Around 60 people attended the meeting on the morning of January 24 in London prior to the central London Gaza demonstration. Any ‘normal’ anti-war activist present would have been more than a little puzzled about its purpose. Of course, there were very few ‘normal’ people there. The overwhelming majority were members of the Socialist Workers Party, plus two CPGB members and a couple each from Workers Power and the Socialist Party. Andrew Murray (a member of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain) chaired the meeting.

Lindsey German’s 10-minute introduction was a pretty uncontroversial round-up of the current situation in the Middle East. She said that the “ceasefire wasn’t the end of the campaign” and that the BBC should be “ashamed of themselves” for not screening the TV advert by the Disasters Emergency Committee. Nothing that was not going to be heard over and over again from the platform of the demonstration a few hours later.

Mind you, she made a very brief, but interesting excursion into Obamaland. She said that she was “sure everybody here in this room was delighted when Barack Obama won against McCain. People are looking for him to deliver change. And on one level, of course, he will.” She described the announced closure of Guantanamo Bay in 12 months as a “success of the anti-war feeling in the US” and concluded that “we shouldn’t look at Obama in the way that we looked at Bush”. But then she went straight on to say, “Of course, the ‘war on terror’ will continue under Obama.” By way of illustration she listed, amongst other things, silence over the Gaza bombing, the disarming of Hamas as the objective of the ceasefire and Obama’s continued support for the Zionist project of Israel.

She might want to bring up this point a bit more in her own organisation. In the pub after the demonstration, a group of SWP members took great exception to the Weekly Worker’s front page of two weeks ago, which featured the SWP’s popular ‘World’s #1 terrorist’ poster – but with a picture of Barack Obama instead of George W. “You are fucking lunatics,” one of the comrades shouted at us. We asked him if he thought that Barack Obama represented a qualitative change from Bush or if he had even read the article. More precisely, we tried to ask him. Because at that point, the whole table was shouting and screaming at us, advising us to “go and fucking sell this in Brixton”.

But of course, the purpose of the activists meeting was not to have a discussion about Barack Obama and how honest socialists should be pointing to the danger of fostering illusions in him. Neither was the purpose to hear the couple of dozen reports by very excited SWP members about “the biggest local Stop the War meeting we’ve had for years” (old habits die hard).

The reports from some of the occupied building and rooms in various colleges and universities were interesting. It was announced that a national conference on February 7 was to bring together representatives from the occupations. But its main purpose is probably to prepare for a new students’ organisation, after the National Union of Students voted through its ‘governance review’ (which further reduced democracy and increased the powers of the bureaucracy). “We should build something in parallel or directly against the NUS,” said one student from the floor. Judging by the comrades’ record on democracy and ‘united fronts’, this won’t be much more than a ‘SWP plus’, based on the reformist ‘minimum demands’ of mostly imaginary coalition partners (the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is, incidentally, planning something similar).

Alternative power base

But again nothing you cannot read about in Socialist Worker. In reality, the meeting had a much more concrete reason: the civil war raging inside the SWP. There were quite a few middle cadre present whose purpose was probably to keep a close eye on comrades German and Rees. Their contributions were pretty much along the usual lines of reporting on a meeting of 300 people in Haringey, 100 in Cambridge, 200 in Birmingham …

Of course, bigging up the coalition (or any ‘front’ the SWP is engaged in) has always been the message. But something was different this time. An SWP comrade from Westminster complained that the “coalition has been turned on and off in the past”. Another member described how the Palestine Solidarity Campaign had organised protests in his university, and it was only because of the “sustained hard work of the Stop the War Coalition over many years” that the bulk of the protest had been “channelled through the coalition, not the PSC”. A few other speakers stressed the need to “sustain” the coalition even when there was no anti-war protest going on.

It is very rare to hear SWP members publicly raising criticism of their own fronts – even as mildly as they did on Saturday. But the traditional leadership of the SWP is split. While some of the comrades might have been there to do a central committee hatchet job, others could be voicing their genuine concerns and opinions. It is hard to tell. Nevertheless, the civil war in the SWP seems to spilling out into STWC.

Most obvious in this respect was Lindsey German. In summing up, she asked, “How come that the anti-war protests in Britain have been the biggest and most successful in Europe?” 80% to 90% of demonstrators are Muslims, but this was “a reflection of the failure to mobilise the non-Muslims”. The success wasn’t just down to “the big Muslim population here – they exist in other countries too”. It is because of “the group of people at the centre of the protests who have kept the Stop the War Coalition alive”. She finished with the call for the coalition not just to give the protests an “organisational lead”, but also “political leadership”. The Stop the War Coalition is “not just for demos – it is for life”.

Rather than launching an out and out fight against the SWP leadership (which they would lose), Lindsey German, John Rees and their fellow ex-member of the central committee, Chris Nineham, are determinedly hanging onto the Stop the War Coalition as their power base. The stronger and more self-contained the coalition becomes as a thing for itself, the more secure will their positions be – or so they calculate.

Out in the cold

But they have quite a job on their hands trying to rehabilitate John Rees. At Saturday’s meeting, he gave a pretty bog-standard speech, in which he went to great lengths to favourably quote other SWP comrades who had spoken before him. His (potentially) most contentious point was to compare Israel with South Africa in the 1970s and to propose that the STWC should become more engaged in the ‘boycott, disinvest and sanctions’ campaign, which was launched in 2005 as an appeal to governments and non-governmental organisations to isolate Israel until it “complies with international law and universal principles of human rights”.¹ But even this point was later picked up by leading SWP member John Rose, who suggested that the campaign should be discussed at the forthcoming STWC conference.

The date for this long overdue AGM has finally been announced, by the way – although it was only made public after the activists meeting. It is to be held on Saturday April 25. The reason given for the delay is twofold – the need to organise events around the recent upsurge over Gaza and the fact that the coalition is about to move office (although neither of these two points explains why the conference could not have taken place last autumn, a year after the 2007 event).

If the Rees-German-Nineham gang of three really intend to hang on, they will have a tough task on their hands, given the size of the SWP block vote. The CC will surely want to replace comrade Rees with a CC loyalist. Despite his playing to the crowd on Saturday, he got exactly zero applause. You could hear a pin drop. It was quite embarrassing. Every other speaker, no matter how dull their contribution, had received at least a polite clap (everybody apart from the CPGB’s Tina Becker, that is, who said that the STWC should not forget about Iran and plugged the new anti-sanctions campaign promoted by Hands Off the People of Iran).

It is astonishing to see how the leadership of the SWP has succeeded in pinning the entire blame of the Respect debacle on a single person. As if John Rees had not been acting with the agreement of the SWP CC when he sold out one political principle after another (open borders, a woman’s right to choose, secularism …). It is extraordinary enough that the leadership gets away with washing its hands of responsibility – but the fact that Lindsey German seems exempt from any blame must be due to some form of mass hypnosis. She is not only John Rees’ partner, but his closest political ally.

Despite her popularity in the SWP she could easily be sidelined or replaced – the CC majority wanted to have her continue on the leadership – but she withdrew from the slate in solidarity with comrade Rees. Nevertheless, there are people in and around the STWC steering committee who might be interested in a deal with John and Lindsey. This puts the SWP leadership in something of a dilemma.

Bring back George?

This dilemma could dramatically increase if what looks like a possible reconciliation between Rees-German and George Galloway materialises. At a STWC rally in Friends Meeting House on January 8, George Galloway referred to “my good friend Lindsey German” (who was one of the speakers) and “my good friend John Rees” (who was sitting in the audience).

In the January 24 meeting, comrade German mentioned Galloway about five times, mainly in connection with his Viva Palestine campaign. From February 14, he is leading a convoy of “at least” 100 vehicles from Glasgow to Gaza, “bringing fire engines, ambulances, tons of aid and thousands of Valentine’s messages from the people of Britain to the people of Palestine.”²

“Whatever you may think of George, we can organise good meetings around this initiative,” comrade German said. At this point, there was a distinct murmur coming from SWP members all around us. He is the one person who is even more unpopular in the SWP than John Rees. After the split in Respect, the SWP ‘suddenly’ discovered its cross-class character, personified in Galloway (rather than accounting for their political subordination to his politics).

Of course, the split in Respect (and the subsequent crisis in the SWP) first appeared as the falling out between Rees and Galloway. But in a storm, any port will do. It would be easier for Rees and German on a personal level to patch things up with Galloway than for the SWP as an organisation.

Notes

1. www.bds-palestine.net
2. www.georgegalloway.com