What promised to be a unique opportunity to construct a powerful socialist movement outside the Labour Party has been squandered on the altar of Scargill’s egotistical intolerance of opinions contrary to his own, and his perverse “back to the future” efforts to create a grotesque caricature of Stalinism.
When I joined I naively believed, like hundreds of others, that there was a chance to create a broad-based, democratic socialist organisation that could challenge the Blairite neo-liberal consensus. However, our calculations failed to take account of the fact that the word “democracy” does not figure in Scargill’s vocabulary and soon we were forced to downsize our expectations.
The Party constitution and many key policies, such as the European question, were decided by the leadership without any membership discussion or vote. The organisational structure was imposed upon members. Election candidates were forced upon branches and alliances with non-SLP socialists were unilaterally ruled out of order, often leading to the SLP splitting the left vote. Initially most members reluctantly accepted this imperfect state of affairs. As a new party with hardly any resources, it would take time to discuss and decide upon so many issues. However, it soon became apparent that Scargill and the leadership had no intention of allowing any such discussions to take place.
When members began to get together to discuss constitutional and policy changes, abusive missives from Scargill stated it was unconstitutional to try to change a constitution and policies that had not been voted on by the membership in the first place! Members signing petitions or sponsoring meetings critical of the leadership received letters from Scargill asking them to confirm or deny they had done this, and threatening disciplinary action. Branches having the audacity to question or challenge the wisdom of Scargill were closed down. Individuals regarded as “troublemakers” were expelled without any form of appeal or seeing the evidence against them.
When such actions failed to stem the growing opposition within the SLP, Scargill and his supporters resorted to crude gerrymandering and manipulation. Almost all the resolutions to December’s National Congress calling for democratic change have been ruled out of order for spurious and inconsistent reasons. I understand moves are underway to exclude leading democrats and debar them from standing for elections to leading party posts. To enforce its authoritarian regime the Scargill leadership allowed virulent homophobic propaganda to be openly distributed within the Party aimed at discrediting their critics, and turned a blind eye to violence and intimidation — which I personally witnessed and complained of to no effect.
Eventually, I decided I no longer wanted to be part of this crude, totalitarian regime and in September followed the lead of many other committed socialists and quit the Party. I anticipate my resignation will not be the last and more will follow the stitch-up that masquerades as its Congress in December. Having said that, I refuse to line up with those who smugly declare that the SLP was destined to fail, that it was premature, etc. Despite my experiences, I still believe that Scargill was 100% correct to call for the establishment of a socialist alternative to New Labour. Although the SLP will not fulfill this role, I am convinced that discussions now beginning to happen between Labour left-wingers, disgruntled SLP members, the Socialist Party and others, will eventually give rise to the broad-based socialist movement that thousands of us have been seeking for years.