fear of extremist violence and Islamophobia, aided by the media obsession with immigration and migration. The sudden media pre- occupation with the anniversary of Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech could hardly have been better timed. The party’s claim to have taken over Labour’s traditional role as the defender of the working class has had a great deal of resonance and could have put it in a strong position to take advantage of Labour’s collapse.

There are two obvious reasons for its comparative eclipse. The first and most obvious is that Cameron’s Tories swamped the BNP as they did Labour. But the second is that the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight and the trade unions combined in vigorous community- based campaigns against it, involving literally thousands of activists across the country. Nick Lowles, of Searchlight, says, ‘We have never had so many people involved in the anti-BNP campaign before. Against the odds, both political and climatic, decent people took to the streets and campaigned strongly for “hope not hate”.’

It is great to have something we can celebrate and I think we should. But most of these ‘decent’ people were from the left and we need to build stronger defences against the BNP across the board. Far from being down and out, the BNP is now a well- organised modern party and next year it will be seeking seats in several regions in the Euro elections, where low polls will assist it.

Combating the BNP involves an adjustment in the way we regard and describe the party, along with a surer and wider approach in society and in local government.

First, natural though it is to loathe the BNP, too often the left discourse sounds like an echo of the hate the BNP exploits. This is especially harmful when angry or violent expression spills over onto the people who vote for it. ‘Decent people’ can and do vote for the BNP, often with some shame, true, but defiantly nonetheless. It is not a protest vote, but a demand to be heard.

So tear off the party’s veil of respectability. Expose and broadcast the vile things that its members say and do. Keep watch on the performance of its councillors, show up their incompetence, deride the irrelevance of their statements and policies, complain to the local government Standards Board.

On the wider front, it is important to encourage people to take a robust approach to combating the BNP, especially in local government where councillors and staff often feel inhibited, either by fears that attacking the party gives it the ‘oxygen of publicity’, or that exposing the myths it propagates as lies will somehow breach electoral law. In the last election, a council official rang me and said that the other party leaders wanted to make common cause against the BNP offensive, but feared to draw attention to it.

Councils across the country have a duty to promote good race relations and social cohesion: combating the BNP’s lies simply fulfils this duty (on this point, see the Cohesion Matters website at www.cohesionmatters.co.uk).

Even in the Labour Party, I have experienced a reluctance to take on the far right. The most extreme example of this came some years ago when I was one of three people standing for election in Hackney. The agent (a man with real anti-fascist credibility) ordered us not to take part in a debate with the National Front candidate, Derek Day, a violent thug and prominent racist, on the estate where he lived and not to canvas the estate. The agent even came to the meeting to order us out. We stayed, trounced Day in the debate and won over people on the estate as we canvassed. In the pub one evening, my colleague’s handbag hit the table with a big thud. She was carrying a hammer, ‘just in case’.

I don’t advise carrying a hammer. But it is vital not to compromise or be intimidated. Resolute, informed, principled and persuasive argument is the way to combat the BNP.

The Watchdog that did not Bark

Ellie Keen — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:08:59 +0000

“No party financial records were shredded. They are held in electronic format, and cannot be shredded,” proclaimed the British National Party after Jon Cruddas MP exposed the party’s dodgy financial dealings in the House of Commons on 18 December.

By 13 February, following the broadcast of the BBC’s File on 4 investigation into the BNP’s finances, the BNP had changed its tune. Said John Walker, the BNP treasurer: “The bag of shredded items produced in the studio to me which the listeners were expected to believe the BBC’s claims, appeared to be in the main, working copies of the print outs of the book keeping software and draft accounts. To suggest I shredded cheques and invoices is ridiculous, why would I destroy invoices, as I would not have paperwork to cover the expenditure as required by the auditor.”

The BNP works on the principle that if one lie is exposed, try another, and hope no one notices the contradiction. Apart from the fact that Walker now admits that the BNP does have non-electronic records, Searchlight’s perusal of the shreds has revealed numerous pieces of original receipts and cheques, clearly identifiable by their various colours, typestyles and handwritten details.

They include numerous references to various family members of Nick Griffin, the BNP leader, which may bolster the allegations from across the political spectrum that Griffin treats the party as his “cash cow”.

Another name that appears on several of the bits of paper is Vanguard Promotions. This is the private printing business in Leeds owned by Mark Collett, the party’s unpopular and incompetent graphic designer and star of the Channel 4 television documentary Young, Nazi and Proud. His imprint appears on many BNP leaflets and many people have questioned the relationship.

Walker was also rather coy about the BNP’s failure to include a donation of £5,315 from Steve Johnson on its return to the Electoral Commission for July to September 2007. “Only one donation for the 3rd quarter of 2007 … was missed,” glossing over the fact that this was 50% of the total number of donations. “It was not reported to my regional treasurer at the time,” he continued, protecting another seriously incompetent BNP officer David Hannam, “and as soon as the Electoral Commission brought this matter to my attention it was duly reported to the satisfaction of the commission”.

Walker does not explain how the Electoral Commission knew about the donation to bring it to his attention before he reported it. Perhaps he does not want to admit that he found out about the omission from Searchlight’s Stop the BNP website.

Reporting a donation late is not the unique preserve of the BNP. The Electoral Commission publishes a list of donations reported in the fourth quarter of 2007 that should have been reported previously. Donations to all three main parties and others are on it, but not Johnson’s, which has simply been added to the BNP’s quarterly list as if it had been reported on time. It is unclear why the BNP receives such apparently preferential treatment from the Electoral Commission.

The BNP reported three donations received in the final three months of 2007, from Sheila Butler, Charles Wentworth and Adam Champneys. Each gave precisely £5,000. Champneys, who has made large donations to the party before, appeared on the BNP’s list of candidates for the South East in the 2004 European election. Butler is new to the donors’ list. It is not known whether she is the same Sheila Butler who made donations to the UK Independence Party in the South West in 2003 and 2004.

The shredded financial records had originated from John Brayshaw, Walker’s predecessor as BNP treasurer. Before resigning he refused to sign off the party accounts because he had not been given access to all the records he wanted to see. He told the Electoral Commission that he had resigned as BNP treasurer “as a number of irregularities had come to light”. Explaining that he had seen Walker and Hannam shredding the documents and been told to burn them, he declared: “I have not seen what the party sent to the commission but do not believe it is a full and accurate set of accounts for the BNP”.

But the Electoral Commission was unconcerned. It took just two weeks to dismiss the matter, without even asking to see his evidence. Its response to him was blunt: “with regard to a breach of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act, we currently have no reason to believe that such a breach has taken place”.

Jon Cruddas MP was similarly unable to persuade the Electoral Commission to take complaints against the BNP seriously. In a letter dated 28 January 2008 the Commission pointed out that the BNP had paid the “appropriate fine of £1,000” for the late submission of its 2006 accounts, in other words end of story. As for the BNP’s attempt to solicit donations from overseas via its front group Civil Liberty, the Commission dismissed the concerns stating that there was not “sufficient evidence to establish that ‘Civil Liberty’ was an organisation of any significant scale, that it raised any substantial funds from any source, or that it passed funds to the British National Party”.

Civil Liberty is not a limited company and has no obligation to make its accounts public. How exactly did the Electoral Commission investigate what funds it had raised? Did the Commission do any more than ask the BNP and/or the BNP officers who ran Civil Liberty, Kenny Smith and Kevin Scott? On this the letter is silent.

“The Commission does however monitor the activities of political parties and associationed [sic] organisations and individuals, and keeps matters under review,” the letter concludes. We are not reassured.

Alan Thornett’s Denunciation of Trotskyism (Part 2)

Ellie Keen — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:00:55 +0000

Part 2 (See here for Part 1)

Alan Thornett’s diatribe against Trotskyism provides an occasion for a re-examination of his own political evolution. It is instructive in that it demonstrates how a false political conception regarding the development of socialism became the starting point for a pronounced shift to the right by a layer of workers and middle-class people who were once attracted to revolutionary politics. This political shift was bound up with profound experiences made by the working class with Labourism in Britain.

In his denunciation of “Trotskyist groups” in Britain for ultra-leftism, Thornett makes particular mention of the Socialist Labour League (SLL) and its successor organisation, the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). The SLL/WRP was formerly the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which publishes the World Socialist Web Site. Thornett’s tendency originated from a split in the WRP in 1974.

Thornett was part of a substantial layer of militant workers won to the Socialist Labour League in the 1960s as a result of its political struggle against the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. A leading shop steward at the massive British Leyland car plant in Cowley, Thornett quit the Communist Party and joined the SLL. He led many struggles in the plant, becoming chairman of the Transport and General Workers’ Union 5/55 branch and of the Joint Shop Stewards’ Committee at Cowley. He was also the leader of the SLL’s industrial wing, the All Trades Union Alliance.

Thornett joined the SLL at a time when it was understood that the development of the revolutionary party would necessarily involve a substantial leftward movement developing within the Labour Party and the trade unions that had the allegiance of millions of workers, who believed these organisations to be socialist. The task was to carry out systematic work to expose the socialist pretensions of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy in order to win the most politically advanced workers to the revolutionary party by breaking them from illusions in Labour. In this struggle, the unions, which represented more than 10 million members and had a very active rank-and-file, were vital arenas of political struggle.

The tendency that Thornett came to lead emerged as an opportunist orientation towards the very bureaucratic leaderships and organisations the SLL had sought to oppose. In opposition to the waging of a political struggle to win workers away from the leadership of the Labour Party and the trade unions, he was to develop the conception that a left tendency would emerge from within the bureaucracy itself that would be won to socialism.

In a period of sharp political shifts in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which in Britain took the form of major struggles against the Conservative (Tory) Party government of Edward Heath, this became the starting point for Thornett’s organisational and political break with Trotskyism.

Thornett had remained very much a trade union militant in his outlook and came to view the struggle waged by the SLL as running contrary to his own work as a shop steward in Cowley, which focused on efforts to work with various left Labourites, Stalinists and left radicals in defence of jobs and working conditions. Thornett wrote later that “Trotskyism, for us—and being a Trotskyist then tended to mean being a member of the SLL because of its size and influence—provided an analysis not only of capitalism but also of the trade union leaders, their role in society and relationship to the employers.”

However, he continued, “The SLL took this to the sectarian extreme. It saw the role the officials played in general as applying equally to them all. It failed to see the different strands within them and that some could play progressive roles. It was, therefore, unable to construct alliances with those who did stand on principle” [Emphasis added].

Thornett’s adaptation to the Labour and trade union bureaucracy developed under conditions of a growing political disorientation within the central SLL leadership of Gerry Healy, Cliff Slaughter and Michael Banda.

As is explained in “How the Workers Revolutionary Party Betrayed Trotskyism,” the split with Thornett unfolded in the aftermath of the unclarified break with the French Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (Internationalist Communist Organisation—OCI) in 1971.

As early as 1966, the OCI had insisted that the Fourth International had been destroyed and had to be reconstructed. Denying that the ICFI represented the continuity of Trotskyism, it rejected the significance of the struggle that had been waged against the Pabloite movement’s political liquidationism and wholesale adaptation to the Stalinist, social democratic and bourgeois nationalist parties, which it proclaimed to be “blunt instruments” through which socialism would be achieved.

In the tumultuous social and political struggles that wracked Europe following the French General Strike of May 1968, the OCI began to build a substantial youth movement, but on the basis of adaptations to various centrist tendencies in France and internationally. It subsequently formed the Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International and the Workers Party (PT) in France as centrist vehicles, through which it established a leading position within the Force Ouvriere trade union. The OCI was responsible for placing Lionel Jospin in the Socialist Party in 1971. Jospin went on to become a key ally of Socialist Party leader Francois Mitterand, who served as president of France from 1981 to 1995. Jospin later became prime minister of France.

The SLL failed to conduct a thorough-going political struggle against the OCI, declaring instead a public split on November 24, 1971, before any real attempt had been made to clarify the cadre of the then-French section of the ICFI and win them away from the centrist perspective of the party’s leadership. This meant that the SLL was politically disarmed and weakened when Thornett’s tendency emerged as a result of a similar centrist deviation and became a direct conduit for a political counterattack by the OCI.

In 1973, the SLL took the decision to launch a campaign to become the Workers Revolutionary Party. The founding documents of the new party represented a major shift away from the SLL’s Trotskyist moorings, under conditions in which a militant anti-Tory movement was at its height. The new party’s declared aim was to “undertake a specific political task: to unite the working class behind a socialist programme to throw out the Tory government and replace it with a Labour government.”

Thus the new party was largely defined in terms of an electoral, tactical policy, rather than as an instrument for achieving the strategic goal of mobilising the working class, on the basis of the historic legacy and international socialist programme of Trotskyism, of overthrowing capitalism, establishing workers’ power and constructing socialism in Britain and internationally.

The demand for the return of a Labour government pledged to socialist policies was, in itself, correct, and provided the possibility of taking workers through the experience of a political struggle against the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. The SLL/WRP anticipated that, with Labour having been brought to power due to an offensive by the working class against the Heath Tory government, millions of working people would expect Harold Wilson’s new Labour government to implement major social reforms. This, in turn, would bring them into conflict with Labour and create the best possible conditions for a political reckoning with social democracy and the building of the revolutionary party.

The WRP’s founding document stated that the subsequent struggle “for socialist policies under a Labour government” would enable the party to “win many thousands to Marxism and throw out the reformist leaders of the trade unions and labour movement.”

However, the SLL/WRP made impermissible adaptations to reformist illusions in the working class. The WRP advanced an essentially electoral programme that made the most minimal reference to the party’s Trotskyist character and the international perspective and political authority of the ICFI. The programme of demands it outlined were framed as a series of “basic rights”—for employment, a higher standard of living, social benefits and better housing, and to “change the system” in an unspecified way. The launching of a mass recruitment campaign requiring only agreement on this programme meant that workers who had not politically broken from reformism and begun their political education as Marxists could flood into the party.

Subsequent events were to develop in a more complex and protracted manner than was anticipated by the WRP. The party was not wrong to predict that the working class would come in to conflict with the Labour government. (Strike action throughout the public and private sector against Labour’s enforced wage restraint resulted in the loss of 30 million working days in the “Winter of Discontent” of 1978-1979.) But it was wrong to assume that a movement against Labour would develop as an uninterrupted extension of the militant movement against the Tories.

Heath had called a general election on May 3, 1974, under the slogan, “Who rules the country, the government or the unions?” Labour won power just four months after the founding of the WRP, but as a minority administration. Its victory had the initial effect of strengthening illusions in the Labour Party and in reformism, not weakening them, including amongst workers recruited to the WRP.

The working class was not politically prepared to immediately wage a struggle against the Wilson government, which it had placed in office, especially after Wilson made significant wage concessions to the coal miners. The reticence to challenge the government was compounded by Labour’s minority status and concerns that the Tories might return to power. Wilson was forced to call a second election on October 11 of that year, in which Labour’s vote actually increased and secured it a parliamentary majority.

The WRP had clearly underestimated the strength of the illusions in Labour in the working class. It was forced by these developments to place renewed emphasis on its Trotskyist identity and its historic opposition to the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. But this met with ferocious opposition from Thornett, who articulated a right-wing reaction to the WRP’s efforts to deepen its struggle against the Labour and trade union bureaucracy.

As the ICFI later explained, Thornett “had developed a close relation with sections of workers on the basis of the centrist basic rights deviations of the 1973-74 period” and “now resisted the return by the WRP leadership to sharp attacks on the Labour government, especially under conditions where it retained a precarious hold on power and was faced with the imminent necessity of calling new elections.”

An additional factor in shaping Thornett’s view that the WRP leadership was being “sectarian” towards Labour was the fact that British Leyland’s future was in jeopardy and depended on the support of the Wilson government. In 1974, British Leyland announced projected losses of £16.6 million. It sought an overdraft facility of £150 million and began talks with Labour’s Department of Trade and Industry. Labour’s Tony Benn spoke in Parliament in December to urge that, because British Leyland was a “leading exporter” and a huge employer, it was essential that government money be used to assist it. This was agreed.

The role of the OCI

Thornett’s general discontent with the party and hostility to its leftward turn made him receptive to political advances made by OCI supporters in Britain, organised in the Marxist Bulletin Group and led by two middle-class renegades from the SLL, Robin Blick and Mark Jenkins. The aim of the two, who were later to pass into the camp of open anti-communism, was to create a faction inside the WRP with the initial aim of removing Gerry Healy from leadership. This, in turn, was considered only a step towards shifting the WRP to the OCI’s position that the ICFI should be liquidated.

Blick wrote in 1980 of how the Bulletin Group contacted Thornett through the WRP’s Western Region Central Committee member Kate Blakeney, who was met in August. Blakeney had told them “there existed an unofficial and rather secret opposition” grouped around Thornett that “had no clear platform or understanding where the WRP had gone wrong, but was rather a coming together of people who for various reasons were dissatisfied with the national performance of the WRP” [Emphasis added].

Blick states that he wrote “substantial sections” of Alan Thornett’s first oppositional document, including “the section on the Transitional Programme, the section on workers’ control, the section on corporatism, the section on Social Democracy.” He also collaborated with Thornett on an almost daily basis, preparing his reports “up to and during the expulsion of the opposition.”

The sections cited focus in large measure on opposing the WRP for its position that “the entire leadership of the trade unions and the Labour Party have been designated as ‘corporatist.’ ” Thornett’s faction platform stated that this was tantamount to calling them social fascists, as the Stalinists had called the Social Democrats in the Third Period.

The WRP’s political critique of Thornett’s right-centrist positions was correct, but Healy repeated and thus compounded the mistake made with the OCI of moving to an organisational settlement before fully clarifying both the party and the working class as to the political issues at stake.

Thornett’s provocative and disloyal behaviour no doubt played a part in Healy’s decision to do so, and he was soon proved right in his supposition that Thornett was working with the OCI. But this well-founded suspicion did not obviate the need to probe the essential theoretical issues raised by Thornett’s platform, which would have meant revisiting the conflict with the OCI and thus taking to a higher level the ICFI’s struggle against revisionism.

As a result of the confusion the split engendered, Thornett was initially able to take several hundred members with him when he was expelled, and the party lost its most important industrial base.

The split with the WRP liberated Thornett and his supporters to pursue “entry work” within the Labour Party, while he continued his trade union career at branch and national level until the late 1980s. Now in his seventies, Thornett has spent more than three decades trading off of the political confusion created by the WRP, while establishing a niche for himself as an advisor to whichever reformist or Stalinist bureaucrat desires his services.

His group was particularly active in the Chesterfield Socialist Movement, grouped around Tony Benn. For several years, he specialised in seeking to regroup various dissidents and splinters from the International Committee. But this was only a step towards ditching his pretensions to Trotskyist orthodoxy and making his way into his natural political home in the Pabloite USec. His International Socialist Group was recognised as a sympathising section of the USec in 1991 and became its British section at the 1995 World Congress.

With his latest writings, Thornett makes clear that his joining the Pabloites was only a step towards the repudiation of Trotskyism that he has now carried out, a development echoed amongst a substantial number of former radicals who have traded in their tattered credentials for well-paid positions in the higher echelons of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy.

In an additional polemic with the British SWP, Thornett writes a political paean to Galloway, describing him as “still the only left Labour MP to make a break with Labour,” “the best public speaker on the left,” and a “central leader of the anti-war movement” with “the biggest electoral base of anyone on the left outside of the Labour Party.” He adds that Galloway is “left Labour in his politics…. But it was this which he brought into Respect from the outset—a genuine component of left-Labour politics.”

Ultimately, this is what Thornett is concerned with: Ensuring that any new party must be a vehicle for various dissident Labourites and Stalinists that is implacably opposed to genuine socialism. “The strength of Respect Renewal, “ he declares, “is that it is serious about approaching other sections of the left, such as the trade union left and the [Communist Party of Britain], about a wider regroupment of forces to tackle the crisis of working class representation.”

Concluded

Alan Thornett’s Denunciation of Trotskyism (Part1)

Ellie Keen — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:50:24 +0000

Part 1 (Part 2 can be found here)

The January edition of International Viewpoint publishes a statement by the Socialist Resistance steering committee entitled “Democratic Centralism and Broad Left Parties.” Also known as the International Socialist Group, the group is led by Alan Thornett.

Thornett has recently secured his position as chief advisor to Member of Parliament George Galloway in Respect Renewal, the organisation formed following Galloway’s split with the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) last November.

The SWP was the motive force for the creation of Respect-The Unity Coalition, which was formed in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war. The SWP conceived of Respect as a political extension of the alliance of antiwar Labour MPs, trade union bureaucrats, Stalinists, Greens, Liberal Democrats and Muslim groups that constituted the Stop the War Coalition.

The SWP calculated that such a coalition could successfully challenge the Labour Party in elections, provided only that it did not place any obstacles in the way of such a regroupment. The biggest obstacle would be to insist that the new party be explicitly socialist. The SWP therefore stated that Respect would be a “broad coalition” with socialists within it, but raising only those demands that were acceptable to all the antiwar forces that joined it.

The “socialist” component of Respect would be made up of the SWP itself, but more importantly, the left Labour MPs and trade union bureaucrats it anticipated would break from the Blair government as a result of the war in Iraq and in opposition to Blair’s pro-business policies. These dissident Labourites would provide the real leadership of Respect.

The SWP thus oriented itself not to the hundreds of thousands of workers and young people who mobilised against the war, but to the political forces that were able to dominate the anti-war movement and ensure that no political struggle was waged against the Blair government.

Such a party, based on widely disparate political tendencies rooted in opposing class forces, and with no agreement on programme other than being “deeply disappointed by the authoritarian social policies and profit-centred, neo-liberal economic strategy of the government,” could under no conditions be viable. But Respect’s fate was to be doubly disastrous, given that the break by a significant layer of Labourites from the party never materialised. The token opposition demonstrated by a handful of MPs to the war in Iraq evaporated once the war was underway. None of them were about to sacrifice their comfortable careers within Labour’s ranks.

Only Galloway found himself outside Labour’s ranks when he was expelled for his opposition to the war. For this reason, Respect became primarily a vehicle for Galloway to win back a seat in parliament.

Moreover, the reliance on Galloway helped to deepen the SWP’s own adaptation begun during the anti-war movement to Imams, Muslim businessmen, petty bourgeois leaders and groups such as the Muslim Association of Britain, as well as to the Middle Eastern regimes to which Galloway is oriented. The SWP did so, hoping to capitalise on Galloway’s connections in order to secure its own electoral advances.

The plan backfired badly for the SWP. Galloway eventually moved against his erstwhile allies when the Muslim politicians and business figures made clear their hostility to the alliance with the SWP—an opposition motivated to some degree by anti-communism, but mostly by petty organisational rivalries and a belief that the SWP exerted too much influence over who was in the leadership and who would stand as candidates.

Thornett, whose small group of supporters were the only other nominally left group in Respect, stepped in to paint Galloway’s Muslim-dominated faction as a great reforming movement against the undemocratic practices of the SWP. He jumped at the chance to “renew” Respect, even handing over his party’s press to it.

An attack on revolutionary socialism

The article by Thornett’s tendency’s in International Viewpoint is framed as a polemic against the SWP, claiming that it was responsible for the failure to secure the “broad alliance of progressive forces” that was originally envisioned as the basis for Respect. But in the process, Thornett delivers one of the most unalloyed presentations of the cynical, unprincipled and anti-socialist politics behind all such efforts to construct new parties from the decaying fragments and breakaways from the old social democratic and Stalinist organisations.

Thornett speaks as the leader of the British Section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec), whose affiliate parties—such as the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire in France—are engaged in similar political efforts throughout the world. He makes clear that the essential basis for all such projects is a deep political hostility to Trotskyism and a repudiation of the essential task of building an independent political leadership for the working class, guided by the socialist and internationalist perspective of Marxism.

The statement acknowledges that “there were no principled questions of politics involved” in the split in Respect, but insists that it is significant nevertheless. Respect failed, Thornett claims, because, unlike the International Socialism Group and the USec, the SWP maintains a commitment to “the models of political organisation and habits of engagement with the rest of the left adopted by some self-proclaimed Trotskyist organisations” that “were strongly pressurised by third period Stalinism and organisational methods and assumptions inherited from the Stalinised Comintern.” He adds that “no section of British Trotskyism was entirely unaffected by this pressure.” (1)

Thornett’s accusation that other left groups in Britain have historically suffered from an ultra-left attitude to the old mass workers’ parties and a Stalinist organisational approach sets the stage for his insistence that no one should make the same mistake regarding the new “broad left” parties formed since the late 1990s. He hails organisations such as Rifondazione Comunista in Italy and, more recently, the Left Party in Germany as a rebirth of the left that has rendered unnecessary and divisive efforts to build an independent Marxist party.

“It is absurd to imagine,” the statement declares, “that it is possible to take off the shelf wholesale texts written in Russia in 1902 or even 1917, and apply them in an unmediated way in 2007. Even less credible is the idea of taking the form of revolutionary organisation and politics appropriate for Minneapolis in 1934 (2) and simply attempting to extrapolate it in a situation where revolutionary politics has been transformed by central new issues (of gender and the environment in particular); where the working class itself has been transformed in terms of its cultural level, geographical distribution and political and trade union organisation; and where the experience of mass social movements and the balance sheet of Stalinism (and social democracy) has radically reaffirmed the centrality of self-organisation and democracy at the heart of the revolutionary project.”

Thornett is not arguing against an uncritical application of Lenin’s writings. He is rejecting any possibility of building a socialist party based on the working class. The future lies, rather, in liquidating into the new “broad left” formations.

He is forced to acknowledge that workers have already had bitter experiences with the very parties he champions, such as Rifondazione Comunista’s “support for Italian participation in the Afghanistan war” and the “neo-liberal domestic policies” of Lula’s Workers Party in Brazil. These, he states, were “of course massive defeats for the left.” But he reserves his venom for anyone opposing the betrayals of these parties.

His document insists: “For some on the revolutionary left, what we might call the ‘clean hands and spotless banner’ tendency, this shows that attempts at political recomposition are a waste of time. Far better to just build your organisation, sell your paper, hold your meetings, criticise everyone else and maintain your own spotless banner…. In our view this simplistic ‘build the party’ option is no longer operable.”

This cynical dismissal of the “clean hands and spotless banner” tendency is a reference to the closing paragraphs of the Transitional Programme of 1938, the founding document of the Fourth International (FI).

Trotsky’s formation of the FI was in political response to world historic defeats inflicted on the international working class as a result of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union and the affiliated parties of the Communist (Third) International under the leadership of Joseph Stalin: the 1926 General Strike in Britain, the Chinese Revolution in 1927, and, above all, the victory of Hitler in Germany.

It was the failure of any party of the Third International to oppose this betrayal that led Trotsky to proclaim its death as a revolutionary organisation and to call for the founding of the Fourth International. He did so in political opposition to centrist parties, such as the POUM in Spain, which opposed building a new international and whose refusal to politically challenge Stalinism led to further bloody defeats. The Stalinist bureaucracy’s response to Trotsky’s challenge was to launch the political purges of the 1930s that culminated in the infamous Moscow Trials.

It was against this background, and on the eve of the Second World War, that the Fourth International was established. Drawing on these terrible experiences, Trotsky wrote: “The present crisis in human culture is the crisis in the proletarian leadership. The advanced workers, united in the Fourth International, show their class the way out of the crisis. They offer a programme based on international experience in the struggle of the proletariat and of all the oppressed of the world for liberation. They offer a spotless banner.”

Thornett rejects entirely Trotsky’s struggle to build the Fourth International, proclaiming it irrelevant in the modern period. He rails against “a false conception of the configuration of the workers’ movement and the left, a misreading of ideas from the 1930s, that is common in some sections of the Trotskyist movement. This ‘map’ sees basically the working class and its trade unions, the reformists (Stalinists), various forms of ‘centrism’ (tendencies which vacillate between reform and revolution) and the revolutionary Marxists—with maybe the anarchists as a complicating factor.”

“On the basis of this kind of map,” the statement continues, “Trotsky could say in 1938 ‘There is no revolutionary tendency worthy of the name on the face of the earth outside the Fourth International.’ If this idea was ever operable, it is certainly not today.”

“Today the ‘thin red line of Bolshevism’ conception of revolutionary politics doesn’t work,” the document insists. Why? Because “this idea often prioritises formal programmatic agreement, sometimes on arcane or secondary questions, above the realities of organisation and class struggle on the ground” [emphasis added] .

Pabloite liquidationism

For Thornett, it is not permissible to speak of Stalinism, reformism and centrism, because the parties he is seeking to construct can be formed and win influence only if the working class is kept ignorant of the political record of these discredited tendencies and is unaware that their remnants form the backbone of the new parties.

Anyone familiar with the history of Stalinism, for example, would not have been surprised by Rifondazione Comunista’s support for Italian participation in the Afghan war. It did so as a coalition partner of Romano Prodi’s government alongside the Left Democrats, which also emerged from the Italian Communist Party.

Various “left” groups had claimed that Rifondazione Comunista would function as a left alternative to the Left Democrats. But Rifondazione Comunista continued to support the government despite its role in Lebanon, is support for the expansion of a US military base in Northern Italy and its implementation of austerity measures that led to its fall from power in February.

The same can be said of the attacks on workers’ living standards by Lula’s so-called Workers Party and the record of any of the other formations held up by Thornett as having rendered Trotskyism obsolete. Thornett’s aim is to provide a political amnesty for organisations such as the German Left Party, set up by a section of social democratic functionaries led by Oskar Lafontaine and ex-Stalinists from East Germany, into which all manner of “left” groups have liquidated, including the sister party of the British SWP.

Thornett accompanies his denunciation of programmatic agreement with a list of “general guidelines” on how to operate in these “broad left” parties. The most significant of these is his insistence that “no revolutionary current can have the ‘disciplined Phalanx’ concept of operation…. [W]e are not doing entry work or fighting a bureaucratic leadership.”

What do Thornett’s prescriptions say of the type of parties he favours? No struggle for programmatic agreement means that there will be no challenge to the pro-capitalist programme of the leading figures in these parties. His tendency is “not fighting a bureaucratic leadership.”

The same is true of Thornett’s rejection of accountability within his own organisation or the broad party (Respect Renewal or some other formation) in which his co-thinkers operate. He does not speak for the rights of the rank and file, but for a leadership of which he is now a well-established representative. Everything can be discussed, any and all views held, only so long as nothing interferes with the right of the leaders to ignore the nominal programme of their party and the mandate of their members and do precisely what they want.

That is what has happened in the case of Rifondazione Comunista’s support for Italian participation in the Afghanistan war. And that is what will happen with Respect Renewal in Britain, should it ever win significant support.

In a related document, David Packer of Thornett’s group makes this abundantly clear. He states clearly how “in the present context we should not, nor have we, been fighting for Respect to adopt a revolutionary programme or revolutionary forms of organisation.”

He goes on to give at least one example of how the “freedom” the Thornett group espouses works in practice. He writes, “I am sure we agree that our bottom line on abortion is a ‘woman’s right to choose,’ but this is not supported by our only MP [George Galloway], nor by some other forces in Respect…. Clearly, we would not expect [Galloway], an avowed Roman Catholic, to argue for a woman’s right to choose….”

Far from issuing forth some newfound wisdom prompted by developments unforseen by Trotsky, Thornett merely revives arguments previously marshalled in order to oppose a struggle against the old and now discredited reformist and Stalinist parties.

His is a warmed-over version of the politics long associated with the United Secretariat and its founding theoreticians, Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. (3)

Throughout the post-war period, the Pabloite groups have insisted that Trotskyism has no independent role to play. The struggle for socialism would proceed by revolutionaries entering into the “mass workers’ parties” that dominated in any given country—Stalinist, reformist or nationalist—which they would steer in a socialist direction by building alliances and giving loyal advice in the hope of influencing their leaders.

In words foreshadowing Thornett’s document, Pablo called in 1951 for “the most effective possible regroupment of conscious revolutionary forces larger than our own” and, through a “fusion with them,” the eventual creation of “big Marxist revolutionary parties.”

Pablo, too, dismissed with contempt Trotsky’s insistence that outside the Fourth International “there does not exist a single revolutionary current on this planet really meriting the name.” He wrote in October 1953, “In the present concrete historical conditions the variant which is more and more the least probable is the one where the masses, disillusioned by the reformists and Stalinists, break with their traditional mass organisations to come to polarise themselves around our present nuclei, the latter acting exclusively and essentially in an independent manner, from without.”

It was in a struggle against this liquidationist tendency that the International Committee of the Fourth International was formed in 1953. Its founding statement, the “Open Letter to the World Trotskyist Movement,” issued by US Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon, declared: “The attempt to revise the accepted Trotskyist analysis of the nature of Stalinism and the Lenin-Trotsky theory of the party, and thereby in effect, to deprive the Trotskyist parties and the Fourth International as a whole of any historical justification for independent existence, is at the bottom of the present crisis in our international movement” (The Heritage We Defend, by David North, Chapter 18: “James P. Cannon’s ‘Open Letter’”).

Cannon could have been writing against Thornett’s document.

For decades, particularly during the revolutionary wave that swept Europe between 1968 and 1975, the Pabloite groups played a key role as apologists for the Stalinist, social democratic and bourgeois nationalist regimes and movements—employing Trotskyist phrases only to justify a policy of complete prostration before the labour bureaucracies.

This loyalty to the bureaucracy has an objective basis. The Pabloites articulated the interests of a layer of the petty bourgeoisie and better-off sections of workers whose social position depended on the welfare state mechanisms and other concessions the bourgeoisie was forced to grant in the post-war period.

The impulse for the ruling class doing so was a fear of a revolutionary development in the working class. However, the instruments through which these concessions were secured and administered were the social democratic and Stalinist parties, which constituted a substantial layer of privileged state apparatchiks in central and local government and the machinery of trade unions, as well as numerous left-leaning academics in the universities and colleges. It was this milieu that was the political tap-root of the various left radical groups, which specialised in demanding more energetic and greater reforms, from which they benefited, while opposing any development that would bite the bureaucratic hand that fed them.

These same considerations shaped the response of the USec’s affiliate organisations to the collapse of the Stalinist, social democratic and bourgeois nationalist parties in the 1990s. This was the decade in which the perspective historically upheld by Pabloism suffered its most crushing refutation.

The revolutionary “self-reform” of the Stalinist bureaucracy that Pabloism had predicted turned out to be its transformation into a capitalist oligarchy that oversaw the reintroduction of private property and market relations in the former Soviet Union. In the West, the reformist Labour parties and trade unions were refashioned as vehicles for implementing Thatcherite policies of privatisation and the destruction of essential services that has resulted in a historically unprecedented transfer of wealth from working people to the super-rich.

In every country, support for these old organisations has haemorrhaged, prompting efforts by sections of the bureaucracy to form new organisations—such as Lula’s Workers Party in Brazil and the Stalinist-led Rifondazione Comunista in Italy—in an attempt to maintain control over the working class. Every such effort was hailed by the Pabloites as a new political dawn.

Only after what remains of the social democratic and Stalinist left decided to make such an organisational break did the USec’s sections finally remove themselves from the decaying carcasses of the old parties. And they did so only to ensconce themselves as comfortably as possible in the new political creations of the self-same bureaucracy—redoubling their efforts to pour scorn on Trotskyism as a sign of their absolute loyalty.

Thus the USec insisted in 2003 that the great danger was that “sections of the revolutionary Marxist movement” had “fetishised their programmatic inheritance into a reified object to be defended against all comers.” What was necessary was “a rejection of the conception of an enlightened, arrogant vanguard that parasites on or subjugates the movement.”

Read Part 2.

Notes:

(1) During the “Third Period,” beginning in 1928, the Communist International declared that social revolution was imminent. In Germany, the Communist Party took an ultra-left line, denouncing the Social Democrats as “social fascists” and opposing Trotsky’s call for a United Front against Hitler as a means of defeating fascism by exposing the Social Democratic leaders and winning the allegiance to communism of the millions of workers who were supportive of the reformists. The Communist Party’s policies were instrumental in ensuring Hitler’s victory.
(2) The Minneapolis general strike of 1934 was led by Trotskyists and resulted in a substantial growth in support for socialism amongst American workers.
(3) The United Secretariat emerged as a political tendency in the years immediately following World War II. Under the leadership of Michel Pablo, the secretary of the Fourth International at the time, it represented an opportunist adaptation to the stabilisation of capitalism. The stabilisation was based on the political betrayal carried out by Stalinism of incipient revolutionary movements in Europe and elsewhere, and the role played by the United States in resuscitating European and Japanese capitalism.

The division of Europe agreed at Yalta and Potsdam and the subsequent onset of the Cold War obliged the Stalinist bureaucracy to reluctantly carry out a programme of nationalisations in the East European buffer states. Pablo responded to this by rejecting the struggle to build independent Marxist parties, based on the central understanding that the instrument for the realisation of socialism was the working class itself. Instead, he argued that the conflict between imperialism and the Stalinist regimes had forced the Stalinist bureaucracy to project a revolutionary orientation and would force it to do so again in future.

This capitulation to Stalinism developed into a comprehensive perspective both justifying and actively seeking the liquidation of the Fourth International. Pablo’s initial prognosis of “centuries of deformed workers’ states” gave way to more modest claims that a process of gradual “self-reform” of the bureaucracy was under way.

The Stalinists were, moreover, only one of a number of “blunt instruments” that could substitute for the revolutionary role previously assigned to the Fourth International. In countries where the social democratic bureaucracies dominated the workers movement, they would be the vehicle for socialist transformation, provided only that enough militant pressure was brought to bear on them by the working class. In the semi-colonial countries, various bourgeois nationalist regimes and parties—from Peronism in Latin America to, later, Castroism in Cuba—would play the same role.

London Mayoral Elections (Part Two)

Ellie Keen — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 22:59:27 +0000

Labour as the party of neo-colonial intervention

New Statesman Editor Martin Bright is unabashed about his adoption by the neo-conservatives. In a July 2006 Observer article, he explained how he was being “feted by the right” after his exposure of “Whitehall’s love affair with radical Islam” had earned him plaudits from “none other than David Frum, the neoconservative Bush adviser credited with coining ‘axis of evil.’” But it “is no shame for those on the left opposed to the rise of radical Islam to build alliances with conservatives prepared to call fascism by its real name”—a disingenuous statement given Bright’s willingness to ally with the most fervent advocates of American global military power.

Another contributor to the Evening Standard’s campaign against Livingstone is Nick Cohen. A one-time Labour supporter and Observer columnist who postured as a left critic, Cohen is one of the most prominent signatories to the Euston Manifesto, first published in the New Statesman. A paean to “liberal” imperialism, it called for a “new progressive democratic alliance” to defend the policy of military intervention so as to safeguard “democracy.” The manifesto won support from a number of pro-Labour journalists, such as Will Hutton and Oliver Kamm, author of Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy, and was endorsed by William Kristol in the US, co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and a leading advocate of war against Iraq.

Writing in the Standard January 9 under the headline “You can do it Boris—just wow us with your true grit,” Cohen informed his readers that he had been through Conservative candidate Boris Johnson’s policies “and found much to admire.” This despite Johnson, an unreconstructed Thatcherite, having had to make a public apology only recently for a 2002 article in which he referred to “piccaninnies” and “tribal warriors” with “watermelon smiles”—the same inflammatory terms utilised by Enoch Powell in his notorious 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech defending racial discrimination and advocating an end to immigration.

The accusation that the government has not been sufficiently resolute in prosecuting the “war on terror” at home is extraordinary. Under Labour, the threat of terrorism has been used to overturn fundamental civil liberties, including habeas corpus. Organisations have been banned and people, mainly Muslim students, jailed for reading material on the Internet said to be linked to terrorism.

Bright and Cohen’s evolution underscores the profound rightward shift within a layer of former “leftists” since the collapse of the Stalinist bureaucracies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and in response to the decay of the old social democratic parties and trade unions.

Analysing the rush by former pacifists and radicals to demand military intervention against Serbia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the December 1995 statement by the International Committee of the Fourth International, “Imperialist war in the Balkans and the decay of the petty-bourgeois left,” explained how these profound changes had “removed an essential prop for those who engaged in protest politics in a previous period.”

The leftism of this social layer, the statement continued, was based not on the independent capacity of the working class, but on the apparent strength of the Stalinist and social democratic or Labourite bureaucracies. The demise of the latter meant that the “workers movement no longer provides the petty-bourgeois left with the same sources of employment or paths to political influence,” while the policies of free-market deregulation and privatisation had provided a powerful social impulse for their conversion to the side of the bourgeoisie.

For a time, this embrace of Thatcherite economic nostrums could still be combined with a liberal stance on sexual and racial issues. The Labour Party especially promoted identity politics, based on race, religion and sexual preference, as it sought to junk any connection with the working class and social reforms and refashion itself as the preferred party of big business.

Now sections of the bourgeoisie have determined this policy is no longer sufficient and acts as a fetter on its broader, long-term ambitions. If British imperialism is to intervene determinedly in the fight to control strategic markets and resources globally, and particularly in the Middle East, the government must recognise that this will provoke opposition and prepare accordingly. Increasingly, the new mantra is that at home, just as abroad—you are either with us, or against us.

“Leftists” groups sign up to defend Labour

That some of the most vociferous proponents of this doctrine have emerged from the likes of the New Statesman and the Euston Manifesto group is proof of the political putrefaction of the Labour Party. This hollowed-out, bureaucratic apparatus, entirely divorced from any democratic control by the populace, much less the working class that once formed its primary constituency, has functioned as the main political representative of the neo-conservatives in Britain for more than a decade. As such it has become the incubator of the most right-wing, antidemocratic tendencies.

No mention of this is made by those now lining up to defend Livingstone. Rather than alerting working people to the dangers posed by the absence of a genuinely progressive alternative to Labour, they argue that a “progressive alliance” means supporting the very same party that has spawned Bright and his cohorts.

Labour’s Compass group issued a statement signed mostly by Labour MPs and National Executive Committee members—“Progressive forces unite behind Mayor.”

“Livingstone is a standard bearer for real progressive politics,” it claimed. “Of course, like all of us, Livingstone operates in the here and now. For London that means the domination of the Square Mile in the form of financial capitalism. He cannot be expected to address such forces at once or alone….

“The battle lines are clear. It’s them and us. And Ken Livingstone is us. We urge every progressive voter, activist and organisation to get behind the campaign to re-elect Ken Livingstone.”

Writing in the Guardian, Seumas Milne argued, “A defeat for Livingstone would not just be a blow to the broadly defined left, working-class Londoners, women, ethnic minorities and greens. It would represent a wider defeat for progressive politics, in Britain and beyond.”

Despite the increasingly personal character of the attack on him, Livingstone has said little about the fact that the opposition campaign is led by individuals associated with Labour and its periphery—arguing instead that he should be judged on his record. London is booming, he argues, and the key test is “whether London is ahead of New York” in the “contest for number-one city in the world.” As the official Labour candidate, it is not possible for Livingstone to identify the pronounced right-wing trajectory of his own organisation without its damaging his electoral chances.

As it is, the Economist forecast that Livingstone’s candidacy for the Labour Party was damaging his ability to trade on “Brand Ken.” In the Guardian, February 27, 2008, Sunder Katwala expressed similar fears over Labour’s ability to mobilise a sufficient vote: “In a low-turnout election, Johnson’s ability to mobilise the suburban vote and those uneasy with London’s diversity and openness could take him across the winning line,” Katwala wrote. Livingstone needed to be able to “mobilise London’s broad progressive majority, winning enough support from Lib Dems, Greens and others to see off” the Tory challenge, thereby offering “a major reason to be cheerful about Labour’s chances of political recovery nationally.”

In the drive to engineer such a “recovery,” declared opposition to the “neo-cons” is being used to support the very party that has championed the Bush doctrine of military intervention, the further redistribution of wealth from working people to the rich and the dismantling of democratic rights.

Yet again, the various petty bourgeois left groups have signed up en masse to this political charade.

George Galloway, whose Respect Renewal group split from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) last year, has announced he will not challenge Livingstone for mayor. “There is an urgent need for change” in London, Galloway has said. “Just not the change from Livingstone to Boris Johnson.”

“In these new and developing circumstances, it would be self-indulgence, a luxury the left can no longer afford, to stand a candidate of the left against Livingstone for mayor.” Galloway has said he intends to form a “progressive slate” for the assembly, with himself as a candidate, to act as a check on the mayor.

The SWP is in the somewhat difficult position of having declared months ago that Stop the War Coalition leader Lindsey German would run for mayor. But in a statement on her campaign, German went out of her way to stress “I have many points of agreement with Ken Livingstone—his anti-racist and anti-imperialist policies are a credit to London and he has seriously attempted to cut car use in the city…. We should defend Ken against attacks from the right, and we should support him against the Tory candidate Boris Johnson and his right wing agenda.”

“However that does not mean that we can or should be uncritical.”

But what does this mean for the SWP’s campaign? With some relief, German explained that “Everyone has two votes for mayor, for their first and second preferences, so the second votes of the smaller parties can be distributed between the two lead candidates…. It is very important that we don’t let the Tory in, which is why I will be calling for all my voters to give Ken their second preference.”

According to reports, at one election meeting, German dismissed charges that her candidacy would damage Labour’s chances, stating that it would actually help Livingstone because the Single Transferable Vote system meant “we will gain votes for Ken.” In other words, the SWP doesn’t take its own campaign seriously and knows that it will not hurt Labour.

Similarly, for the Socialist Party (formerly the Militant), the elections pose “an invidious choice between a former left who has embraced a big business agenda and a Thatcherite throwback. Both offer neo-liberal policies and will continue to preside over obscene poverty and social deprivation while the City wallows in wealth.”

“The situation is crying out for a new workers’ party but, unfortunately, once more an opportunity has been lost,” it complained, following the decision of unions such as the Rail and Maritime Transport not to stand candidates. This meant there was “no coherent working-class alternative.”

The “Socialist Party is normally opposed to policies of ‘lesser evilism,’” it stated. “But there are occasions when different factors, especially working-class consciousness, compel us to modify our approach. In this case, through gritted teeth, like many London workers, we recommend a second-preference vote for Ken Livingstone.”

There is nothing new in the line-up of the former radical groups. When Livingstone stood as an independent in 2000 they came together to form a joint slate, the London Socialist Alliance, which promoted his candidacy. At the time, they argued that Livingstone’s success could be a force for reinvigorating the party or providing the nucleus for a new workers’ organisation. This was despite Livingstone’s stipulation that he intended to rejoin Labour at some future point. Even when he was readmitted to the party in time for the 2004 elections, these groups called for second preference votes to be cast for Livingstone.

Respect Renewal, the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party all claim to be involved in the fight to construct a new workers’ party. But when the chips are down, they immediately back Labour as the “progressive” choice. No matter how far Labour goes in its attacks on the working class and its support for neo-colonialism, the various left groups insist that it remains the “lesser evil,” which workers must defend if they are to beat back the attacks of the right.

But if support for Labour is truly a means of defending the essential class interests of working people, then why is there a need for a new party?

In truth, none of these groups believe it is possible to fight for a politically independent workers’ organisation. That is why, whenever the right rears its head—and even if substantial sections of that right are identified with the Labour Party—their response is always the same: defend Labour. One thing is guaranteed: as the election looms ever closer, their currently limited criticisms of Livingstone and the Labour Party will become even more circumspect.

The furore around the London mayoral contest does raise important issues. There is no question that a factional fight over political policy is raging within broad layers of the ruling elite, and within the Labour Party itself. Faced with the significant setbacks suffered by US and British imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan and the prospect of economic recession, some are demanding a drastic realignment of domestic politics in line with the battle being waged for global hegemony, which must entail even greater “sacrifice” from the population—especially as regards its democratic rights.

As always, the left groups claim that this can be dealt with by tactical manoeuvres on the electoral front. While warning of the threat from the right, they treat this development as if it can be resolved by putting a cross in the correct place on a ballot paper. But the bitter furore surrounding the London election is not a temporary, conjectural episode. Its roots lie in the deepening crisis of the world capitalist system and the growth of inter-imperialist antagonisms and social tensions this is generating.

The absence of a socialist alternative is not a secondary factor in this situation. It is the fundamental issue confronting working people. So long as the working class does not have any independent means of articulating its opposition to social inequality and the threat of war, the ruling elite are determined to resolve the crisis on their own terms.

The Democracy of Political Funding

Ellie Keen — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 02:11:27 +0000

Labour’s traditional form of fund-raising was an example of democracy in action. It depended overwhelmingly on very modest contributions from millions of supporters, the great majority of whom were working people and pensioners.

In the constituencies, money was and still is raised from members by subscriptions, donations, raffles and functions organised by voluntary supporters. Among the affiliated organisations the individual contributions are also at a very modest level but there are millions of contributors. Much of the money is collected through trade union political funds. Opponents of Labour often speak of this money as though it gives Labour some kind of unfair and undemocratic advantage.

How wrong these critics are! The right of working men and women, members of trade unions, to collect and distribute money to influence political and economic policies affecting their welfare, their employment prospects, their pension arrangements, education, health provision and the need for international action against war has a long and worthy history. It is part of our democratic heritage.

From the earliest days of the industrial system workers sought to protect themselves and their children against cruel exploitation. One obvious way was to seek legal protection. Hence the very early agitation for control of working hours of women and children in textile factories and for safety in mines and all industrial workplaces.

This struggle for minimum legal standards in employment continues to this day. Much has still to be done, for example, to achieve equal pay for work of equal value, an issue of special concern to women. Similarly, hundreds of thousands of workers have been adversely affected in recent years by changes or threatened changes in occupational pension arrangements.

Trade unionism in the workplace coupled with political action are the keys to progress. This is why millions of trade unionists voluntarily recognise the need to contribute to the political funds of trade unions.

An important stage in the evolution of trade union political funds was centred on the struggle in the early 20th century for the payment of Members of Parliament. This demand was in the Charter in the 1840s when the early working class were seeking the right of parliamentary representation. How could working people stand for parliament and, if elected, live as an MP without financial support? Trade unions raised money to sustain MPs who were seeking to promote legislation for the protection of labour.

In 1913 a Trade Union Act was passed, following sustained agitation against restrictions imposed by legal decision, which established the right of unions to pursue certain political objects. The law has been changed from time to time and the relevant legislation now dates from 1992.

Under the law as it now stands a union must, if it wishes to ‘further political objects’ as set out in the Act, get the approval of the membership in a ballot vote. If, and only if, a majority is secured, can it then establish a political fund. This fund must be separate from the normal union funds. Any member who objects to contributing to this separate fund has the right to ‘contract out’. They must not in any way be excluded from any other right of union membership. The existing law defines what is meant by ‘the furtherance of political objects’. Any expenditure of money for these political objects must be taken from the separate political fund and not from the general funds of the union.

It will thus be seen that the law on the political funds of trade unions is not an example of privilege. It is indeed restrictive, but it imposes restrictions which the unions have accepted and surmounted by their democratic endeavour. Thus even before a political fund can come into existence in a union, there is in real life a debate about it. If the policy-making body of the union decides in favour of taking a ballot the issue is then submitted to a legally controlled ballot vote of the entire membership. If, and only if, a majority is secured can a political fund be established. If and when the fund is established any member who objects to contributing has a right to ‘contract-out’. They must not suffer any loss of rights in the union.

Trade union political contributions are an example of democratic action. They are not to be confused with or placed in the same category as big donations from wealthy aristocrats or businessmen, irrespective of the political party they favour.

Practising What We Preach

Ellie Keen — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 01:43:05 +0000

It was five years ago that my frustrations with mainstream parties prompted me to get involved in party politics. At the time I felt that the political process simply did not reflect the broad values of most people I knew – and especially those engaged in the anti-war movement.

These values were reflected in an opposition to imperialism and neo-liberalism, although most people I came into contact with very rarely, if ever, used these words to express their concerns.

Instead they asked why our foreign policy could not be based more on cooperation instead of conflict. They wanted a better quality of life for them, their friends and families, and felt people in other parts of the world were entitled to the same as well. Instead what people see today is war and instability abroad, and increasing discontent at home despite an apparently wealthy society. People are worried about the future of their children. They are concerned at widening inequality, the increase of stress and depression, the record levels of binge drinking, drug abuse, violence and vandalism. How could it be that after a decade of uninterrupted economic growth our society could feel more fractured, unequal and unhappy? Why are our kids reported to be the unhappiest in Europe?

The answers to these concerns lie in a critique of the way the way free market fundamentalism has increasingly invaded and distorted our lives, and the need for society to be protected from its all consuming appetites.

The challenge for those of us who aspire to live in a more humane and just society is to be able to explain the source of people’s everyday concerns in a language they immediately understand, and point to solutions that are immediately realisable.

There is a lot of talk in government circles about the need for a ‘national conversation’ about what ‘Britishness’ means in the 21st century. If we are to have such a conversation, it would be well served by looking back to the future.

The ideas of universal healthcare; a living wage; participatory democracy; public services that are accountable to the people who use them; food, medicine and shelter as a human right; these are not particularly radical ideas. They are common sense ideas enshrined in the UN Charter.

Add to that list a foreign policy that places a premium on diplomacy, and international cooperation, plus more decisive action on climate change, and there is the basis of a manifesto a sizeable slice of the British public would sign up to.

Why are these ideas so radical today? At one stage most would have been regarded as the bread and butter of social democracy. They appear radical now only because of the way neo-liberalism has shifted political discourse to the right over the last 20 years. All the while the gap between what the politicians do, and what people want, has widened.

The challenge of building political organisations that can bridge that gap is best realised and tested through day-to-day engagement in the practical struggles and frustrations of people’s everyday lives. Electoral politics, despite its pitfalls, forces such an engagement. Effective campaigning does likewise. Engagement with politics of a mass character is essential. It forces you to absorb the experience of the people you aim to represent, and it puts your views to the test.

It is also essential that we practise what we preach. How we build is as important as what we build. Our political organisations must embody the values that we wish to see reasserted in broader society. Our culture should be one in which disagreement is not seen as disloyalty and where inclusivity is not confined to those who sympathise completely with your own views. Whatever our forms of political organisation they must be places where we bring the best out of people, where the instincts that brought them into politics are raised to a higher political and moral plane.

Unity is Possible - Look at Europe...

Ellie Keen — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 02:36:14 +0000

The radical left unity projects in Scotland (the SSP) and England (Respect) made small but significant electoral breakthroughs between 2003 and 2005. However, their implosion in the last two years as result of internal disputes and splits has cast doubt on whether the radical left can ever move away from its Life of Brian depiction of incessant hair-splitting on questions of political purity, much less exercise any influence on the political process. However, the objective conditions of hegemonic neo-liberalism, continuing imperialism and the decomposition of social democracy demand that the idea of a radical left unity projects is not jettisoned for reasons of any short-term difficulties. For the radical left, in these aforementioned conditions, to be a credible option for a growing body of disillusioned and progressive opinion, unity and cooperation amongst itself are vital. Uniting the radical left together is not just about making one new alliance or organisation the sum of its constituent parts so that it is not divided, important though that is. Rather, it is about making the new organisation more than the sum of its parts. Therefore, unity can help prefigure growth of members and influence through pooling resources, pushing in the same direction, working to common priorities and being more credible to wider social movements and the like.

Unity can take different forms. The basic form is working together in genuine, full and trusting ways in campaigns, while the higher forms involve electoral alliances and organisational fusions. Joint-working or electoral alliances may be the pre-figurative basis for subsequent organisational fusion. For any of these forms of collective working to be possible, respect and tolerance of differences are vital while differences must also be discussed constructively. Unity must be achieved on the foundation of openly discussing and resolving differences for ‘paper’ unity will dissolve when strong differences emerge. But the basis of collective working together in the same electoral alliances and party organisations must be that overwhelming consensus on the grand political questions of our age amongst the radical left forms the bedrock of a common ideology for radical left unity, from which questions of how to operate are secondary and subject to fraternal discussion and debate. This has often been described as the ‘80:20 equation’, where the 20 per cent of disagreement is not allowed to get in the way of agreement and action on the 80 per cent of issues where there is common ground and consensus. Consequently, to facilitate agreement (the 80 per cent) and fraternal discussion (on the 20 per cent), radical left projects must be characterised by pluralism, openness and relative broadness, with some degree of interim internal autonomy to the pre-merger constituent parts.

Mindful of this, this article presents short, thumb nail sketches of the radical left unity projects in continental Europe before making some preliminary conclusions about what they can teach us in Scotland and Britain. It should not be assumed that all radical and far left groups and parties in each of the countries covered are involved in the radical left unity projects outlined below. Indeed, the communist parties with sizeable numbers of elected representatives still exist in Portugal, France, Italy and Greece outside radical left unity projects and here both radical left unity projects and sizeable communist parties exist alongside a plethora of other assorted leftists groups. Even outside the radical left unity projects – where they exist – other left and progressive groups and forces exist so the unity projects are not ‘finished products’. And in Belgium and Sweden, long-existing left parties predominate so there have been no radical left unity projects. Nonetheless, the following survey gives some idea of what happened, when and why. Readers are urged to use the free encyclopedia, Wikipedia (wikipedia.org), to learn more about these projects and their components part by typing in the name of each country, finding the section on politics, then political parties. From here, there are entries and links to the various organisations’ own websites (some of which are in English).

Denmark

The Red-Green Alliance was formed as an electoral alliance in 1989 by three leftwing parties (left social democrats, communists and Trotskyists) with Maoists joining in 1991. The Alliance then developed into an independent party based on individual membership, with the founding parties having no official influence and a majority of members not having has a past in one of the founding organisations parties. It then gained parliamentary representation in 1994, having six MPs (three per cent vote) in the 2005 elections and four MPs (two per cent) in the 2007 elections.

Finland

The Left Alliance is a green socialist party, formed from the merger of the People’s Democratic League, the Women’s Democratic League, and the Communist Party in 1990. Given the different political persuasions, divisions have been common with defections to the social democrats and the forming of a new communist party. Electoral performance has ranged from 17 to 23 MPs (nine per cent-11 per cent) for the parliament to 1,000 to 1,300 councillors (10 per cent-12 per cent vote) and one to two MEPs (nine to 10 per cent vote).

France

In addition to the Communist Party, there are three Trotskyist parties, of which the larger two (LutteOuvrière and Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR)) have jointly worked together on a sporadic basis in the electoral arena (regional, presidential, European). However, their enmity towards each other is also marked although the LCR has recently made a call for a broader, anti-capitalist party to be created. It remains to be seen what the reactions of the other two Trotskyist parties, Communist Party and social movements are to this.

Greece

The Coalition of the Left of Movements and Ecology is commonly known as Synaspismos or SYN. Until 2003, it was called the Coalition of the Left and Progress and is a major component of the parliamentary Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA). SYN emerged initially as an electoral coalition in the late 1980s, with two communist parties being its largest constituents, and securing over 10 per cent of the vote in parliamentary elections and a substantial number of MPs. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the coalition moved to become a party in 1991. Electoral fortunes were mixed in the early to mid-1990s but parliamentary representation was secured (10 MPs in 1996 on five per cent vote, two MEPs in 1999 on five per cent vote). In elections in 2000, SYN was supported by left ecologists, gaining just over three per cent of the vote and six MPs. In parliamentary elections of 2004, SYN together with several smaller left and left ecologists parties formed SYRIZA alliance. The alliance with the smaller parties was formed again at the end of 2005, providing a firm basis the 14 MPs gained on a five per cent vote in the 2007 parliamentary elections, which makes SYN the fourth biggest party. SYN also has many councillors, being the third biggest party in local government, and a sizable, semi-autonomous youth wing. SYN aspires to be an ‘umbrella’, where people of varying left ideological and theoretical backgrounds can find a natural home. Therefore, SYN members are encouraged to form and participate in internal platforms which mount open discussions and publish magazines, but may not work against party policy. These platforms are invited to put forward theses on party policy and strategy at triennial congresses. SYRIZA’s genesis arose in a forum of the radical left in 2001 called the Space of Left Dialogue and Common Action, which in turn led to an electoral alliance for the 2002 local elections, and provided the basis for its formal establishment in 2004. However after the 2004 election, the smaller parties accused SYN of not honouring an agreement to have one of its MPs resign so a member of one of the smaller parties could take the seat. This crisis led SYN to run independently from the rest of the Coalition for the 2004 European elections but later in that year SYN returned to SYRIZA. By 2007, several new radical left and green organisations joined SYRIZA, helping it secure its breakthrough.

Germany

The important development of Die Linke, fusing together the former PDS, a breakaway section from the social democrats (SPD) and various far left groups is an important development. It is amply analysed in Victor Grossman’s article in this edition of the magazine. Suffice it to note The Left has polled eight to 13 per cent, is the only left party in Parliament (unless one still views the SPD and the Greens as left-of-centre) and has become the strongest of the oppositional parties. The German Communist Party (DKP), the traditional party of the left in western Germany, retains some roots among some workers and students. Although often critical of the Left, it supports The Left in elections and has friendly ties to that party’s Communist Platform. The newer Communist Party of Germany (KPF) also has some such ties but rarely supports The Left. There are also smaller Maoist and Trotskyist parties or groups, very visible at demonstrations, as well as ecological and immigrant groups and the anti-globalisation Attac.

Italy

In 1991, when the Italian Communist Party became the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), dissidents founded Communist Refoundation (PRC) as a party to unite all communists. It was joined by Proletarian Democracy, a Trotskyist party. PRC was led by Fausto Bertinotti, a long-time CGIL union leader (from 1994-2006), helping it achieve nine per cent in the 1996 election. The party’s MPs supported and then opposed the Olive Tree centre-left coalition leading to its fall and a split in PRC with the setting up of the Party of Italian Communists. In 2004, PRC joined the centre-left opposition, The Union, entering government when it won power in 2006. The decision to participate in the coalition government, particularly in light of the government’s policy on Afghanistan and Lebanon, attracted much criticism. Internally, the PRC has recognised tendencies ‘Being Communists’, Critical Left (which quit in 2007) and the Communist Project (which quit in 2006). PRC has around 70 MPs currently based on gaining seven per cent votes.

Luxembourg

The Left was formed in 1999 by activists from existing political parties (communist, New Left, Revolutionary Socialist Party and Socialist Workers’ Party) and won three per cent vote and one MP in that year. But a dispute between the communists and the majority of the Left led to both running separately in the 2004 elections, with the Left losing its MP.

Netherlands

Although the Socialist Party (originating from a Maoist communist party in 1972) is currently larger in parliamentary terms, GreenLeft is a larger extra-parliamentary organisation. It began life as an alliance of four parties (communists, socialists, greens and Christians). Initially, it had 16 MPs in 1972 but this fell to six in 1977, precipitating further cooperation albeit of an uneven outcome involving splits from each party and leading to a situation where only two of the four parties had just three MPs between them by 1986. This increased the pressure for full fusion, particularly from unions and environmentalists. In 1989, an interim organisation was formed for the 1989 European elections, leading to the creation of GreenLeft in 1990 as a party and the dissolution of the four former parties. Again this precipitated splits, leading to the formation of splinter groups. Political unity was slowly fashioned out of diverse opinion, although divisions remained over issues of Kosovo, Afghanistan and individual freedom. Between 1990 and 2007, GreenLeft has had between nine and 19 MPs, one and four MEPs, 50-odd members of provincial legislatures and tens of other elected position in local government.

Norway

The Socialist Left Party was founded in 1975 although it began life in 1973 as the Socialist Electoral League (SEL), an alliance of the Socialist People’s Party, Communist Party of Norway, Democratic Socialists and independent Socialists following the victory for the ‘No’ campaign in the European Community referendum of 1972. In the 1973 elections, the SEL achieved an 11 per cent vote and 16 MPs. However, as SEL moved to become a party with its constituent parties disbanding, the Communist Party left, and it was not until the late 1980s that its first level of electoral success was repeated. In 2005, with nine per cent vote and 15 MPs it joined the centre-left Red-Green government coalition. Meanwhile, the Red Electoral Alliance (REA) was founded in 1973 as an election front for the Maoist communist party, becoming its own independent party in 1991. From 1993 to 1997, REA had one MP but despite recording its highest ever vote (two per cent), it lost its seat and failed to regain it in 2005 with a lower vote (one per cent) although it maintained around 60 councillors. This retrenchment led in 2007 to a fusion with the Maoist communist party to form Red.

Portugal

Left Bloc (Bloco de Esquerda, LB) was founded in 1999 from a number of far-left parties from Maoist, Trotskyist and communist backgrounds. All of these parties had stood in elections and became currents within the LB. Initially developed as a coalition, the LB has since become a party while its constituent components have maintained their existence and some levels of autonomy, leading to a loose structure. This structure may also provide an umbrella for other interested socialist organisations. In 1999, the LB polled two per cent in the Portuguese parliamentary election with this rising to three per cent in 2002. These results were generally better than the collective results of its predecessor components. In 2005, the LB achieved a breakthrough with 6.5 per cent and eight MPs. It also has one MEP and many local councillors, making it Portugal’s fifth biggest party. The LB’s presidential candidate in 2006 received 288,224 votes (five per cent). With support from students and unions in particular, the LB is becoming to be seen as a credible left alternative to the older, more established communist party and the more centre-left socialist party because it has become a pole of attraction for many involved in various social movements. The BL proposed Portugal’s first law on domestic violence, which was passed in parliament with the support of the socialist party. Portugal is unusual in that it has another radical left unity project, the Unitarian Democratic Coalition (UDC), consisting of the Communist Party, the Ecologist Party and Democratic Intervention. The coalition was formed in 1987 to run in the simultaneous national and European parliamentary elections, and in every election since these parties have stood together at the UDC, even though the Communist Party is the major element within it. Tensions are minimalised by the sharing out of lead candidatures. Since 1987 the UDC has had in: the national parliament between 12 and 31 MPs (eight to 12 per cent vote); local government in excess of 200 councillors (11 to 13 per cent vote); and the European Parliament two to four MEPs (nine per cent to 14 per cent vote).

Spain

United Left (Izquierda Unida) was formed as a political coalition in 1986 during the mobilisations against NATO by several groups of leftists, greens, left-wing socialists and republicans but was always dominated by the Communist Party. After the electoral decline of the Communist Party in 1982 (from 10 per cent to three per cent), the UL slowly improved its electoral results reaching nine per cent in 1993 (1.8 million votes) and 11 per cent in 1996 (2.6m votes). From 1999, it went into decline, with its support slipping to five per cent in 2000. In that election it signed a pact with the Socialist Party. Following the tradition of the Spanish left, the UL does not have an organisation in Catalonia. Until 1998, UL’s counterpart in Catalonia was Iniciativa per Catalunya (IC-V). But IC-V moved towards the centre, and broke relations with the UL, leading the UL to set up its own organisation in Catalonia, Esquerra Unida i Alternativa (EUiA). In 2004, UL ran with IC-V, achieving five per cent and five MPs. UL has around 70,000 activists and more than 2,500 councillors. Founded in 1995, Alternative Space is a political organisation from a Trotskyist tradition but draws on anti-capitalist, feminist and ecologist perspectives following the different currents that formed it. It operates as a current with UL but is also an autonomous organisation and most of its members do not belong to this coalition.

Switzerland

In Switzerland, the radical left consists of three groups (Alternative List, Solidarites, Swiss Party of Labour) which have a smattering between them of elected representatives at the various levels. However, they worked together in coalitions when standing for elections in 2005 (as Left Alliance) and 2007 (as À gauche toute! Genève).

Lessons for the Scottish and British radical left

This brief cook’s tour around the most significant western European radical left unity projects has a number of lessons:

What seem like disparate groups can work and fuse together (although it is interesting to note that in nearly all instances they do not include members of sister organisations of the Socialist Party (ex-Militant) in Britain and where they include members of sister organisations of the British Socialist Workers’ Party, these members have no significant influence on the radical left unity projects). Working together and, ultimately, fusing is often brought about by prior campaigning activities and joint electoral slates. Of course, while such fusion should be welcomed in itself, sometimes the underlying recognition is that individual parties have often ceased to be credible or influential players on their own so fusion is required to regain some kind of radical left critical mass.

The degree of success for the radical left unity projects is sufficiently high that acquiring further knowledge about them, if not trying to emulate them, is desirable. This can be gauged by their presence in representative legislatures and membership numbers, particularly amongst members from formerly-aligned, non-aligned and independent backgrounds. However, success in attracting left members from social democratic, Labour-type parties has been less evident.

Despite successes, radical left unity projects do suffer from ups and downs reflecting wider changes in society, struggle and consciousness – in other words, left unity does not guarantee inexorable upward momentum.

Engaging in the electoral arena is vital but so is campaigning in extra-parliamentary terms outside elections (although this has been more difficult to show in this cook’s tour). Indeed, it would be a strange notion to counter-pose the two – elections and campaigning – as at cross purposes with each other.

Splits do take place, either as a result of deeply held policy differences or the reluctance to consent to the dissolution of an organisation upon fusing with others. However, fusion need not led to this outcome depending on the process and nature of fusion. Seldom have splits come about because of entering government coalitions – this will remain the great test of these projects given that any government in the foreseeable future in any of the European countries is likely to be dominated by neo-liberal, bellicose parties.

The history of radical left unity far pre-dates the watershed of the rise of the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements in the new millennium.

Different ‘models’ exist of radical left unity and activists should look at which they think are most appropriate to their situation.

Some Green/ecologist parties and organisations have been involved but this is far from standard practice and given an impending environmental catastrophe, opening up avenues to the left of the Green movement is an important future task for the radical left unity projects.

Clearly, a long way still has to be travelled until an alternative is built to the crumbling edifice of mainstream social democracy but these projects provide food for thought and for action.

Professor Gregor Gall is Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Hertfordshire and author of ‘The Political Economy of Scotland – Red Scotland? Radical Scotland’ (University of Wales Press, 2005). He lives in Edinburgh.