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SOCIALIST UNITY

Debate & analysis for activists & trade unionists

7 January, 2013

CELEBRATING THE TURNING OF THE TIDE AGAINST FASCISM

Category: Articles — By: Andy Newman at 3:30 pm

Philosophy Football’s Victory at Stalingrad Night Out

Saturday 2 February 2013. The 70th Anniversary of the Red Army’s Victory at Stalingrad.

“Meet Comrade Feelgood.” Q Magazine.

The blistering hot socialist R&B of Thee Faction will be providing anthems to march, and dance to! A night of musical mayhem and purpose.

“Balkan ska meets Ottoman punk in The Trans-Siberian’s infectious brass blow-out.” Time Out

Co-headliners The Trans-Siberian March Band are a Balkan Brass band with a
fearsome blend of two clarinets, two saxophones, three trumpets, two tubas, two trombones,guitar,vocals and two percussionists, they never fail to get audiences dancing.

Opening the night, Seumas Milne columnist on the Guardian and author of The Revenge of History discusses the meaning of Stalingrad with Geoffrey Roberts acclaimed historian of the Eastern Front and author of Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov who is joined by Susan Richards, editor of the OpenDemocacy Russia website and author of Lost and Found in Russia. Reporting from today’s anti-fascist frontline, Matthew Collins, author of Hate.

At Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road London E1 (5 mins walk from Liverpool Street station. Doors open 6pm, show starts 7pm.

A Philosophy Football night out for a one-party state of ideas and entertainment, in association with the Hope not Hate Campaign.

TICKETS JUST £9.99. From Philosophy Football or call 01273 472 721

Bookings online at Philosophy Football

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ON THE CRISIS IN THE SWP

Category: Articles — By: Andy Newman at 1:31 pm

My decision to publish a redacted version of a transcript of the part of the SWP’s conference dealing with the report of the disputes committee has proven controverisal, as I knew it would. Before I go any further, let me share with you an email from Charlie Kimber on behalf of the SWP, which I think in the circumstances is civil enough even though I don’t agree with it:

Charlie Kimber To office@socialistunity.com
Dear Andy Newman,

I am shocked and outraged that you have published a transcript of the Disputes Committee session at the recent SWP conference. It is of course fundamentally an attack on the individuals involved and their right to speak openly about these events. They did so in the belief that what they said was for the people in the room only. You – and whoever sent you this information – have betrayed that trust.

Did it occur to you to contact anyone involved in the case, or any of the people who are readily identifiable from this transcript before you published it?

It is also an assault on the SWP, its democracy, and our attempts to deal with this issue fairly.

Organisations that have to deal with personal cases and allegations of this sort deserve the right to privacy about the details of the proceedings. Do you think that trade unions, for example, should publish transcripts of such cases?

I do not believe you are motivated by any considerations apart from a desire to damage the individuals involved, and the SWP, and to achieve tawdry publicity.

You should never have published the transcript and should take it down immediately.

Charlie Kimber , SWP national secretary

Let us start with the political context. The SWP has been the largest far left group in Britain for some time, and played a vital role in the launching and sustained campaigning of the Stop the War Coalition, it has also been one of the driving forces in campaigning against the far right, through its participation in Unite Against Fascism. It also has a relatively high profile, especially on university campuses, and for many people coming across the SWP it will be their first contact with the socialist movement. It also has a limited but not unimportant footprint in some unions.

What is more, whether we agree with their politics or not, it is a characteristic of the British political scene that despite their relatively small size, the outside left is dominated by Marxist groups like the SWP and Socialist Party, and this has an impact on the practicalities of building the left in broader terms.

This year’s SWP conference saw an unusual degree of division, with rival factions, alternative slates for the Central Committee, a clearly fractious rumour mill, and expulsions of dissidents. What is significant is that the divisions have seemed to take on a generational aspect. The vote on whether or not to accept the Disputes Committee report saw the SWP conference split almost exactly down the middle. In an organisation where votes are always unanimous in favour of the status quo, this is effectively a defeat for the current leadership, despite their narrow formal victory.

The interest in this issue is not a prurient one due to the nature of the allegations, but a political one because the Disputes Committee report was challenged and almost rejected.

Now while we would all prefer that this political dispute concerned a wholesome disgreement about an issue like the Syrian revolt, or whether or not to support Len McCluskey, the real world issue that has cleft the SWP is a messy and unpleasant one concerning serious allegations of sexual impropriety, and the preceived mishandling of the complaint by the committee tasked with resolving it. This has spilled over into broader questioning of the democratic deficit in the SWP, and has exposed some of the rather crude bullying that some SWP members feel they have been subjected to.

If the SWP is facing a serious crisis, as seems likely, then that is of significance to the wider left, and the actual nature of the dispute cannot be contained. Let us be clear, there has already been leaking by word of mouth, and the nature of the allegations against a senior SWP CC member has been circulating around left activists and trade union officials for a while. Furthermore it is clear that even within the SWP there is very serious disquiet about the way the allegations were handled. There was no putting this back in the box.

Once I received this transcript in an unsolicited email, I had to decide whether to publish or not. I decided that whether I personally published it or not, then it would find its way onto the Internet. Note that Charlie Kimber does not dispute the accuracy of the transcript. By publishing it first I could at least ensure that the names were redacted. In the Internet age, closed sessions of conferences are unsustainable.

But more generally, I think there is a genuine public interest in publishing, so that the broader left appreciates what the SWP is consuming itself over, and in providing the accurate facts, rather than allowing rumour to poison the well. I believe it is better for the entire transcript to be published than for it to be selectively quoted. The way that the debate was conducted seemed fair, both sides were given a fair hearing, and no inappropriate detail was revealed.

I reject utterly the idea that I have somehow breached a duty of trust to the SWP, I have no such duty to them. With regard to an expectation of privacy, the debate at SWP conference already restricted itself from discussing personal details, and the debate concerned itself with the process of the Disputes Committee investigation and report.

Nor is this website typically focused on dscussing the SWP or other left groups; it is a topical issue for the left, and thereforre that is being reflected on this blog, but it is the opposition within the SWP, not myself, who is driving the agenda here.

21 responses

RESPECT VENEZUELA’S DEMOCRACY

Category: Articles — By: Andy Newman at 10:27 am

Recent days have seen articles in newsapers around the world seeking to create an expectation of crisis in Venezuela, due to President Chavez’s poor health,  Spain’s ABC newspaper has claimed the president is in a coma and only kept alive by a life-support system. The Guardian reports that social networks are abuzz with speculation that he is already dead. The Independent writes:

A shroud of political doubt enveloped Venezuela today as rumours grew that President Hugo Chavez may be close to death in a Cuban hospital or, at the very least, will not be well enough to make his own inauguration to a new term of office in just five days’ time.

While top lieutenants of his socialist, anti-US government still have not provided full details of the President’s condition they are not hiding its seriousness, revealing in public statements that he is suffering a “severe respiratory infection”. Mr Chavez, leader of the western hemisphere’s most oil-rich nation and one of the world’s most divisive political figures, has not been seen in public since undergoing cancer surgery in Havana on 11 December.

Few now believe he will be fit enough to leave Cuba in time for his inauguration to a new six-year term, which is due to take place in Caracas next Thursday. Yet his ruling socialist party, the PSUV, has struggled to explain what would happen were he not able to attend, in part because the leftist Bolivarian constitution that Mr Chavez himself helped craft over a decade ago offers no clear answer.

In fact, Venezuelan Vice President Nicolas Maduro announced on Friday (4 January) that President Hugo Chavez’s new term of office will begin this Thursday 10 January.

VP Maduro explained that the official Presidential swearing in ceremony can be done at a later date by the Supreme Court, in line with Articles 231-235 of Venezuela’s constitution. He called on “all Venezuelans to read their copy of the Constitution” where the current situation of the country is clearly outlined.

The announcement about the new term of office was made with Hugo Chavez currently in Cuba receiving treatment for cancer.

Hugo Chavez won a record number of votes to be re-elected as President with 55% last October. But Maduro has warned about the right-wing’s attempts to use Chavez’s current absence to force a new election. He explained that opposition leader, Guillermo Aveledo recently sent a letter to all ambassadors in Venezuela in which he develops “a false thesis of what is stated in the National Constitution.”

He added that “In recent hours the misinterpretations of the right have increased as they believe that their hour has come. They have launched a national and international campaign against the Venezuelan people, looking to take advantage of the circumstances in order to destabilise the country.” The objective of these plans is to “reverse and destroy the Bolivarian Revolution” he highlighted.

On Saturday Venezuela’s National Assembly (its parliament) began its new term of office and re-elected Diosdado Cabello as President of the Assembly. During the session Cabello explained that “Hugo Chavez was elected president and he will continue to be president beyond January 10. No one should have any doubt … this is the constitutional route.”

An Emergency Public Meeting in Support of Venezuela

Thursday January 10, 7.00pm,
Bolivar Hall, 54 Grafton Way, London, W1T 5DL (nearest tube: Warren Street)

——————————————————————————–

• Samuel Moncada, Venezuelan Ambassador

• Tariq Ali, writer • Jeremy Corbyn MP

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SWP CONFERENCE TRANSCRIPT – DISPUTES COMMITTEE REPORT

Category: Articles — By: Andy Newman at 8:45 am

KAREN R: This is the section on the disputes committee. My name’s Karen R, I’m from Manchester and I’m going to chair this session. There are two items for discussion under this session. One will be a report from the disputes committee, and people will have the opportunity to challenge that, at the end of which there will be a vote on whether or not to accept the report from the disputes committee. The second part will be an election for a new disputes committee.

I understand that there are very strong feelings around the report of the disputes committee this year, and I think it’s important that we do try and explain some of the ground rules on which this debate will take place. Clearly we’re talking about very difficult issues and I think it’s important that we do understand that we do that properly and we take that seriously.

The first point is that people have an absolute right to challenge the disputes committee report and they can look at the process and the procedures that the disputes committee are presenting to you today. What we cannot do is re-hear any discussion that they’ve had in terms of the detail. We are not going to sit and listen to the detailed discussion, we are going to listen to the presentation that they present, and the challenges to the process and the procedure. Any attempt to introduce any evidence about what happened is not going to be acceptable in this hall because that’s not fair to any of the individuals who are involved. (applause) I’m (inaudible) that we do stick to that, and I will be making sure that we do stick to that, because people have rights within this process and one of those is the right to be treated with respect.

The second point that I want to make is that it’s not acceptable in this session, or in any session, to make personal accusations about any member of the SWP. We have a process for doing that and that process is very clear. If people have personal complaints and accusations they need to use that process to do it, not the floor of this conference, because that’s not going to help the debate.

The third thing is about the tone of the debate. I think it is important that whether you agree or disagree with what people say, it is important that people are listened to with respect and allowed to be heard. I am not going to tolerate disruption or any attempt to try and stop people being heard, regardless of what they say, as long as it is within those rules that we’ve established.

So saying that, I’m going to bring forward the first part of our agenda. Because there are people who have already informed us that they wish to challenge this report, they have been given space to do that and they have been allowed time within this debate to do thar. Therefore if you want to speak in this debate you can put a slip in, but there is only a very very small chance that you will be called, because a number of people have already expressed their right to challenge, and there will be the disputes committee who have a right of reply to those. So as I say you can put a slip in, but it is unlikely that you will be heard.

The way it will happen is that somebody from the disputes committee will present the report, and then there will be an extended speech from the first person who challenges, then we will move on to the debate with people who have three minutes each.

OK, so I’m going to introduce Candy U who’s from the disputes committee, who will make this report.

CANDY U: Firstly I want to explain who and what the disputes committee are. We thought that because you’ve heard so much about us you might like to see who we are, so this is the disputes committee. (Members of disputes committee stand up.) There are eight of us, we’re elected every year, and we are accountable to the conference.

We’re not a law court. We are here to protect the interests of the party, and to make sure that any inappropriate behaviour of any kind by comrades is dealt with, and we do that according to the politics of a revolutionary party. So, you know, we’re not just opposed to sexism and the abuse of women, we understand where it comes from and we’re actively involved in campaigning and challenging and fighting that, and understand how important it is to do that if we are going to change the system that we live under.

I want to give a brief summary of the three complaints that we’ve had this year.

Comrade Alpha from Bristol was expelled from the party for domestic violence. Comrade Beta was suspended for six months for fighting in a nightclub and abusive behaviour, and because he breached his suspension that was extended for a further six months. Those two have not been disputed by the comrades involved, so I’m going to concentrate on the third case, and I’ll read out a brief summary of the decision that we came to.

In September 2012, a comrade who we’ve called W, a woman, made a complaint of rape against Comrade Delta, a member of the party’s central committee. The CC immediately asked Comrade Delta to stop all activity on behalf of the party until the complaint had been investigated. The disputes committee met over a period of four extended days in October 2012.
We agreed to use the standard legal definition of rape, but to also widen the remit of what we investigated to include questions of sexual assault, harassment and whether the relationship as a whole was abusive.

The disputes committee found that the charges were not proved. We didn’t think that Comrade Delta raped W. And it was not proved to the disputes committee that Comrade Delta had sexually assaulted, harassed or abused W.

We found it difficult to rule on these issues, because the versions of events differed substantially and there were no witnesses. The disputes committee didn’t recommend any disciplinary action against Comrade Delta, and that final report was backed by six out of seven of the panel members.

The seven members who were on that panel, who heard that complaint, were Rhetta M from Manchester, Maxine B from Sheffield, Dave S from Glasgow, Pat S and myself from London. (Candy forgot to name the two CC representatives also on the panel, Esme C and Amy L.) We’re all experienced comrades who are active in the party and a number of us have experience of dealing with people who have experience of rape or abuse.

And because this is such an important report we’ve actually written it together. So bear with me, I may refer closely to my notes or read from them, because we thought that was important.
I want to say sometihng about confidentiality, because we always treat complaints in confidence, but in this case the woman concerned was asking us to preserve her anonymity, and we took that very seriously. People didn’t tell their partners even about this case. And it is because of that question of confidentiality that we’re not going to tell you the details of, of, er, of what we heard during the hearings.

I mean I guess it’s obvious to say, but we don’t have disputes committee hearings in public. And if the details are made public, it really is very unlikely that in the future people will feel that they can come forward with complaints like that, particularly those of an intimate nature.

A few general comments before I start on the actual process. We really, obviously, understand that comrades are concerned and worried this case, and I think the hardest thing was for comrades to hear that an allegation of rape had been made against a leading member of the party, and to hear it through rumour and innuendo, and not from the party itself. And I understand, we understand, why people are upset and angry about that. But we want to make clear why that happened, because it is isn’t actually our responsibility that that happened.
Unfortunately information about this complaint wasn’t kept confidential in the way that we had asked. In fact, people outside the party, such as Chris Bambery, members of Counterfire, members in Unite Against Fascism, who then told Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of PCS – all these people knew about the case within a week of the hearing, before we’d even finished our final report. Now that is obviously unacceptable, but it also, we understand, put comrades in an extremely difficult position, because they were having to defend something that they hadn’t heard about from the party.

And we also know that it meant that comrades have heard about this through rumour, they’ve heard half-truths, they’ve heard things that actually aren’t true being circulated. We do think that that is extremely regrettable, but I hope you understand that it wasn’t something that was under our control.

I really want to stress two things. One is that our request for confidentiality is not a cover up, comrades. We’re not trying to hide anything because of that. But we also believe really strongly that this report should be given to conference, and that that is the correct place for us to do this. I guess it is obvious, but you can’t deal with something like this through circulating an email report. It has to be done face to face.

But it’s also essential that we do this at conference because of democracy and accountability. If we were to do this report to the national committee or anywhere else in the party, then people who want to question or challenge the report won’t be here. We think it’s right that we do this in front of conference, who elected us, and that we should do it in front of the whole party.
Just one other general point, is that we did want to remind people what they were voting on here. Because this isn’t about the CC, alternarive slates, the factions, it’s not about the comrades who have been expelled, it’s not about a debate about feminism or women’s liberation. It is actually about – and I know it’s difficult because of all of the debates but I do think we have to separate them – it is really about whether we have carried out this process correctly, politically correctly, democratically, and that we’ve done that to the best of our abilities.

I want to move on to how we came to our decisions, and some of the questions that we discussed in advance. So we were asked by the chair to, if any of us felt that we were too close to any of the parties involved, or if we felt that we would be seen to not be objective in any way, to rule ourselves out. One comrade who was from W’s district did do that.

We then discussed the situation that we all knew Comrade Delta. We knew his important role in the party and on the central committee, and none of us knew W or knew her well. We agreed that we would have to be especially careful to take that into account in the way that we dealt with this.

We also discussed how difficult it is for women in capitalist society to be heard if they make a complaint of rape or harassment. We know how the courts and the police make women, you know, try to blame women, how few rapes are reported and how few of them are successfully prosecuted. And we understood how personally difficult it was for someone to come forward with a complaint like this.

So we considered how we could make that as supportive as possible, and not add to her distress if we could, and try to accommodate her wishes as much as possible. So we agreed – normally the person who the complaint is about would be in the room – but we agreed that Comrade Delta wouldb’t be there when either she or her witnesses spoke. And we would normally ask questions from all of the panel to the witnesses concerned. We didn’t think that was appropriate, so we proposed that the questions be asked just through one person that she chose. And she had a comrade with her to support her. And so in advance and during the hearing, we tried to make sure that she had whatever support we could give.

Then in terms of the process, we did discuss very carefully how to approach the question of rape, and we didn’t just want to use the standard legal definition, so we agreed to extend the remit in the way that the report summarised of what we investigated, so we also wanted to include questions of sexual assault or harassment, as well as whether Comrade Delta’s conduct was in any way abusive or the relationship as a whole.

We noted that the complaint concerned incidents that had taken place over a period of about six months in 2008 and 2009, which was three or four years before we met. We also noted that there had been an informal complaint about these incidents from the same woman in July 2010, which hadn’t come to the disputes committee, and at that time she complained of sexual harassment rather than of rape.

We were clear that there were a number of reasons why it might take a period of time for a woman to come forward with a complaint like this. And we also understood that there was a process whereby the woman might change how she perceived these incidents, which W now described to us as an issue of rape. We therefore agreed it was essential to investigate the complaint that was in front of us.

We looked at how the complaint was handled in 2010. She’d raised concerns of harassment, about these same incidents, with the central committee. Central committee members had met with Comrade Delta, who denied them. And at that time W was asked if she wanted to go to the disputes committee, but she confirmed that she didn’t want to do that. She wanted an apology, for her views to be recognised, and for the CC to be made aware of them. An informal resolution was reached which was agreed and accepted by W.

Now, she was concerned to preserve her anonymity then and the CC had insisted on that, but people may remember if they were at conference in 2011 that information about this appeared on the internet just before our national conference in January 2011, and as a result of this the CC made a statement to conference about it. And we agreed with the views of those who felt that this conference decision hadn’t been handled well, and we noted that the CC had acknowledged this after conference and subsequently had proposed a new protocol, which ensures that any complaints about CC members now, informal or otherwise, will be referred automatically to the chair of the disputes committee.

We also discussed how we should consider Comrade Delta’s role as a member of the central committee. We expect that CC members’ behaviour should be scrutinised more closely than that of other comrades, because of the role that they play, the elected position that they have, the responsibilites they have, and we entrust them really with the party’s wellbeing, so if their behaviour falls below standard, then it’s the party’s reputation that is damaged.

We also however thought it was important to be clear that the disputes committee doesn’t exist to police moral, er, bourgeois morality, so we agreed that issues that weren’t relevant to us were whether the comrade was monogamous, whether they were having an affair, whether the age differences in their relationahip, because as revolutionaries we didn’t consider that should be our remit to consider issues such as those.

In terms of the process of the investigation, and the questioning of the comrades who came before us, we tried to be as thorough and careful as possible in doing this, so we heard from W and from Comrade Delta, who gave us two very different accounts of what had taken place in 2008 and 2009. We heard from and questioned a number of other comrades. They were people who had been brought as witnesses, either by W or by Comrade Delta. However neither of them were witnesses to the actual events that had taken place at the time. We also heard from Hannah D, Charlie K and Alex C, who are the CC members who had handled the case informally in 2010.

After we’d heard from the witnesses, we called both W and Comrade Delta back in, and we had a long discussion about whether we should ask W any further questions, because we didn’t want to cause her any undue distress. We were also conscious of how the police and the courts put the woman herself on trial.

We’ve heard rumours have circulated about the questions we’re meant to have asked her, which included whether we asked her what she was wearing. And I can tell you comrades, we did not ask that question, it’s just not true.

We only asked questions around the issues that had been presented to us. As I said earlier, we had made clear that we were going to investigate not just the question of rape, but the broader relationship, the broader issues. We had said to both parties before we start that that would mena we might have to ask them some questions that we wouldn’t ask them if we were just investigating the question of rape.

So, coming on to our conclusions. We discussed all that we had heard over quite a long period of time very thoroughly. The conclusions we came to were that we were unanimous in our view that Comrade Delta had not raped W. In relation to the other questions, we considered how to weigh up the different accounts we’d heard very carefully. It was a difficult thing to do, and we tried to take into account all of the issues that might influence our views.

We decided that we didn’t believe that any of the allegations were proved, and that was why we didn’t find that Comrade Delta was sexually abusive or harassing, and therefore why we didn’t recommend any disciplinary action against him. If we had believed that he was guilty of any misconduct, then we would have either recommended his expulsion or his removal from the central committee, which would have been the two options available to us.

So that was the conclusion that we came to. We would like to stress that we’ve only had one complaint against Comrade Delta. But after we concluded the hearing, a woman comrade, who we’ve called X, wanted to give a report to the disputes committee which she believed was relevant to the case. She confirmed to us that she didn’t want to make a formal complaint, and we explained that we’d concluded our case. But we agreed to meet with her and to consider what she had to say. So we met with her, and with Comrade Delta.

We were clear that it didn’t change our view of the outcome of W’s case, the complaint that we’d heard. We would like to say that the issues that X raised didn’t include the suggestion that there had been any sexual activity that had taken place between her and Comrade Delta. She did subsequently contact us, and she said that she wanted to register that she was going to make a formal complaint, and that she didn’t want it dealt with until after this conference. We asked her to make clear what her complaint was, but we have not received that.

The other issue that I just want to raise before I finish is that we have received a deal of correspondence from comrades, making complaints about how other comrades have operated in this, since, since this case has happened, and especially about breaches of confidentiality. And we were also asked to investigate these by the CC. So the disputes committee will look at these after conference, and if there are any serious breaches of party discipline, we will investigate them. But in general, we do hope that the conference will make some political decisions that do allow us to move on, without the disputes committee sitting in permanent session.

To conclude, we are obviously – the seven of us – the only people who have heard all the evidence that was brought before us. Because we can’t go into the details, that means that you will have to take our report and the conclusions that we came to really on trust, that we did this correctly. All I can say, all I can emphasise really, is how seriously we took this process. We met over a period of four long days. We were as thorough and meticulous as we could be. And I would like to stress that if we had believed that Comrade Delta was guilty of any misconduct, we would have recommended disciplinary sanctions.

And as I’ve said, we discussed things really from every angle, politically, grounded in our belief in the poliics of our organisation. We are unanimous that we came to this with no preconceived agenda, that we used the best methods of the revolutionary tradition. We discussed, debated, considered, changed our minds, listened to each other, and then we came to the best conclusions that we could, to the best of our abilities, and it’s on that basis that I put this report to you and to the conference.
(applause)

KAREN: I don’t really think applause is applicable in any of these debates or contributions. I think we should just listen carefully and give our judgment at the end of them. The next speaker is Viv Smith from Dalston branch. She’ll have five minutes, which is an extended contribution.

VIV S: I should make clear that I’m not speaking from Dalston, I’m just speaking as I was involved as a witness in the dispute. (Audience: Can’t hear! Mic!) Is that better? Comrades, I want to start from something I think we can all agree on, which is that we are very proud of the party’s politics and tradition in fighting women’s oppression, and I think we saw this in action this summer where the rest of the left really failed the test of the Assange case, getting the issue of imperialism wrong and on the issue of women’s oppression. I think George Galloway paid the price for that and Respect paid the price for that. We stand head and shoulders above any other organisation when it comes to fighting for women’s liberation.

It’s really because of this that we felt we had to come forward, because when things go wrong we feel they have to be discussed properly, and that’s why we’re raising this challenge.
Now people will have seen in IB3, as Candy’s talked about, some of us were involved in this disputes committee hearing in the summer. We’re very concerned about the way the hearing was conducted, and the failure of the report in our minds to explain the outcome.

The hearing as you’ve heard concerned an accusation of rape, an incredibly serious accusation which we think the committee did take very seriously, and Candy mentioned the fact that the woman had come forward a few years previously at a conference. And the CC did handle the case in the way that she asked them to. But I think it’s important to say that she felt she could come forward two years later because she – as she explained it to me when she rang me up and asked me to give evidence on her behalf – she felt able to actually confront the issues that she’d gone through and actually say that she felt she had been raped. She felt the way the party had handled the Assange case gave her confidence that she would get a fair hearing.

Unfortunately, although Candy’s put a very clear picture of the case, it wasn’t her experience that it went well. She’s incredibly traumatised by the hearing, and I think it’s fair to say that the witnesses are incredibly shocked by some of the things that took place.

I think the most serious for us – because Candy’s absolutely right, nobody as far as I know or as far as the woman has said asked her how she was dressed – but comrades, she was asked about past and subsequent sexual relationships, and she was pressured -

KAREN (interrupts): Could I ask you not to go into the detail of what was discussed, because I don’t think that’s relevant and that is one of the ground rules that we agreed. (Audience groans.) I think if we get into the details of the case – (Many audience members: Let’s hear it!) I did ask if people could not actually interrupt. We are attempting to deal with a very very serious issue, and I think it’s important that a guarantee of confidentiality was given. I think that then if we try and then hear this, hearing small elements of what took place and the detail of the content, then we’re actually moving to a different agenda to the one that we agreed. I suggest we attempt to stick to that.

VIV: Should I go on? Thank you. My point is that she was asked on the basis of gossip, that had apparently been relayed in a meeting, about a relationship with another male comrade. Now that’s not going into the detail of the case, that was an accusation that was made. I don’t think there is any place in the SWP in respect of procedure for us to question the woman, or anyone else for that matter, about their sexual behaviour in relation to a rape case.

But Candy, I think you also have to admit that there were other problems.

She wasn’t offered support – we asked for support. The woman had to ask the disputes committee if she could have someone in the room with her, she had to ask the panel so that she knew one person in the room. She knew nobody on the disputes committee panel.

And I think one of the most distressing things for her was that she was expected to respond immediately to the evidence that Comrade Delta was able to bring – she never got to see it in advance. He had her statement for weeks before she appeared in front of the panel. Some of the issues that were raised were things she had blocked out, and it was an incredibly traumatic experience for her.

And yes, I think Candy’s absolutely right to say it’s important that the comrades on the panel were asked about whether or not they felt able to take part in the hearing, but I think we do need to consider and think about very carefully – and this is not an attack on the individuals involved – that when five of the people hearing the case were either current or former CC members, and that all of the people had worked incredibly closely with Comrade Delta, which is going to happen when you’re dealing with a leading comrade, I think you have to acknowledge that it brings an incredibly huge burden to bear. I’ve worked with Comrade Delta for 12 years and it’s an incredibly difficult situation.

Shortly after the hearing Candy referred to, a second woman came forward with an allegation of sexual harassment, and she will speak herself in this session. I think it’s important to say that she’s been moved from her party job following giving that evidence, and that she’s been told her presence at the centre would disrupt the harmony of the office. I think this constitutes punishing her for making a complaint of sexual harassment.

The main concern for us is that two comrades have come forward, with an allegation of rape and an allegation of sexual harassment. I think the response of ‘not proven’ does not explain in any way, in any sufficient way at all, how those sanctions have been applied, particularly given that two years previously the CC had clearly taken some kind of discussion and action.
The way the CC has dealt with the situation subsequently has very much made the situation worse, by not giving details within the bounds of confidentiality to the NC, for example. And -
(Red ‘stop speaking’ light goes on)

I’m hoping for a little bit of extra time, because people did interrupt me.

KAREN: I’ve given you an extra minute, Viv, I’m afraid. (Viv and Karen talk over each other)

VIV: All I want to say is that it’s very important comrades are clear we are not asking for the disputes committee to re-hear the case. The decision stands. We’re asking that comrades reject the report in recognition that there were serious failings in the way the hearing was conducted, and that a decision of ‘not proven’ does not sufficiently explain how it is that two women can come forward and not be believed. And -

KAREN: No. You have to -
(Viv leaves stage to applause)

KAREN: (over applause) … not to applaud contributions in this session. The next speaker will be Rhetta M from the disputes committee.

RHETTA M: Everybody who sat on this DC sat as revolutionary socialists but also with our world experience. I’m going to come to that in a minute, but just to respond to a couple of things from Viv first.

As I think was said by Candy before, all the questions that the DC put to W were shaped by the complaint that the person, W, brought to us. First of all it was in writing. And there were weeks between us receiving that written complaint and us coming together to listen to her, and to investigate the complaint, but I have to say that the delay was – we basically met as soon as W was available to meet with us, around her other commitments etc.

And the other thing that I want to say is that, er, yes, there was one complaint, and it isn’t the case that two women came forward with complaints against Comrade Delta. That was made very clear, I hope, to you in the report. We heard a complaint, we concluded our hearing, we were unanimous in our findings, and some time after that a second person came forward and said they wanted to share some aspects of their perspective on their relationship with Comrade Delta with us. We still have not received any other than one complaint on Comrade Delta.

I just want to go back to the world experience, and I want to say a few things about myself, which I didn’t say to any of the comrades in the dispute committee when we sat. (inaudible) I was trained as a rape counsellor, and I’ve been doing that work, working with people surviving rape, ever since, through my working life. I also did a doctorate on rape and aid. (Some personal information removed)

When I received this complaint, my first reaction was to ring the chair and to ask straightaway, how are we supporting the complainant? I was reassured that this was offered to her, and she had said she had all the support she wanted from the DC and the CC. So because of that, as has been said before, I want to talk a little bit about process.

Because of understanding the need to be as absolutely supportive as possible, Comrade Delta was only in the room when he was questioned by us. He wasn’t in the room otherwise. We did everything we could to put our questions – and in this instance, in the chair requested, we were thorough and meticulous in our investigation.

KAREN: That’s time.

RHETTA: At the end of the day, we didn’t find that Comrade Delta had done anything wrong. Because of my experience, my background, I have no hesitation in saying to you that if he had done something wrong (inaudible)

KAREN (over Rhetta): Thank you. The next speaker will be Hannah D.

HANNAH D: I think comrades may know that myself and three other members of the CC – Ray M, Joseph C  and Mark B – have expressed our reservations about the disputes committee report and the CC’s handling of the aftermath at a number of CC meetings since the DC reported. I wanted to request that we had the opportunity to bring this to conference, because we felt that we had a duty to be open to comrades about them.

Why? Not because this is a question of questioning the integrity of comrades on the DC, but because it is right that comrades are able to judge whether, especially in cases of this nature, the report equips them to feel confident that we have dealt with this issue in a way that is beyond repoach.

What are the issues at stake? They have been laid out by Candy. Our politics give us a common understanding of the enormous obstacles facing women who bring complaints of this nature, so we have to understand that no woman comes forward lightly. We have to do everything in our power to give them a sympathetic and supportive hearing. It is essential of course that we seek to establish the facts as well as possible, because that’s essential to do justice to all parties involved.

But because the DC is a political body, it also has to show how our wider politics of oppression were applied in the deliberations and decisions. That’s why the DC worked very hard to deliver a clear verdict on the rape allegation, as well as the wider questions of sexual harassment and conduct. And I think we have to say in relation to the question of conduct, there was clearly some disagreement on the disputes committee, with the comrades only being able to decide that the allegations were not proven, and the chair of the disputes committee reporting to the CC that he felt that the conduct fell short of a CC member.

The question of conduct is not about moralism – it’s to do with standards of behaviour. I think that when two women say that they felt a leading comrade’s behaviour was inappropriate, the question of conduct is entirely relevant. I think in hindsight that given the focuses of the divisions on the DC, and the not proven verdict, that the CC should have taken a clear position on the question of conduct, and given our reasons for accepting Comrade Delta’s resignation – because I think it would have helped mitigate against some of the polarisation that has taken place in the party over the last few months.

I think one of the most regrettable parts of it has been the rumours and speculation on all sides with unwarranted attacks on Comrade Delta and the disputes committee. I think it is of particular concern that the two women – the CC has received complaints about the way in which the two women involved in the complaint have been accused of having done it for a personal grudge or out of political malice, and that those who have been critical, including myself, in the privacy of the CC have been labelled as feminists, autonomists, or motivated by political disagreement. There is no place for these in our party, so let’s acknowledge them, and let’s rebut them strongly at this conference.

I think it would have been helpful to allow comrades to move amendments to the report, rather than giving delegates the choice (Karen talks over Hannah) – hold on, I’ll finish on this – the choice of accepting or rejecting the report. And I think it’s been made clear that if comrades reject the report, the complainants do not want to reopen the case. But I do feel it’s essential that any newly elected DC looks at these questions in order to develop a more effective response in the future.
(Applause)

KAREN: The next speaker will be Dave S.

DAVE S: I just want to make a few points because there’s a lot of speakers and there’s not a lot of time. I concur with some of the things that Hannah said – if people were attacked for bringing a complaint to us because of having political reasons, then we want to make clear that anyone’s got the right to bring a complaint. I think Candy tried to make it clear – it’s not about feminism or attacks on people or anything like that, anybody’s got the right to bring a complaint, and we wouldn’t want to be in a position where the disputes committee isn’t able to encourage people to bring a complaint without personal villification. That’s one of the reasons it’s so important to maintain confidentiality and for us to bring the report to the conference that put us in place in the first place.

I’ve been in the party for 40 years, and I’ve had the misfortune, fortune, you can put it however you like, to have been on disputes committees on occasions over the years. (inaudible) This is by far the most serious and the most vexing I’ve ever been involved in. It’s also the longest running one I think that’s happened, and the most thoroughly investigated that’s happened. We took it very seriously.

And I think – I wanted to deal with a couple of points. I want to make clear that the committee unanimously, all seven of us, agreed that Comrade Delta did not rape W. On the rest of the very serious charges, it was very difficult to deal with incidents that happened three and a half years ago, and we never felt anyone was lying or making up (inaudible), I want to make that quite clear. But there were contradictions in what had taken place and how it had taken place.

There were no witnesses to the events, and there was nothing in terms of evidence and detail that would lead us to believe that Comrade Delta – that it was proved that Comrade Delta (inaudible)

We came to a compromise. The spirit of the ‘not proven’ was that. (inaudible) None of the speakers have said this – and I’d like to think Viv and Hannah – but there have been accusations made against the committee that we’ve acted as a whitewash for Comrade Delta, or as stooges for the central committee.

I speak for myself, but it applies to everybody else. I’ve dealt with disputes cases where I’ve been involved in expelling the full timer for the district, somebody that I’d worked with for years, who’d been a former CC member, who I’d built a friendship with. It was a painful experience, it damaged the district, I can’t say I’m proud of what happened, but we didn’t balk at that. We would have taken action against Comrade Delta if we thought it was merited. There’s more I wanted to say, but I’ve run out of time, comrades, thank you.
(Some applause)

KAREN: The next speaker is Sadia J.

SADIA J: The first thing I want to say is that the complainant is this case frequently asked to come to this session, so she could be aware of what’s being said about her, because it is her case after all. She was prepared to speak out so that people could hear about her experiences and learn from what’s happened here, so that it wouldn’t happen again. But she was denied that right by the CC.

I want to talk about her experiences after she made the complaint. A lie that’s been frequently told is that she’s been manipulated by other people with their own agenda. She refutes this, which is yet another reason why she wanted to be here today.

She thought that if she put a complaint to the party that it would be dealt with in line with the party’s politics and our proud tradition on women’s liberation. Sadly her experience was quite the opposite. She felt that from the beginning – that there were problems from the beginning and she expressed them to Pat Stack. And I have to say that Pat has been really amazing with her throughout this whole process.

(inaudible) … be questioned in line with gossip. And again I’m sad to say that her experience really was the opposite. She feels that she was questioned in quite a reactionary way, and was made to answer questions on the spot as if she was the one on trial.

She was questioned about why she went for a drink with him, her witnesses were repeatedly asked whether she’d been in a relationship with him, and you know, she was asked about (Karen begins to talk over Sadia to warn about providing details) … she was asked about relationships with other comrades including sexual relationships. All this was irrelevant to the case.
We’ve got a proud tradition in the party of rejecting that line of questioning by the state. This is about consent. To date she hasn’t been told what evidence was presented against her by Comrade Delta and by his witnesses. She felt she was being interrogated and felt they were trying to catch her out in order to make her out to be a liar. She did not accept the line of questioning, saying ‘they think I’m a slut who asked for it’.

Rita, a comrade who is experienced in working with rape victims and was supporting her in the questioning – she had to actually go back into the room and have a go at the DC for their inappropriate questions.

Her treatment afterwards has been worse. She feels completely betrayed. No one on the CC has ever contacted her voluntarily, not even to tell her that Comrade Delta was standing down, and she feels she’s been treated as this non-person. The disgusting lies and gossip going round about her has been really distressing and disappointing for her to hear, and the way her own witnesses have been treated in Birmingham hasn’t been much better.

We discussed our concerns with Charlie and Amy before the Birmingham aggregate, and they both stated that they took our concerns on board. At our aggregate, the treatment of her witnesses was so bad that the CC received two formal complaints from comrades, and a formal complaint has been lodged with the disputes committee.

Recently the complainant wanted to attend a meeting and tried to talk to a local member. He told her that it wasn’t appropriate for him to speak to her and he walked away. What kind of message does this send out – that if you have a serious allegation to bring against a leading member, don’t bother because you’ll be victimised for doing so?

Is it right that a young woman has to plan her route to work avoiding paper-sellers, or that she comes away from a meeting crying because people refuse to speak to her? Is it right that her witnesses are questioned about their commitment to the party because they missed a branch meeting?

I’ve always been really proud of being a member of the party and I’ve been really proud of our tradition on women’s oppression. This isn’t about an attack on democratic centralism.

KAREN: You need to wind up.

SABBY: Disagreeing with the (inaudible) doesn’t make the complainant or any of us an anti-Leninist. We’ve always taken a principled stance on this issue. And we’re asking conference to reject this report, and to challenge an emerging culture in our party, so that this can never happen again.
(Applause)

KAREN: The next speaker is Amy L.

AMY L: I just want to explain – I think Candy missed it out by mistake – that on the panel that heard this case, there were two members of the central committee, myself and Esme C. That’s why I’m speaking.

Someone’s just raised the case about whether we considered conduct. I want to be very clear that the disputes committee did consider this. In fact our entire investigation was about conduct. Because Candy outlined, before we heard any of the evidence from anybody, we decided what we would actually investigate. We decided we wouldn’t just investigate the issue of rape that was brought to us, but actually we looked at whether there was sexual assault, harassment, or if the relationship had been abusive.

That really reflected our understanding of women’s oppression. We thought from the start it wouldn’t be good enough to say that there were things we were concerned about, but we didn’t rule on them because it wasn’t in our remit. So we made it our remit. So the whole investigation was actually about conduct, and we extend that to both parties.

Now also then, does that raise the issue of the (expected) conduct of a central committee member? We wouldn’t tolerate issues of rape, of sexism, harassment or abuse from any of our members. But for a central committee member, it’s not just about the personal behaviour, it’s about also damaging the party. It made us more conscious of that. (inaudible) At the end of that process, we did not hide those things that we laid out in our remit.

The other thing was this idea that ‘not proved’ leaves it open. I want to be clear – it was unanimous on the disputes committee, the main charge of rape, we didn’t think Comrade Delta did this. But perhaps not proven left open the other allegations, that he’d done it maybe, maybe not? This was not what was meant and not what we thought.

I have to say, the real concrete proof after we’d listened for four days to all the evidence and everything – the concrete proof that we didn’t think he’d done this was that no disciplinary action was taken at all. If we thought there was any chance of those issues (inaudible) we’d take action whatever the position in the party. I really hope that comrades understand just how seriously we took this process, how we took into consideration our wider politics, and how at the end we came to our decision that Comrade Delta had not done those things, and I ask you to accept this report.
(Smattering of applause)

KAREN: The next speaker will be X.

(Note – X was named in the conference and spoke openly, however I am not naming her in this transcript)

X: Some comrades will already know that I’m the second woman who’s come forward as part of the dispute, and it’s me that’s been removed from my position in the (removed) department. I wanted to say that I’d been a district organiser for (removed) years and I hope people will respect that I wouldn’t come forward lightly.

I want to start by reiterating what Candy said – that this isn’t a trial, comrades won’t get to hear both sides of the story, so you’re never going to be in a position to decide who you believe. However, comrades can take a position on whether the process you think has been adequate.

I also want to add that I think it’s entirely disingenuous that leading members have denied that there is a second complaint. My evidence was effectively a second complaint, but because of the experience of the first case I’m unwilling to have it heard by the current disputes committee as a separate dispute. I don’t accept the account given that they’re not aware of the substance of my complaint – it’s the same as the account that I’d given in the first place.

I want to just quickly outline why I think there were problems with the way the dispute was conducted. First I think the composition of the disputes committee was problematic. Viv has mentioned that five of the seven were former or current CC members, most of the people have close or long term working relationships and in some cases friendships with the accused, and while I don’t for a second question the personal integrity of the individual comrades, when it comes down to, as they said, whose version of events you’re most likely to believe, I do think it creates an unfair bias in this case.

And I want to reiterate – it’s not an attack on the comrades’ integrity, or as the CC argued in their statement, about questioning the comrades’ ability to apply our politics on women’s oppresion. (inaudible)

I believe the nature of the investigation was fundamentally flawed. The accused was able to see my evidence four days in advance of any questioning to prepare his defence. I was not made aware of the evidence the accused brought to contradict the case, so I had no opportunity to challenge his testimony. I was still denied the right to even basic details of his response – whether he’s denied it ever happened, given a different version of events. None of my witnesses were called. I was never cross-questioned following the accused’s evidence.

Obviously there are instances where people may come forward with malicious intent, so it’s right to investigate claims. However in our tradition we argue that women do not come forward lightly in cases like these. We should start from that belief and attempt to substantiate the woman’s complaint. U don’t believe that the DC in my case shows this to have happened.

Finally – (voice breaks) in my opinion the worst part was the nature of some of the questioning. I was asked if it was fair to say I liked to have a drink. That’s all I need to say on the matter.
Just very quickly, I’m running out of time, but I just wanted to address – because the question of my job has been raised by the factions, to avoid any confusion, I wanted to address this. It is true that I did initially resign. (inaudible) Charlie rightly refused to accept my resignation on the basis that I shouldn’t be punished for bringing forward a complaint. Within days of the hearing I asked to be allowed to return to work, but in many meetings and appeals to the central committee I was repeatedly told that I’d disrupt the harmony of the office.

The worst part and the most stressful part of this is the motivations that have been ascribed to people coming forward. We’ve had accusations of the state – (Karen calls time)
(Applause)

KAREN: The next speaker is Charlie K.

CHARLIE K: Comrades, I want to talk about the method that has guided us through what was inevitably going to be an extremely difficult process. It is that we were never going to hear, in front of the whole of the party, the evidence involved in this case. To preserve anonymity, to protect the individuals involved, the party has developed a method which involves a group of comrades on the disputes committee going away and looking at all the evidence involved in a case. That’s an incredibly onerous responsibility, and it’s one you should take very seriously yourselves as a conference when you elect people to these positions.

Because they take on – you voluntarily cede your right to look at all the evidence, and instead cede to those people, we give you this responsiblity. It’s a method of setting up a group independent of the central committee which has been repeatedly agreed inside the party, including at the democracy commission. Does this make them infallible? It does not. It does not. But let me repeat that the only people, the only people that have heard all the evidence in this case are the people on the disputes committee.

Not the bloggers. Not the gossips. Not the people who have attacked anybody else in this case. The only people who have heard it all are the disputes committee.

And therefore for me, it would have to be a very powerful reason to overturn their verdict. And I say – and I share this with you – that I would have argued to support the disputes committee report whatever it had said. If it had called for disciplinary action against Comrade Delta, I would have argued to accept it. If it had argued to expel Comrade Delta, I would have argued to accept it. And I now argue that we should accept the decisions that dispute committee has come up with, because I think to do otherwise is to impose our belief about what we know about the case above the actual evidence which the people heard themselves.

On X’s case, look, it was difficult. X came to me at the end of the process and said that she wanted to resign from her position working full time for the party. I took it upon myself to say it was inappropriate for X to do that. And I met her twice, and twice she told me that she wanted to resign from working for the party. It was stressful, it was difficult, but I continued to argue for her not to do that.

That doesn’t feel to me like the action of someone who is attempting to drive someone out of their position. It doesn’t feel to me like it was the action of someone who was trying to victimise somebody.

Then X said that she agreed about that, but did not feel – and it’s entirely reasonable – did not feel that she could work that she could continue to work in the (removed) department. (Identifying information removed) It was because of that that I tried to find a solution and compromise which has ended up with her working (removed – another party job). Don’t think that it was at all easy, but that doesn’t sound to me like victimisation.
(Muted applause)

KAREN: The next speaker is Pat S.

PAT S: Is this on? (Audience: No.) Is it on? (Audience: No.) (Mic gets fixed)

OK comrades, I want to just say a few things. Hearing this case was the hardest thing that I’ve done in my 38 years in the party. And it was made harder by the fact that, as Candy said at the beginning, we all knew Comrade Delta and we didn’t know W. We all tried to take that into account, and all measures to make things as accommodating as possible for W – I was in regular contact with her, and I’m sorry if she feels in any way that we fell short on doing that, because I really tried to make sure that we didn’t.

At the end of the hearing I ended up in a minority of one. As a result I’ve been the subject of lots of gossip and speculation.

It’s been said that I found Comrade Delta guilty of rape. I didn’t – I agree with the majority on that question absolutely. My disagreement came around the question of sexual harassment, and at the end of the hearing I was very uneasy about that question.

After X came forward as a witness, I reached the conclusion that while sexual harassment was still not proven, it was likely that it had occurred. And I also felt that Comrade Delta’s conduct fell short of that that one should expect of a CC member.

As a result of this, I had stories put around that I was part of a plot to ‘get Comrade Delta’. I ask the comrades this – why would I be part of a plot to get Comrade Delta? I’ve known him for years, I consider him a friend, I have enormous respect for what he’s done for the party, and any time we have been on a different side of arguments, there has been no rancorous feeling between us.

I am also not part of a feminist faction, a democracy faction or indeed any faction. The idea that Bambery or Counterfire would get hold of any information about this case is something that fills me with horror. I did not automatically believe the woman involved, any more than I automatically believed the CC member. I tried honestly and even-handedly to follow the evidence to a conclusion.

Since that time – and the conclusion was the one I’ve said – since that time I have had concerned. I was shocked at comrades who have not heard the evidence going round branding Comrade Delta a rapist. I think that is shocking.

I was equally shocked though when longstanding comrades, who really should have known better and knew nothing of the case, assigned motives to the two women who came forward which the disputes committee never assigned to them – indeed, which we explicitly rejected. I would say to the comrades who do that, that there are lessons that must be learned for the future, and one of them must be that any woman within the party has the right to come forward without their motives being speculated on by people who have no idea about the incident (inaudible as talks over applause).

This case was difficult for everybody, but at the end of the day, I could not do any other than stand by the conclusions I had reached, in fairness to all the parties concerned.
(Applause)

KAREN: The next speaker is Regi P.

REGI P: I just want to start off by saying that I do thank Candy and the disputes committee. (inaudible) I actually feel a bit more reassured. (inaudible) Over the past few months it’s been very very hard, we’ve had all sorts of rumours, all sorts of horrible things and it’s been really really dofficult to know what to do about it. It’s been difficult to respond and to go forward and talk to people who are coming up to us saying I’ve heard this, I’ve heard this, blah blah blah. It’s been a difficult time.

But I think it is important that we go back to how we got this disputes committee. Because we could going round and round in circles over lots of different things. (inaudible)

I was a delegate to last year’s conference, and I voted for the disputes committee. And I voted for them because I think these people are best placed to deal with these difficult questions. I would never want to hear any of these things, and I think it’s a very difficult thing they have to do. I voted for them because I trust that any case that comes up against them, they will deal with it with the utmost scrunity, regardless of any person’s long standing in the party, whatever they have done. (inaudible) What it actually means is if they are a CC member, we need to deal with it with the utmost scrutiny. We need to deal with it with the highest standards of the party. And I believe that this disputes committee has been able to hold each case to the highest standards.

I came here today to listen with an open mind, listen to the debates, listen to – I knew there were going to be oppositions. I have come to listen to both sides, then make up my mind, then vote and move forward. And what I’ve heard from the people who were there in the disputes committee is that they did try to deal with this as sensitively as possible, because we know, from our perspective we know that the bourgeois courts deal with these cases in horrible ways.

They changed the process in order to support her. They spent an extra large amount of time looking at this case. They treated it in a very broad way – they didn’t just look at one allegation. And I genuinely feel, from this hall, that I can say I believe this very very serious allegation has been dealt with with a very serious method. I feel a sense of relief actually, that I do feel reassured by this report. And I think the party has actually held up this case to its highest levels. (inaudible)

(Some applause)
KAREN: Thank you. The next speaker will be Sara B.

SARA B: Comrades, we have to welcome the fact that we have a disputes committee. We have no faith in the bourgeois court system to deliver justice. (inaudible) The contribution I’m about to make is in no way to undermine the fact that we have a disputes committee – that is the right way to go.

However, I think the fact that we’re having this debate, that there is a challenge, that we’ve heard today that the crux of the differences on the central committee come down to this report, that we’ve just heard Pat S’s view on the report and we’ve heard from one of the people who gave evidence as well – something has gone somewhat awry with this case, and I think it is our duty to look into it and come to a conclusion about our attitude to whether the report should be accepted or rejected.

Now some of the things that come out of this have been arguments that anyone who wants to challenge or disagrees with the outcome is either a feminist or it’s moralism. I just want to deal quickly with this. It’s nothing to do with feminism – I think that’s been dealt with actually. But I’ll talk about the question of moralism, and bourgeois morality – that somehow we’ve got something against people of different ages having relationships with each other, or it isn’t acceptable that people might be conducting affairs. This has got nothing to do with it comrades.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have morality inside the SWP. It’s not a case of ‘anything goes’. When Candy says that they wanted to make sure that the conduct of comrades didn’t fall below standards, I have to go further. It’s not just about falling below standatds that might be set down by society. Our standards have to be watertight, they have to be the highest of the highest standards, especially for our leading comrades who are leading who are leading in the class and in united fronts. We’ve got to be like Teflon – non-stick. (Applause)

We have to make sure that the answer we get is absolutely crystal clear. I do have a problem though about the procedure. What we’ve heard up to now – and it’s right that this should be debated at conference – is that we must defend the procedure, we must trust in those who are on the disputes committee. I’ve nothing against the integrity of the people on the disputes committee, or the fact that we have one.

But at the end of the day for me what counts is that the procedure should lead to an outcome that clarifies the situation, that gives us guidance and makes us feel confident, internally within our organisation and externally to the outside world, that we have done the right thing. And comrades, I don’t think we can wholeheartedly say that, and that in itself I think needs to be the reason why we reject the report in this instance, because I don’t think – actually, I agree with Charlie that we’re not infallible – I don’t think we must trust in the disputes committee because we must. That’s a cyclical argument.

We trust in the disputes committee because they deliver (inaudible) over key issues. I don’t think that’s been the case. The argument for rejection of the report is in this instance, not to re-open the case but to admit there is not the clarity we require, and to look for further improvements in the future to make sure that in the future the same mistakes aren’t repeated again.
(Applause)

KAREN: The next speaker is Esme C. While she’s getting up, we have a question: ‘Is there a political reason why, if conflicting accounts were given, the women were not believed?’

ESME C: The first thing I want to clear up is that if – well, we know the complainant is very distressed both by the outcome and by how she feels things have progressed since the hearing. Nobody on the disputes committee would want to cause stress to that woman or to the people around her.

I was one of the central committee members who was seconded to sit on the disputes committee, and none of us support the slander that has been put either about the claimant or about the people who supported the claimant, or the labels that have been attached to them. We believe that every comrade who has been involved in this process has the right to be treated with the dignity and respect that is befitting of our party’s ability to investigate very difficult and trying cases that are brought before us.

The second thing is I want to clear up something that X raised. X raised with us, why when she came to us with her evidence was she not allowed to bring witnesses, not allowed to have Comrade Delta’s testimony relayed back to her? The reason for that is that we’d asked her whether she wanted to make a formal complaint, and we’d made it clear to her that she had every right to do so. And at that point in time she did not want to make a formal complaint. Therefore we only listened to her testimony in regard to whether it changed our point of view on the original investigation.

We made it clear to her then, as we do now, that she still has every right to put in a formal complaint against Comrade Delta that will be heard formally by the disputes committee with witnesses on both sides, and with the chance for both sides to go through the formal process of scrutiny that happened in the first case that we heard.

That’s why that happened. It wasn’t an attempt to deny justice, it was an attempt to hear from somebody brought in after we’d heard the case some evidence that she thought we ought to hear, but who did not at that time want to make a formal complaint (inaudible).

The next thing I want to clear up really is about the inappropriate questioning. Because, you see, as Candy mentioned at the beginning, firstly many of the rumours about things we might or might not have asked are greatly untrue. Comrades know here that we should not listen to lies and rumours about what has or hasn’t been said. The second thing is that the questions that we did ask – and it was raised by somebody else, not myself and not the disputes committee, that we raised a question about the comrade’s sexual history. We asked one question that was related to the testimony brought to us by the complainant.

We didn’t introduce new material into that. We asked her about what she’d brought to us because she thought it was relevant to our investigation of what had happened. We asked a question about that, she told us the answer to that, and we accepted the answer that she had told us. So we weren’t asking inappropriate questions, we were trying to do the job that comrades had asked us to do, which is people make a complaint of rape comrades, I’m afraid we have to investigate that complaint. And we have to ask, within the remit of what we think is responsible questions – we have to be able to ask people about the evidence they give us.

I’m very sorry for the distress that that’s caused, but we have to be able to scrutinise -

KAREN: Wind up.

ESME: – the questions that people bring to us in a thorough way so we can report back to and be accountable in front of the party.
(Scattered applause)

KAREN: The next speaker is Gill G.

GILL G: OK, comrades – the theme for the last two days has been that we have to stop talking about this internal shit and build the class struggle. Absolutely right. But you know what? Sometimes you can’t move on unless you deal with something.

And the issue that we’re talking about this evening – this issue has been simmering away in the party for two years. It’s now part of a huge row that has been taking place over the past two or three months.

This is the reason the CC is split. This is why four young comrades have found themselves out of the party. This is why at this conference we’ve seen one group of comrades urged to view another group of comrades as the enemy. This is damaging.

And much of this contribution is addressed to the CC actually, because all of you – whichever side of the split – all of you are immensely capable. I hope that conference will vote to reject this disputes committee report, and will do that as an acknowledgment that there’s a problem, and that we’re going to deal with it. Not to re-open the case, but whatever the vote on the disputes committee, I want the CC to give leadership in a difficult situation.

I want you to take away the proposals that were put to you by thirty members of this organisation that we asked to be distributed, and that was not allowed. I want you to look at those proposals seriously, work together, and come back to this conference tomorrow with a proposed way forward.

Now those proposals – they included some very very basic things. That comrades who bring a complaint of serious sexual misconduct should be supported, should be kept informed and not be questioned on their sexual history. If we cannot agree this comrades, then frankly I despair.

Tbere’s this daft idea that other people have mentioned, that it’s impossible to criticise the disputes committee because it’s an elected body of this organisation, and somehow that will call the whole of our tradition into disrepute. Well that’s nonsense. That’s not political argument, that’s bureaucratic rubbish. Come on, comrades – this is an excellent organisation, but occasionally we make mistakes.

And I’ll tell you what, CC – if we do not deal with this at this conference, this will be on every fucking sectarian blog out there and this party will be dragged through the mud, and it will damage our work in years to come, it will damage our ability to recruit and build.

I’m so proud of this party. We can do so much better than this. But it has to start this evening. I’m moving rejection of the disputes committee report, because this time we’ve made a mistake. We should acknowledge that, we should move on.

The very final point – the complainant asked to be here, she was denied permission to be here. My understanding – I’ve never met her, but my understanding is she will be outside at the end of this session if comrades would like to meet her and discuss what actually happened.
(Applause)

KAREN: The last speaker will be Maxine B.

MAXINE B: The first thing I want to say is that I really feel that, despite what everybody’s said, that really there is a challenge being made to the integrity of the disputes committee.
For myself, I joined the party as a young woman through the question of women’s oppression. I thought the party was the best place to be, not just in terms of the theory but in terms of the way in which we act, our practice. And I really reject the idea that there has been some kind of cover up that has taken place, or the idea that the decision was made because Comrade Delta was on the central committee.

Now I think a lot of you in this room, maybe not some of the newer members, will know that two years ago it was Sheffield district and myself who wrote the article that went into the internal bulletin that attacked John Rees for his role, who was a leading central committee member. I tell you, to me I do not care if you’re on the central committee or what position you have in the party. If Comrade Delta had been found guilty, if we believed in any way he had done any of these things, I personally would have not only asked for him to be removed from the CC, I would have asked for him to be expelled from the party. I tell you, we did not.

The reason I say this really is that despite everything everybody has said who’s come up to oppose it, we are the only people who sat and listened for day in and day out to the evidence from both sides. I tell you, it’s not good enough to say that if a woman makes a complaint, then she is right. We have to be able to listen to the evidence that is there, and that is precisely what we did.

Now Pat didn’t, in the end, sign up to the statement. But I tell you, all five women, who have long term experience of dealing with questions around women’s oppression, did sign up to it, because we believed that he was not guilty. I tell you, it was a very very sad case that we had innuendos, that this has been pulled into factional activity as well, and I think that all of that is really to the detriment of the possibility of anybody getting justice inside this organisation. Because people have tittle-tattled all sorts of lies and innuendos across the party and made this into a highly factional issue. I think that this is completely and utterly wrong.

I had to bite my lip for the last three months while I listened to the stuff that has been said about this case, and I tell you, they were not true. To be honest, some of the things that have been said up here are not true.

But I believe that people have the right to confidentiality. And I do not see anybody else coming forward with any alternative to the way we did it. We gave W absolute respect. I urge you to vote for this report that we’ve made, and to be honest, nobody else has come forward to stand for the disputes committee. I do not know, if people are so angry about the way in which the disputes committee have dealt with this then really they should have come forward with an alternative slate.
(Applause)

KAREN: Comrades, I’m going to ask Candy to respond to the debate.

(From floor: Point of order! Point of order!)

KAREN: If you want to make a point of order then you need to go to the standing orders committee. (Waits) It’s about whether we should have additional speakers. We haven’t got time. (inaudible) I think we should continue, so Candy can you sum up.

CANDY: Comrades, I think the first thing to say is that we completely understand that it was an extremely difficult thing to do to come forward. I don’t think anybody would expect that to be any other way. I think that one of the criticisms against us is that we didn’t give W support in this, and I really think that that isn’t true. In fact Sadia said that Pat Stack had been wonderful in relation to the woman concerned, and Pat is the chair of the disputes committee who dealt with her. So I am absolutely sure that both before and during the process, we did everything we could to support her.

I’m afraid to say there was nothing we could do to make it a situation that wasn’t extremely distressing for her. We were very aware of that, and I think we did everything we could to try to support her.

Now I think it goes without saying that anyone who comes forward shouldn’t be victimised in any way for doing that. And I also, personally, believe that if anybody who has come forward in this way is accused in any way of having political motivations – whether it’s that they’re part of a grudge against Comrade Delta, or feminism, or a different view of women’s liberation – I personally believe that that is disgraceful and that kind of discussion shouldn’t be taking place.

But I’m here to tell you what the disputes committee did, and in terms of the disputes committee, we explicitly discussed whether those issues were relevant, and explicitly decided that they weren’t. We were here to listen to what was said to us.

In terms of whether people saw Comrade Delta’s evidence, he didn’t actually provide evidence in advance and that’s why they didn’t, why W didn’t see it.

In terms of who was on the panel – I mean, I explained that we were conscious of the fact that we knew Comrade Delta. To be honest comrades, I don’t believe you could have another panel of people who didn’t know Comrade Delta better than they knew that woman. And so that was a problem that we had to try to consciously overcome.

In terms of the questions that we asked – I can’t come back and answer some of the things that have been raised because I’m not going to go into the details. I can only assure you that we asked the questions that we did because we felt that we had to ask them to try to establish the issues that we were grappling with. (Karen talks over)

Sorry Karen, but just very quickly.

KAREN: You need to stop.

CANDY: OK. All I can do is just assure you that we looked at Comrade Delta’s role as a CC member, we took very seriously the high standard of behaviour, and we did everything we could to listen to the evidence and to come to the conclusions that we did. If we thought that -

KAREN: Stop.

CANDY: OK.
(Smattering of applause)

KAREN: We are now going to take a vote on this matter. People need their voting cards in order to vote. The vote is on whether to accept or reject the disputes committee report that has been presented to you today. (Repeats this louder.) Could I see those in favour of accepting the report as presented to you today.

(Votes are counted)

KAREN: Can I see those against, please?

(Votes are counted)

KAREN: The report’s been accepted. There were 231 votes for accepting, 209 votes to reject and 18 absentions.

3 responses

6 January, 2013

CARILLION’S FAILURES OF CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Category: Articles — By: Andy Newman at 4:27 pm

Today’s report in the Observer concerning the scandalous failure of care at the Surgicare centre in Hertfordshire, run by the services group Carillion, makes somber reading. Three deaths of patients who had been admitted for routine treatment prompted an independent report before Christmas, as the Observer recounts:

the report also contained the admission that nurses dealing with the case at the privately run centre had needed a ventilator at 8.30am the day before the patient died, but “no machine was available”. That admission, along with the report’s further revelation that clinical medical records are missing and that the resident medical officer at the Surgicentre did not ask for a more senior doctor to attend to Ms Mansi as her health deteriorated, has provoked her brother, Michael, to demand the closure of the centre, which has been at the centre of a series of scandals over the past year.

The Carillion run unit had already been investigated over potential failings in the cases of six patients who suffered irreversible sight loss after treatment. There have been 21 serious clinical and patient information incidents since the clinic opened in September 2011. The clinic also lost the records of 8,500 ophthalmology outpatients last year, prompting local MP Stephen McPartland to back calls for Carillion to lose its licence.

Carillion is a giant company, with annual revenue of around £5 billion, employing about 45000 people around the globe. Significantly, it earns millions of pounds from offering facilities management services within the UK public sector.

The latest scandal must raise questions about Carillion’s low standards of corporate governance, mired as the company is in controversy about unlawful shakedowns and extortion from low paid Asian workers at a Swindon hospital, which has been obscured by years of cover ups, and now by victimization of the whistle-blowers who reported the scandal to management. The allegations of extortion by supervisors were known to Carillion management as long ago as 2007, and at Director level as long ago as 2009, but no effective investigation was undertaken and no action to protect the staff until the workers commenced strike action, in February 2012.

A company with strong ethical values, and a robust culture of effective management would have acted swiftly to identify the truth behind allegations of extortion by white supervisors from Asian staff. Instead Carillion conducted farcically flawed investigations in Swindon, where the victimized staff were too intimidated to give evidence, and where Carillion seemed to operate on the assumption that their white supervisors were inherently more truthful than their Asian staff. Anti-corruption recommendations made in 2010 were simply ignored by local management, who Carillion now acknowledge failed to implement them. Following support from the GMB union, ten members of staff finally did give evidence that they had been forced to give gold and other goods to their supervisors to secure their holiday approvals, shift changes and other work rights they were entitled to. In seeming contravention of the Public Interest Disclosure Act, Carillion has disciplined the whistle blowers; and Carillion further admitted to the Bristol Employment Tribunal in December that no disciplinary sanction has yet been issued to any supervisor.

It doesn’t even end there. Carillion has been up to its neck in the civil liberties scandal of blacklisting, where an unlawful register was maintained on behalf of construction companies, to share information with the aim of preventing workers who the companies disapproved of from gaining employment.

The Blacklist Support Group, run to help workers whose lives have been blighted by this scandal, report that the Information Commissioners Office specifically identified both Tarmac and Carillion as being subscribers to the Consulting Association, the organization that administered the unlawful blacklist. Carillion came into being after the demerger of Tarmac in 1999. Prior to this date Tarmac was a major subscriber to the Consulting Association blacklist. After 1999, Carillion carried on the same operations.

The Information Commissioners Office has also now released hundreds of pages of un-redacted blacklist files which highlight the role played by Carillion and a number of their subsidiaries in blacklisting. Crown House is only one of those firms identified. Schal International and SkyBlue Employment Agency (both wholly owned subsidiaries of Carillion) are also specifically identified in the blacklist files. John Mowlem Ltd – now trading as Carillion (JM) Ltd is also identified. So far there is evidence that 224 workers were blacklisted by Carillion.

The Consulting Association sales book, records and invoices show that Carillion itself was charged subscription fees, additional fees for checking names and charges for attending Consulting Association meetings between 1999 (when Carillion was set up) and 2008 (a few weeks before the Consulting Association was closed down). Between 1999 and 2006 alone, Carillion paid the Consulting Association £32,182.74 + VAT This is one of the highest amounts charged to any of the subscribing companies. Prior to 1999, Tarmac was being invoiced for these services. John Mowlem Limited now trading as Carillion (JM) Limited had a separate set of invoices and salesbook records.

Carillion was charged for attending numerous Consulting Association meetings in Scotland, the North West, London and the South East region and Woodstock throughout this period. Senior managers employed directly by Carillion were attending Consulting Association meetings as late as 2008.

The unredacted blacklist files and financial documents on many occasions identify the name or provide the initials of the senior managers who passed on information to the blacklist. This information supplied by Carillion continued to be used for blacklisting up until 2009.

For example, identified as the “Main Contact” for Carillion is LK – (Carillion’s HR Director, Liz Keates); also mentioned is JB – John Ball – Head of Human Resources at Carillion in 1999. John Blake a current senior manager for Carillion admitted collating information that appeared on a blacklist file and sending it to John Ball at Carillion Head Office whilst giving evidence during the Smith v Carillion Employment Tribunal in January 2012.

These claims about Carillion’s role in blacklisting have been put forward on numerous occasions in undisputed written witness statements and oral evidence at various Employment Tribunals. Much of the information was first exposed on Alan Wainwright’s online blog (ex-Director of Industrial Relations for Carillion who became a whistleblower)
If any of these facts were incorrect, Carillion have had every opportunity to refute them in court but have always declined to do so.

Yet, Carillion’s CEO, Richard Howson, now denies that Carillion have at any time participated in blacklisting of trade union members. In an attempt to protect the Carillion brand, he claims that the only part of the Carillion empire ever to have used the Consulting Association was a subsidiary called Crown House and that ended in 2004.

It seems to be further evidence of poor corporate governance that the CEO of the organization denies facts which Carillion has not sought to refute at Employment Tribunals, and some of which Carillion managers have themselves admitted in testimony. This suggests that Mr Howson should better inform himself before making public statements on blacklisting.

Carillion is a very major player in providing public services, running schools, hospitals, and council services paid for out of the public purse. For example its recent bid to run education services in Stafford would have been worth at least £700 million, and could have been worth £5bn over the project life. During the course of that bid, a senior officer from Stafford Council who had been involved in early stages of the procurement resigned from the council and took up employment with Carillion.

Hull City Council recently voted unanimously to review their procurement processes, to seek to exclude companies involved in the scandal of unlawful blacklisting. It is high time that private companies making profits from public services recognize that they need to match up to the ethical standards that the public expects.

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NEW BLOGS

Category: blogging — By: Phil BC at 1:54 pm

Time for a rundown of the latest new(ish) blogs to have crossed the desk this last month. As ever, all are firmly on the left and well worth checking out.

1. Anne Fairweather (Labour) (Twitter)
2. Dream Housing (Unaligned) (Twitter)
3. Grumpy Old Trot (Unaligned)
4. HegemonyOrBust (Unaligned)
5. Labour for Democracy (Labour)
6. Laura McInerney (Unaligned/Education) (Twitter)
7. Lipstick Socialist (Unaligned) (Twitter)
8. Next Generation Labour (Labour) (Twitter)
9. Not Such A Wonderful World (Unaligned)
10. sandrassp (SSP)
11. SharonGooner’s Blog (Unaligned) (Twitter)
12. Solidarity Bear (Unaligned)
13. The Political Idealist (Labour) (Twitter)
14. The Rants of Sophia C Botha (Green) (Twitter)
15. This Nightmare Will Pass Away With the Morning (Labour) (Twitter)
16. Unlearning Economics (Unaligned) (Twitter)
17. What You Should Be Angry About (Unaligned) (Twitter)

That’s it for December/January. If you know of any new blogs that haven’t featured before then drop me a line via the comments, email or Twitter. Please note I’m looking for blogs that have started within the last 12 months. The new blog round up is posted on the first Sunday of every month, and is also cross-posted to A Very Public Sociologist.

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5 January, 2013

UNITE BRANCHES SHOULD RE-NOMINATE LEN MCCLUSKEY

Category: Articles — By: Andy Newman at 12:43 pm

Nomination forms should be sent to branches by 7th January. Therefore UNITE branches need to have a meeting between now and 15th February. If you don’t get nomination papers to the branch, then e-mail ELECTIONS@UNITETHEUNION.ORG

LEN’S DETAILS: BRANCH NW/567 – NUMBER 1121

Download the United Left leaflet supporting Len here

United left argues that Len McCluskey’s term of office from Jan 2010 has seen:

•Real leadership in the fight against austerity – UNITE’s message is clear: “no to all cuts – don’t make workers pay for the crisis”
•Branch reorganisation to create workplace branches
•Genuine empowerment to members with the branch as the base Branch funding for every branch implemented
•£25M dispute fund set up Leverage strategy developed and now major resources devoted to further work
•A genuine fighting back strategy that is seeing real wins for UNITE workers when they take strike action
•Community membership introduced – a first in the union movement 50,000 new members from a relaunched 100% campaign
•Plans for a new conference/training centre in Birmingham city centre
•A real fightback in the Labour Party with a brand new UNITE political strategy – no more blank cheques!
•A culture of openness, tolerance and democracy throughout the union
•New ecomms strategy giving UNITE the best website and member contact in the union movement
•Membership data systems overhauled and simplified
•No repudiations of any dispute since Len took office Root and branch review started of every UNITE department to make it “fit for purpose”
•New impetus to our international work -developing a fighting back organising strategy in all the GUFS
•Ending the TGWU/AMICUS divide and genuinely uniting our new UNITE union

Broadly these positions are accurate, and Len has done a good job so far, and it is in the interests of the left to continue to stabilise the union under left leadership.

42 responses

4 January, 2013

BRITAIN AND THE FALKLANDS WAR: “A WORLD CUP WITH GUNS”

Category: Articles — By: admin at 3:00 pm

This brilliant essay by Eric Hobsbawm first appeared in Marxism Today, in January 1983, under the original title of “Falklands Fallout”.

Patriotism in the hands of the labour movement is a powerful weapon. Patriotism in the hands of the Right is fraught with danger. The Falklands war sounded some alarm bells which the Left ignores at its peril.

More has been talked about the Falklands than about any other recent issue in British and international politics and more people lost their marbles about this than about almost anything else. I don’t mean the great bulk of the people, whose reactions actually had very little to do with the Falklands.

Hardly anybody knew about the Falklands. I suppose the number of people in this country who had any personal relations with the Falklands or even knew anybody who had been there, is minimal. The 1680 natives of these islands were very nearly the only people who took an urgent interest in the Falklands, apart of course from the Falkland Island Company, which owns a good deal of it, ornithologists and the Scott Polar Research Institute, since the islands are the basis of all the research activities in the Antarctic. They were never very important, or at least they haven’t been since World War I or perhaps just the beginning of World War II.

They were so insignificant and so much out of the centre of interest, that Parliament let the running be made by about a dozen MPs, the Falklands lobby, which was politically a very, very mixed lot. They were allowed to stymie all the not very urgent efforts of the Foreign Office to settle the problem of the islands’ future. Since the government and everybody else found the Falklands totally without interest, the fact that they were of urgent interest in Argentina, and to some extent in Latin America as a whole was overlooked. They were indeed far from insignificant to the Argentines. They were a symbol of Argentine nationalism, especially since Peron. We could put the Falklands problem off for ever, or we thought we could, but not the Argentinians.

A question of neglect

Now, I’m not judging the validity of the Argentine claim. Like so many nationalist claims it can’t bear much investigation. Essentially it’s based on what you might call ‘secondary school geography’ — anything that belongs to the continental shelf ought to belong to the nearest country — in spite of the fact that no Argentines had ever actually lived there. Nevertheless we’re bound to say that the Argentine claim is almost certainly rather stronger than the British claim and has internationally been regarded as rather stronger. The Americans for instance never accepted the British claim, whose official justification changed from time to time. But the point isn’t to decide which claim is stronger. The point is that, for the British government, the Falklands were about as low as they could be on its list of priorities. And it was totally ignorant of Argentine and Latin American views, which are not merely those of the junta but of all Latin America.

As a result it managed, by withdrawing the one armed ship, The Endurance, which had always been there symbolically indicating that you couldn’t take the Falklands over, to suggest to the Argentinian junta that the UK wouldn’t resist. The Argentine generals, who were patently crazy and inefficient as well as nasty, decided to go ahead with the invasion. But for mismanagement by the UK government, the Argentine government would pretty certainly not have decided to invade. They miscalculated and they should never have invaded but it’s perfectly clear that the British government actually precipitated the situation, even though it did not mean to. And so, on April 3 the British people discovered that the Falklands had been invaded and occupied.

The Government should have known that an invasion was imminent, but claimed it didn’t, or at any rate if it did know it took no action. This is of course being investigated at the moment by the Franks Commission.

An upsurge of popular feeling

But what was the situation in Britain when war broke out and during the war itself? Let me try and summarise it fairly briefly. The first thing that happened was an almost universal sense of outrage among a lot of people, the idea that you couldn’t simply accept this, something had to be done. This was a sentiment which was felt at all levels right down to the grass roots and it was unpolitical in the sense that it went through all parties and was not confined to the Right or to the Left. I know of lots of people on the Left within the movement, even on the extreme Left who had the same reaction as people on the Right. It was this general sense of outrage and humiliation which was expressed on that first day in Parliament when the pressure for action actually came not from Thatcher and the Government, but from all sides, the ultra-Right in the Conservatives, the Liberals, and Labour, with only the rarest of exceptions. This 1 think was a public sentiment which could actually be felt.

Anybody who had any kind of sensitivity to the vibes knew that this was going on, and anyone on the Left who was not aware of this grass roots feeling, and that it was not a creation of the media, at least, not at this stage, but genuinely a sense of outrage and humiliation, ought seriously to reconsider their capacity to assess politics. It may not be a particularly desirable sentiment, but to claim that it didn’t exist is quite unrealistic.

Irresistible decline

Now this upsurge of feeling had nothing to do with the Falklands as such. We have seen that the Falklands were simply a far-away territory swathed in mists off Cape Horn, about which we knew nothing and cared less. It has everything to do with the history of this country since 1945 and the visible acceleration of the crisis of British capitalism since the late 1960s and in particular the slump of the late 70s and early 80s. So long as the great international boom of Western capitalism persisted in the 50s and 60s even the relatively weak Britain was to some extent gently borne upwards by the current which pushed other capitalist economies forward even more rapidly. Things were clearly getting better and we didn’t have to worry too much although there was obviously a certain amount of nostalgia around the place.

And yet at a certain stage it became evident that the decline and crisis of the British economy were getting much more dramatic. The slump in the 70s intensified this feeling and of course since 1979 the real depression, the deindustrialisation of the Thatcher period and mass unemployment, have underlined the critical condition of Britain.

So the gut reaction that a lot of people felt at the news that Argentina had simply invaded and occupied a bit of British territory could have been put into the following words: ‘Ours is a country which has been going downhill for decades, the foreigners have been getting richer and more advanced than we are, everybody’s looking down on us and if anything pitying us, we can’t even beat the Argentinians or anybody else at football any more, everything’s going wrong in Britain, nobody really quite knows what to do about it and how to put it right. But now it’s got to the point where some bunch of foreigners think they can simply march some troops onto British territory, occupy it and take it over, and they think the British are so far gone that nobody’s going to do anything about it, nothing’s going to be done. Well, this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, something’s got to be done. By God we’ll have to show them that we’re not really just there to be walked over.’ Once again, I’m not judging the validity of this point of view but I think this is roughly what a lot of the people who didn’t try and formulate it in words felt at that moment.

Decline of the Empire

Now in fact, we on the Left had always predicted that Britain’s loss of Empire, and general decline would lead to some dramatic reaction sooner or later in British politics. We hadn’t envisaged this particular reaction but there’s no question that this was a reaction to the decline of the British Empire such as we had predicted for so long. And that is why it had such very wide backing. In itself it wasn’t simply jingoism. But, though this feeling of national humiliation went far beyond the range of simple jingoism, it was easily seized by the Right and it was taken over in what I think was politically a very brilliant operation by Mrs Thatcher and the Thatcherites. Let me quote her in the classic statement of what she thought the Falklands war proved: ‘When we started out there were the waverers and the faint-hearts, the people who thought we could no longer do the great things we once did, those who believed our decline was irreversible, that we could never again be what we were, that Britain was no longer the nation that had built an empire and ruled a quarter of the world. Well they were wrong.”

In fact the war was purely symbolic, it didn’t prove anything of the kind. But here you see the combination of somebody catching certain popular vibes, and turning them in a right wing (I hesitate, but only just, to say a semi-fascist direction). That is why from the right wing point of view it was essential not simply to get the Argentinians out of the Falklands, which would have been perfectly practicable by a show of force plus negotiation, but to wage a dramatic victorious war. That is why the war was provoked by the British side whatever the Argentine attitude. There’s little doubt that the Argentinians, as soon as they discovered that this was the British attitude, were looking for a way out of an intolerable situation. Thatcher wasn’t prepared to let them because the whole object of the exercise was not to settle the matter now but to prove that Britain was still great, if only in a symbolic fashion. At virtually every stage the policy of the British government in and out of the United Nations was one of total intransigence. I’m not saying that the junta made it easy to come to a settlement but I think historians will conclude that a negotiated withdrawal of the Argentinians was certainly not out of the question. It wasn’t seriously tried.

A new alliance

This provocative policy had a double advantage. Internationally, it gave Britain a chance to demonstrate her hardware, her determination and her military power. Domestically, it allowed the Thatcherites to seize the initiative from other political forces within and outside the Conservative Party. It enabled a sort of take-over by the Thatcherites not only of Conservative camp but of a great area of British politics. In a curious way the nearest parallel to the Thatcherite policy during the Falklands war is the Peronist policy which, on the other side, had first launched the Falklands into the centre of Argentine politics. Peron, like Mrs Thatcher and her little group, tried to speak directly to the masses using the mass media, over the heads of the establishment. In our case that included the Conservative establishment as well as the Opposition. She insisted on running her own war. It wasn’t a war run by Parliament. It wasn’t even run by the Cabinet; it was a war conducted by Mrs Thatcher and a small War Cabinet, including the chairman of the Conservative Party.

At the same time she established direct lateral relations, which I hope will not have long term political effects, with the military. And it is this combination of a direct demagogic approach to the masses, by-passing the political processes and the establishment, and the forging of direct lateral contact with the military and the defence bureaucracy, that is characteristic of the war.

Neither costs nor objectives counted, least of all of course the Falklands, except as symbolic proof of British virility, something which could be put into headlines. This was the kind of war which existed in order to produce victory parades. That is why all the symbolically powerful resources of war and Empire were mobilised on a miniature scale.

The role of the navy was paramount anyway, but traditionally public opinion has invested a lot of emotional capital in it. The forces sent to the Falklands were a mini-museum of everything which could give the Union Jack particular resonance — the Guards, the new technological strong men, the SAS, the paras; all were represented down to those little old gurkhas. They weren’t necessarily needed but you had to have them just because this was, as it were, a recreation of something like the old Imperial durbars, or the processions at the death or the coronation of British sovereigns.

Clochmerle rides again

We cannot in this instance quote Karl Marx’s famous phrase about history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, because no war is a farce. Even a little war in which 250 Britons and 2,000 Argentinians get killed is not a matter for jokes. But for foreigners who didn’t realise the crucial role of the Falklands war in British domestic politics, the war certainly seemed an absolutely incomprehensible exercise.

Le Monde in France called it a Clochemerle of the South Atlantic. You may remember that famous novel in which the Right and the Left in a small French town come to enormous blows over the question of where to situate a public convenience. Most Europeans simply could not understand what all the fuss was about. What they did not appreciate was that the whole thing was not about the Falklands at all and not about the right of self-determination. It was an operation concerned basically with British politics and with the British political mood.

Having said that let me just say very firmly that the alternative was not between doing nothing and Thatcher’s war. I think it was politically absolutely impossible at this stage for any British government not to do anything. The alternatives were not simply to accept the Argentine occupation by passing the buck to the United Nations, which would have adopted empty resolutions, or on the other hand, Mrs Thatcher’s intended replay of Kitchener’s victory over the Sudanese at Omdurman. The pacifist line was that of a small and isolated minority, if indeed a minority with a respectable tradition in the labour movement. That line was simply politically not on. The very feebleness of the demonstrations which were being organised at the time showed this. The people who said the war was pointless, and should never have been started, have been proved right in the abstract, but they themselves have not benefited politically and aren’t likely to benefit from having been proved right.

A split in public opinion

The next point to note is more positive. Thatcher’s capture of the war with the aid of The Sun produced a profound split in public opinion, but not a political split along party lines. Broadly it divided the 80% who were swept by a sort of instinctive patriotic reaction and who therefore identified with the war effort, though probably not in as strident a manner as the Sun headlines, from the minority which recognised that, in terms of the actual global politics concerned, what Thatcher was doing made no sense at all.

That minority included people of all parties and none, and many who were not against sending a Task Force as such. I hesitate to say that it was a split of the educated against the uneducated; although it is a fact that the major hold-outs against Thatcherism were to be found in the quality press, plus of course the Morning Star. The Financial Times, the Guardian and the Observer maintained a steady note of scepticism about the whole business. I think it is safe to say that almost every single political correspondent in the country, and that goes from the Tory ones right down to the Left, thought the whole thing was loony. Those were the ‘faint-hearts’ against whom Mrs Thatcher railed. The fact that there was a certain polarisation but that the opposition, though it remained quite a small minority, was not weakened, even in the course of a brief and, in technical terms, brilliantly successful war, is significant.

Nevertheless, the war was won, fortunately for Mrs Thatcher very quickly and at a modest cost in British lives, and with it came an immediate and vast pay-off in popularity. The grip of Thatcher and the Thatcherites, of the ultra-right, on the Tory Party unquestionably increased enormously as a consequence. Mrs Thatcher in the meantime was on cloud nine and imagined herself as a reincarnation of the Duke of Wellington, but without that Irish realism which the Iron Duke never lost, and of Winston Churchill but without the cigars and, at least one hopes, without the brandy.

Short term effects

Now let me deal with the effects of the war. I shall here only mention briefly the short term effects, that is between now and the general election. The first of these is likely to concern the debate on whose fault it is. The Franks Commission is at present inquiring into precisely this. It is certain that the government, including Mrs Thatcher, will come out badly, as they deserve to. The second issue is the cost of the operation and the subsequent and continuing expense of maintaining the British presence in the Falklands.

The official statement is that it is going to be about £700 millions so far, but my own guess is that it almost certainly will run into thousands of millions. Accountancy is, as is well known, a form of creative writing, so exactly how you calculate the cost of a particular operation of this kind is optional, but whatever it is, it will turn out to be very, very, expensive. Certainly the Left will press this issue and they ought to. However, unfortunately, the sums are so large as to be meaningless to most people. So while the figures will go on being much quoted in political debate, I suspect this issue won’t be very prominent or politically very effective.

The third issue is the bearing of the Falklands on British war policy, or defence policy as everybody now likes to call it. The Falklands war will certainly intensify the savage internal warfare among admirals, air marshals, generals and the Ministry of Defence which has already led to one post-Falklands casualty, the Minister of Defence himself, Nott. There is very little doubt that the admirals used the Falklands affair to prove that a large navy, capable of operating right across the globe, was absolutely essential to Great Britain — whereas everybody else knows that we can’t afford it and what’s more it just isn’t worth keeping a navy of that size in order to be able to supply Port Stanley. These discussions will certainly raise the question of whether Britain can afford both a global navy and Trident missiles, and what exactly the role and importance of independent British nuclear weapons is. So to this extent, they can play a part in the development of the campaign for nuclear disarmament which should not be underestimated.

Next, the future of the Falkland Islands themselves. This, once again, is likely to be of little general interest since the Islands will cease to be of any serious interest to most Britons again. But it will be an enormous headache for civil servants, for the Foreign Office and for anybody else involved because we have no policy for the future It wasn’t the object of the war to solve the problems of the Falkland Islands. We are simply back to square one, or rather back to square minus one, and something will sooner or later have to be done to find a permanent solution for this problem unless British governments are simply content to keep an enormously expensive commitment going for ever, for no good purpose whatever, way down there by the South Pole.

Patriotism and the Left

Finally, let me deal with the more serious demonstrated the strength and the political potential of patriotism, in this case in its jingo form. This should not perhaps surprise us, but Marxists haven’t found it easy to come to terms with working class patriotism in general and English or British patriotism in particular. British here means where the patriotism of the non-English peoples happens to coincide with that of the English; where it doesn’t coincide, as is sometimes the case in Scotland and Wales,

Marxists have been more aware of the importance of nationalist or patriotic sentiment. Incidentally I suspect that while the Scots felt rather British over the Falklands, the Welsh didn’t. The only parliamentary party which, as a party, opposed the war from the start was Plaid Cymru and of course, as far as the Welsh are concerned, ‘our lads’ and ‘our kith and kin’ are not in the Falklands, but in Argentina. They are the Patagonian Welsh who send a delegation every year to the National Eistedfodd in order to demonstrate that you can still live at the other end of the globe and be Welsh. So as far as the Welsh are concerned the reaction, the Thatcherite appeal on the Falklands, the ‘kith and kin’ argument, probably fell by the wayside.

Now there are various reasons why the Left and particularly the Marxist Left has not really liked to come to terms with the question of patriotism in this country.

There’s a particular historical conception of internationalism which tends to exclude national patriotism. We should also bear in mind the strength of the liberal/radical, antiwar and pacifist tradition which is very strong, and which certainly has passed to some extent into the labour movement. Hence there’s a feeling that patriotism somehow conflicts with class consciousness, as indeed it frequently does, and that the ruling and hegemonic classes have an enormous advantage in mobilising it for their purposes, which is also true.

Perhaps there is also the fact that some of the most dramatic and decisive advances of the Left in this century were achieved in the fight against World World I, and they were achieved by a working class shaking off the hold of patriotism and jingoism and deciding to opt for class struggle; to follow Lenin by turning their hostility against their own oppressors rather than against foreign countries.

After all, what had wrecked the Socialist International in 1914 was precisely the workers failing to do this. What, in a sense, restored the soul of the international labour movement was that after 1917, all over the belligerent countries the workers united to fight against the war, for peace and for the Russian Revolution.

The British tradition

These are some of the reasons why Marxists perhaps failed to pay adequate attention to the problem of patriotism. So let me just remind you as an historian that patriotism cannot be neglected. The British working class has a long tradition of patriotism which was not always considered incompatible with a strong and militant class consciousness.

In the history of Chartism and the great radical movements in the early 19th century we tend to stress the class consciousness. But when in the 1860s one of the few British workers actually to write about the working class, Thomas Wright the ‘journeyman engineer’, wrote a guide to the British working class for middle class readers, because some of these workers were about to be given the vote, he gave an interesting thumbnail sketch of the various generations of workers he’d known as a skilled engineer.

When he came to the Chartist generation, the people who had been born in the early 19th century, he noted that they hated anything to do with the upper classes, and would not trust them an inch. They refused to have anything to do with what we would call the class enemy. At the same time he observed that they were strongly patriotic, strongly anti-foreign and particularly anti-French. They were people who had been brought up in their childhood in the anti-Napoleonic wars. Historians tend to stress the Jacobin element in British labour during these wars and not the anti-French element which also had popular roots. I’m simply saying you cannot write patriotism out of the scenario even in the most radical period of the English working class.

Throughout the 19th century there was a very general admiration for the navy as a popular institution, much more so than the army. You can still see it in all the public houses named after Lord Nelson, a genuinely popular figure. The navy and our sailors were things that Britons, and certainly English people, took pride in. Incidentally, a good deal of 19th century radicalism was built on an appeal not just to workers and other civilians but to soldiers.

Reynold’s News and the old radical papers of those days were much read by the troops because they systematically took up the discontents of the professional soldiers. I don’t know when this particular thing stopped, although in the Second World War the Daily Mirror succeeded in getting a vast circulation in the army for precisely the same reason. Both the Jacobin tradition and the majority anti-French tradition are thus part of English working class history though labour historians have stressed the one and played down the other.

Again, at the beginning of World War I the mass patriotism of the working class was absolute genuine. It was not something that was simply being manufactured by the media. It didn’t exclude respect for the minority within the labour movement who failed to share it. The anti-war elements and the pacifists within the labour movement were not ostracised by the organised workers.

In this respect there was a great difference between the attitude of workers and of the petty bourgeois jingoists. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the largest single volunteer mass recruitment into any army ever, was that of British workers who joined up in 1914-1915. The mines would have been empty but for the fact that the government eventually recognised that if it didn’t have some miners in the mines it wouldn’t have any coal. After a couple of years many workers changed their mind about the war, but the initial surge of patriotism is something we have to remember. I’m not justifying these things, simply pointing to their existence and indicating that in looking at the history of the British working class and the present reality, we must come to terms with these facts, whether we like them or not.

The dangers of this patriotism always were and still are obvious, not least because it was and is enormously vulnerable to ruling class jingoism, to anti-foreign nationalism and of course in our days to racism. These dangers are particularly great where patriotism can be separated from the other sentiments and aspirations of the working class, or even where it can be counter-posed to them: where Nationalism can be counterposed to social liberation. The reason why nobody pays much attention to the, let’s call it, jingoism of the Chartists, is that it was combined with and masked by an enormous militant class consciousness. It’s when the two are separated, and they can be easily separated, that the dangers are particularly obvious. Conversely, when the two go together in harness, they multiply not only the force of the working class but its capacity to place itself at the head of a broad coalition for social change and they even give it the possibility of wresting hegemony from the class enemy.

Extraordinary 1945

That was why in the anti-fascist period of the 30s, the Communist International launched the call to wrest away national traditions from the bourgeoisie, to capture the national flag so long waved by the Right. So the French Left tried to conquer, capture or recapture both the tricolour and Joan of Arc and to some extent it succeeded. In this country, we didn’t pursue quite the same object, but we succeeded in doing something more important. As the anti-fascist war showed quite dramatically, the combination of patriotism in a genuine people’s war proved to be politically radicalising to an unprecedented degree. At the moment of his greatest triumph, Mrs Thatcher’s ancestor, Winston Churchill, the unquestioned leader of a victorious war, and a much greater victorious war than the Falklands, found himself, to his enormous surprise, pushed aside because the people who had fought that war, and fought it patriotically, found themselves radicalised by it. And the combination of a radicalised working class movement and a peoples’ movement behind it proved enormously effective and powerful.

Michael Foot may be blamed for thinking too much in terms of ‘Churchillian’ memories — 1940, Britain standing alone, anti-fascist war and all the rest of it, and obviously these echoes were there in Labour’s reaction to the Falklands. But let us not forget that our ‘Churchillian’ memories are not just of patriotic glory — but of victory against reaction both abroad and at home: of Labour triumph and the defeat of Churchill. It’s difficult to conceive this in 1982 but as an historian I must remind you of it. It is dangerous to leave patriotism exclusively to the Right.

Rule Britannia

At present it is very difficult for the Left to recapture patriotism. One of the most sinister lessons of the Falklands is the ease with which the Thatcherites captured the patriotic upsurge which initially was in no sense confined to political Conservatives let alone to Thatcherite ones. We recall the ease with which non-jingos could be tagged, if not actually as anti-patriotic, then at least as ‘soft on the Argies’; the ease with which the Union Jack could be mobilised against domestic enemies as well as foreign enemies. Remember the photograph of the troops coming back on the troopships, with a banner saying ‘Call off the rail strike or we’ll call an air strike’. Here lies the long term significance of the Falklands in British political affairs.

It is a sign of very great danger. Jingoism today is particularly strong because it acts as a sort of compensation for the feelings of decline, demoralisation and inferiority, which most people in this country feel, including a lot of workers. This feeling is intensified by economic crisis. Symbolically jingoism helps people feel that Britain isn’t just foundering, that it can still do and achieve something, can be taken seriously, can, as they say, be ‘Great’ Britain. It is symbolic because in fact Thatcherite jingoism hasn’t achieved anything practical, and can’t achieve anything practical.

Rule Britannia has once again, and I think for the first time since 1914, become something like a National Anthem. It would be worth studying one day why, until the Falklands period, Rule Britannia had become a piece of musical archaeology and why it has ceased to be so. At the very moment when Britain patently no longer rules either the waves or an empire, that song has resurfaced and has undoubtedly hit a certain nerve among people who sing it. It is not just because we have won a little war, involving few casualties, fought far away against foreigners whom we can no longer even beat at football, and this has cheered people up, as if we had won a World Cup with guns. But has it done anything else in the long run? It is difficult to see that it has, or could have, achieved anything else.

Saviour on a white horse

Yet there is a danger. As a boy I lived some formative and very young years in the Weimar Republic, among another people who felt themselves defeated, losing their old certainties and their old moorings, relegated in the international league, pitied by foreigners. Add depression and mass unemployment to that and what you got then was Hitler. Now we shan’t get fascism of the old kind. But the danger of a populist, radical Right moving even further to the right is patent. That danger is particularly great because the Left is today divided and demoralised and above all because vast masses of the British, or anyway the English, have lost hope and confidence in the political processes and in the politicians: any politicians. Mrs Thatcher’s main trump card is that people say she isn’t like a politician.

Today with 3,500,000 unemployed, 45% of the electors at Northfield, 65% of the elctors at Peckham, don’t bother to vote. In Peckham 41% of the electorate voted for Labour in 1974, 34% in 1979, and 19.1% today. I’m not talking of votes cast but of the total number of people in the constituency.

In Northfield, which is in the middle of the devastation zone of the British motor industry, 41% voted for Labour in 1974, 32% in 1979 and 20% today. The main danger lies in this de-politicisation, which reflects a disillusionment with politics born of a sense of impotence.

What we see today is not a substantial rise in the support for Thatcher and the Thatcherites. The Falklands episode may have temporarily made a lot of Britons feels better, though the ‘Falklands factor’ is almost certainly a diminishing asset for the Tories; but it has not made much difference to the basic hopelessness, apathy and defeatism of so many in this country, the feeling that we can’t do much about our fate. If the Government seems to hold its support better than might be expected, it is because people (quite mistakenly) don’t put the blame for the present miserable condition of the country on Thatcher, but, more or less vaguely, on factors beyond her or any government’s control. If Labour hasn’t so far regained enough support — though it may still just do so — it isn’t only because of its internal divisions, but also, largely, because many workers don’t really have much belief in any politicians’ promises to overcome the slump and the long term crisis of the British economy.

So why vote for one lot rather than another? Too many people are losing faith in politics, including their own power to do much about it.

But just suppose a saviour were to appear on a white horse? None is likely to, but just suppose someone were to appeal to the emotions, to get that adrenalin flowing by mobilising against some foreigners outside or inside the country, perhaps by another little war, which might, under present circumstances, find itself turning into a big war, which, as we all know, would be the last of the wars? It is possible. I don’t think that saviour is going to be Thatcher, and to that extent I can end on a slightly up-beat note.

Free enterprise, to which she is committed, is not a winner, as fascist propaganda recognised in the 1930s. You can’t win by saying: ‘Let the rich get richer and to hell with the poor.’ Thatcher’s prospects are less good than Hitler’s were, for three years after he had come to power there was not much unemployment left in Germany, whereas three years after Thatcher came to power unemployment is higher than ever before and likely to go on climbing. She is whistling in the dark. She can still be defeated. But patriotism and jingoism has been used once to change the political situation in her favour and can be used again. We must be on the look-out. Desperate governments of the Right will try anything.
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