Why does LLB display such hostility towards the Socialist Labour Party, when success by the SLP can only strengthen the hand of any remaining ‘left current’ within the New Labour monolith? Why does LLB run yet another hostile, inaccurate and tendentious article (Crisis in the SLP, LLB, November) prophesying fatal internal strife, doom and disaster for the SLP? What motivates such self-serving, but unfortunately predictable sectariana?
Wishing misery and failure on your neighbours and relatives is not an edifying mode of behaviour. The roots usually lie in low self-esteem and lack of success in the protagonists’ own activities. Unfortunately the defeat and marginalisation of the socialist tradition both domestically and internationally seems to have strengthened the utterly negative factionalism endemic on the British left — behaviour LLB supporters claim to eschew. The source of LLB’s warped, unbalanced and pre-determined attitude to internal or external difficulties the SLP faces — real, imagined or exaggerated — is obvious. LLB supporters have a dogmatic, unsustainable and incoherent attachment to continued political work within New Labour under any conditions. As a result most of those involved with LLB actually wish the attempt to construct an electoral alternative to New Labour — now a self-evident historical necessity — to fail.
The strength of one’s own political positions and strategy cannot be derived from identifying the weaknesses in others. We could all make untold public criticisms of various left groupings and personalities operating both within and outside New Labour. Doing so should only occur in the most exceptional circumstances.
In order to further the greater good LLB (supposedly) has a correct tradition of not publicising, or making, factional capital from internal divisions on the left — an attitude it clearly does not display towards the SLP. We ask that LLB disowns this unhealthy act of factionalism in its next edition.