Workers' Liberty

The Awl leaflet on the split got 174 views on the SSP Discussion forum and 24 replies ( so far) which is not bad going-no hostility but replies seemed to go off at a tangent quickly

Pete

Lessons of the SSP Crises

Most members of the SSP have been angry and saddened at
seeing their Partys' crises and demise over the last 2 years.
There were real hopes of an effective influential united Socialist party gaining more and more support over time and eventually taking power.

The party now faces a bitter organisational split, electoral meltdown and the prospect of a return to smaller left groups, hostile to each other, competing for influence and finding it difficult as a re-divided force to gain respect and support from the working class.

But how did the SSP get here? Some would like to place
all the blame on one man and his ego- just a good apple gone
bad- others want to place the blame on the State and Media
and some want to place the blame on the Executive committee while
absolving Tommy Sheridan of all responsibility.

None of this is very honest and the danger is that unless lessons are learned honestly then the Left will go on endlessly repeating similar mistakes every time there is a crises to the delight of our class enemies.

Workers Unity has said for many years now and long
before this crises broke that there were real weaknesses
in the Party. We re-state some of them below but they
can be read in a slightly different form at our website-
www.workersunity.org.uk- created long before November 2004.

• A need for greater honesty, transparency
and accountability between the rank and file membership and
Leadership is now needed. (It was keeping the key minutes a secret from the membership that led to the protracted rumour mill-and the rumour mill created a poisonous atmosphere within the party- personal relations deteriorating to the point where agreement became impossible).It was a sign that the leadership did not trust its own membership.

• The need for our press to be opened up to the membership – a
key WU demand –this could have went a long way to preventing the
conflict being carried out in the Capitalist press- who have had
their own anti -SSP agenda.

• It was clearly wrong to raise one man up above the party
creating a Cult of Personality type situation that made
accountability of that individual to party structures and norms of resolving conflict impossible when it was most needed.

• An imbalance was created between parliamentary and
extra- parliamentary work, with far too much of a focus being placed on a bourgeois Parliament at the expense of extra-parliamentary campaigning. This was particularly damaging to trade union work – there has been no attempt by the Party to act as a lever in relation to the working class industrially -No real emphasis on getting workers to fight back. Instead the focus became the 6 MSPS and industrial work largely consisted of telling trade unionists to leave the Labour party and build the SSP.

• The ongoing resistance to setting up a Marxist Education
Programme also caused problems. An educated membership was likely to be a more vigilant, assertive , able and critically minded membership in terms of insisting on leadership openness and accountability. There would also have been more pressure to emphasize extra-parliamentary campaigning on class-based issues of concern to working class people. And the obsession with the Independence issue was part of that wrong focus – it represented a retreat from class politics.

You have working class people rightly concerned mostly
with issues such as unemployment and underemployment
bad housing, crime, racism, war, anti-union laws meanwhile
the party of the working class was obsessing over the issue
of further constitutional change . And there is no sign
that lessons have been learned here given recent statements
by Executive committee members. Finally we say :

No Bloodletting !

No Witch-Hunts !

No Expulsions !

No Verbal abuse!

There should be agreement between Tommy Sheridan and the present
Executive about the need for these four points and how this can be enforced.
PS
Its also possible that a particular brand of feminism
contributed to the debacle.Its also possible that
Tommy Sheridan may line up with his roots in the CWI
post-May 2007 if he gets elected and not the SWP-
extending the CNWP into Scotland.

Peter Burton
Personal Capacity

could you ellaborate on "Its also possible that a particular brand of feminism contributed to the debacle." ? I totally agree with everything else that has been said

Hi Keir,

I am not on and do not move in SSP ec circles so it
is difficult to know 100% what peoples motivations were
at the time of the NOv 2004 EC.

Its a bit like a big 1000 piece jigsaw, where time
has led to a clearer image of what the big picture is
without all the pieces being in place, even now.

Sheridan way way back referred to the female MSPS
as " witches " - very wrongly as he later admitted
but it showed who the real conflict was between.

Carolynn Leckie has started speeches at SSP conferences
by saying " I am a women " pausing for a reaction and
then making her speech . Rosie Kane has said recently
that she really really did not want to believe the
accusation that Tommy had been in Sex clubs .

I think there is a radical feminist type moralism
going on here that saw Tommy as being hypocritical
about womens'rights when he really wasn't.
Unsavoury perhaps, unwise definitely -but hypocritical?

This was entangled with other tactical considerations
about what to do about the allegations at the time.
Whether they were so angry with him as to have an agenda to replace him or just wanted him to change his ways - i don't know,
but i feel ideological differences made agreement difficult.

Pete

Pete,

It may well be that there is are elements of radical feminist moralism on the United Left side. However, I think there is pretty clearly a strong element of sexism and anti-feminism on Sheridan's part, something which you seem to want to blur over. (Apologies if I've misunderstood you and am being unfair.)

Sheridan attacked the UL leaders for wanting to convert the SSP from a party of class struggle to a politically correct feminist sect - whatever criticisms one can make of the UL's approach feminism, this accusation is wildly unfair and clearly motivated by a general hostility to the politics of women's liberation. Meanwhile, the way that Sheridan and his supporters behaved in court, from pouring abuse on Sheridan's former sexual partners, witnesses and (3/4 of) the party's female MSPs to promoting Sheridan's wife as a kind of bourgeois political first lady also suggests an indifference if not hostility to fighting sexism.

Of course this lashes up quite neatly with the SWP, who are busy selling their socialist principles on women's liberation to right-wing misogynist Islamists, and the CWI/SP, who have never taken this issue even slightly seriously.

It would be good for some other comrades better acquainted with either the politics of the SSP than me could pitch in.

Sacha Ismail

Sacha,

I think Sheridan has had hostility to the near radical feminism of Carolynn Leckie in particular, but not necessarily from a socialist feminist perspective. I don't want to defend some of his actions particularly in relation to Katrine Trolle or how his wife was used-i just think the image presented by those who lead the UL , as Sheridan being totally to blame for the crises and split is wrong- and not just because he was wrong tactically.

Do you think Sacha that consensual sex in a Sex club is sexist?
I'm not sure that i do. Theres no argument about what he did
to try and prove himself innocent was wrong- but is the act of
going to a sex club sexist- anti-women ?- I suspect it was viewed that way by Carolyyn, Francis and Rosie.

So there is a picture of a man who is not as pro- womens rights and pro-womens liberation as he should be working everyday in the Parliament alongside at least one female MSP who is very close to radical feminism -its another ingredient in the crises pot- another piece of the jigsaw.

Pete

... he thinks that it's defamatory for people to accuse him of doing so whilst married?

He sued claiming the specific allegations of the NOTW story were untrue,
and part of those allegations were that he had sex after he was married
with other women .So there is a fear there of possible marriage breakdown if the
accusations had not been legally challenged successfully- and a sort of
"Last Man Standing" approach once he made up his mind to sue.

Pete

... I'm trying to imagine being in this position - the News of the World accuses me of going to a sex club (splutter, gasp - who me?!)... and in order to persuade my partner it's not true I... sue the NOTW.

And I keep returning to the fact that if my partner needed me to successfully sue the NOTW before he would believe what I told him, our relationship would be in serious, serious trouble. Okay, we're both men, we both shag anything that moves or whatever it is, so maybe it's not quite the same.

But I don't buy the 'sue to save the marriage' argument.

You cannot sue the NOTW over claims about sex clubs without saying that there's something wrong with consensual sex between adults which is outside the institution of marriage. But there isn't. (If it's behind your wife/partner's back, that's a different matter, but see above). Politically, this seems to me a truly awful basis on which to sue - or reason for suing - anybody.

What I don't quite get is that if the UL are *more* rad fem on these issues than Sheridan, wouldn't they have more reason to want to defend his 'honour'? (Unless they had very good reason to think he'd lose, which seems to be the case).

Sheridan's case for suing - I'm talking about the sexual politics of it - doesn't seem to have been not-so-rad-fem and rather more kind of socialist feminist, but simply reactionary, simply 'family values' and what have you.

Or am I misunderstanding something?

But maybe the relationship would have been in "serious serious trouble"
without a jury backing TS? There was a big element of trying to save/restore
his reputation about the suing stuff. Whether it actually worked is doubtful.
A few years ago TS was a very very popular person in Scotland, and he liked
being popular ( too mucH). I think suing was about trying to restore his reputation,
clearing his name,in the eyes of wife/ family and supporters-money may well have been another motivation

Pete

PS
congratualtions on the drama