Oops
The party that ended before it began
Act one, Scene one
A nondescript room with cheap modern furniture somewhere in a conference centre or hotel. The characters are a bearded man in his early 30s called Vincent and a blonde fifty something woman called Eleanor. They each have a Shure mic in front of them and address a camera which is probably an i-Phone on a stand. Both speak with American accents. The text at the bottom of the video proclaims them to be from Worker’s Hammer, the propaganda arm of the Spartacist League of Britain. Neither of them looks or sounds as if they’ve ever seen a hammer, let alone a worker.
They’re in Liverpool for the inaugural conference of Your Party and Eleanor is just back from a rally addressed by one of the two leading figures in the zygotic party, Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South. Eleanor is impressed by the number of different left paper sellers selling left papers to each other. She and Vincent like the cut of Sultana’s anti-Zionist, anti-Nato, pro working-class jib, but doubt whether she has the revolutionary cojones to really take on the right-wing, witch-hunting, er, Jeremy Corbyn.
“Oh, oh”, as my 20 month old grand-daughter says.
Act One, scene two, the not so distant past
You may recall that a year ago some greeted the prospect of a new party with a degree of excitement. And as recently as September the New Statesman’s Anoosh Chakelian, in an interview with one of the then four independent but Your Party-leaning “Gaza” MPs, Shockat Adam, wrote that:
Despite its fuzziness, this new party would win the support of a third of Labour voters. If it allied with the Green Party, the proportion would jump to nearly half, according to polling revealed exclusively by the New Statesman from Ipsos. Labour MPs, particularly in urban centres packed with young progressives, are fearing for their seats, and pollsters predict a split in the left-wing vote.
I am a fan of Chakelian’s work but I am wary of such hypothetical polling at any time, let alone three years away from a general election. Last week a poll suggested that a “new party led by Rupert Lowe” would get 10% of the vote. In March, when Lowe was in the news, he was only recognised by 14% of those polled, so I am obviously one of the 4% of delinquents. Incidentally one in five Britons (20%) either say they’ve seen an UFO themselves or know someone who has.
And there was a time, in the wake of the 2008 crash when new Left parties enjoyed something of the fascinated attention that far Right parties do now. Podemos was strong in Spain; Syriza ruled Greece for a while – though almost the only visible remnant of its tenure today is that ubiquitous Voldemort in leathers that is Yanis Varoufakis.
The coat-of-many-colours New Popular Front of Jean Luc Melenchon did exceptionally well in last year’s French parliamentary elections, but since then his own party has split and the front’s polling position has declined - though it is still well ahead of President Macron’s party. The position of the far Left in Spain has weakened, but in Germany Die Linke did better than expected in February’s federal elections.
Even so it feels a long way since 2011 when Occupy London camped in front of St Paul’s cathedral, supported by its progressive canon chancellor, Giles Fraser (later to become a Brexit campaigner). And even further from that strange post-Brexit election of 2017 when Corbyn’s Labour received 40% of the popular vote. Two years later that fell to 32%.
Act One, scene three, Friday evening, two rallies
A carnivore let loose in a field of keffiyehed herbivores, the SWP will bore you, heckle you, outlast you, points-of-order you into submission or until you decide to give up politics altogether. They are the herpes of revolutionary socialism.
Long before Vincent and Eleanor were hammering away at Corbyn’s revolutionary credentials, Your Party was rent by an apparently farcical battle between Zarah Sultana – representing the Young Turks – and the Old Guard around Jeremy Corbyn. They wrangled over the timing of the party’s launch, with Sultana eventually unilaterally opening a membership scheme and getting people to pay into it, and getting dumped on for doing so by Corbyn and the Gaza independents. Looking back it’s evident that this wasn’t really a battle about timing but about control. Sultana didn’t want to be governed by Corbyn’s managers, and particularly not by his de facto chief of staff, Karie Murphy.
With the question of the money only partly resolved, by the time the conference attendees were rocking up in Liverpool the bigger issue had become exclusions, or, as those in danger of exclusion always call them, “witch-hunts”.
On the very train carrying him to Liverpool, the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party later revealed to horrified reporters from far left news outlets - and half way through a sausage roll - he had been emailed and told by “the organisers” to sling his revolutionary hook. The same thing had happened to several other SWP comrades, which was ridiculous because where would the British anti-war, anti-Zionist, anti-fascist, pro strike, placard manufacturing and picket augmenting movement be without the SWP?
All of a sudden, the popular mood had turned against the Corbyn faction’s “witch-hunting” – an irony because over forty years earlier young Jeremy had been the provisional convener of the “Defeat the Witch-Hunt Campaign”, formed to fight against the expulsion from Labour of the entryist Militant tendency.
A brief reminder: Militant had pretended to be a lose, almost accidental grouping formed around a newspaper but were in fact the sphincter-tight Revolutionary Socialist League; their own success (particularly in Liverpool, as it happened) leading to their eventually becoming too big a problem for even Michael Foot to ignore.
Double irony. The commentator Owen Jones, whose late father had been a fulltime worker for Militant, was now on Merseyside arguing in favour of the witch-hunt. After watching an almost demented anti-“witch-hunt” speech by an SWP stalwart named Amy Leather, he posted:
The Socialist Workers Party… are a highly centralised party who arbitrarily expelled dissenters. Whatever you think of the Your Party cluster fuck, watching these SWP’ers posture as democratic tribunes is a little bit much. The SWP don’t want “collective decision-making running through”. They just spy an opportunity to recruit members who they will mostly end up burning out. That’s their driving purpose not building an alternative left wing political party.
And he was right. That is how that party has always been: hyper-active, contemptuous of non-members, and prepared to use crushing tedium as a political weapon. A carnivore let loose in a field of keffiyehed herbivores, the SWP will bore you, heckle you, outlast you, points-of-order you into submission or until you decide to give up politics altogether. They are the herpes of revolutionary socialism.
