How do you strangle a potentially promising initiative before it’s even properly launched? Have the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) announce that they want to be involved. Well, we’ve got the new politics, so why shouldn’t Labour Party members work with the SWP and what’s left of British Trotskyism as we “encourage mass mobilisation for a more democratic, equal and decent society“? Continue reading
Tagged with SWP
On the SWP and “uniting the Left”
I was looking at my watch the other day and I remember thinking “it’s been a while since the Socialist Workers Party issued a ‘unite the left’ call.” And whaddya know, they’d already done it. My lefty trainspotting isn’t what it used to be.*
From time to time the SWP like to go on unity binges. In 2009 when the RMT/Socialist Party/Communist Party electoral vehicle No2EU contested the European elections after the SWP had been specifically excluded from participating, they duly produced an open letter to the left in which they proclaimed “Unity is not a luxury. It is a necessity.”
The problem for the SWP, of course, is this not long followed their stupid wrecking of Respect and the embarrassing adventurism of the Left List. And their turn to founding Respect came off the back of dumping the Socialist Alliance – a vehicle that, at least for a time, united the principal organisations of Trotskyism for the first time since the 1940s. Far be it for me to suggest that if you’re going to do the talk, you should also be doing the walk. Continue reading
