Socialist Regroupment

In this section we have printed reports from Left unity initiatives from Wales and Ireland that have experienced mixed success. The next issue of Emancipation & Liberation will look at the Respect Coalition in more depth.

Forward Wales to challenge Labour

There was a mood of confidence and anticipation as a new left-wing political party was launched in Wrexham on November 8. The local RMT railworkers’ union secretary Dave Bithell told members: We’ve beaten Labour once and we’ve got to move forward to beat Labour again and again.

The combination of a radical socialist message coupled with the credible, common-sense approach typified by the party’s Assembly Member, John Marek, was evident throughout the day.

The new party name Forward Wales/Cymru Ymlaen was adopted along with aims and principles committing it to building a sustainable socialist society.

John Marek himself described the day as a new dawn for Wales and stressed the party would be different from others. He said Wales had always been a radical country and Forward Wales would reach out to urban and rural areas, Welsh speaking and non-Welsh speaking. Strong representation from trade unionists, a feature of Marek’s election campaign to win his seat in the Assembly back in May, ensured vocal support from representatives of the firefighters, PCS civil servants, the RMT and the GMB. Dave Bithell himself was elected as trade union organiser for the new party and re-iterated the RMT ’s support for the new party.

The party will now seek to build branches in every constituency in Wales in readiness for next year’s (2004) European and council elections.

The party already has advanced plans to contest elections in its Wrexham stronghold but there are likely to be candidates standing under the Forward Wales banner throughout the country.

But the party’s priority is to campaign in communities and workplaces, such as the ongoing Wrexham Against Stock Transfer campaign activists initiated in September. The campaign has succeeded in bringing together tenants and council workers after more than a dozen meetings around estates facing sell. The new party will aim to link up the various local campaigns against stock transfer in Wales into a national campaign. Forward Wales’s constitution ensures that its elected representatives, like the Scottish Socialist Party, receive an average skilled workers’ income and the party will be looking to cement links already made with the SSP in the coming months. It will also be building international links in readiness for the European elections next June.

Seren Issue 11 Jan. 2004

Left Unity urged

One of the largest left meetings in Wales for years has heard renewed calls for left unity in Wales.

Forward Wales AM, John Marek, shared a platform with ex-Labour MP, George Galloway, and antiwar campaigner, John Rees in Cardiff University on January 20. The meeting attracted 300 people, many of whom were young. The meeting, British politics at the crossroads, was part of a wider campaign to launch a new electoral coalition by Galloway.

This coalition has already pledged not to contest the European elections in Scotland due to the strength of the SSP and its hoped that the left vote in Wales will not be split either, with Forward Wales claiming they have a candidate capable of uniting the left.

John Marek stressed the need to campaign in the communities as well as standing in elections, both locally and on a European level, in order to build a grassroots socialist alternative to New Labour.

Seren Issue 12 Feb. 2004

Nothing Surprising and Nothing New

On February 14th a Convention of the Left was held in Derry City.The main sponsors of this meeting were the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party of Ireland and the Green Party. Under the banner of the Socialist and Environmental Alliance they had contested the election to the Northern Ireland Assembly (see article by John McAnulty) in Derry City and East Londonderry County. This is a critique of this Convention, which first appeared in The Plough no. 27, the bulletin of the IRSP.

A non-party socialist described the course of the meeting as follows:

• 1. IRSP delegates, who had turned up in good faith, amounted to over 20% of those present.
• 2. The SEA platform displayed a willingness to allow speakers to discourse at great length, unless they happened to be republican, and more specifically, IRSP.
• 3. Discussion of the necessity of an anti-imperialist, anti-partition basis to any class struggle, or indeed campaign, in the North, was effectively precluded, despite the feeling of the meeting that it should be dealt with.
• 4.When it appeared that Republican Socialists were swaying the meeting, a member of the platform pronounced that they would object on principle to being a part of a grouping, which included the IRSP. The outcome of the meeting was, should we have needed it, a lesson in the primacy of principled politics. Those who criticize the IRSP for being part of the problem might be better advised to examine the bankruptcy of their own solutions:
  • a) While these pure Marxists might find the writings of Connolly, Larkin and Costello too parochial to deserve study; they can hardly disown the writings of Marx (or indeed Lenin).
  • b) For Marx, Ireland was a classic example of a colony. The unity of the working class in such circumstances was almost impossible, as a large proportion of them were wedded to the imperialist ideal. The descendants of the colonists saw themselves in the main as a class apart, because of the privileges, which the British state had provided for them in return for their support. This contradiction between these two, artificially created, sections of the Irish working class could, according to Marx, only be overcome by the removal of the problem: The British colonial presence in Ireland.
  • c) Despite the (relative) independence achieved by the 26 counties, the problem, and solution, has not changed in any meaningful way. Northern Ireland remains a colony, maintained for no other purpose than to perpetuate the divisions within the working class outlined by Marx over 150 years ago.
  • d) These are the facts, and no attempt to avoid them will make them any less true. However, avoidance has a long history, most famously, and disastrously, following the Second World War. Both the CPNI, the small Trotskyite groups, and eventually the NILP sought to build class politics in the North as part of an internal solution. These efforts were of course made in good faith, but they were based on the flawed assumption that if the border issue was skirted around it would simply go away.
  • e) It would be pointless to comment on this analysis, other than to ask where these groups are now, except that this is the same solution as is now being put forward as a programme by the putative Convention of the Left. That this exercise has developed into a debacle will come as a surprise to few. However, like all experiences it has had its uses, in that it has clearly drawn the line between the radical left and the reformists. This line is National Liberation.

The mainstream left (as they would wish to be perceived) in the North, believe that they can convince loyalist workers to abandon generations of prejudice by not broaching the subject, which most concerns them. One has to wonder at the arrogance of those who think that the working class are stupid, but who seek to lead them in any case!

Loyalist/unionist workers are part of our class. They also happen to be wrong. There is no quick fix to this contradiction within our class. However, honesty about our goals, and specifically our republicanism, are necessary prerequisites for our interaction with them. We have nothing to hide.

Finally, there is no such thing as normal politics. There is only politics that serves the working class, and politics which do not. Clearly, and unfortunately, the current Convention of the Left falls into the latter category.

Colin Craig