50-odd people turned out for a meeting on the People's Charter (PC) with John McDonnell MP and RMT general secretary Bob Crow at Lambeth Town Hall on 16 June, although it's fair to say almost everyone anywhere near 30 years old was an organised lefty. The Socialist Party outnumbered the SWP considerably. To my knowledge only one person there was a member of the CPB (originators of the People's Charter). A couple of Greens were also present.
Ted Knight as the Chair introduced the meeting firmly stating that the PC 'is not a petition', that it is something for 'us all' to unite around.
Sarah Tomlinson (NUT, SWP) mainly spoke about NUT issues, including a local anti-academy campaign. She used her speech to attack the 'British Jobs for British Workers' slogan, eulogising Visteon as an example of a dispute where 'only the [trade] union flag was flying'. She was not heckled but I could already hear some low-level chuntering from SPers. Later a comrade who may have been an SWPer was roundly heckled by the SP after denouncing BJFBW, and Tomlinson continued to bang on about it when she was brought back at the end.
Attacking the SP over this industrial issue, when they actually played a fairly positive role, and leaving the political car crash of NO2EU alone, seems pretty bizarre but I guess it was a way of being sectarian without openly breaking with Bob Crow, who spoke next. She did talk about the left forming 'a united pole of attraction' and referred to how good it was that 'a socialist' (she meant Kevin Courtney) was standing in an NUT election.
But she didn't say that she thought the 'pole of attraction' needed to be openly socialist. Kevin Courtney is not exactly promoting himself clearly as a socialist; nor did NUT SWPer Tom Woodcock who won a good number of votes in a Cambridgeshire council election as an independent.
Crow talked about the PC being a way of 'raising the level of people's consciousness' and reiterated that it 'is not a petition'. He sees it as a tool for engaging people in discussion - he talked about knocking on doors, signing people up, then holding local meetings. He then said 'some time down the road, a convention of some sort' could be held at national level.
This really sounds like the voice of defeat. Unless you pose the question of power to people, how is the PC politically useful? How do people change the world through the PC? Logically, a government of some kind would have to enact these demands, what sort of government is that? The energy people put into engaging people in 'discussion' has to go somewhere - not just 'come to this meeting' but then pass this motion, which goes up the democratic structure of this national movement - or 'party' to be blunt. These things should be debated at national level, with then the party posing them at elections and fighting for real power. Surely these things are absolutely basic.
Of course people's consciousness is low but the only way to change that is through being organised and socialist - and no one else is going to do it but us. One Labour Party member made a good point from the floor - why will members of organised left groups spend their time promoting this rather than their own program? Well exactly, they won't. If all I'm doing is trying to raise people's consciousness in ones and twos or through small local meetings, I might as well do that with a real socialist program in the AWL (or SWP, SP etc..).
John McDonnell made clear that the real target of the PC as far as he is concerned is disgruntled Labourites. He was effectively talking about using it to build a different pole of attraction... in the LP. He continued his recent tiring, empty rhetoric about LP 'change candidates', bizarrely seeming to suggest that soft-Blairite group Compass were moving left and 'could be worked with'.
Astonishingly, he even suggested at one point that 'Marx and Engels would be ashamed of it [the PC]'. So why is he, a supposed Marxist, involved in it? Because he represents the utter defeatism of most of our movement at the moment. He repeatedly said we've moved 'beyond' attempts to unify the left, which always end with the 'fun' of expelling dissenters, and counterposed solidarity in the workers' movement with left unity.
This is intensely frustrating as it is clearly a massive step back that the left is not even attempting to unify despite the general agreement that, with the election of the BNP, this is an emergency. The only talk of standing local working-class candidates came from the CPB comrade from the floor - and of course his definition of a 'working-class candidate' would be much broader than ours, including Greens and so on.
It is worrying enough that Crow and McDonnell attempt to portray political defeats as potential victories, but worse is that the kind of people turning up to PC meetings accept this so readily. I was not called to speak but a Workers' Power comrade who intervened stressing the need for a unified socialist pole of attraction was heckled quite aggressively, including by people who genuinely seemed to think 'we're doing that now!' We should continue to engage with PC events, making our points about the need for a Socialist Alliance and the political demand of a workers' government but accept that they are likely to be dominated by frustrated, middle-aged or elderly Labour Party types.