SPGB Snippets: Ann Widdecombe (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

July 15, 2026

Red faces in the Socialist Workers Party after their tweet on X in response to the death of Widdecombe was ‘Hooray, she’s dead’, followed by immediate deletion as furore swept the media. Some even confused the SWP with us.

So we should point out that, while we oppose capitalism and all its works, and urge the world’s people to establish a post-capitalist society of democratic common ownership, we have no truck with the SWP’s infantile reaction to the death (probably murder) of a pro-capitalist politician, however detestable that person’s opinions.

Capitalism is a worldwide system of private property and market trading, which can only be replaced at a worldwide scale by a conscious and informed majority, not by targeting individuals.

Democracy or leadership? — the difference (1994)

From the November 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Regular readers of the Socialist Standard will probably be aware that the Socialist Party doesn’t have leaders. They will also hopefully be aware that the Socialist Party claims to be completely democratic, with each member having one vote.

The reason for this is that we realise that democracy and leadership are mutually exclusive. We argue that a democratic socialist society will not have leaders because if it did then it could never be fully democratic. The same applies to the organisation of a Socialist Party. 

So what’s wrong with leaders? Leaders are only necessary in a society where a minority own the means of living and the majority of the population arc exploited for profit. In a society based on free access to the means of living via common ownership, all there will be is democratic organisation. There wouldn’t be a propertied owning class or state — in other words no people with more rights than others, or leaders.

Some people confuse organisation with leadership. The Socialist Party may not have leaders, but it does have strong democratic organisation, in which the members have full control over Party office-holders. Democratic organisation is therefore completely different from leadership. If anything, a democratic party requires more organisation than a semi-democratic leadership party, because it relies more on the initiative of the membership.

This being said, the next area of confusion is the concept of “dominant personalities”. The argument here is that even if you don’t have leaders, and the organisation is democratically controlled by the membership, you will always have those people who are: more knowledgeable than others, better at arguing than others, and generally more influential and active than others. Of course, this is true, and again there isn't a problem here. The point is everyone has the same “legal” weight, so no matter how well known you are or how good you are at writing articles for the Socialist Standard, at the end of the day you only have the same “legal” power as the least able or active member of the Party.

A third point which is often raised is the assertion that any party whose aim is to change people’s ideas is de facto a leadership party. This is pure semantic quibbling. The point is, we don't propose to lead the revolution and we don't propose to exist as a party after the revolution.

Compare this with the SWP. They are an unrepentant leadership group that aims to lead the working class to a “workers’ state” that they will inevitably control. Their concept of democracy is “democratic centralism”. The basic idea here is that the membership democratically vote for their all-powerful leaders on the Central Committee. This is obviously open to abuse, but the main point is that having leaders of any kind can never be fully democratic. Having the right to vote for your superiors doesn’t make for a democratic organisation. Democratic leadership is a contradiction in terms. Leaders and leadership are therefore incompatible with democracy.

The Socialist Party is broadly organised along the lines of how socialist society will be organised. There will be those who seem more dominant and capable than others. A democracy of class-conscious workers will ensure that any leadership pretensions that any of these “strong" people might have will come to nothing. The nature of the “power structure” simply will not allow it.

When it has been proved that leaders are, have been, and always will be our enemy, do you really think a democratic socialist society will ever feel the need to reintroduce them? 

Dave Flynn

Letter: Marx and the State (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx and the State

Many of your members and readers may feel that the SPGB is a truly Socialist and Marxist Party. But I doubt if Marx would think so if he were alive today.

One of your biggest theoretical blunders is assuming that society can be changed through Parliament. The state machine of every bourgeois society has as its principal aim the preservation of the supremacy of the ruling class, and the consequent enslavement of the proletariat. So how you expect to use this state machinery against the ruling class is beyond my comprehension. As Marx said in The Civil War in France " . . . the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”. So how are we to achieve Socialism? Engels provided the answer in a letter to G. Trier dated December 18th 1889. “The proletariat cannot conquer its political domination, the only door to the new society, without violent revolution”, (my emphasis) If the SPGB supposes for one minute the bourgeoisie is going to simply hand over one iota of their power power and privilege just because, by some miracle, the SPGB has a majority in parliament then they are living in a dream world.

For the revolution to be successful we need a strong organized proletarian party. Let us hear what Marx has to say on this in a letter to F. Bolte dated November 23rd 1871. “The political movement of the working class has as its object, of course, the conquest of political power for this class, and this naturally requires a previous organization of the working class developed up to a certain point and arising precisely from its economic struggles”. But we see that the SPGB refrains totally from indulging in these “economic struggles” i.e. fighting for higher wages, against unemployment and public spending cuts etc. Certainly not Marxist tactics!

In number eight of your Declaration of Principles we find the wholly dogmatic and élitist statement that the SPGB is “determined to wage war against all other political parties”. Engels had something to say on this in the above mentioned letter to G. Trier, namely "For the proletariat to be strong enough to win on the decisive day it must form a separate party distinct from all others and opposed to them, a conscious class party. But that does not mean that this party cannot at certain moments use other parties for its purposes. Nor does this mean it cannot support other parties for short periods in securing measures which either are directly advantageous to the proletariat or represent progress by way of economic development or political freedom”. So much for the SPGB’s dogmatism.

In conclusion I have this to say about the SPGB, principally that it is not the Marxist or Socialist party it claims to be and will certainly never lead the proletariat to emancipation. Socialism will only be achieved by a truly Marxist Party (e.g. The Socialist Workers’ Party) that is active within and able to lead the proletariat to victory, not by the passive élitist theorising of the SPGB.

A. Mounsey

Sunderland

Reply:

Selecting quotations out of context has been the stock-in-trade of the so-called Communist party throughout its existence, and now the non-Socialist Workers’ Party, (formerly IS) are trotting out the same time-worn fallacies.

If society cannot be changed through Parliament, why does the SWP go through the ritual of putting up candidates? Presumably they hope to get elected.

It is perfectly logical for us to aim at capturing Parliament, because we hold that capitalism can be ended in no other way. It is contradictory for the SWP to say Parliament is useless, then try not only to capture it but try to use Parliament, not to establish Socialism but to reform capitalism by modifying the useless policies of Labour governments. This is what “fighting the cuts”, etc., means. In so doing they accept that the power for change resides in the political arena.

Yes, the state machine is there to preserve the supremacy of the ruling class. No less so in places like Vietnam, whose ruling class has SWP support. All the nationalist struggles fought ostensibly against imperialism, and supported by IS or the SWP, have as their aim control of the state to preserve class supremacy. The political parties which support capitalism, including the Labour party which is urged workers to vote for, gain power because they are elected by a majority of workers who as yet are reform, not revolution, minded. When the reverse situation is reached, a Socialist majority will elect their own delegates, and the state will then be in the hands of those who have a mandate to end capitalism. It is good of the SWP to expose themselves as advocates of violence; the workers will wisely ignore them.

Marx’s letter to Bolte makes exactly the opposite point from your selective quotation. He shows that the economic organization of the workers precedes the political, which is decisive.

And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. (Marx’s emphasis)

(Selected Correspondence, Lawrence & Wishart edn., p. 318-9)

So with The Civil War in France. Marx, writing about the Paris Commune (see March SS), explains what happened to “the ready made state machine":

While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself and restored to the responsible agents of society.

And:

Nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supersede universal suffrage by hier-achaic investiture.

(Selected Works, p. 472)

The repressive relics like the standing army, the bureaucracy and hierarchy which the state-capitalist advocates of the SWP seek to preserve, are what Marx sought to scrap.

Show us what specific advantage can be gained by the Party for Socialism supporting parties for capitalism. If you cannot do this (and you can’t) your final quotation is meaningless.

Finlly, while calling us élitists you say the "SWP" will lead the proletariat to victory. Leadership is élitism. The SPGB has never set out to lead the workers anywhere. We are confident of their capacity to understand and organize on a conscious basis; only sheep need leaders.

If you can get one of your “leaders” to debate us on Socialism, we will be happy to continue the tuition.

Editors.

The SWP reforms (2026)

From the March 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the article in our January issue on Your Party we pointed to the SWP’s hypocritical position in demanding that YP should have democratic internal elections while its own Central Committee was not chosen democratically. Members only had the choice of voting for or against a slate hand-picked by the outgoing committee. It has now been reported that at its conference in January the SWP has changed this to allow other candidates than those selected and recommended by the outgoing committee (tinyurl.com/yh4wcyms). Not quite so undemocratic but still not democratic as those on the outgoing committee’s slate will still have an advantage

The weakness of the anti-war movement (2001)

From the November 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The weakness of the anti-war movement is that the majority want nothing more than a return to capitalist “peace” rather than the overthrow of the system that causes war

According to the Guardian (15 October), government ministers were genuinely surprised at the estimated 20,000 plus demonstrators who turned out the previous Saturday for a CND peace march against the war in Afghanistan. The editors of the Guardian themselves must have been surprised, since earlier the same week they had published opinion polls showing 86 percent support for the war. Opponents of the war have already had a number of surprisingly large turnouts, given the short notice and word-of-mouth methods of announcing their meetings.

On 21 September a meeting was called by the “Stop the War Coalition”, an umbrella front organisation organised under the auspices of the SWP’s “Globalise Resistance” umbrella front organisation, and the “Socialist Alliance”, another front organisation. They had booked the main hall at Friends Meeting House in London, which seats 1,200 people. In the end over 2,000 people showed up, to this snap meeting, and thus an extra hall and an impromptu out-door meeting had to be organised as well, with speakers rotating between meetings. Although a healthy turn-out, the bulk of the audience was made up of what MP Jeremy Corbyn (one of the speakers) referred to as “The Usual Suspects”. Indeed, there is every chance that a bomb strike on that hall could have wiped out most of the left in London.

A CND concept vigil was organised outside Downing Street the following day (the concept being that everyone wear black). This attracted some 2,000 people as well, and saw them lined up along Whitehall displaying placards stating that they were standing “Shoulder to Shoulder against the war”, in pastiche of Blair’s cretinous soundbite of support for the US government in its war.

In clear distinction to the recent “anti-capitalist” demonstrations, these events were attended by an immensely broad range of background and age. One of the demonstrators was old enough to recall being handcuffed to a Socialist Party member, as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Compared with crowds at other political events, they were relatively receptive to taking the literature being distributed by Socialist Party members present.

Alongside this various committees have been formed: “Media Workers Against the War”, “Artists Against the War” and “Lawyers Against the War”, usually with a significant SWP organisational input. This mushroom-like proliferation of organisations and their prominence within the anti-war movement that exists demonstrates the degree to which it is dominated by leftist notions and agendas. The aim, indeed their very existence, is focussed on the war itself, as an immediate crisis, without developing any broad analysis of the system of society that spawned it, with themselves as the unifying organisations drawing together the disparate groups and agendas involved in opposing the war.

Many of the protestors are dyed-in-the-wool pacifists, whilst others are leftists, and still others Islamists, united only in their opposition to this particular war, not their reasons for opposing it. This was made abundantly clear at the CND march. Trafalgar Square had been booked, some time before the 11 September 11 attack, by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign for their own cause, but they handed it over to CND for their anti-war march. A number of speakers, including one from the PSC, used the occasion of the war to push the Palestinian nationalist case as a cure for international terrorism. The number of mosques thanked by the meeting chair for their help in organising the event indicated why slightly more turned out in opposition to this war compared with the Kosovan conflict. The chair also thanked the Stop the War Coalition for helping organise the event. So, the front of a front was working in a front with CND to hold the march.

Speaker after speaker at each of the meetings have trotted out a long list of reforms, from George Monbiot’s suggestion of a Tobin Tax and an International Clearing House to alleviate world poverty, to Tariq Ali’s more conventional leftist approach of assessing the situation in national terms such as placing the Palestinian question at the centre, to the general cry for a standing International World Court to try “crimes against humanity”. The best CND could manage was a weak call to “negotiate”. The only glimmer of hope has been that the nebulous threat from “terrorists” has made the situation resistant to attempts to nationalise the problems into a conflict between specific states, thus speakers have had to talk much more in terms of a world solution.

The problem with this approach, above and beyond the mendacity of leftist fronts, is that it fetishises the crisis (both in philosophical, and more popular usages of the word, the latter, specifically for all the “activists” who long for a campaign to throw themselves into). It sees the immediate situation of open conflict as the problem, the simple solution of which is to simply pull back the troops. It doesn’t go beyond that to examine the fact that if states have weapons and armies, they are there to be used. It fails to look at how conflict is actually continuous in the present world. It simply adopts (and promotes) a simple moralist position, “War is bad, mmm’kay?”

Cause of war ignored

By taking the state propaganda at face value, and focussing on this war as a singular event, rather than a manifestation of historically arrived-at social relations, peace protestors are left with nothing more than vapid hopes. In ignoring this, they lose sight of the fact that we live in an economic system which drives its actors to battle against one another, in order to secure trade routes, natural resources and capital investments. This conflict is continual, the only variation being in the intensity of the conflict and the badges on the uniforms.

The leftists focus on the role of American Imperialism (with the SWP pointedly refusing to condemn the 11 September hijackers, merely disapproving of their tactics), hence their couching of their anti-war sentiments in terms of US withdrawal from the region. Such accounts present it as if the American government had some choice in pursuing an imperialist policy, that its actions result from some mysteriously gung-ho national characteristic, rather than from the dictates of capitalist economy. It also ignores the fact that if the US ceased to be the disruptive force for chaos in the region, there are plenty of willing understudies to take over that role. All capitalist states are basically imperialist in character and ambition.

That the master class of each nation needs to have recourse to violence to enforce and defend its interests in the world means that they must keep exclusive control of the states that direct those armies. The political machinery of society remains in the hands of a tiny minority so that it can be exercised to enforce the wage-enslavement of the immense majority at home, and rob the capitalists’ rivals abroad.

Hence why in Britain the decision to deploy military forces isn’t permitted to be voted on by Parliament, and why in America (as in the Kosovan war) the state can ignore the (unconstitutional in itself) War Powers Act (which, basically, states that the President may not deploy forces abroad for more than 60 days without congressional approval). The fewer hands involved in controlling the power to wage war, the better for the ruling class.

In its heyday, CND could count on having half-a-million marchers turnout to march down Whitehall to press its case for abandoning nuclear weapons. The holders of political power steadfastly ignored them, and nuclear weapons are still here. CND could march half a million down Whitehall against the war now, and the clique in charge would steadfastly ignore them again. The principle that the “masses” have no say over the means of war must be maintained at all costs. So long as the immense majority allows the state to arm itself and remain in the hands of a select few, we will have no capacity to effect war policy.

A socialist took the opportunity of an open microphone to address a Coalition Against the War demonstration from the plinth of Nelson’s Column, at a demonstration on 8 October, and point these facts out to the crowd. Hopefully some seeds of thought were sown there, and the idea that only socialism, the abolition of these conditions of war, exploitation and the existence of class, represents the practical material answer to the threat of war in all its forms will gain ground. So that, at some future demonstration, the impressive number of participants will stop chanting the puerile “Welfare not Warfare” and instead loudly proclaim their adherence to “no war, but the class war” as a means for bringing this ongoing horror to an end.

Pik Smeet

Letter: Building the Party (1995)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Building the Party

Dear Editors,

I am writing to tell you about Marxism 95. The meetings I went to were very good (especially the discussion after the talks), but on leaving these talks I was faced by an army of SWP members asking me to join (this even happened after the first meeting—as if going to one meeting organised by the SWP would leave me, or anyone, rushing to join—but faced with this pressure, who knows?). When I answered “No” when I was asked. I was literally pulled over and asked "Why not?”. When I tried to explain that I was still finding out about them I was told "If you want a real change join the SWP" and “Join today and if you find that you have made a mistake, just throw away your membership card." —Of course it is not as simple as that, but they told me that it was.

Another point I would like to comment on is a talk on the Saturday by Bernie Grant MP, who is a member of the Labour Party. I was in no doubt that he is on the left of politics—but not the left of Socialism, on the left of Capitalism because Labour are certainly a capitalist party and in my opinion there is a massive gap between capitalism and socialism. When I brought this comment up after the meeting, the three or so SWP members that I was with admitted that Labour are a capitalist party and said that Bernie Grant would probably be in the SWP but "he can have a bigger influence and meet more people in the Labour Party". I then said maybe I should join the Conservative Party so I "could have a bigger influence and meet more people". They told me that was not the same, but I think that it is.

Adam Jaffer, 

Coventry

Political Notes: Labour love in (1982)

The Political Notes Column from the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour love in

In November 1980 Michael Foot defeated Denis Healey in the parliamentary election for the leadership of the Labour Party. This victory was regarded by many people in the Labour Party as signalling an important change, as with a new, dynamic, “left-wing" politician as leader, the next Labour government would be able to begin, once again, the job of running the profit-system in ways it claims are beneficial to the working class.

As Foot's ascendancy was greeted from some quarters with great enthusiasm, we were not encouraged to remember that he had been Minister of Unemployment in the last Labour government when the number in the dole queues had doubled. The large membership of the Labour Party is not united in sharing a single political objective and Foot's inability to smooth out major disagreements between the fighting factions has led to speculation that he is about to be ousted from his position.

The names of Denis Healey, Tony Benn and Roy Hattersley have all been rumoured as possible successors. As the ideas of these heirs apparent are canvassed it is worth remembering that they all give general support to the profit system. The Institute of Directors in Scotland recently invited Healey to address them on “How any future Labour government would not be a bad thing for business, or for free enterprise" (Observer, 5 September 1982) to which Healey readily agreed. A twist to the episode came when Denis — engaging in some free enterprise himself — asked for a £500 fee on top of his expenses, and the Institute, unwilling to pay his free market rate, went elsewhere for a speaker.

Tony Benn, although often mistakenly associated with the word “Socialism", does not advocate revolution. By his own admission he believes that capitalism can be changed to work in our interests by a series of reform measures. In the 27 August edition of New Socialist, the Labour Party magazine, Benn urged certain reforms regarding the constitutional power of the cabinet to declare and end a war and the monarch's power to dissolve Parliament and invite someone to form a government. He does not urge the arrangement of society so that there will be no need or use for monarchs, governments or wars.

Wars fought over the interests of the ruling class — over markets, trade routes, raw materials and strategic areas — are not democratic occurrences. Soldiers are not, for instance, asked by their commanding officers whether they would care to engage in killing “the enemy". But this is what Benn would like to see: "The making of war and conclusion of peace should be subject to the consent of the Commons".

In an interview after his article had been published, he described his proposals as “modest". The scale on which our lives are impoverished and made insecure by capitalism is not “modest" and this social structure cannot be dismantled by piecemeal measures.

As Shadow Home Secretary, Roy Hattersley has been busy trying to cultivate an image of respectability, perhaps in order to be regarded as a person “responsible" enough to be trusted in higher office. Unveiling a proposed policy to be debated at this year’s Labour Party conference. Hattersley said that the next Labour government will adopt “a compassionate and moral attitude" towards immigration. He said the approach would be not to treat immigration issues as a numbers game about black people.

From the point of view of his vote-catching potential. Hattersley must have been pleased to have made his opinion clear, lest his support for the racially discriminatory 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act was remembered. For all his endearing “compassion”, he is still firmly in favour of the world being artificially divided into nations and of people's mobility being shackled by their "nationality". Being interviewed on News at Ten (ITV) last month, he was asked whether, by wishing to case the pressures on immigration, he was implicitly condoning the actions of some "illegal immigrants”? “Oh No", he replied, “I am very much against illegal immigration, and I favour catching illegal immigrants and sending them home.”

More love

In a pamphlet, The Labour Party — Myth and Reality, published by the Socialist Workers Party, the role which the Labour Party has played in supporting capitalism is described in some detail and many examples are given of its impotency to remove the problems we suffer in a class-divided society. It speaks correctly about the "myth that the Labour Party can be won to socialist politics". It concludes, however, with the ludicrously illogical statement, “We even support the Labour Party against the Tories, until we are in a position to replace it". If you continue to give support to something you will, of course, never be able to replace it. For, although it may have escaped the attention of the Leninist intelligentsia of the SWP. you cannot both support and oppose the same political party.

Racist repentant?

In his early days as governor of Alabama, George Wallace would get his audiences going in that Deep South fortress of racial persecution with a chant: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”.

Well forever is a long time and it was a notably different Wallace who recently went on the campaign trail for another term (or rather to win the Democratic nomination, which amounts to the same thing). The old favourite of the Ku Klux Klan came out as a bold champion of equal rights between white and black.

No secret was made about the reason for this. Few black votes were allowed in Alabama in the old days but now about a quarter of the state’s registered voters are black. Wallace badly needed their support. Leaving nothing (he hoped) to chance he also declared himself a fervent friend of god (religious groups like the Born Again Christians have quite a political influence in the Deep South).

The old Wallace was a chilling politician; in face of his racist mob oratory, one did not know whether to laugh, cry, or run for cover. It was easy to forget, then, that he had not always spouted these vicious prejudices; he came out as a white racist only after his first attempt at being governor failed because he was too “liberal”. The lesson he learned is that, if there are votes in it, you must out-racist the racists—or, now, try to out-liberal the liberals.

If Wallace is to be taken seriously, it must be in a way he does not intend. His cynical, vote-grubbing changes of policy, careless as they are of the effect on the conditions — and in the case of Alabama it used to be on the very lives — of people, were always inspired by a single-minded ambition for power.

They may be represented now as caricatures but if so it is because, like caricatures, they have a basic validity, illustrating the nature of the features they emphasise.

Wallace’s campaigns, with all their swings, have one message. The politics of capitalism are cynical, corrupt and decadent, typical of the social system itself.

Sunshine

Geoffrey Howe has never been famous as the Conservatives’ little ray of sunshine but even at that his latest thoughts on the matter of unemployment were gloomy enough to depress the dole queues even further.

Interviewed on Radio Two by Jimmy Young (who tries to be famous as everyone’s little ray of etc., etc.), Howe said that the peak of unemployment has not yet been reached (in other words, things will get worse) and that “It’s bound to take a long time” before the jobless figures begin to fall.

Well if anyone is supposed to know about these things it is the Chancellor of the Exchequer but the unemployed can take comfort; Howe, like his predecessors, has a notable record for getting his prophecies about the economy wrong.

In May 1980, flushed after his first year in charge at the Treasury, he exulted “. . . inflation would start to move down after July, the economy would resume its growth from next year, interest rates would come down ‘in due course’ and there were still many opportunities for firms to expand” (Daily Telegraph, 29 May 1980).

Just over a year later, Howe was definite that he had done the trick, claiming that “there was an accumulation of evidence” which justified him in saying that “the recession was over” (The Times, 10 August 1981).

If Howe was wrong when he said that things were getting better for British capitalism, he can also be wrong when he groans that they are getting worse. Both prophecies are false for the same reason: no Chancellor, nor any of the hordes of “experts” who offer their advice (whether asked for or not) can predict the course of capitalism’s economy. If it were otherwise, they might be able to eliminate booms and slumps and instead organise an even progress to prosperity.

Their obvious impotence should of itself be enough to ensure that no worker anywhere will ever vote for them again. What will actually happen, at the next election, is that people will leave the dole queues to join those at the polling stations, lining up to opt for another spell of anarchy and poverty. And that is a little ray of sunshine for Howe.

Letter: Trotskyist? Leninist? (1986)

Letter to the Editors from the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Trotskyist? Leninist?

As my interest in politics is only about three years old. and my introduction to socialism began about one year ago. I cannot claim to know much about any other political parties, beyond the fact that their policies are opposed to the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Neither am I really clear about what is meant by Leninism. Trotskyism etc But I do know that the Socialist Workers' Party is regarded by its members and by previous contributors to the Socialist Standard as Trotskyist. So why does Steve Coleman refer to them as Leninist in the July Standard?

Grant Dixon

Chatham

Reply:

All Trotskyists are Leninists. The SWP claims to be both. After all, Trotsky was just one of the gang of leaders who hung around with Lenin and accepted his elitist outlook. Other Leninists are Stalinists — they defend the activities of the dictator Stalin as being a logical progression from Lenin's policies. At least they possess the merit of consistency: if you advocate Lenin's methods of achieving a dictatorship you might as well defend Stalin's tyrannical methods of maintaining it in being. As for old Leon Trotsky, he was just an ousted Bolshevik dictator who enjoyed the pleasure of criticising the state-capitalist nightmare which he had played a key part in bringing into being. When the sailors at Kronstadt told the Bolsheviks to stuff their dictatorship over the proletariat it was Trotsky who led the Red Army to massacre them. Trotsky never gave up the belief that Russia was a "workers' state", albeit a deformed one The SWP have advanced beyond Trotsky's analysis on that one: they say that Russia is state capitalist. But even here they are hopelessly mixed up. because they argue that Russia was socialist from 1917 until the late 1920s and then, once Trotsky had left the scene, it became state capitalist In other words, the SWP are terribly confused and Grant Dixon cannot be blamed for being baffled by the various labels used to describe these absurd leftist outfits.

Editors.

Sting in the Tail: Their Problems . . . (1992)

The Sting in the Tail column from the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Their Problems . . .

David Mellor's little lapse certainly hogged the headlines, but another story concerning more serious lapses by political leaders was tucked away inside The Guardian (25 July).

Professor Hugh Freeman, a prominent psychiatrist, told a meeting of fellow shrinks In Dublin that world statesmen have often been:

Incapable of exercising normal decision-making powers through abnormalities of brain functioning.

According to the Prof., Prime Minister Anthony Eden was heavily into booze and drugs during the 1956 Suez crisis and "was not fit to be In charge of national affairs at that time”: US President Woodrow Wilson was "severely mentally handicapped" for the last year of his term: Stalin ended up "so irrational" that he could have started World War 3, while JFK was almost certainly taking steroids and amphetamines during the Cuban missile crisis. The Profs case is made and he didn’t even mention Hitler!

As the poet wisely put it:

Great men are great In our eyes -

While we kneel.

Let us rise!

. . . Our Solution

Is it any wonder that 'World Statesmen" go barmy? Consider the hassle George Bush faces over the proposed sale of 5 billion dollars worth of US fighter aircraft to Saudi Arabia.

If the deal goes through he risks outraging the Israelis and, in this election year, the Jewish American vote, if it doesn’t go through then 30,000 defence industry jobs will be lost along with who knows how many votes.

Of course, he could buy-off the Israelis and their supporters by granting Israel the 10 billion dollar loan guarantees he has been holding out on, but this will not pacify the American arms control groups: how, they ask, can Bush claim to be promoting Middle East peace and sell arms there at the same time?

All heads of government constantly face such mind-bending problems: let's save the poor souls from their mental anquish by relieving them of all that decision-making and simply re-organise society for the benefit of humanity.

Footloose Faldo

Most days that Scorpion gets up he is quite pleased to find a pair of boots to wear. Sometimes he feels lucky just finding his feet.

That is not the case with Nick Faldo, recent winner of the British Open Golf Championship. Mr. Faldo has been paid £100,000 a year since 1989 to wear Stylo Matchmaker shoes during televised tournaments. Turns out that the naughty Faldo wore Footjoys shoes In his recent triumph. Stylo are not best pleased.

There is talk of-some action being taken which is understandable considering Stylo's holding company lost £9 million last year.

It says a lot about capitalism when even an enjoyable pursuit like an afternoon on a golf course has been turned into just another business opportunity for the money grubbers. Everything capitalism touches It spoils.

That's History

Are you baffled by the complexity of the ethnic mix of Eastern Europe and how it got that way? Then Malcolm Bradbury's description of an imaginary Eastern European country in his satirical novel "Rates of Exchange" could give you a clue:

It is a land that has . . . been pummelled, fought over, raped, pillaged, conquered and oppressed by the endless invaders who, from every direction, have swept and jostled through this all too accessible landscape. Swedes and Medes, Prussians and Russians, Asians and Thracians, Tartars and Cassocks, Mortars and Turds, Indeed almost every tribe or race specialist In pillage and rape, have been here . . . and left behind their imprint, their customs, their faiths, their architecture, their genes . . . And so its culture Is a melting pot, Its language a pot-pourri, Its people a salad.

So how do those "ethnic-cleansers" square all that with their racial nonsense?

All In The Game

Labour and Conservatives are fond of pretending that they are radically different from each other. Really, of course, it is all a bit of a game.

John Biffen, Tory MP writing in The Guardian (21 July) and discussing John Smith's future prospects had this to say:

He will have to provide a convincing policy alternative . . . He will be under great constraint to do this particularly as Labour's public spending and interest rates policies broadly reflect those of the Conservatives.

It Never Fails

Recently we saw a poster for an SWP meeting entitled "Will The Economy Ever Recover?" We saw it too late to hear what the speaker had to say, but our answer to that question is, yes, the economy will recover.

This will happen for several reasons: One is that the present slump will eventually bring down interest rates to the point where companies find it attractive enough to borrow in order to invest: another is that growing unemployment exerts downward pressure on wages and this will also attract employers.

Then the property crash means that factory, warehouse and office space can be had cheaply, and because of production cut-backs stocks will become depleted and need replacing, while companies will be able to buy the plant and machinery of bankrupt competitors at knock-down prices.

Factors like these will encourage capital to invest again in production because of the prospects for bigger profits and the economy will have recovered. Every slump contains the seed of the next boom and vice-versa.

Standard Leeds OK (1979)

Party News from the November 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

After unsuccessful attempts to sell socialist literature in Bradford two members of West Yorkshire branch switched their attention to Leeds City. Sales were slow at first but now persistence has paid off. We sell between fifteen to twenty copies each Saturday. We have found that our “special offer” deal of the current Socialist Standard plus a back-issue, for “only” 20p, also pays rewards.

The main reasons for the increased sales of the Standard in Leeds are our perseverance, the new design of the journal and our gradually acquired “selling technique”. The latter consists of shouting our message like a couple of political barrow-boys: “Labour No, Socialism Yes!”. . . “Abolition of the Wages System! . . . “Capitalism No, Socialism Yes!” . . . “Labour-Tory; same old story!” . . .

Selling socialist literature in the streets is often illuminating and amusing. We frequently get abuse from fellow workers, ranging from a basic “Eff off, mate”, to a “Go back to Russia”. The first type of insult receives the reaction it deserves—we ignore it. The latter type of advice usually gets the reply: “If we tried to sell our communist literature in Red Square we’d be arrested”.

Recently, the Tories have ventured forth in Leeds selling their new comic, which they have the nerve to call Democrat. One member approached one of these lackeys of the ruling class and, respectfully touching his forelock, asked ‘”Ow’s life up at the ‘All, Sire?” He defiantly replied that he was a worker, lived in a council flat and had six kids to support. Clearly a case of ragged trousered philanthropism.

Also selling their wares in the precinct are the predictable group of “Socialist” Workers, sporadically shouting about the “Right to Work” and the need for a minimum wage. This contrasts sharply with the neighbouring shouts of “What bloody Right!” and “Forget minimum wages, support their abolition!”

The final rival group we usually is the Young National Front, looking menacingly militaristic in their bovver boots, cropped hair and sun glasses. Recently, we approached one of the Aryan Race asking him if he wanted to buy a Standard. He proudly referred to the fact that he and his mates “smacked up” the SWP paper sellers every Saturday. However, after a wasted attempt to explain the gist of Socialist thought, he abruptly ended the conversation stating that the SWP were hardly “democratic”, which was a true enough statement, but somewhat ironic coming from him. Finally, before he went on his way, we entered the worst deal of out and swopped the last Standard for National Front News (price 8p, for pages of racist rubbish) whose presentation resembled the Socialist Worker paper in layout and design, as did their complete lack of understanding of the cause of social problems.

However, despite such aggressive competition, literature selling in Leeds has recently left us with a greater sense of satisfaction as we leave for home with all our Socialist Standards sold.

If you are one of those people who buy the Socialist Standard from us in Leeds and you sympathise with the Socialist case, then please follow up your interest by getting in touch with us to find out more about Socialism. If you agree with the ideas you’ve read, don’t just sit there, get up and join!

RB (West Yorks)

Voice From The Back: Spaced out (2001)

The Voice From The Back Column from the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spaced out

The US multi-millionaire Dennis Tito returned to earth on 6 May after his trip on a Russian space flight. He paid about $20 million dollars for the privilege; well American capitalists have got to do something with the surplus value that they have extracted from the working class. The awful thing is that while he was away in space for a week the capital that he has invested in the exploitation of the working class made him even richer than he was when he left the planet earth. As he is estimated to have a fortune of $200 million at present that is bloody rich. If every capitalist in the world was given a one way ticket into space, it would make no difference to the wealth produced on this planet, it would of course cut the consumption of wealth quite considerably.

Is democracy ghastly?

The Trade Union movement, in one of its worst moves ever, assisted in the development of the Labour Party. The outcome of that decision is that former railway workers, coal miners and factory hands are calling themselves Lords, dining at the Savoy and discussing the merits of Bollinger ’57 champagne. And are the legions of present and former Labour MPs grateful for the soft living they procured with the help of the TUs? Not a bit of it.

“Teachers unions should end the “ghastly ritual” of their Easter Conferences because they turn off would-be recruits, the chairman of the Commons education committee said last night. Labour MP Barry Sheerman said he was dismayed by the behaviour of some delegates at the National Union of Teachers’ conference in Cardiff, who jeered and held up placards when education secretary, David Blunkett, addressed them.” Guardian 17 April.

Art for cash’s sake

The art world was excited by the re-emergence of a “lost” painting of Claude Monet entitled Haystacks, Last Rays of the Sun. It is a painting that has not been seen in public since 1895. It goes under the hammer at Southeby’s next month and is expected to fetch £5 million. So where has this masterpiece been for over a hundred years? In private hands, where its various owners have kept it safe from the prying eyes of the great unwashed. This is not an unusual fate for artistic works. The very rich, and quite often the very stupid, hoard them under lock and key, often not even looking at them for years on end. These are the people Wilde described as “knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing”. Inside a socialist society all works of art will be available for the public to enjoy, not for millionaires to store in vaults.

Strange bedfellows

The news from Scotland that the Socialist Workers Party will cease to exist and that its 272 members will transfer to the Scottish Socialist Party illustrates the complete lack of principles of both parties. The SSP stand for an independent Scotland, the SWP in the past have always ridiculed this as narrow nationalism. We predict that a battle for supremacy between these two Leninist factions will probably break out in the future. They have certain views in common though. They are opposed to the concept of a class-less, trade-less, money-less society and of course see themselves as the self-appointed leaders of a working class too stupid to get socialism for themselves for “five hundred years”. A plague on both their houses.

Slaughter of the innocents

Capitalism is an awful social system, the old, the infirm and the handicapped are particularly unfortunate recipients of its competitive uncaring nature, but a recent report by the United Nations Children’s Fund shows how terrible is the fate of many children inside capitalism:

“Two million children have been killed by conflict over the last 10 years; 12 million children have been made homeless; six million children have been injured or disabled. Of the world’s 40 million displaced, 20 million are children. Up to 10,000 children each year are killed by landmines” Observer, 6 May.

Situations vacant

From the majestic mountains and glens of Scotland we are delighted to inform our readers of the wonderful career opportunities that are available in Tony Blair’s modern, cool Britannia. “Grouse Beaters wanted. Male and female accommodation. Meals provided. Apply in writing to the Head-keeper, Corrybrough Estate, Tomatin, Inverness-shire IV13 7XY” Herald, 8 May. “Accommodation” AND “meals provided” – Wow! “Near Utopian conditions for the lower orders, your Lordship.” For how long are we going to let these arrogant swine get away with these insults?

Enlightened self-interest

When 39 drug firms dropped their case against South Africa importing cheaper anti-Aids drugs, it was hailed as a victory for humanity over profit. It wasn’t that simple though, because the firms had only bowed to public opinion when it seemed that the import of cheaper drugs into Africa seemed inevitable. The South African government have refused to provide retroviral drugs through the public health system despite this apparent victory. The London-based mining giant Anglo-American is now negotiating with an Indian pharmaceutical company to purchase cheap Aids drugs for its HIV-positive workers in South Africa. An altruistic gesture by big business? Not quite. “Businesses say the pandemic will have a devastating effect on the economy, and research has shown that providing workers with drugs is cheaper than paying for absenteeism, loss of productivity, hospital treatment, funerals, and replacing and retraining staff” Herald, 7 May.

Why you shouldn’t vote state capitalist (2001)

Pamphlet Review from the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why You Should Vote Socialist. By Paul Foot, Bookmarks.

Paul Foot is a good journalist, who specialises in exposing capitalism for not living up to its own standards. For this his fellow journalists chose him as “campaigning journalist of the decade”, even though he seems to have got it wrong about Hanratty. But let’s not be too churlish. Despite being a member of the SWP he’s a good writer and the first 50 pages of this 60-page pamphlet are an excellent demonstration of the truth of the old saying “Labour, Tory; Same Old Story” in relation to the Blair government.

Blair and his team have pursued the same policies as the Tory governments of the 80s and early 90s, not just on economic matters, which anyone with a knowledge of how capitalism works could have predicted (as we did, but not Foot – he voted Labour in 1997) but also on civil liberties, where governments have some leeway.

It’s in the last two chapters that Foot goes off the rails. He correctly states:

“Under capitalism, unemployment, inflation, the rise and fall of booms and slumps, are not brought about by governments, but by economic forces beyond government control.”

But also:

“Elected governments of whatever colour cannot and do not determine what happens to the international capitalist economy unless they embark on the most determined and ruthless economic intervention” (emphasis added).

It is just such a policy of state intervention to try to control capitalism that Foot advocates on behalf of the Trotskyist “Socialist” Alliance and the Scottish Sheridan Party (with which the SWP has just merged its Scottish section) who, together, are contesting a third of the seats in the present general election (in most other constituencies Foot says people should still vote Labour!). But, if tried, this would provoke an economic crisis and, if persisted in, would lead to an autarkic state capitalism with shortages and rationing as in Cuba and North Korea.

The alternative to capitalism is not “determined and ruthless” state intervention but socialism, a world-wide society of common ownership, democratic control, and production for use not profit. But Foot doesn’t offer this, not even as a long-term aim. Instead, he accepts a curious definition (by Michael Barratt Brown) of socialism as a society where, among other things, “housing would be available at reasonable rents” and “pensions for the aged and invalid, and payments during sickness and unemployment would be provided on a universal scheme based on contributions related to income”. In other words, the Old Labourite dream of a reformed capitalism. Perhaps Foot never really did vote Labour without illusions.

Adam Buick

Respect – in retrospect (2007)

From the December 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look at the shipwreck of yet another attempt to organise a left-of-Labour reformist party.

Respect – acronym for Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environment, Community, Trade unionism – was set in January 2004 by George Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party to try to make political capital out of the widespread opposition to the Iraq War.

The SWP is a Leninist vanguard party and as such is always on the look-out for protest movements to take over with a view to recruiting more members and followers for itself. Before the Iraq War the front organisation which the SWP pushed, in a bid to create a left-of-Labour political party it could influence, was the “Socialist Alliance”. But they had been thinking about “playing the Muslim card” since the time of the first Gulf War.

According to “author and academic” Jamal Iqbal, writing in the East London Advertiser (8 November):

“Leading figures in the SWP had been advocating the alliance with religious groups for some time. In the 1994 pamphlet, Prophet and the Proletariat, Chris Harman – then as now one of the SWP’s chief ideologists – argued that the party should make common cause on the issue of ‘anti-imperialism’ with Islamists, in part as a way of recruiting their members”.

Much to the annoyance of others who had participated in the project, the SWP decided to pull the plug on the “Socialist Alliance” so that its members could concentrate on building up and controlling Respect. For a while the strategy of building up Respect as a left-wing alternative to Labour seemed to be working. In the 2004 European Parliament and London Assembly elections Respect polled over a quarter of million votes. Then, in the General Election the following year, Galloway scored a spectacular victory in the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency in the East End of London over the sitting Labour MP, Oona King, becoming the first left-of-Labour MP to be elected at a General Election since 1945.

Galloway’s victory was followed by an equally spectacular breakthrough at local level, when 12 Respect councillors were elected to Tower Hamlets borough council where they became the official opposition to Labour ahead of the Tories and the Liberals. Some on the left saw this as the beginning of an electoral challenge to Labour from the left which could spread. But they overlooked two things. First, that all 12 Respect councillors were of Bangledeshi origin and had been elected, not as leftwingers, but on the basis of Muslim “communalism”, of playing the Muslim card to win the Muslim vote. Second, that not far away in Dagenham there was another spectacular result: the British National Party with 11 councillors emerged as official opposition. Their votes had been obtained by playing the “white working class” and “anti-Muslim” card – and there are more “white workers” in Britain than “Muslims”. What Respect and the SWP were doing was splitting the working class on religious and communalist lines and in effect opening the door for the BNP.

Now the whole thing has blown up in their face. In September Galloway issued a circular denouncing the SWP’s stranglehold on Respect. He and his supporters began to organise to put the SWP in its place. The SWP responded by expelling some of its members who refused to break with Galloway and then provoking a split in Respect.

At local level, in Tower Hamlets, this took the form of four councillors breaking away from the Respect group and forming a new “Respect (Independent)” group on the council. Their leader was Councillor Oliur Rahman who, as Respect candidate in Poplar and Canning Town at the 2005 General Election, had come third, polling a respectable 6573 votes or 17 percent. According to the local paper, their press conference on 29 October to announce the breakaway “was overseen by John Rees, the main man in the Socialist Workers Party and still currently the national secretary of Respect” (East London Advertiser, 1 November).

In a letter in the local paper the following week, expelled SWP members Kevin Ovenden and Rob Hoveman revealed that two of the breakaway councillors were card-carrying members of the SWP. Their letter was also revealing in other respects as it was written by two people who until a month or so ago had been leading SWP “cadres” (even though, as Galloway’s parliamentary assistants, their salaries are paid out of his expenses as an MP):

“It is extremely regrettable that a fundamental division has occurred in the Respect between the leadership of a very small organisation called the Socialist Workers Party and almost everyone else in Respect. The SWP acquired a stranglehold over our organisation, which has caused a deep rift at national level. Our MP George Galloway (Bethnal Green and Bow) raised criticisms of the direction the national organisation was heading in August. Instead of a reasoned response from senior SWP members, the criticisms were met with growing hysteria. This has finally come to a head, with the SWP leadership seeking to undermine the democratic structures of Respect and abusing many of its leading members. The SWP has also sowed the seeds of division which have seen four Tower Hamlets councillors turn their backs on Respect after trying to stage a coup against the democratically-elected group leader. Two of these councillors are SWP members and the other two are the SWP’s closest allies. If they had any principles, they would stand as SWP candidates – but know they would get no votes.” (East London Advertiser, 8 November).

Respect’s annual conference was to have been held on 17 November. What happened was that two conferences were held that day, one organised and controlled by the SWP and the other by Galloway and his supporters. Respect has split into two rival organisations. It remains to be seen what the political fall-out will be.

There are a number of lessons to be learned from this.

First, the dishonest tactics of Leninist groups such as the SWP which set up front organisations to attract the support of well-meaning people concerned about some issue. The honest approach would be to say “we are the SWP, this is what we stand for, join us if you agree”. But this is not how Leninist organisations operate. For them, workers are not politically intelligent enough to work things out for themselves and so need to be led – by them. They see themselves as leaders and discontented workers merely as foot soldiers to be used to further their political influence and, ultimately, to help them into power. They really are officers looking for infantry.

Second, as workers are not that stupid, they eventually get found out. This happened once before, in the 1970s, when the SWP (and its predecessor IS) managed to obtain considerable influence over the rank-and-file shop stewards movement of the time. They thought they were using the movement for their own Leninist ends. The shop stewards went along with this because they welcomed the research work done by SWP academics and students and the printing facilities the SWP provided. At some point the SWP leadership decided to tighten its control. The shop stewards demurred and eventually a whole section of the SWP was expelled for syndicalist deviationism.

Third, playing the Muslim card always was playing with fire. The Islamist groups the SWP worked with and hoped to influence were never going to be manipulated by secular Leninists. Once again it was a question of who was using who and of when those who the SWP thought they could manipulate would turn on them. The SWP – together with Galloway and his supporters – must take a heavy responsibility, having encouraged a split in working class in Britain on communalist lines. The SWP might now try to take up a more secularist position, but the damage has been done. Not only have they burnt their own fingers, but they have left a legacy which genuine socialists will have to undo by re-asserting the need for working class to organise on class, not communal, lines.

Adam Buick

Racism rears its ugly head (1993)

From the December 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Leninist ideologues of the SWP believe a ban on the BNP will go some way to eradicate racism. To this end they re-formed the Anti Nazi League in January 1992 to confront racist boneheads head on and to awaken public consciousness as to a "new Fascist threat". Similarly, the Anti Racist Alliance — another of the anti-racist groups that have sprung up in recent years, vying to be the standard bearers of the cause — believe making racial harassment a criminal offence and tightening restrictions on the sale of extreme-right literature will make racism go away.

Both seem not to realize that the prevalence of racist ideas is largely due to the official racism that has been perpetrated by British governments, local councils, courts, police, etc throughout the twentieth century.

Successive Liberal, Tory and Labour Governments have been at the forefront in promoting xenophobia through Act of Parliament for almost 90 years: 1905 Aliens Act; 1914 Aliens Restriction Act; 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act; 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act; 1971 Immigration Act; 1981 British Nationality Act; 1991 Asylum Bill. These Acts resulted in the lowering of successful applications for UK citizenship by 28 percent last year the lowest for 10 years.

Racist candidate

In 1964, a Tory candidate won the Smethwick Parliamentary seat from Labour with the slogan "if you want a nigger lor a neighbour, vote Labour". In the May 1979 election, a month after Blair Peach lost his life at an anti-Nazi rally, the NF vote fell from 19.2 percent to 6.1 percent in its strongest seat. This had less to do with public disapproval of racism and more to do with the ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher. As one Guardian writer pointed out:

The demise of the NF as a political force was mainly due to Margaret Thatcher rather than any anti-racist campaign. When she said in 1978 that the British people feared they were ’being swamped by an alien culture’, NF supporters switched to Conservative" (14 May).

November 1991 saw Kenneth Clarke, the then Education Secretary, stepping in to prevent a housing association moving five black families from inner-city Nottingham into his neighbouring suburban constituency of Rushcliffe. Clarke feared the families would be "problem families", and that their homes would become half way houses for criminals. Challenged on the matter he replied "I am not concerned about the colour of people’s skin, but you don’t put square pegs in round holes” (Guardian, 22 November 1992).

The current panic about the rising tide of fascism has been sparked by a BNP candidate, Derek Beackon, securing a council seat in the East End ward of Millwall. One BNP councillor, however no more constitutes the dawn of the Fourth Reich than did the victory of the two NF councillors in Blackburn in the mid 1970s.

Neither is racism in Tower Hamlets anything new. When the Liberals took the Tower Hamlets council from Labour seven years ago they embarked upon a discriminatory housing policy, which was attacked for its racist nature in giving priority to the sons and daughters of Tower Hamlets residents. In 1991 the Commission for Racial Equality look the Lib-Dcm council to the High Court for failing to ensure that their housing policies did not discriminate against ethnic minorities. The High Court ruled against the Lib-Dem council housing policy. However, the extent of official racism was this year to become even more evident when the Court of Appeal went on to rule against the decision, permitting the council to investigate the immigration status of applicants.

If anything, the BNP victory was the result of local disenchantment at the efforts of the three mainstream political parties in the area, and frustration caused by local levels of poverty, unemployment and deprivation. Tower Hamlets has pockets of high unemployment and last year out of a total housing stock of 67,581, 45,475 houses were found to be unfit to live in or in desperate need of repair.

Racist housing policy, though, is not confined to the East End of London. In October of this year it was announced that the Labour-controlled Liverpool City Council were to be taken to the High Court by the Commission for Racial Equality, for its failure to comply with its order to end discriminative housing policy.

Official racism is all around us, and not confined to the activities of a few East End boneheads. The whirlwind of patriotism and jingoism, for instance, whipped by the Gulf War with the help of the right wing press (Sun, Daily Mail, etc) provoked widespread violence and racial abuse in Britain, including the firebombing of 20 mosques.

In June this year, European Community Ministers agreed to strengthen the walls of "Fortress Europe" in the wake of an influx of Bosnian refugees fleeing the civil war in former Yugoslavia. At the same time the British government were detaining 200 immigrants without trial.

Hitler impressed

Those who think that the BNP are unique in their wish to make Britain "racially pure" would do well to remember that the sentiments expressed by Winston Churchill almost 90 years ago. Churchill, impressed by the theories of Social Darwinism, theories that also impressed Hitler, wanted to sterilize 100,000 "mentally degenerate" Britons who he felt were threatening to sully the British character.

These sentiments have echoed down the years, changing form as the situation demands and nowadays finding outlet, amongst other things, in official opposition to the ERM and Maastricht, "Buy British" campaigns and belligerent tabloid headlines that condone the efforts of "our boys" overseas. Anything, in fact, that might impinge upon the 'British way of life" is viewed as a threat by reactionaries from the Labour Party to the extreme right.

The calls to "Ban the BNP" and "Bash the Fash" by the ARA and the ANL must be opposed by Socialists. As Socialists we should uphold the right to platform. Once we beg the state to regulate organizations and movements we set precedents that pave the way for regulations for other organizations Gay Rights. Pro-Abortionists, single parent groups, perhaps a ban on the SWP. the RCP and the Socialist Party? Andrew Puddephatt of Liberty expresses similar thoughts: in banning the BNP. he said "there is a danger that the government will begin to ban groups which are opposed to their policies" (Guardian, 28 September).

Calling for a ban on the BNP is tantamount to admitting that the working class lacks the ability, the confidence, the ideology, the arguments to tackle racist views head on and to discredit them. At the same time, appeals to the state to ban far right groups distracts attention from the real cause of racism — the capitalist system. Those who openly promote racism can hardly be counted on to abolish it

Home Secretary Michael Howard was right when he commented on the BNP: "Paradoxically, repressive legislation might actually be welcome to such organisations".

To ban the BNP would be to force it underground, to make it a paramilitary organization and thus more attractive to its supporters who relish violence and thrive on the oxygen of publicity. In Northern Ireland a host of organizations are banned (IRA, INLA, IPLO, UVF, UDF, UFF) — this does not stop them killing hundreds of people a year and causing widespread destruction from Belfast to London.

During the ANL march on the BNP headquarters at Welling, a black police constable. Leslie Turner, was apparently singled out for a beating by ANL activists. Speaking from his hospital bed. PC Turner reflected that the BNP had a "legitimate right to freedom of speech" (Times, 18 October).

Is there not an irony in this for the SWP? That in a march they organized to confront racism a black police constable was beaten up who believed racist thugs — who also would have liked to have given him a beating — should have the right to express their views.

Perhaps the BNP could also draw a lesson from this. Of the 20,000 who took to the streets that day. the one that took a beating in protecting them was one they would "repatriate". Both parties, the BNP and the SWP, should stop their infantile bickering and single-issue policies and realize that the real cause of poverty, housing shortages, unemployment is the capitalist system, a system where profits always come first. What we need is class unity. If we must ban anything, ban capitalism!

John Bissett

Does the SWP have an answer to racism? (1993)

From the December 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The number of recorded racial attacks, arsons and killings has risen dramatically over the last five years as the economic recession has deepened. Is violent confrontation the answer?

The week after the Unity march was held in October to protest against racism and the BNP, the SWP organised a meeting at the LSE entitled "Why the police protect the Nazis". The speaker was the leading SWP member, Tony Cliff. Anyone attending this meeting to hear anything about why the police protect the Nazis, assuming as the title did that this was the case, would, though, have been very disappointed. The speaker, stupidly or dishonestly, thought that it was enough of an argument to shout to the audience (1) that most police are Nazis and (2) that the police had the constitutional job of supervising the Unity march, so therefore (3) the reason why the police prevented SWP members from burning down the BNP Head Office was that the police were Nazis.

This is what logicians describe as assuming what you are trying to prove. Cliff’s argument was about as strong in its structure as the argument that God is all powerful because created the Universe. Had he been putting this argument about the police being Nazis to an audience on Any Questions or Question Time or on an outdoor platform at Speakers’ Corner, he would have been quite rightly refuted and ridiculed by any cross section of workers.

As it was, Cliff’s audience, many of whom had attended the march, seemed content to wholeheartedly agree with Cliffs rousing oratory. One irony here is that after the contentious report (commissioned by the government from the tobacco magnate Patrick Sheehy) to run the police like a business, many police officers have been wooed by the stringent law and order promises of Tony Blair. Labour’s hopeful Shadow Home Secretary; the result is that come the next general election many coppers will be voting for the same party as the members of the SWP: the Labour Party. It is a point of historical record that at general elections, after lambasting the Labour Party and all its necessary shortcomings, the SWP asks its members to vote for Labour candidates as the election of another Labour government will give workers “an inch more space to manoeuvre" than under the Conservatives.

The Unity march had been organised in the wake of growing racism in Britain and across Europe. The number of recorded racial attacks, arsons and killings has risen dramatically over the last five years as the economic recession has deepened. Workers become desperate and often, ignorantly. look for easily identifiable scapegoats. Racism is thus adopted by them and exploited by those brighter, ruthless politicians who see votes and power in it. The real problem in Tower Hamlets in East London, where Derek Beackon was recently elected as a BNP councillor, is a housing problem.

Respectable racism

It is very important to look at how racism moves from being the nasty neurosis of a few frustrated fanatics and thugs to an idea which thousands of people begin to vote for. The problem in Tower Hamlets is not so much the few skinheads who sell the BNP literature on a Saturday morning — although the threat they pose to local ethnic minorities causes a lot of fear and misery — it is the thousand people with "respectable" appearances who voted BNP in the election and the tens of thousands in Britain who could soon be doing the same thing.

What did the SWP say about this problem at the meeting? What educational and argumentative ammunition did it provide for the eager young radicals who attended to learn about how to persuade fellow workers against racism? The SWP speaker said nothing about such arguments. Absolutely nothing. Instead the 30-minute talk was devoted entirely to repealing the mantra about the police all being Nazis, and to looking at half a dozen ways of using physical force against fascists. His tirade included all the vocabulary of "barricade storming" and the need to use guns against fascist thugs who have knives. Cliff’s argument was befitting of any angry young child who had not yet understood the rôle of ideas in politics.

Fascism personified

He saw fascism as an almost physical entity, a concrete part of society, personified in the small number of identifiable members or officers of the BNP. These people had to be "taken out" (physically deterred from being fascists, by being beaten up or, presumably, killed) and then the problem would be solved. You have to surgically remove the "bad apples". In one of many moments of flamboyant rhetoric he said:

"I'll tell you this. If you have a barrel of good apples but there is in the middle of the good apples one bad apple, the good apples will not make the bad apple good."

What followed from this simplistic and strikingly inappropriate metaphor, is that if the "bad apple" of fascism currently sitting in the middle of society could somehow be surgically removed, then all the good apples would be preserved Although Cliff’s language was riddled with references to force being used against the Nazis, he nowhere articulated with any precision how far his young acolytes should go in the furtherance of their aim to "remove the bad apple". Are the fascists to be simply threatened with baseball bats to relinquish their bigotries; are they to be rounded up and locked away to rot in some secret SWP political prison camps for workers with "the wrong attitude"; or was Cliff recommending that, ultimately, these political incorrigibles should he assassinated?

This meeting, like other SWP meetings I have attended, was rigged. It could not be described as an open, honest meeting designed as a genuine forum for workers to discuss the ideas put by the speaker. The rigging works in this way. The speaker addresses the meeting for half an hour. The chairperson then invites people from the floor for any questions to the speaker or points they wish to raise. Some of these questions, as you might imagine, raise points which are very awkward for the SWP. pointing to inconsistencies in its propaganda, undemocratic features of its organisation or clearly anti-working-class conduct it urges upon its followers. Rather than require the speaker to answer each point from the floor once it has been made (and thus allowing the questioner to come back if they are not satisfied with the speaker's response), the chairperson simply takes all the questions from the floor in sequence without any response from the speaker. When the chairperson thinks enough questions and points have been raised, he or she then invites the speaker to respond to the points collectively. This sinister technique thus permits the speaker to pass over any really troublesome points, damning them with feint response. Such meetings, in the best traditions of authoritarian, deceptive showpieces, give the appearance of being open because questions from the floor are allowed but in reality the questions that the SWP would prefer not to be asked of them in public are deftly avoided by their speakers.

That was exactly what Tony Cliff did at this meeting. One of the first questioners was a young man who identified himself as having been a long-time resident of London’s East End. He said that he could not really see any substantial difference between what Cliff had urged anti fascists to do (i.e., beat up fascists) and what the fascists were doing (beating up anti-fascists and people from ethnic minorities). If what the SWP objected to in fascism was it reliance on force to further its ideas, its bullying, threatening tactics, then surely it was wrong to employ exactly those tactics in opposing the rise of fascism? A few SWP members coughed and shuffled about at this point but Cliff was saved from having to enter into any serious debate with this man because the chairperson moved immediately to the next questioner. When the time did come for Cliff to respond to the six or seven points put to him. he dealt contemptuously with the point from the East Ender. The answer, in a few seconds before hopping on to a more friendly question with a much practised agility, was simply that the force of the anti-fascists was historically justified because (a) the other side started it and (b) the force the the fascists had used before (in the Second World War) and were planning to use again was of such a high order that it would be foolish to try and respond in the realm of ideas.

We were back to the principles of gangsterism. The talk of Robert de Niro playing Al Capone in The Untouchables. "If someone comes for me with fists, I answer with a knife. If he comes with a knife I answer with a gun . . ." Many people in areas like Tower Hamlets are living in desperate poverty. There is a housing crisis. Some people from ethnic minorities do have housing and so ignorant workers are left prey to the idea that if these "immigrants" were ail shipped away then there would be plenty of houses and jobs for "British" workers. What is the best way to argue against this sort of politics? Don’t ask Tony Cliff, he doesn’t seem to know or care. At least if he has any thoughts on these matters he was not disposed to share them with anyone at the SWP meeting. Cliff had other things on his mind and sounded more like Lennox Lewis’s coach than a political thinker.

Burn it down

One of the questions was from a young man from Northern Ireland. He spoke as a member of the SWP and was very keen that the meeting should focus closely on exactly why the SWP activists on the march had been prevented from turning down Upper Wickham Lane in Welling, towards the BNP headquarters "to burn it down". There was momentary unease from some at the meeting whereupon the questioner decided to be more up front: "I mean we might as well be clear about what we w'ere trying to do". He went on to fulminate against the police and how despicably pro-Nazi their conduct was in not permitting reasonable activists like himself to go about their proper civic business with cans of petrol and flame throwers. Clearly, the state was in cahoots with the BNP. Quite who the SWP would turn to for assistance if the BNP threatened to bum down its premises is open to question.

The interesting thing about the contribution of the young frustrated arsonist was that no one sought to dissent from the aim of the march that he avowed. Tony Cliff did not say, for example, in summing up. that the SWP had not formulated any such plan. The chairperson did not publicly proclaim that the questioner was, in fact, speaking for himself alone when ranting on about the need to burn things down. The young firebrand turned out to be the kid who yelled that the Emperor had no clothes on: the naive exposer of truth.

Workers from different cultures and ethnic groups have more in common that that which distinguishes them. They are all living in relative poverty and insecurity while they are systematically robbed by the owners of the means of producing wealth (owners who come from all sorts of racial groups). Racism has not tended to develop in times of economic boom; it flourishes when the going gets particularly tough for workers. With nationalist rhetoric of mainstream politicians, racist ideas being toyed with by Labour and Liberal local councillors, and a land where, for instance, the Minister for Education advocates that the Union Jack be unfurled from every school roof in the land, vicious racism is only one goose-step away.

The arguments against racism must be put on radio phone-in programmes, in local and national newspaper letters columns, in public debates, pubs and and during doorstep canvassing. But the only effective arguments against this ugly and recurrent feature of capitalism are those which are truly socialist. Not those quasi socialist SWP banalities which end with an embarrassed instruction "vote Labour with no illusions" at the next general election. It was a Labour government in 1962 which promulgated Britain’s first piece of explicitly racist legislation. Racism is born from the poverty and nationalistic tensions of capitalism; there is no such thing as a successful campaign against racism within capitalism. That this is so is testified to by the reemergence of racism with all its terrors after it had risen and then fallen in the 1970s. The Anti-Nazi League rather unbelievably claim that racism failed in the 1970s because it was stymied by the might of university students with yellow badges chanting to Clash songs in parks. The truth is that most National Front supporters or potential voters were absorbed into the Conservative Party, specially after Mrs Thatcher assured them all in a speech in 1979 that (a) she would not tolerate our culture being "swamped" by foreigners and (b) that unlike the relatively small and shabby NF, she had the power and real prospect of putting her prejudices into action.

The growth of racism will not be broken with brute force, only bones and hope will become fractured in such a fight. In open public debate, the ignorance and bigotry behind the arguments of racism can be easily exposed, at which point support disperses more quickly than the queue at the door of the surgeon who is exposed as an unqualified impostor with a penchant for learn-as-you-go quackery.

Gary Jay

Blogger's Note:

". . . It was a Labour government in 1962 which promulgated Britain’s first piece of explicitly racist legislation."

I looked for a correction in a later issue of the Socialist Standard, but I couldn't see one. The Labour Party wasn't in government in 1962. The legislation referred to from 1962 was the Commonwealth Immigrants Act which was a piece of legislation which ". . . entailed stringent restrictions on the entry of Commonwealth citizens into the United Kingdom."  The Labour Party in opposition, led by Hugh Gaitskell, opposed the 1962 Act.

What legislation Gary Jay was perhaps thinking of was the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1968, which was a piece of legislation passed under Wilson's Labour Government. This was denounced in the pages of the Socialist Standard at the time as piece of racist legislation:

• April 1968: Labour's New Race Law by Adam Buick
• April 1968: 'Prejudice and Pride' by Ivan