Workers' Liberty

After twelve years as a coalition of the left, and five years after it became a coalition including almost all the activist left groups in England and Wales, the Socialist Alliance was shut down at a conference on Saturday 5 February 2005.

It was a close vote - 73 to 63, with two abstentions - and the 63 votes against closure were exactly the same number as for the main "left" position at the last SA conference, in March 2004, Lesley Mahmood's amendment against the SA supporting Respect and for the SA standing candidates in the June 2004 council elections.

The appearance of closeness was deceptive, because the decisive voting block at the 5 February conference was made up of SWP members, and the SWP could have called in another ten, or 20, or 30 members at will (in fact, they had an SWP meeting simultaneously, in the same building). Nevertheless, it was good that the SWP was not able to push through the shutdown without a fight and an evidently taxing effort to mobilise.

The plan from the platform (SA chair Nick Wrack and secretary Rob Hoveman, both SWP members) was for two short speeches for shutting down the SA, two against, one for and one against an amendment to the shutdown motion, and then a vote, 18 minutes of debate in all. Challenges from the floor modified that a bit.

Chris Jones's challenge to the constitutionality of the whole proceedings was lost by 54 votes to 68 with six abstentions. My challenge to have two other motions put in to the main debate - one for a "negotiated transfer" of the SA, signed by John Nicholson, Declan O'Neill, and Jim Jepps as well as "hard" pro-SAers, and one for an interim steering committee to reconstruct the SA, also signed by Nicholson and O'Neill - fell by 59 votes to 69 with six abstentions. Those motions, and all others on the order paper, thus fell when the main shutdown motion was passed.

Lesley Mahmood's challenge, to have some debate from the floor, was however carried, 67 to 64. Nick Wrack succeeded, by 71 votes to 56, in getting that debate from the floor limited to two speeches on each side, a total of 12 minutes.

No SWP member spoke on the substantive issue of shutting down the SA, or any but the procedural issues dealt with by Wrack and Hoveman from the platform; in fact, it took a pause and a renewed appeal from the chair before anyone would come forward to take the second floor speech for the shutdown.

The SWP got its dirty work done for it by people whose idea, as far as could be told from the speeches, was that shutting down the SA - so long as non-SWPers would accept it gracefully - would be less acrimonious than keeping it going.

Immediately after the March 2004 SA conference voted to support Respect, the SWP and its friends shut down the SA at national level (in direct contradiction to the text of the March 2004 motion, which said the SA should continue alongside Respect). The office was closed, the SA's office worker resigned, no circulars or emails went out, no correspondence was dealt with, cheques sent in were not cashed, and the website was shut down.

Andy Newman, who moved the shutdown motion, is the secretary of a surviving SA branch, in Swindon, and will contest the 2005 general election on behalf of that SA branch. So far as I could tell from his speech - which centred on the idea (delusion, in my view) that the SA had missed a chance to grow quickly into a movement ten thousand strong because on the big anti-war marches in 2003 the SWP had mainly promoted SWP leaflets, papers, etc. rather than SA material - his idea is that it would just cause too much conflict to revive the SA.

Declan O'Neill and John Nicholson, despite having signed motions which would fall if Newman's motion passed, backed Newman. We must have "no recriminations"; we must be able to find ways to agree, they claimed. O'Neill said that we should look towards "regrouping in the autumn". How disbanding now is a step towards that, he did not say.

The blunt pro-shutdown case was left to Liam MacUaid of Socialist Resistance, who said that Respect, the Galloway/SWP electoral coalition, is becoming "the new mass party of the British working class", and defended it against O'Neill's complaint that Respect allows no serious internal debate.

Moving the motion to continue the Socialist Alliance, I said that the SA's 2001 general election campaign in 2001 had been a big step forward, both in presenting independent working-class socialist politics to a broader electorate than for decades, and in achieving more left unity than for decades. The socialist presence will be much weaker in the 2005 general election. We should fight to rebuild. The SA can be rebuilt - to start with, around the Socialist Green Unity Coalition effort for the 2005 election. Those who no longer want to build a socialist alliance should step aside and let us continue, rather than shutting down what has been achieved so far.

Pete McLaren seconded the motion, and John Pearson and Dave Church also spoke for the motion.

Steve Freeman moved an amendment to Andy Newman's motion. The amendment was lost, and the motion was carried by 73 votes to 63 with two abstentions.

The only other motion debated - for the SA to repay the £3,300 owed to Walsall Democratic Labour Party from a loan made for the 2005 Euro-election campaign - was won by the "SA-ers", by 65 votes to 57 for the SWP and its friends.

The SWP's original idea had been for the SA's remaining funds - reported at about £6,000 - to go to Respect. They withdrew in favour of Andy Newman's motion, which splits SA funds seven ways between AWL, CPGB, ISG, SADP, SSN, SWP, and SUN. The odds must be that the SWP will now discover large SA debts to the SWP printshop which mean that little or no SA funds are left free.

In a brief meeting of pro-SA people in the meeting hall after the formal end of the conference, Jean Kysow noted that many local SAs still have funds. It is important that those are used for socialist purposes rather than siphoned off to Respect.

The Socialist Alliance Democratic Platform has called a "unity conference" for 12 March in Birmingham. Some SADP people have grand ideas about this being the start of "a new workers' party", or at least a "campaign" for it. However, the real step towards left unity, and towards reconstructing an alliance of socialists, now available is the Socialist Green Unity Coalition.