Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 22:37:01 -0600
From: Scott Marshall <scott-AT-rednet.org>
Subject: Fight is on for a socialist oriented British Labor Party


**Fight is on for socialist-oriented British Labor Party**

(Reprinted from the February 17, 1996 issue of the People's 
Weekly World. May be reprinted or reposted with PWW credit. 
For subscription information see below)

By William Pomeroy

LONDON -- The right-wing grouping under Tony Blair that 
captured leadership of the British Labor Party last year is 
now encountering a fightback by the left in both the party 
and the labor movement.

Most forthright of the responses has been the move to form a 
new Socialist Labor Party (SLP) to carry forward the 
principles and program that Blair and the Labor right wing 
have thrown overboard. Such a new party is a highly 
controversial step but it is provoking a needed debate on 
the course of action by the labor movement as the very real 
possibility of the election of a Labor Party government 
looms.

Announcement of the founding of the SLP was made at a 
meeting in London Jan. 13. Its principal founder and only 
prominent leader to date is Arthur Scargill, president of 
the National Union of Mineworkers.

Scargill, who led the last great British working class 
struggle in the miners" strike of 1984, was a member of the 
Young Communist League before joining the Labor Party. On 
the executive of both Labor and the Trades Union Congress, 
he consistently defended socialism and working class rights. 
His decision to leave the Labor Party came at the party' 
annual conference last October where his eloquent call for 
the retention of Clause 4 (the provision in the former Labor 
constitution that committed the party to a socialistic 
public ownership of the means of production) was rejected by 
the Blairite machine which has committed the party to a 
capitalist market economy.

At its founding meeting, the SLP outlined a program that 
includes backing for the Clause 4 content, for the 
renationalization of public sector industries privatized by 
the Tory government, for commitment to full employment, for 
the restoration of trade union rights abolished by the 
Tories, for peace and unilateral nuclear disarmament, and 
for issues of human, animal and environmental rights.

The controversy precipitated by the SLP is not over its 
program, but over the tactics and timing of its creation. 
Scargill and his associates have received heavy criticism, 
especially from the left Labor Members of Parliament, not a 
single one of whom has swung to the SLP. Although a minority 
in the Parliamentary Labor Party, they are an influential 
and active opposition to the right-wing Blair policies, 
numbering among them Tony Benn, Denis Skinner, Ken 
Livingstone, Ann Clwyd, Alice Mahon and a score of others.

It is the contention of the Labor left that the fight for 
the Labor Party, for its principles and long-standing 
program, for working class interests, must be conducted 
within the party.

Ken Livingstone said, "The struggle for socialism is going 
to be fought within the next Labor government, and Scargill 
has opted out of that."

Other critics assert that the timing of the SLP (which has 
announced an intention to run candidates everywhere in 
opposition to the Labor Party in the coming election) is 
harmful because in a closely-fought contest it might take 
enough votes from Labor to enable the Tories to stay in 
power.

British Communists tend to urge continued support for the 
Labor Party as the opponent of the capitalist-class-based 
Tory Party. The issue of the SLP, however, has precipitated 
a debate among Communists with some insisting that a Blair 
government would not be different from that of the Tories.

Arthur Scargill is not taking his SLP along an ultra-left 
path. It has a constitution specifically designed to keep 
out Trotskyists and their "entryist" tactics (the rebuffed 
representatives of the Trotskyist Militant Labor 
organization walked out of the Jan. 13 meeting). In the main 
it seeks to draw its members -- Scargill aims at 5,000 
within 18 months -- from disillusioned Labor members and 
from the trade unions.
##30##
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