Splintered Sunrise

And so we come to the question of what the election results say about prospects for the left. And the answer to that would be, not very much. But just about enough to be getting on with, if those involved can rise to the occasion.

The Respect results were solid enough – below what might have been expected, with Galloway not even coming close to that GLA seat, but far from being disastrous. Of course the split hasn’t helped, with the exit of the SWP meaning a loss of both resources and activists, and with both sides looking a bit like damaged goods, as usually happens in splits. On the other hand, 2.4% is not too bad given the circumstances, and the excellent vote for Hanif in City and East, plus the third council seat in Sparkbrook, show there is still critical mass in the party’s East London and South Birmingham strongholds. And, while some of the other results were poor, some were quite encouraging.

The problem is this – while Respect does have its strongholds, it’s very much a localised force. Even in London, Respect doesn’t exist in most of the city. And the prospects for expansion would have to be taken long-term – the Cheetham Hill result in Manchester, for example, shows potential, but you’d be looking years ahead to convert that into a mass base. That requires long-range planning and a fundamental break from the politics of get-rich-quick schemes.

But this problem of localisation is one for the left generally. The Socialist Party has a scattering of members nationwide, but in electoral terms it’s severely localised, and its implantation in the unions is also pretty sectional. You can also take a look at local formations with broadly Old Labour politics in places like Blaenau Gwent or Barrow, not to mention a whole raft of vaguely leftwing independent councillors. The left-of-Labour spectrum has very little traction, but there is a sociological space for a socialist alternative – it’s really a problem of organisation, of low levels of struggle and of atomisation.

What I think is this. None of these local formations are remotely likely to dissolve themselves into Respect – the most you can say for the moment is that, if Respect threw itself into non-sectarian networking in a serious way, as well as consolidating its own bases, it could be a centre of gravity for a smallish but significant left current. Also on the clár should be cultivating a dialogue with the Green Left, as well as keeping an eye on the LRC and Compass to see if there are any signs of life in the Labour Party. You can never tell where new forces will come from.

Obviously this poses a challenge for Respect. I’m not wildly enthusiastic about Respect as is – I’d like it to have a firmer socialist identity and more of an orientation to the working class than it does. The party also needs to get itself a bit of a sense of dynamism. Potentially, there’s a lot of good will out there towards the post-split Respect simply due to it not being the SWP, who have a serious track record of alienating their sometime allies. It would be a failure of massive proportions if that was allowed to dissipate.

As far as the SWP/Reespect/Left List is concerned, things are clarified a little. It should be pointed out that not all the Left List results were terrible – there is a fair base of support in Preston and Sheffield at least. We may point out that these results are based on long-term concentrated work that empirically goes against the grain of the SWP’s national practice. But then again, the key people are Michael Lavalette and Maxine Bowler, excellent comrades in many ways but also very very loyal to the SWP. While in principle there should be an opening to the Left List where it has a serious presence, in practice that poses a problem.

In London on the other hand, the results were diabolical. It may be that, with Galloway failing to win election to the GLA, the SWP has staved off the immediate danger of an exodus of members to Respect, as happened last autumn. But spending in excess of sixty grand to get results well below what the Socialist Alliance polled in 2000 is an embarrassment to say the least. Lindsey has never struck me as the kind of woman who would enjoy being spanked, so it’s no wonder she was the sole candidate not to appear at the mayoral declaration.

It puts the CC in an awkward position, doesn’t it? Some people were clear that the purpose of the Left List was to be a spoiler for Respect – hence the leaflets saying “Respect is standing as the Left List” and such like. But the membership were spun the idea that Lindsey was in with a serious shout of getting onto the GLA, that she was a national figure with mass electoral appeal, and that at the very least the Left List vote would run Respect close if not surpass it. None of these things have come to pass, for various reasons – an unknown name, yeah, but also an unbelievably sectarian mayoral campaign that, in the context of the Ken-Boris polarisation, aimed 90% of its fire at Ken and most of the rest at George. One may doubt if Cliff or Hallas would have got themselves into this position in the first place, but they certainly wouldn’t have run the sort of campaign their epigones did.

And so it is that John Rees, despite all his bluster, has cemented his reputation as the Rube Goldberg of revolutionary politics. The SWP’s few remaining allies in the Left List will have been given pause for thought. The three councillors in Tower Hamlets will be distinctly jittery. And, while I’m not expecting any move from inside the SWP leadership, if anyone is contemplating a coup against the Power Couple, now would be the time to do it. It’s hard to see the SWP playing any positive role in the broader movement while John and Lindsey remain in situ. Certainly, not many people will be falling over themselves to work with them any time soon.

You see, Paul, being a trade union general secretary is very much like making love to a beautiful woman. You have to seduce the membership, string them along with your honeyed words, whisper sweet nothings in their ears, promise them the earth. Then, as soon as you get the chance, you screw them so hard they’ll be walking funny for a week.

Yes, I couldn’t suppress a smile at the news that Swiss Toni was running for the top job in SIPTU. This is one of those occasions where, though you have to support the left candidate against the right, your heart sinks at the prospect of doing so. Presumably a credible left candidate, like Clare Daly or Des Res, was unavailable.

It’s nice that Swiss is putting on a big show of taking this seriously. He’s been banging on a lot about the Crisis and how workers shouldn’t have to pay for it. This is, I assume, the same crisis he’s been prophesying for years. I’m also slightly startled to see that Swiss has procured himself a swanky website. Back in the days when I knew him, he was still having trouble with new-fangled gizmos like the tele-phone wire.

I can’t help thinking that it would be a laugh if he actually won. For, although the Gen Sec job is well remunerated and has a nice pension attached, I don’t believe he wants to win. Swiss is quite comfortable at the university. He is also, let’s not forget, permanent Great White Chief of the Socialist Workers Party, a position he’s held since being headhunted by Cliff thirty years ago, and which he could continue to hold for the rest of his natural life, provided he stays on the Brits’ good side.

So why this quixotic run? Well, I recall the first Carolann Duggan campaign, where Carolann’s high vote surprised everybody, despite her being exactly the kind of candidate union members warm to. At the time there was a clear anti-partnership platform, and there was a reasonable perspective that a rank-and-file movement would be built out of the campaign. Of course, no rank-and-file movement was built, and some of us were quite clear that the Swips weren’t going to build one, although many comrades thought they would. I assume this run has more to do with raising the group’s profile, and boosting morale in the ranks. After all, in a two-horse race it would take a really diabolical candidate to get less than 30%.

Still, Swiss on the campaign trail must be a real treat. Clever and articulate he may be, but other adjectives also come to mind, like dour and abrasive. Not exactly your hail-fellow-well-met type. A makeover may be called for. Give the dude a trendy haircut and stick him in a shiny suit. If he’s still going around in that green jumper with no elbows, now would be a good time to retire it. Maybe even break out the fine wines and Belgian chocolates…

With the tea brewing and Aunt Rosemary singing “Mambo Italiano”, I turn my attention to the linked questions of autonomy and substitutionism. This is an area where the legacy of Cliff turns out to be more than a little problematic.

To take autonomy first, let us go back to the closure of Women’s Voice. This turned out to be quite a traumatic affair. It’s not just that it was controversial within the party, it was even controversial in Cliff’s family. It also turned out to be the making of a bright young fulltimer fresh out of college, one L German. Lyndzee made her reputation by acting as Cliff’s battering ram on the issue, going on a tour of the branches to ensure they all voted the right way. Branches that voted the wrong way were rewarded with a return visit.

Now, even the defenders of Women’s Voice would have said it was problematic, lacked focus and needed a serious overhaul. But basically, it fell foul of the retreat to the bunker signalled by the downturn perspective. That the move against WV wasn’t about the specific problems of WV was signalled by the fate of the SWP Gay Group, who got a lesson in Machiavellian politics when they voted in favour of closing WV, only to be closed down themselves immediately afterwards. Flame also fell by the wayside about the same time, in what precise circumstances I do not recall.

Well, that could be argued to be fair enough, in terms of the period. An experiment was made and it didn’t work out. However, then you run into Cliff’s fondness for theorising his pragmatic decisions. In practice, WV had proved to be a road out of the party; therefore, a recurrence of that sort of thing could be avoided by taking a stance against autonomous organisation. And if this was an unfortunate tendency of Cliff’s, the second rank of the leadership were much more rigid in this position. Cliff, at least, was pragmatic enough to be able to reverse his positions when he got a sniff of an opportunity.

So there was a culture that grew up of defending (in a rather abstract way) minorities’ right to self-organisation while in practice aiming the vast bulk of one’s fire against “separatism”. And we might rhetorically support the Black Sections in the Labour Party, basically to embarrass Kinnock, but there was no question of having any analogue in the SWP.

Actually, this was for a long time a small but significant underlying difference between the SWP and the ISO. Since the ISO was based in the homeland of identity politics and had seen much of the New Left disappear into Jesse’s Rainbow, you might have expected them to be even tougher on the autonomy question. In fact, while their position was formally identical to the SWP’s, the stress was very different, based on an understanding that minorities would organise themselves no matter what clever white blokes had to say on the subject.

Now we come to substitutionism. Cliff, in his occasional Hundred Flowers moods, used to like to quote Rosa Luxemburg’s dictum that the mistakes of a real, living movement were worth more than the resolutions of the wisest Central Committee. You might say, would that Cliff had applied this piece of wisdom to his own practice. But then you have to set this alongside Cliff’s fondness of talking about how Lenin (the real one, not Seymour) would go over the heads of the Bolshevik CC and appeal directly to the class. It’s crucial to understanding Cliff’s self-image. Of course, this only works if you’re prepared to believe that Cliff really did have a mystical connection to the working class.

Albeit that I don’t believe the structures of the Cliff movement were ideal, given those structures there were clear advantages to having Cliff around. He was a tough taskmaster. Notwithstanding his indulgence of some notorious chancers, he usually had a keen nose for bullshit. And, despite a broad sectarian streak, he was essentially a pragmatic sectarian, quite willing to carry out dramatic u-turns (“bending the stick” in Cliffspeak) if he thought it would help build his organisation.

Now, it could be said that the Cliff movement after the departure of the Great Helmsman would lose some of Cliff’s less attractive idiosyncrasies. But it also lost his assets as well, and its real weaknesses have been harshly exposed in recent years. Most prominent among them is a Central Committee the core of which has been in office a very very long time – imagine if Gordon Brown’s cabinet was packed full of relics from the Callaghan government and you’ll get the idea. This visibly ageing leadership is not supplemented by fresh blood as it needs to be – every so often some wunderkind will be headhunted, but talent does not rise up through the ranks. Nor is there any mechanism for it to do so.

At this point we enter a chicken-and-egg discussion, but it can scarcely be gainsaid that the permanent leadership does not really trust the membership, at least not to the point of allowing them the latitude to make their own mistakes and learn from doing. And this is reinforced by a tendency to circulate in a rather small, incestuous world. Not to mention they guard their positions jealously – power in a small sect may not seem like much, but it can become addictive in a way that Alex Callinicos’ ancestor Lord Acton would have recognised. And so the CC sets itself up as the font of wisdom, and the poor membership are reduced to being little more than a stage army. Which can have some romantic appeal if you fancy being a sailor in a re-enactment of Battleship Potemkin, but scarcely makes for the sophisticated and assertive cadre that (as Harman underlined in Party and Class) would be necessary to hold the leadership to account.

Now, this has definite political consequences. If you, as a would-be revolutionary leadership, have contempt for your own members, then contempt for the class as a whole cannot be far behind. The result is an almost inevitable political sectarianism.

This is why I think the “Russian dolls” analogy used in Respect, although it describes something real, is not quite right. Maybe it’s better to start with Rees’ assertion that Respect was too important to be allowed to fail. If you’re building a broad party – and I leave open whether that’s what you want to do in the first place – the Marxist left has to consciously minoritise itself, and accept that things are going to happen that it doesn’t agree with. When you’ve got a multi-ethnic formation to handle, you also need some sensitivity on issues of self-determination and autonomy.

Now let’s say that the leadership treats its own cadre as a stage army. In this scenario, the members of a broad front are yet another rung down – a stooge army, perhaps? Since the front is too important to allow mistakes to be made, there will be a strong temptation to use your organisational muscle to make sure everything goes the right way. The trouble is, that makes people outside the magic circle feel excluded. It’s particularly difficult if you’ve a lot of militant Asian youth with energy to burn and who are up for a political discussion, if they get nothing to do except leaflet drops and barbecues while the clever white blokes make the decisions.

Not that I’m lauding spontaneity for the sake of spontaneity, you understand. If you leave politically raw youth to their own devices, they are sure to make mistakes. But I think it’s a sign of political maturity to allow them the space to make mistakes, to have faith that they’re capable of reflecting on what they’ve done and learning lessons, and above all for a tendency with very few concrete achievements to its name to have a sense of modesty about itself. That may mean that some middle-aged white blokes have to take a back seat, but it’s not like the rest wouldn’t do them some good.

Sometimes the Irish left reminds me of nothing so much as the classic movie Tin Men. Surely you remember the stellar performances from Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito as rival aluminum siding salesmen. Well, the SWP and the Socialist Party are a bit like that. Their day job may be purveying the ideological equivalent of aluminum siding, in subtly different brands indistinguishable to your average punter, but what they really enjoy is denouncing each other as liars, cheats and frauds. To be honest, sometimes it’s seeing the funny side that stops you getting altogether depressed.

Well, the brands may be similar to the naked eye, but that’s not to say they’re the same. You find the same sales paraphernalia of street stall, tabloid newspaper and petition, but a closer examination shows there are differences. Militant have always preferred to deal with bread-and-butter issues, preferably with a trade union connection. Often this shows them at their best, as with their current agitation around the completely worthy case of the sacked airport workers. The Swips, by contrast, get most excited around big international events.

To tell you the truth, I’ve been a little worried about the local Swips, as they seemed to have lost their spark of late. But last week none other than Swiss Toni himself was in town addressing the troops. I chose not to go, figuring that there were more fun things to do with my evening. For one thing, Kieran’s speaking style has always reminded me very much of Mike Banda, although he lacks Mike’s characteristic warmth and good humour. For another, he was speaking on the Crisis, which would be the same Crisis he’s been predicting for the last thirty years. All things considered, a nice cup of tea and some BA Robertson on the stereo seemed a better bet.

And lo, the Great White Chief seems to have invigorated his acolytes. On walking by Queens yesterday, my eye was caught by a large yellow poster bearing the legend “Free Tibet” and a photo of an oppressed Tibetan. On closer examination, this proved to be advertising a meeting under the rubric of “People Before Profit”, which is the Swips’ funny hat of choice at the moment. What this has to do with socialism or the class struggle is not immediately apparent - and the poster had no slogan other than “Free Tibet” - but I suppose it marks a return to the tried-and-true methodology of being the loudest advocates of whatever’s popular with the kids.

There may be a pitfall or two here. I hear that the Chinese community in Dublin are starting to organise counter-demonstrations. And I don’t know how many supporters of the Dalai Lama there are in the north of Ireland, but there are a hell of a lot of Chinese. Attracting Amnesty-type students is one thing, but do you really want to run the risk of attracting lots of angry Chinese?

On the other hand, these are the guys who not so long ago were running pro-hijab demonstrations outside the French embassy. The Swips’ love affair with the Muslims may have foundered on the rocks of factional politics in Respect, but could an alternative be presenting itself? Could Buddhism be the new Islam?

Right, so I just wanted to make a few short comments on the question of autonomy and self-organisation. And what I’ve been thinking about in this regard is the great flowering of minority radicalism in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Everybody, of course, knows of the Black Panthers, the great trailblazers of this sort of self-organisation, and there’s an enormous amount could be (and has been) written about them. In some ways, though, I’m at least as interested in the groups that came after and which, in contrast to the rather inchoate politics of the Panthers, were a hugely important part of the New Communist Movement.

There were lots and lots of these groups about, but they’re very little known these days and, with the significant exception of Max Elbaum’s invaluable Revolution in the Air, there’s almost no accessible material on them. This is a pity, because there are all sorts of fascinating aspects to the movement that seem really odd to us now.

One might not have expected, for instance, the emergence of Red Guards in San Francisco’s Chinatown, a place that’s been in the news a lot over the last few days. Actually, from the outside, it would have seemed a deeply unlikely place to be a hotbed of radicalism. Much of the community was petty bourgeois (in the strict economic sense) and the leading figures in the community were extremely reactionary people, fiercely loyal to the Kuomintang. And yet, in the late 60s, a very large layer of Chinese youth became radicalised, partly under the influence of the Cultural Revolution and partly inspired by what the Panthers were doing to resist racism in Oakland. And, with the youth in motion, you found old-time Chinese communists, who had kept a very low profile for decades, coming out of the woodwork. And this combination of circumstances led to some fairly strong organisations and the revival of a tradition of militancy that had been almost forgotten.

And you had similar phenomena in other minority communities. And, what was most important, you had organisations that were not simply ethnic advocacy groups but openly identified themselves as part of the revolutionary left.

Now I’m not going to go in any detail into the history of these movements. I want to consider a few points about their strengths and weaknesses and why they failed in the end, after showing so much potential in their early years. This is where a lot of observers go in for the unattractive phenomenon of Marxist hindsight – you know, like in those books telling you what great things Lenin and Trotsky could have achieved had they only had Cliff or Grant around to advise them. Often the criticism says more about the critic than about the criticised – if you ever hear anyone saying that the problem with the Black Panthers was that they didn’t build a multiracial socialist party with a transitional programme and an orientation to the industrial working class, it’s a bit like criticising a fish for not having feathers.

In the end, the failures of the movements had a lot to do with a period, a fair bit to do with state repression and yes, their own mistakes were a significant factor. But we shouldn’t be so arrogant as to assume that we, the possessors of hindsight, are immune from making those mistakes.

There are three issues I’d like to point out.

The first is that minority radicals, in their great majority, were drawn to some variant of Third World Marxism. This is often held against them, but it’s quite understandable. Yes, cultural links might explain why Puerto Rican radicals might turn to Castroism, or Chinese (and Korean and Filipino) radicals to Maoism. Yes, the CPUSA’s tradition of antiracist work might explain the affinity of many Black militants to pre-1956 Stalinism. But it goes beyond that. The big attraction of these brands of Marxism was their practical involvement in the anti-colonial struggle. Which wasn’t just a matter of “Third World solidarity” or some theory of ethnic minorities as “internal colonies”. You literally couldn’t be a Chinese militant in San Francisco without opposing the Kuomintang, you couldn’t be a Puerto Rican militant in New York without having something to say about what was happening on the island. It’s sobering to realise how few minority radicals were attracted to Trotskyism, which after all is supposed to be the permanent revolution tendency and has an impressively sophisticated theoretical apparatus for dealing with racism and imperialism.

The second is the question of democracy. Let’s take the Black Panthers, who get cut a lot of slack in retrospect because of their cool image. You can talk about the various failings of the Panthers in terms of, say, the primitiveness of their politics, or their backward attitudes towards women, or how the movement became vulnerable to an influx of criminal elements. Most of the Panthers’ internal failings could have been dealt with had they been a democratic movement, but they weren’t. The internal regime of the BPP was one of total military centralism, combined with a compulsory personality cult of “Supreme Servant of the People” Huey Newton. Weirdly enough, although the more orthodox Maoist and neo-Stalinist groups continued to uphold the monolithic party as an ideal, their record in this respect was actually much better than that of the Panthers.

Finally, we have a history on the left of clever white blokes pontificating about whether or not minorities have the right to self-organise. This is really a moot point, not to say an entirely counter-productive discussion. History teaches us that minorities have a habit of self-organising without bothering to ask the permission of clever white blokes. That’s how it works in the real world, and that’s how it should be.

There are some rather transparent parallels for the present day, but I’ll leave them to yourselves for the time being.

Plenty of people will already have noted the discussion on Socialist Unity about the SWP-Reespect’s “Left List” for the London elections. I don’t intend to get into the “Left List” as such, except to note that the SWP is now declaring an affinity for Die Linke in Germany. Given that until relatively recently the SWP weren’t all that fond of the PDS/Die Linke – I vividly remember a Chris Harman speech where the Renaissance Man made an attack on the PDS that was spectacular in its mendacity – this is a bit cheeky. It’s also ironic in that, back in the far-off 1990s, the PDS launched the Linke Liste as a means to broaden their base by having non-party candidates on the party list. The extraordinary narrowness of the SWP’s new “Left List” makes for an interesting contrast. It’s what we’ve come to expect from the post-split Reespect, where non-SWP people are like black delegates at the Republican Convention in the US – loads of them on the platform, but that doesn’t fool anybody.

Anyway, what interests me is the way the Swops have been whinging about a “loophole” preventing them from running under the Respect banner. This loophole being the Electoral Commission’s determination that Linda Smith remains the Respect nominating officer, and that an official Respect candidate must be approved by Linda. This fits in, by the way, with a persistent whinge in recent months about the EC, as well as lots of chest-beating on the blogs (in connection with the dodgy Dubai cheque) about how real r-r-r-revolutionaries don’t allow themselves to be constrained by bourgeois legality.

Let’s go over this again. The relevant piece of legislation is the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. Apart from revealing in its title that the British political class have lousy Latin, the Act lays down the ground rules for political parties to operate and which the Electoral Commission is charged with enforcing. In the first place, parties have to register their name and details, including a leader, nominating officer and treasurer. For example, two days ago the Left List was registered, with Oliur Rahman as leader and nominating officer.

There are a number of restrictions on parties as well. One of the most obvious is that a party must have a name which does not lead to confusion with another party. This is what may be termed the Richard Huggett clause, after the notorious prankster who used to run as a “Literal Democrat”, and is designed to prevent spoiler candidates. Members of the Socialist Party (the ex-Militant version) will be able to tell you in great detail how they have to stand as “Socialist Alternative” because the EC ruled that the Socialist Party of Great Britain had prior ownership. And that is why the SWP can’t employ some creative variant of the Respect name.

The EC also has oversight of party accounts and donations, notably in terms of “permissible donors”, with anyone donating more than £200 having to fall into that category. Unless your party is headquartered in Norn Iron, donations from outside the UK are not allowed. That rules out donations from Jersey or the Isle of Man, never mind Dubai. This was the point about the dodgy Dubai cheque – a foreign donation to Respect would have been totally illegal, and (in re Rees’ solicitation of the money to defray debts from the OFFU conference) elementary steps to separate OFFU from Respect had not been taken. Galloway knew this, which is why he instantly suspected a provocation.

This is not, I must emphasise, a question of cringing before the capitalist state and its laws. Some of the more excitable Swops really need to go and read what Lenin (the real one, not Seymour) wrote in Left-Wing Communism. It’s really a basic question of professionalism. You want to run for election? Fine, there is a legal framework for you to do so. Even an amateur should know that. And, since the Electoral Commission is a quasi-judicial body with executive powers, which is very good at uncovering dodgy practices and takes such practices very seriously indeed, you would have to be either an adrenaline junkie or a complete idiot to even think about trying to hoodwink the EC.

So, if you’re looking to run for election, there’s no point in you bellyaching about how awful the Electoral Commission is. There are rules. You are made aware of them in advance. You have to abide by them. Even if it is an awful system, that doesn’t exempt you from the rules, no matter how revolutionary you are.

There are two further points worth making. One is that, when New Labour or the Tories fall foul of the EC for dodgy donations, you don’t hear the left complaining about the oppressive nature of the EC. In fact, when the Abrahams scandal broke, Prof Callinicos was positively crowing over New Labour’s embarrassment in Socialist Worker. That affair ended, of course, with the general secretary of the Labour Party falling on his sword. We need have little fear that Rees will follow him – even if we get past Rees’ habit of getting other people’s fingerprints on his work, the hierarchy has steadfastly protected him.

This leads me to another interesting point. While Respect is a registered political party, the Socialist Workers Party is not. This conveniently exempts the SWP from having to make any declarations to the Electoral Commission. In fact, the SWP’s status in law is that of a private club. A bit like White’s, only the food isn’t as good and the chairs are less comfortable. And to those familiar with the SWP leadership’s MO, a private club is kind of fitting.

For the last lot of months I’ve been following with interest the arguments in and around Respect on the question of endorsing Ken Livingstone or standing against him. But I’ve held back from commenting, mainly because I haven’t come to a hard and fast view of my own. It is worth, though, looking at some of the issues at stake.

Firstly, I’m not all that enthused about Ken per se. He isn’t really Red Ken these days, nor has he been for quite some time. On the other hand, he is still a cheeky chappie, which has stood him in good stead. What of his record as mayor? Well, he hasn’t made London a citadel of socialism, but then he never promised to. And, however much he’s moved to the right, he remains a relatively serious municipal reformist. He isn’t simply analysable as a representative of New Labour. In fact, Londoners who aren’t members of far-left groups (the majority, in other words) are much more likely to perceive him as being in a state of tension with New Labour.

He does, too, have a few positives going for him. His consistently antiwar stance and his diplomatic moves towards Chávez count in his favour. So too, does his defence of minorities in one of the world’s most ethnically diverse cities. This is especially important in that Boris Johnson, the Tory challenger, is known for coming out with the sort of casual racism that wouldn’t even make it into the Daily Mail or Private Eye these days. All right, a lot of the funds being disbursed by the mayor’s office have gone to black entrepreneurs rather than working-class communities. But, minorities will be asking themselves, will we get a better deal under a Boris regime? The same goes for RMT members who may still be smarting over Ken’s support for strikebreaking, but who will be all too aware of what a hardline Thatcherite administration would mean.

What of the other accusations thrown at Ken in the media’s campaign against him? Well, I don’t particularly have a problem with him running a job club for members of Socialist Action. At least it isn’t the AWL. And what of Peter Tatchell’s complaints that Ken has been cold-shouldering him since the Qaradawi affair? I fear this may be Ken simply protecting his own sanity. Much as I like and respect Peter, it must be said that he’s not the most pleasant person to be around when you disagree with him.

All in all, I think that, if you don’t actually vote for Ken, you should at least be considering a united front approach to his supporters.

This situation might change if there was a credible left-of-Labour candidate. But there isn’t. What there is, at the moment, is Lindsey German.

There are a number of problems I have with the Lindsey candidacy. The first one is that, as was admitted from the start, there was no hope of her winning, so her candidacy was aimed at boosting the (pre-split) Respect vote in the GLA contest. That seemed reasonable. If my maths are correct, you need something like 5.5% to win a list seat on the GLA. That was thought to be a credible target, if Respect could get 20% or thereabouts in East London. This in turn was achievable on the basis that there would be a big turnout from the Bangladeshi community. Now, what with the SWP’s shenanigans around the Respect split, most recently their declaration of a vote-splitting candidacy in the City and East constituency, not to mention Galloway’s rapport with the community, is it likely the Bangladeshis will turn out en masse for Lindsey? I think not.

Again, Lindsey was a relatively strong mayoral candidate last time around because of her prominence in the Stop the War Coalition. (Not least thanks to the StWC having had an excellent press officer.) This time, she was going to be much more reliant on the Respect organisation, much of which has now decamped to Respect Renewal. Not only that, but, despite the SWP’s vainglorious declarations that “We are Respect”, the Electoral Commission seems not to agree. That means that Lindsey, and any constituency candidates, will be appearing on the ballot paper as independents, and why the Rees-pect list is apparently going to be a “Left List”. That’s your brand recognition gone at a stroke.

There is another aspect that will become more apparent as the campaign goes on. During the last mayoral campaign, I became addicted to reading Lindsey’s election blog, due to its often hilarious otherworldliness. Honestly, Posy Simmonds couldn’t have made it up. The overwhelming impression was of a woman who hadn’t set foot outside the SWP centre for the last 25 years. And yet she’s still banging on about how London has one of the worst transport systems in the world. Really, it may not compare well to Paris or Berlin, but in the world? Worse than Kolkata? Worse than Glasgow? I mean, I’m not the most frequent visitor to London, but even I can tell that under the Ken regime the transport system has improved massively.

Which brings me on to the question of united front tactics. The Swops like to claim this as a special strength, and their theory implies that they should be reaching out to Livingstone voters in a non-sectarian way. Yet 90% of their argument is along the lines of “Why Ken is shit”. The existence of a rightwing Tory candidate, never mind one running Ken close, barely features. You would get the impression that the election was a two-horse race between Ken and Lindsey. But it isn’t. And this might have some justification if the ultraleft tone was backed up by a hard Marxist programme rather than a wishy-washy reformist one. But it isn’t.

This is a campaign that, frankly, is dying on its arse. The sensible thing, even from the point of view of an SWP member, would be to sit the mayoral election out. In the absence of a serious candidacy, it has the potential to be an enormous waste of time, energy and money for very little return. As far as I can see, the only reason for this candidacy is a desire on the part of Lindsey and Kim Jong Rees to save face. Which, let’s be honest, is no way for a revolutionary group to conduct itself.

I’ll return to Koštunica presently, but here’s a question: why does the Socialist Workers Party remind me of Yugoslavia in the early 1980s?

It’s all a problem, you see, of managing succession. This is especially hairy when you have the regime’s founder, who built the regime in his own image, still hanging around at an advanced age and with no heir apparent.

I was thinking about this in terms of the 1974 Yugoslav constitution, which was perhaps not Edvard Kardelj’s best idea. Under the ’74 dispensation, the centre was massively weakened to the benefit of the republics and (to a lesser though still considerable extent) the Socialist Autonomous Provinces. Evidence of this was that the more powerful bit of the federal legislature was the upper house, the Chamber of Republics and Provinces, where unanimity among the regional delegations was required and so nothing controversial could get passed. The lower house’s utter powerlessness was demonstrated by the fact that it was actually allowed to decide things by majority vote, because nothing it decided mattered. And as in the state structure, so too in the League of Communists, with the regional bureaucracies becoming basically self-standing.

This was only workable as long as Tito was still around to act as arbiter of last resort. But by the time Tito died in 1980, the grand old man was almost ninety and so all of his longstanding kitchen cabinet were either dead or dying. There was nobody left with the authority to fill the gap. And so the poor Yugoslavs were landed with a toothless “collective presidency” of eight anonymous regional pen-pushers with a rotating chair. And so anonymous were these pen-pushers that it became a staple of Yugoslav humour, when the collective presidency appeared on TV, to wonder aloud just who these numpties, the collective head of state, were.

Slobo put a bomb under that, of course. This is not because of Slobo’s unique malevolence – although he was a definite no goodnik, I’ve never bought the popular image of him as a Bond villain stroking a white cat – but simply because he was the first Yugoslav politician to act as if Tito was dead.

Now we come to the problems besetting the SWP. Cliff was always an awkward bugger of course, and I firmly believe he had lost touch with reality in later years. But the party at its best was much more than Cliff, and you have to ask yourself what happened to the extraordinarily talented leadership that IS had in the early to mid ’70s, when the group was at the peak of its influence. The answer is, of course, that most of those guys are now dead or expelled or both, and the few who remain in the SWP – with the sole exception of Renaissance Man Chris Harman – are long since departed from central leadership roles.

What you have instead is a leadership the core of which was formed in the 1980s, and has been remarkably stable since. They are a group of people with talent, I’m not denying that, but there are factors militating against them apart from just being too long in office. There is, for example, to my knowledge no member of the Central Committee who has ever been in the Labour Party. (Chris Harman might possibly have been in the LPYS forty years ago, but that doesn’t count.) That’s a big disability, especially in the electoral field and when it comes to dealing with rough-and-tumble local council politics. Secondly, although the party contains some fine trade union militants, these are not represented at the centre. I’m scratching around for someone with a solid union background on the CC, and can’t think of one. Certainly, industrial organiser Charlie Kimber has never been a union militant in his life – for all the insight Charlie brings to the subject, they may as well have appointed classic computer game Simon Says. Finally, there are far too many people on the CC who became party fulltimers straight out of college and who have never actually held down a real job. The problem is common in the British political class, but in a revolutionary group…

Anyway, that’s enough about composition. There’s another point here where the Yugoslav analogy is more appropriate. That is that the post-Cliff “collegiate leadership”, which some comrades hoped would be an improvement on one-man management, is better described as a federal leadership. The various party tops all have their own bailiwicks, and exercise feudal authority within them.

Renaissance Chris, for instance, runs the ISJ, where he has quietly surrounded himself with co-thinkers. Commander Begbie edits Socialist Worker. Martin “Bebop Tango” Smith has authority over the organisers, and moreover gets to hector address the comrades every week via Party Notes. Martin’s partner, resident glamourpuss Judith Orr, edits Socialist Review as well as running Bookmarks, the party’s only really successful venture. My old friend Prof Callinicos, meanwhile, is charged with administering the colonies. This he does in fine old Rhodesian style, perhaps explaining why the SWP’s international empire is a lot smaller than it used to be.

This is what’s known as a balance of forces, where nobody has the strength to achieve real hegemony. But that doesn’t explain the pre-eminence in recent years of that cuckoo in the nest Kim Jong Rees, who actually has shown the initiative in realising that this is a post-Cliff era. Yes, John and Lindsey may have established themselves as the “power couple”, but their actual base is remarkably narrow. And narrowing by the day, with their credibility being so much bound up with Respect. Perhaps, to turn the problem on its head, it’s simply that none of the other CC barons has the strength to move against them unilaterally. It would really require a combination of forces.

This is, by the way, getting to be an urgent question for anyone in the SWP who thinks the group should be more than a shrivelled sub-Healyite sect. For myself, I’ve long since come to the conclusion that Rees was a high-functioning sociopath. This explains why those who know him best tend to like him least. He can be utterly charming if he’s trying to cultivate you, then cut you dead in an instant if he thinks you’ve slighted him or his importance as Great Revolutionary Leader. This is why he’s proved good at putting coalitions together, and absolutely rotten at sustaining them. If you have a situation where the national secretary of Respect, whose job should involve maintaining effective relationships, won’t speak to George Galloway or Salma Yaqoob (which was the case for quite some time before George’s letter), then it’s obvious that something is very very wrong.

The trouble with the SWP CC, as I see it, is that they have been together so long that it’s second nature to them to act as a cosy clique. Even those who don’t like Rees will instinctively get his back against the outside world, and convince themselves they’re defending The Revolutionary Party. And yet, it surely must have occurred to one or two of them that the SWP is shrinking rapidly, its flagship paper’s circulation is in the doldrums, they have no allies, they have no money, the organisation’s reputation is rapidly disappearing down the dunny, and both events in Scotland and the dodgy Dubai cheque are likely to see things getting a lot worse. If Rees was working in an actual business, or even a relatively efficient part of the public sector, he would have been sacked long ago.

I am told, by the way, that Bookmarks is soon to publish a pamphlet on “Strategy and Tactics” by one J Rees. I refuse to believe that Bookmarks would court ridicule by doing such a thing. It would be as absurd as, say, Ireland invading Chad. Oh, hold on…

If you ask any observer of Irish politics about the late Noël Browne, chances are that the first thing they’ll mention will be the Mother and Child debacle in 1951, when Noël was comprehensively mugged by the Catholic hierarchy and his own cabinet colleagues. In fact, Noël dined out on that for decades afterwards. This probably explains why, despite his membership of multiple political parties including Fianna Fáil, and being a bit of a martinet who preferred gofers to comrades, he managed to maintain an image of being a selfless and uncompromising idealist. Nice trick if you can pull it off.

Somehow I doubt that Tower Hamlets councillor Ahmed Hussain, whose defection straight from the Socialist Workers Party to the Tories has now been confirmed, will live so long in the affections of the public.

Listen: anyone who’s been involved in local politics knows that defections are the small change of council business. They happen on a regular basis, in councils up and down Britain. Sometimes there are policy issues involved. Sometimes there are personality clashes in what’s generally a small world populated by crabby egos. And sometimes there are the spoils of office, which aren’t great in material terms, but the wrath of a councillor who feels he’s been denied a rightful committee chair or stint at wearing the mayoral chain is wondrous to behold.

Like I say, it happens all the time. Labour councillors join the Lib Dems, Lib Dems go Tory, Independents go every which way but loose. Since the mainstream political spectrum is so narrow (especially with the Orange Book gang taking over the Lib Dems) and councils’ powers are so tightly circumscribed, it doesn’t usually make a huge amount of difference.

You would think the hard left, as a more ideological tendency, would be less susceptible to this sort of thing, and you would be right, but less susceptible doesn’t mean immune. On a semi-regular basis – it seems like once or twice a year – you hear of some Labour councillor in the north of England who’s defected to the Socialist Party. The SP seem to never hold on to these council seats – either the councillor fails to be re-elected or he parts company with the SP or both. The SP used to tout these defections as evidence that they were on their way to great things, but they tend to be a lot more sober these days. And that speaks well of them.

So we come to the Ahmed Hussain saga. Firstly, it would obviously be different if Hussain had jumped ship to, say, the Socialist Party or the Greens. It would even be different if he’d gone over to Labour – New Labour may be hegemonic in the Labour Party, but the Labour Party is not reducible to New Labour. Defecting to the Tories, on the other hand – to the class enemy, the party of British capital – is a lot harder to explain away. And with such indecent haste! Negotiating his defection while still holding an SWP membership card! At least Roger Rosewell or Peter Hitchens allowed a decent interval between their revolutionary periods and their Tory periods.

What’s more significant is what this says about the SWP hierarchy. I agree that nobody has come out of this looking particularly good, but what is most bizarre is the press release issued by the SWP-Reespect in the middle of the night asserting that all was well and that Ahmed remained true to the ideals of Respect, notwithstanding his public praise for Dave Cameron’s policies and his photocall with leading London Tories. I assume this was the work of the SWP-Reespect’s press officer, listed as one J Rees. If so, Rees has made himself look like a pillock. Beyond that, the press release, issued in the name of Oli Rahman, made Oli look like a pillock, and if I was Oli I would be extremely annoyed. My chum Richard Seymour has also made himself look a pillock by loudly demanding “corrections” to what turned out to be a correct story.

Now, beyond that, let me reiterate that defections are small change in local politics. And we may say that Ahmed Hussain is an opportunist, and we’d be right, but there’s no foolproof test for opportunistic tendencies that individuals may develop months or years down the line. Lenin (the real one, not the blogger) said so on several occasions. And yet the SWP, in their self-proclaimed role as Scientific Marxist Vanguard©, have suggested that such precognition is possible. Here is Renaissance Man Chris Harman:

Another problem flowing from the success of Respect was familiar to people who had been active in the past in the Labour Party, but was completely new to the non-Labour left—opportunist electoral politics began to intrude into Respect…

Socialists did their best to deal with these unhealthy developments. They struggled against the non-left interlopers. By and large the left won. [Gulam] Mortuza turned against Galloway when the left blocked his bid to become “president” of Tower Hamlets Respect, leaving Respect and returning to Labour. Shamsuddin Ahmed was not selected for the council seat he wanted in 2006, left Respect and stood for the Liberal Democrats. Mohammed Zabadne soon became tired of left wing politics and broke with Respect. The willingness of socialists to argue against those who saw Respect simply as a vehicle for their own political careers was vindicated—but two years later this was used by Galloway to denounce, by implication, the SWP.

Renaissance Chris goes on to approvingly quote the Winchellised Internal Bulletin document on Tower Hamlets by Doherty, McGarr and McLoughlin, wherein the three comrades whine about not always getting their way in terms of candidate selection. This is the meat behind the accusation of Tammany Hall politics:

On the selection panel…we were continually being told that “strong” candidates were needed in the most winnable wards. This was a thinly veiled code for selecting Bengali men with a standing in the local area. Of course we recognised that after years of Labour clientalism it was important for the preponderance of candidates in these wards to be ethnic Bengalis. But we also argued that there needed to be a balance across the spread of candidates that reflected all the different elements in Respect’s coalition…

Well, at the heart of that was the big push to get John Rees a nomination in a “safe” Asian ward. But let’s return to the Three Stooges:

One [of the twelve councillors] defected to Labour and one resigned. Both felt slighted that their personal ambitions were not being satisfied. Both were Bengali men with some standing in their wards. One was the candidate who replaced John Rees in Whitechapel. Another was, in fact, one of the people hand picked by Abjol and Azmal as the only possible choice in Shadwell.

You may think, and you would be right, that this sort of thing is inevitable in hardball local politics. It was doubly inevitable in an organisation as new, unstable and diverse as Respect that there would be some attrition. What’s interesting is that during the Respect split, SWP loyalists made huge play out of one councillor defecting and another resigning. This was held up as proof positive that there was an opportunist degeneration in the Tower Hamlets council group. It was suggested that this could have been avoided with better vetting. As we know, however, Rees’ enforcer Shaun Doherty vetted all the Tower Hamlets candidates, so this boils down to a complaint that the SWP didn’t get the candidate selection all their own way. And there’s also been on occasion an unpleasant implication that opportunism is all you could expect of the Bengali councillors without the Scientific Marxist Vanguard© closely supervising them.

Shyeah. I think of Rees’ remarkable non-self-criticism in Red Pepper:

Even John Rees believes he made errors. ‘The mistake I made was not to raise the situation in Tower Hamlets nationally, because I didn’t want to make a local issue into a national argument. We [the SWP] gave away too much ground in Tower Hamlets and were too soft with George. But that’s the real world … We should have raised the issue of the accountability of our elected representatives after the 2006 local elections.’

In other words, “I was right but I wasn’t forceful enough about it at the time.”

And what of Ahmed Hussain’s defection, not to Labour but directly to the Tories? After the rhetorical huffing and puffing about opportunism on Tower Hamlets council – in which Hussain was held up as a model left councillor – you would think that some reflection would be in order. But then, this is the SWP we’re talking about here. So it’s no surprise to see a press release that amounts to “Oh dear, how sad, never mind.”

The story below from Ted Jeory of the East London Advertiser:

A Respect councillor, former ally of George Galloway and member of the Socialist Workers Party has dramatically defected to the Tories in what is being seen a major milestone in Tower Hamlets politics.

Ahmed Hussain, who represents Mile End East at the Town Hall, met the Tories’ shadow London minister, Bob Neill, and Tower Hamlets group leader Peter Golds to seal the move this morning (Wednesday).

He becomes the local party’s first ever Bengali councillor and in doing so he has made the Tories, who less than two years ago boasted just one councillor in Tower Hamlets, the authority’s official opposition with eight members.

Mr Neill welcomed the defection as “momentous” and predicted that Tower Hamlets could soon become ‘a Tory borough.’

“It’s a real step forward for the party and the area,” he added.

Cllr Hussain, who was also being courted by Labour recently, said he had been interested by Tory Leader David Cameron’s approach.

He added: “I really believe Tower Hamlets Conservatives will continue to make a difference in this borough.”

But political rivals will be dismayed and think Cllr Hussain’s reputation will now lie in tatters.

The former Labour supporter was one of MP George Galloway’s ‘12 Bengali tigers’ elected as a Respect councillor in 2006, and has voted against Conservative motions at the Town Hall since.

He was one of four councillors to split from Galloway’s Respect faction in October and remained a prominent member of the MP’s bitter enemies, the SWP.

Soon after that split, he instigated exploratory talks with the Lib Dems about forming a coalition with the Respect rebels.

But since the failure of those discussions, all four councillors have been weighing up their futures as all parties tried to tempt them to their sides.

Cllr Hussain is the first to jump and his move comes as a bitter blow to council leader Denise Jones and Poplar & Canning Town MP Jim Fitzpatrick, both of whom are understood to have written glowing references to London party chief Ken Clark.

Actually, it gets even better than this. Ahmed had a press conference arranged for 4pm yesterday, with Tower Hamlets Tories having prepared leaflets, publicity photos and everything, but called it off at fifteen minutes’ notice because, apparently, he’s still mulling over his options. The SWP-Reespect, by the way, issued a press release (at 2:15am) claiming that Ahmed is staying with them, its impact slightly blunted by its having quotes from Oliur Rahman but not from Ahmed himself.

The Respect Renewal response below:

No one likes an opportunist

Cllr Ahmed Hussain, who split from the Respect group of councillors in Tower Hamlets three months ago, has completed the most rapid chameleon-like transformation by today joining the Tories in Tower Hamlets Town Hall.

Hussain was instrumental in the breakaway of four councillors from the Respect group last November. Now, at a press conference scheduled for 4pm today, he is to leave those councillors high and dry, not to mention the voters of Mile End East who trusted him, by jumping ship again.

Tory leader David Cameron is scheduled to come to Tower Hamlets next week to welcome the new recruit. Hussain has already been photographed at Tory HQ with leading party members. “It shows just how opportunist the Tories are,” says Respect group leader Abjol Miah. “But Cllr Hussain will fit in on that score. He claimed to be leading a left wing breakaway from Respect MP George Galloway and the Respect group of councillors.

“He even paraded his membership of the Socialist Workers Party when he thought it suited him. Now he’s off with the Tories! The heads of the voters of Mile End East must be spinning. The Tories have been roundly defeated in that ward, but now, thanks to Hussain’s self-serving opportunism the residents are stuck with a Tory.

“It s pointless asking him to do the decent thing and resign. So the voters will have to turf him out at the next election, which I’m 100 percent confident they will.

“We will continue to fight the New Labour/Tory policies of privatisation, scapegoating and war.”

Respect MP George Galloway adds:

“As for the other councillors who walked away from the Respect group with Hussain three months ago. They must ask themselves if they are happy for the Tories to be the official opposition in Tower Hamlets.

“They must realise they have been the victim of a con by Hussain and those who promoted splits inside Respect. If they don’t want the Tories to have a position of influence in Tower Hamlets then they know what they need to do - abandon the split from Respect and stop playing games with the electorate.”

The story almost defies comment, but there are a few observations worth making. The first is the obvious one, that the line spun by the SWP about the “left-right” split in Respect was pure banana oil, manufactured for internal consumption. And there was a lot of this. The four splitters in Tower Hamlets were routinely referred to by SWP members as “the leftwing councillors”. The fact that one councillor had defected to Labour was adduced as proof that, unless the SWP kept a firm grip on Respect, these Bengalis would drift into opportunism. (Let’s tactfully pass over the council candidates being personally vetted by swivel-eyed party loyalist Shaun Doherty.)

And now we have a Reespect councillor, and a member of the SWP forbye, planning his defection to the Tories! Unless, that is, Labour or the Lib Dems can come up with a better offer… Now it’s only fair to point out that Ahmed Hussain is not a hardened SWP member. In fact, his politics have always had a strong rightist bent. But he apparently joined the SWP to advance himself in Respect, and the SWP opportunistically allowed him in on the basis that, hey, he was an elected councillor and therefore an ornament asset to the party. This reminds me of a conversation I once had with a CC member, when I asked him why Garry Bushell was ever allowed in the party. The reply was, “Well, he was a good organiser.”

This has, it’s fair to say, come as a bit of a surprise. Most observers had been waiting for Oli Rahman to jump ship to Labour, which he hasn’t done yet. But that, Oli’s prominence notwithstanding, might have been a less serious blow. We know that Oli’s politics are basically Old Labour anyway. But this is more ominous for the Rees-German cabal, because it seems to suggest on Ahmed’s part a basic lack of confidence in the future of Reespect, and the SWP for that matter. And you know that if Cliff was still around, heads would have been rolling long before now. Is this to be John Rees’ legacy to the left - discrediting SWP politics for a generation?

Plenty of discussion on this over at Socialist Unity and at Liam’s.