The “Coalition of Resistance” (initiated by Counterfire, a group of people who recently left the SWP) has called an anti-cuts conference on 27 November.
“Right to Work”, a campaign initiated and run by the SWP, has called a “unity conference” for anti-cuts activists on 5 December.
And the National Shop Stewards’ Network, mostly run by the Socialist Party, has set an anti-cuts conference for 22 January.
RTW has also announced a conference of its own for 12 February.
The anti-cuts movement is already too vast and too varied for any one “front” to control it. It will become more so after 20 October. Many of the important battles against cuts will be waged by unions, which of course will take their decisions through their own procedures and not on the say-so of this or that campaign centre.
Initiatives to draw together activists, create links, allow discussions, and facilitate protests like the “Right to Work” march at the Tory party conference, or the “Coalition of Resistance” picket at Downing Street planned for 20 October, have a part to play.
But we must not have the movement diverted and distracted by frantic competition between different “fronts” to swing the issue of which of the various (politically more or less similar) conferences each anti-cuts group will support.
None of the “fronts” must try to substitute for the broad movement. The task of active socialists is to mobilise to transform the real labour movement and make it fight, rather than to try to use anti-cuts feeling to construct a series of miniature proprietary “new labour movements” of our own, alongside the sometimes slow-moving “big” movement.
Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty supports all the conferences and protests. And we support the call for unity made by “Right to Work” on 3 October.
We would add three points:
1. COR, RTW, and NSSN should get together and find ways to merge their four separate conferences into a single event, run by a joint organising committee which should also be open to delegates from other anti-cuts groups.
2. All these groups — COR, RTW, NSSN, and others — should pledge to unite their efforts to build, in every area, broad, representative, democratic anti-cuts committees, based on delegates from trade union branches, stewards’ committees, Labour Party organisations, and community groups.
We now have a great opening to construct such committees, after the TUC congress made an explicit call for local anti-cuts campaigns.
3. Trades Councils can play a central role in initiating these committees, but the committees must be broader than existing Trades Councils. Nowhere should COR, RTW, NSSN, or other specialist groups attempt to substitute for the broad campaigns, nor should COR, RTW or NSSN people allow their respective efforts to promote their own particular front to take priority over developing the broad movement.
