An Apology to The Right Honourable Eric Heffer, MP (1981)

From the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

House of Commons, 28 April 1981

Dear Sir,

It has been drawn to my attention that your journal on May 1980 said that I had written in Socialist Revolt of April 1957 the following:

“No one can deny that Communists in the past have made grave mistakes, but does anyone believe that Russia would have retained its socialist basis . . . without Stalin’s iron rule during the most difficult period in Communist history? Would subversion, direct aggression, economic sabotage etc. not have crushed the germinating seed of world Communism if Comrade Stalin had not “enforced” the unity of Communists in Russia, and throughout the International Communist Movement?”

In fact the article was written by someone called Ian Watson, and was on pages 13 and the back page. At the head of that particular article the Editor wrote, “We do not agree with anything in this article. It is however, an example of the apology put forward by the Communist Party.”.

Writing of the Communist Party Programme, “The British Road to Socialism” in that issue of Socialist Revolt I in fact wrote “What do they mean? The same as in the Soviet Union and the “People’s Democracies”? “Workers” who become transformed into a Party of bureaucrats. Only real control at all levels with industry separate from the State apparatus can guarantee real democracy and genuine socialist participation”. That can hardly be called support for Stalin.

I expect an apology and retraction in your next issue.

Yours sincerely.

Eric S. Heffer,

MP for Walton.

We Apologise.

Eric Heffer is right. The passage we reproduced was not written by him and was preceded by the editorial disclaimer he quotes. We regret this mistake and unreservedly apologise.

It is also true that Eric Heffer wrote an article in the same April/ June issue of Socialist Revolt (“organ of the Socialist Workers’ Federation”) criticising the Russian regime. What he does not say is that the article in question also criticised the Communist Party as “reformist” for maintaining that “socialism can be achieved peacefully through the Parliamentary method”. The SWF (of which he was a leading member) declared that it rejected “the concept of supporting a Labour Government or any other Parliamentary Government as a means of establishing socialism”. Eric Heffer’s views have evidently changed since he is himself now a leading parliamentarian and reformist! What makes him a reformist, we hasten to add, is not his (present) view that Parliament can be used in the abolition of capitalism, but his belief that capitalism can be abolished gradually by a series of reform measures passed by a Labour Government.

Editors.