The second SLP Congress was disastrous, with Arthur Scargill now running one of the most undemocratic regimes ever seen in what purports to be a socialist organisation. Despite such shenanigans, I am still convinced that he was 100% correct to call for the regroupment of the left outside of New Labour.
We have a lot to learn from the SLP experience and the rest of the non-Labour left. These organisations suffer identical problems to those of the Labour Party, namely the exclusion of rank and file members from the decision-making process and the drive to silence dissent. But now the rumblings in New Labour, the organised opposition to Scargill (about a third of the SLP membership), the recent split in the Socialist Party and elsewhere all suggest that a growing number of socialists are disaffected with the traditional authoritarian organisations of the left.
In their place we should establish a democratic, broad-based, inclusive movement with a multiplicity of views, currents and tendencies which span the socialist agenda from left reformism to revolutionary socialism. A number of us have recently come together under the name of the Socialist Democracy Group, to look at ways of starting this process.