Weekly Worker ‘my favourite’

Tony Benn was one of three Labour Party politicians who addressed conference as guest speakers. His introductory speech was fairly standard, noting the warmongering, anti-working class policies of New Labour. He said New Labour had been set up on the basis that the only way to win elections was to adopt Thatcherite policies.

According to comrade Benn, “a lot of people in Britain feel they are no longer represented – they are managed”. He informed us that we were the only generation in human history to have both the capacity to destroy humanity as a whole through nuclear annihilation and, on the other hand, enough “cash” to be able to create a truly egalitarian society. This is why he feels it is so important to get behind John McDonnell and his challenge for the Labour Party leadership.

Most people in the movement will have heard Tony Benn speak numerous times – he certainly did not renege on his promise to get more involved in general left politics following his resignation from parliament. So it was nothing new to hear him express his despair at the way the current left is (dis)organised. Reeling off a list of many of the groups and groupuscules that exist, he commented: “The sectarian left drives me crazy … there are too many socialist groups and not enough socialists in the Labour Party.” In the question and answer session a comrade from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty wondered why his organisation had been missed off the list. Benn assured him that he regularly reads Workers’ Liberty, along with numerous other left papers, “but my favourite is the Weekly Worker”.

It was clear that comrade Benn does not agree with our politics, but he acknowledges our paper as indispensable for those wanting to understand today’s left. However, despite regularly turning to our press for information, he displayed a profound misunderstanding of our political approach that is not uncommon amongst readers who simply skim for information. Comrade Benn felt that the Weekly Worker is flawed because it takes a purist approach, in which “St Marx, St Lenin and St Trotsky” cannot be criticised. The Weekly Worker is, of course, one of the most outspoken critics within the left of this approach.

Benn also informed us that he had bought a copy of the paper that morning, only to find an “attack” on “this very meeting”. Suffice to say, it was the bureaucratic shenanigans of the organisers (principally SYN chair Owen Jones) that we felt the need to “attack”, not the SYN conference or SYN itself – both of which we seek to strengthen through our involvement.

Dave Isaacson

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Good AWL Labourites

By far the biggest section of the organised left at the conference was the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and its Education Not For Sale campaign. But the comrades certainly punched below their weight and their intervention as a whole was rather subdued. Indeed, when I enquired why they did not get up and speak a bit more I was told that the AWL did not want to dominate proceedings. But why turn up in such numbers if not to try and positively shape things?

Sacha Ismail, however, had already admitted on the SYN discussion list that the AWL had agreed a compromise on the question of Venezuela, removing all reference to Hugo Chávez as a Bonapartist from the proposed CYN position. While I may have reservations about the AWL position, it is far better than the uncritical tailing of Chávez favoured by the soft left. In my view, the AWL should have stuck to its guns. Even if its position had been defeated, it would at least have been raised at conference for debate and discussion.

Daniel Randall and David Broder did make some good points – particularly their emphasis on socialism as the conscious control of society from below. However, in the debates on a ‘living grant’ and ‘living wage’ the AWL let slip its narrow, economistic approach to politics. When asked just where he had got his figure of £150 a week for a student grant, comrade Randall beautifully summed up this approach: NUS had called for £120, he said, and he wanted to demand more than that. This is, unfortunately, an all too common attitude – rather than call for what we need, follow the lead of the reformist right (perhaps with a bit more added on for luck).

Rightly, comrade Robin Sivapalan ridiculed that approach, but he would not support the CS amendment. Although it called for the minimum wage to be “determined by a democratically elected and accountable working class commission”, it did not contain the phrase, ‘working class struggle’! An adequate minimum wage can, of course, only be won through working class militancy, but this is hardly in contradiction to the call for a commission to determine precisely what our demands ought to be.

Had the AWL comrades voted to support our amendment (instead of voting against or abstaining) then the politics of SYN would have been significantly strengthened. That they did not is a shame, but in many ways reflects their overall approach – playing the role of good left Labourites, instead of revolutionaries looking to intervene in the Labour left in a principled manner.

Perhaps that is why the comrades failed to back James Turley, CS candidate for the SYN executive. I was assured by both comrades Ismail and Broder that they personally had voted for James as their second preference, but this was obviously their own individual choice – if the whole AWL/ENS delegation had voted for him, then he would easily have been elected. By contrast CS comrades, despite our numerous political differences with the AWL, voted as a bloc for comrade Broder as a second-preference candidate in order to strengthen the left on the executive.

Ben Lewis

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Alphabet soup

One wonders if guest speakers John McDonnell, Tony Benn and Katy Clark MP were aware exactly who they were calling “the future” in their conference speeches. Possibly they weren’t able, in their half-hour visits, to gauge the real make-up of the conference.

The fact is, probably two-thirds to three-quarters of the turnout were not innocent Labourites at all, but a neat cross-section of those alphabet-soup groups most keen on the party. By far the largest segment was the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Having recently given up on their old course of deep entry, they nonetheless snapped right back into form and helped vote through plenty of left reformist fare, with a couple of unambitious motions of their own thrown in for good measure. It’s like they’ve never been away …

Some groups never even got over the entry bug. For Socialist Appeal, this was another part of the grand plan which sees – via some kind of Marxist conjuring trick – workers flooding into the Labour Party in their hundreds of thousands upon a serious capitalist crisis. Why? They just do! Predictably (for them), they offered a fawning motion on Chávez and some interventions on uncontroversial issues, and hung around selling their simply irresistible eponymous magazine – the latest issue carries the shocking revelation that Blair said Iraq was a disaster on TV. A scoop only slightly undermined by its prominence in all mainstream news outlets two months ago.

It would be nice if, some day, one of these Labour-left gatherings might pass over without the backroom dealings of Socialist Action … but this wasn’t going to be it. As is the way with this extremely secretive, semi-Stalinist grouping, one was only able to identify them by employing one’s sixth sense – there are two on the executive. Those standing were asked to give all their organisational affiliations and, sure enough, these comrades listed fronts dominated by Socialist Action. Anything up to eight other SA people may have been there. But who knows? If Appeal are wizards, Action are ninjas.

Then there were the two Socialist Students comrades left outside in the cold January air, boycotting the whole thing and attempting to lure the unwary with a nice, safe ‘Save the NHS’ petition, before, one assumes, informing those who stopped to sign of the futility of the conference and the thoroughly bourgeois character of the Labour Party, now that their parent body, the Socialist Party, no longer enjoys Labour membership.

While you could say that breaking with Ted Grant’s entry fetish was a positive step, the sectarian attitude to Labour now displayed is hardly an improvement.

James Turley