Edward Platt, The New Statesmen
The supporters of the Socialist Workers Party who gathered in
Trafalgar Square on a bright sunny day at the end of March could not agree how
to define the relationship between their organisation and the rally taking
place around them. One seller of the weekly Socialist Worker, who was down from
Sheffield for the day, told me that Unite Against Fascism was a “front” for the
SWP, but the man working on the stall selling party literature was more
cautious: “It’s not an SWP event,” he said. “We’re part of it. But it’s bigger
than us.”
That was certainly true: UAF is an organisation with many
supporters, including many trade unions, and the demonstrators who had
assembled at the statue of Nelson Mandela outside the Houses of Parliament had
marched to Trafalgar Square beneath a wide array of banners. There were
Socialist Worker placards saying “No to racism: blame Tories and bosses not
migrants” but there were also banners of local branches of the National Union
of Teachers (NUT) and the Labour Party. “Hugs not Thugs”, said one, and another,
“Save Your Hate for the Daily Mail”. The speakers on the stage set up between
the fountains in Trafalgar Square reflected the make-up of the crowd: Wayman
Bennett, the joint secretary of UAF and a prominent figure in the SWP, was
followed by Diane Abbott and Christine Blower, the general secretary of the
NUT.
The speakers were interspersed with bands, evoking memories
of UAF’s predecessor the Anti-Nazi League, and the great days of Rock Against
Racism in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The SWP has always sought to “punch
above its weight”, as the saying goes, by attempting to co-ordinate a broad
constituency in support of a cause. But at the moment it has a particular
interest in surrounding itself with respectable figures, and in directing
attention towards its anti-fascist campaigns, because it is seeking to repair
the damage caused by a scandal that has played out over the past 18 months.
In 2010, one of its leading members, who has always been
referred to as “Comrade Delta”, was accused of sexually assaulting a young
female “comrade”, and the party’s attempt to deal with the matter via a
“disputes committee” composed largely of his colleagues has provoked anger and
derision. Three further allegations of rape prompted claims that sexual abuse
was “endemic” within the organisation.
Yet it was the suggestion that the leadership had protected
one of its own, and persuaded hundreds of members to collude in a cover-up,
that convinced many people it was irredeemably corrupt.
In March, the University of London Union, which used to let
rooms to the SWP for its annual conference on Marxism, changed its constitution
to allow its officers to ban the party from the premises and accused it of
being a “rape-apologist organisation which prides itself in creating an unsafe
space for young women”. The attacks are not only verbal: recently, SWP stalls
have been overturned at student demonstrations, and its activists harassed and
abused.
The man working on the stall at Trafalgar Square articulated
the defiant view that the leadership has taken throughout the affair: “We’re
not going anywhere,” he said. “If anyone thinks we are, they’re crazy.”
Yet such loyalty is increasingly rare: hundreds of former
members have left the party, many with scornful parting words for their former
comrades. “If I had died last year I should have died happy to have been a
party member,” wrote a long-standing member, Ian Birchall, in his resignation
letter. “Unfortunately, the events of the last year have changed everything.”
Birchall’s remark that he had never seen a “crisis remotely comparable to the
one we are now going through” carries some weight. He had been a member for 50
years and wrote a biography of Tony Cliff, the revered Trotskyist activist who
set it up.
Cliff was born Ygael Gluckstein in Palestine in 1917. He was
the son of a Zionist building contractor, although Paul Foot – the campaigning
journalist and long-standing SWP member – said he was “speedily converted out
of Zionism by observing the treatment of Arab children”. In 1947 he came to
Britain, where he changed his name, and established the Socialist Review Group,
which became the International Socialists (IS) in the early 1960s and then the
SWP in 1977. It defines itself as “a voluntary organisation of individuals who
understand the need to organise collectively to fight for the socialist
transformation of society”.
The transformation required is absolute, “for the present
system cannot be patched up”, and it will be achieved only “through the
self-activity and self-emancipation of the working class”. Tony Cliff said that
“the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class” and the
concept is often expressed by the slogan “Socialism from below”. Christopher
Hitchens, who was an early member of IS, said that the result of a “revolution
from below” would be that “those who worked and struggled and produced would be
the ruling class”.
Hitchens went on to become features editor of Socialist
Worker, the party’s newspaper, and book reviews editor of International
Socialism, its theoretical journal, but when he was a student at Oxford in
1967, his local branch of IS had no more than a dozen members. “For a long
time, these groups remained tiny,” Foot wrote, after Cliff’s death in 2000. Yet
the SWP became the dominant force on the far left in the late 1980s, in the
lead-up to the dissolution in 1991 of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
The end of the cold war had strengthened the SWP. It seemed
to bear out Cliff’s view that the Soviet Union had never been a socialist
society, but a “state capitalist” one, which “people on the left had no reason
to defend”, as David Renton, another member who left this year, said to me.
“Cliff toured the country, addressing rallies, saying I was right,” he recalled
when I met him at his house on an estate near the Caledonian Road in north
London.
Renton is an Old Etonian and the nephew of a former Tory
chief whip. By the time he joined the SWP in 1991, he had become used to living
in “a perpetual civil war” with his family and contemporaries at school, his
resignation letter said. He had been involved in other organisations on the far
left, but he was drawn to the SWP because he felt it was playing a positive
role in the upheavals of the time, and because of its approach to revolutionary
politics. “They were serious about the project, and the years it would take,
while not making the compromises with capitalism that would mean giving up
before you started,” he told me.
David Renton said that the SWP believed it was the natural home
for people to the left of Labour but it became apparent during the 1990s that
there was a “size threshold” it couldn’t pass. “The history of the SWP in the
next 20 years is watching a series of attempts to take this image of themselves
as a mass political party and give it legs,” he said.
Richard Seymour – the author of a critical account of
Hitchens’s journey from revolutionary socialist to advocate of the war on
terror – joined the party in 1998. “The situation politically wasn’t offering
much hope,” he told me, “but people had lots of anecdotes about past
experiences. They were saying we were nearing the beginning of a mass movement,
and when the anti-capitalist movement kicked off around ’99, and the anti-war
movement after 9/11, we had a sense that they were probably correct.”
The attempt to set up an organisation to exploit the
anti-globalisation campaigns failed, but the party had more success with Stop
the War, which was launched after the 11 September 2001 attacks, and reached
its apogee at the mass rally in London to demonstrate against the impending
invasion of Iraq. Few of the people who went on the march on 15 February 2003,
myself included, would have known it was organised by the SWP, and even fewer
joined the party as a result. But the scale of the protest offered a glimpse of
the influence to which the SWP aspired.
It attempted to capitalise on its success by forming an
alliance with the Respect Party, whose public face was the MP George Galloway.
Galloway won the parliamentary seat of Bethnal Green and Bow in London for
Respect in 2005 and later became MP for Bradford West, but the alliance with
the SWP collapsed in 2008. Respect’s national chair at the time, Linda Smith,
blamed the SWP’s “sectarianism” and “control-freak methods”, while the SWP said
Galloway and his allies were moving to the right.
The SWP had gained nothing from the venture, the journalist
Paul Anderson writes, except a “few recruits . . . and a lot of ridicule for
cosying up to barmy reactionary Islamists”. One of its periodic bouts of
infighting ensued: John Rees and Lindsey German – “the two leading figures most
responsible for the Islamist turn”, in Anderson’s phrase – were expelled, and a
new national secretary, who would come to be known to the wider public as
Comrade Delta, was appointed.
The first complaint against Comrade Delta was made in 2010. A
woman who was referred to as “Comrade W” accused him of sexually harassing her,
and he stepped down as national secretary while remaining part of the party’s
leadership: its central committee, or CC. The party was told about the
allegations at its conference in 2011.
Alex Callinicos – professor of European studies at King’s
College London and grandson of Richard Lyon-Dalberg-Acton, the 2nd Baron Acton
– introduced the session at which they were discussed. As the SWP’s
international secretary and the editor of International Socialism, Callinicos
is the party’s chief theorist, but according to Richard Seymour he was also its
“main pugilist” throughout the Delta affair. His speech has been described as
“a euphemistic triumph”. “At no point did Callinicos talk of sexual harassment
or sexual assault,” a former member wrote. “He made it sound like there had
been a lover’s tiff,” David Renton says. “He gave the impression it was a
relatively minor row, and said we have dealt with it because we have slightly
demoted this figure.”
Comrade Delta spoke next: he told the delegates that if they
“knew the very worst he was accused of, they would gasp at how empty the story
was”. Other leading figures spoke on his behalf, and Renton says the delegates
responded “to every signal that the misconduct was of the mildest character
possible by chanting, ‘The workers united will never be defeated,’ and gave
[Delta] a standing ovation.”
Rosie Warren, a student at Sheffield University who joined
the party during the student occupations of 2010, said it was a very
uncomfortable event: those who were not applauding were either as confused as
she was, or “some combination of disgusted and appalled”.
Charlie Kimber, the party’s new national secretary, maintains
that the standing ovation was provoked, not by the dismissal of the allegations
of sexual harassment, but by another attack on Delta. “I very much regret the
two became intertwined,” he told me.
The assurances that the affair was “a bit of a
misunderstanding” and that “both Delta and the female comrade wished to put it
all behind them” soon proved false. Comrade W was not satisfied with the result
of the original complaint; in fact, she came to the conclusion that she had
understated her case. She left the SWP in the autumn of 2010 because she felt
she could not remain a member while Delta was on the central committee, but she
rejoined a year later and in September 2012 she accused him of rape.
Even then, many people in the party still “didn’t want to
hear it”, Richard Seymour says. There were pragmatic reasons for that. Despite
a subscription-paying membership of no more than 2,000, the SWP employs 50 or
60 people full-time at its headquarters in Vauxhall, south London – and the
national secretary decides who gets the jobs. What’s more, many people liked
Comrade Delta and his strategy for the party. “He said we don’t need big united
fronts and all the rest of it: the workers and the trade unions are going to start
fighting back against austerity, and we have to help that struggle along,”
Seymour recalls. “A large chunk of the party had great sympathy with this.”
The younger members were not so easily placated. The
generational divide had personal and political dimensions: David Renton told me
that “almost all the young full-timers took against Delta” because they didn’t
like him.
Others found themselves at odds with the party’s
old-fashioned attitude to feminism, which it associated with “a separatism that
doesn’t really persist, particularly on campuses”, Rosie Warren says. “The
feminism we’d come across was focused largely on harassment and assault, and
getting angry at victim-blaming narratives,” she says. “So the knee-jerk
reaction we saw in the party when everything came out was completely alien to
us.”
Soldier of some revolution from below: Christopher Hitchens’s
first job was at Socialist Worker. Photo: Muir Vidler for the New Statesman,
2010
The party’s decision to investigate the allegation
internally, through its disputes committee, rather than referring it to the
police, is the most remarkable aspect of the affair: it has astonished people
outside the SWP, and some within it, too. “What right does the party have to
organise its very own ‘kangaroo court’ investigation and judgment over such
serious allegations against a leading member?” wrote the former Socialist
Worker journalist Tom Walker in his resignation letter. “None whatsoever.”
David Renton, who is also a barrister and has dealt with
cases of rape and sexual harassment, believes that it didn’t occur to the
disputes committee to suggest that the woman should go to the police – as one
of its members later said, the committee had “no faith in the bourgeois court
system to deliver justice”.
Comrade W’s reasons for not reporting the case to the police
are less clear, but Renton suggests she may have had two concerns: as well as
the understandable fear that the police would treat her case insensitively, she
may have believed that their priority would be to secure a conviction against
the leader of a revolutionary party – an attitude, he adds, that stems from an
overestimation of the SWP’s significance. “People on the left often do this,” Renton
says, citing Julian Assange’s belief that the rape charges against him must be
politically motivated because he is “the world’s number-one bad guy”. In other
words, she may have been trying to protect the organisation from what she saw
as a “predatory man” who should not be in a leadership position, and from state
scrutiny.
Regardless of what her motives were, Comrade W was “doubly
betrayed”, says another former member called Linda Rodgers. She came to the SWP
because she trusted it, and it should have told her it wasn’t competent to
investigate. “Would the DC [disputes committee] have investigated a murder?”
Rodgers wrote. “I would guess not, but then what does that say about the level
of seriousness with which the CC and DC treat rape?”
Kimber maintains that because the complainant did not want to
go to the police, they had no choice but to investigate themselves. Yet the
decision left the disputes committee “hopelessly out of its depth”, David
Renton says. None of its members had relevant experience, nor did they not seek
advice from party members who were lawyers. “I’m gobsmacked that no one ever
said
to the SWP, ‘Look, if you take statements, you’re collecting
criminal evidence.’ ”
Published accounts of the hearing, which was held over two
days in October 2012, exposed even more egregious flaws: Comrade Delta was
supplied with details of the complainant’s case weeks in advance but she was
not allowed to see his evidence beforehand, and the committee members – who
included colleagues of Delta’s, old and new – asked her questions about her
drinking habits and sexual past. Comrade W left the room in tears, saying that
they thought she was a “slut who asked for it”.
By the time the disputes committee presented its report to
the SWP’s annual national conference at Hammersmith Town Hall on 4-6 January
2013, the revolt against the party’s handling of the case had begun: four
members, who became known as the Facebook Four, had been expelled for
discussing the case on social media and two dissenting factions had emerged,
each with the support of 50 or 60 members. “The party was split in two,” Rosie
Warren says. “My organiser was desperately trying to get each half of our
district just to sit together.”
The DC told the conference that it had reached a unanimous
verdict: Comrade Delta had not raped Comrade W. It also found that he was not
guilty of being “sexually abusive or harassing”, though not unanimously: the
chair of the committee said he had decided “that while sexual harassment was
still not proven, it was likely that it had occurred”. He also felt that
Delta’s conduct “fell short” of what “one should expect of a CC member”.
The complainant was not allowed to speak, though she had
wanted to, but other people spoke on her behalf: one asked the conference to
reject the report because of the “serious failings in the way the hearing was
conducted” and another said that W felt “completely betrayed” by the way she
had been treated since the hearing. The conference was also told that a second
complaint of sexual harassment had been made against Delta which the committee
had not investigated. “It was all beyond belief,” Rosie Warren says. “I wasn’t
the only one who cried after that session, from fury as well as despair.”
The delegates were given no good reason to approve the
report, beyond that the people on the panel were long-standing members with
good reputations. “I couldn’t believe those voting in favour of the report had
been sat in the same room as me,” Warren says. “I couldn’t believe they were
people I had respected, taken leadership from – I couldn’t believe that we were
even in the same organisation. I couldn’t believe the injustice.”
The motion passed by the narrowest of margins – 231 for and
209 against, with 18 abstentions. Yet the leadership did not treat the result
as a warning, or a cause for reflection: critics say it was still not too late
to moderate its approach, but instead it imposed its authority by insisting
that Comrade Delta had been vindicated and that anyone who did not accept the
vote should leave the party.
News of the disputed report soon spread: a transcript of the
debate on the DC’s report appeared on the Socialist Unity website on 7 January
and people started asking what was happening. Three days later, Tom Walker
resigned from the SWP and from his job on Socialist Worker, saying he did not
believe that “anyone sensible” would ever join the party again.
“That was the beginning,” Richard Seymour says. Soon, the
“bourgeois media” picked up the story: Laurie Penny wrote an article for the
New Statesman website and the Daily Mail joined in.
Pressure came from outside the organisation, as well as
within: union organisers wrote an open letter asking the CC to reconsider its
approach to the case, and journalists and academics, including Ilan Pappé and
Owen Jones, said they would not speak at events organised by the SWP. Linda
Rodgers called on all the members of both the CC and the DC to resign, and
China Miéville, the science-fiction and fantasy writer who stood for parliament
in 2001 for the Socialist Alliance, the SWP’s electoral coalition, declared
that “the fight for the soul of the SWP is now on”.
The argument was partly about the nature of the SWP’s
internal processes. It operates what it calls “democratic centralism”, which
means that policies are debated during the three months running up to
conference, and voted on at conference. Once ratified, all members are required
to support them. In effect, argument is silenced for nine months of the year,
and even the conference debates are severely curtailed. According to Rosie
Warren, a member of the central committee would introduce each session with an
overarching description of the year’s events, after which lowlier members would
report successes in individual workplaces or campaigns. At the next session,
delegates would be handed a summary of the discussion and invited to agree with
it by vote. “It always struck me as really bizarre because there was nothing to
vote on,” she says. “It was just a description of the session.” It is hardly
surprising that many members saw the Comrade Delta case as not only disturbing
in itself, but illustrative of a “deep democratic deficit” within the party.
Its broader culture was also called into question. “When you
treat human beings as disposable objects in the name of la causa, when
appropriation of activists’ labour and good will is the norm, when exploitation
of your own side goes unchallenged, sexual abuse is one probable outcome,”
wrote Anna Chen, who worked unpaid on various SWP press campaigns, including
Stop the War. She believed the SWP’s habit of “ripping off their activists for
wages, thieving their intellectual efforts and claiming credit for their
successes” had initiated a pattern of “diminishing regard for their members”,
which had led to the point “where even someone’s body is no longer their own”.
The party’s hierarchical structure and its culture of
“loyalty beyond logic” concentrated power in the hands of the central committee
at the Vauxhall headquarters. Yet the leadership had no intention of “opening
up the party’s structures”, as its first response to the debate made plain.
Towards the end of January, Alex Callinicos published a long article in
Socialist Review, the party’s monthly magazine, which examined the necessity of
“deepening and updating Marx’s critique of political economy” and referred to
the Delta affair, in passing, as a “difficult disciplinary case”, significant
in so far as it prompted “a minority” to dismiss “democratically reached
conference decisions” and, hence, undermine democratic centralism.
What the dissenters were arguing for, he wrote, was “a
different model involving a much looser and weaker leadership, internal debate
that continually reopens decisions already made, and permanent factions”. Such
changes would make the SWP “smaller and less effective”. Defending the handling
of the Delta case was synonymous with defending the party’s revolutionary
purpose.
In March, the leadership conceded to demands for a second
conference to re-examine the allegations, but only on the most unconciliatory
of terms. “Let us be clear that this comrade has been found guilty of nothing,”
said the pre-conference bulletin. That was true – Comrade Delta has never been
formally charged, let alone tried or convicted, and is entitled to the
presumption of innocence like everyone else. Yet it was not his guilt or
innocence that was in question, but the way the party had dealt with the
complaint.
The leadership refused to acknowledge the criticism. It said
the March conference was to “reaffirm the decisions” of the January conference
and, sure enough, the “opposition got smashed”, Richard Seymour says, because
people “who had never been seen in the organisation turned out to vote”. China
Miéville had said that the conference would be “a last chance to save the party
from disgrace”, and when it was over, he, Seymour, Rosie Warren and many others
resigned.
David Renton stayed on because he wanted to see if they could
take the complaint any further. He had met the second complainant, Comrade X,
in February, and “was absolutely convinced that in every single thing she said
she was telling the truth”. In the summer, the disputes committee concluded
that Delta had a case to answer – but he would not have to answer it because he
had left the party: the investigation would be reinstated only if he should
choose to rejoin. “Essentially, they admitted that the second complaint was
probably true,” Renton says. “Which obviously cast a light backwards on the
first complaint as well.”
In March, before the special conference, another member had
told the Guardian she had been raped: she said that the problem was “a systemic
thing” and that the SWP was a “dangerous environment to be in”. In October, a fourth
woman revealed that she had also made a complaint. She said she had been raped
in December 2012. She reported the case at the end of January 2013, after the
handling of the Comrade W case had provoked outrage within the party, and yet
she was treated in exactly the same way. The two women from the DC who
interviewed her asked, “What effect would you say drink and drugs had on you
that night?” and encouraged her to drop the complaint. A pattern had become
apparent, the woman maintained: “. . . the Socialist Workers Party is a group
that is sexist, full of bullies, and above all will cover up rape to protect
its male members and reputation.”
Not surprisingly, Charlie Kimber dismisses the allegation.
“It is wholly untrue,” he told me. “If I believed it for a moment then I would
not be the party’s national secretary – or a member of the party.” It is partly
because the SWP takes the oppression of women seriously, he added, that the
case was so painful for it. He said it could hardly be accused of attempting a
“cover-up”, as the case provoked non-stop debate for the best part of a year
and prompted the party to elect an independent body to review its disputes
procedures. “Did the Lib Dems act in this way over allegations of harassment?”
he asked. “Has the Labour Party?”
The new disputes procedure was announced in December, at the
party’s third conference in a year. The code corrected some of the flaws made
apparent in the Comrade Delta case, and the CC also issued a partial apology to
the complainants. “We are sorry for the suffering caused to them by the
structural flaws in our disputes procedures . . .” Kimber wrote. Even that fell
far short of the full apology and whole-hearted invitation to self-examination
that its critics wanted. But David Renton realised that the leadership had gone
as far as it could. “If they had admitted that they got things wrong, and
genuinely apologised to these two women, they would have had to stand down, and
completely overhaul the organisation. In a sense, that was the story of the
last year – why a bunch of us said things and why, beyond a certain point, the
organisation refused to listen. Because if they had listened, they would have
had to switch the organisation off.”
Yet many people have maintained that the leadership’s
attempts to save the party had the opposite effect. “You think you won in
Hammersmith,” wrote a member called Richard Atkinson in his resignation letter
that March. “You didn’t: you lost. For all the foot-stamping and cheering you
lost, comprehensively and probably irrevocably.”
David Renton and 165 other people left in January to form a
new group called rs21 (Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st century) and he
believes the SWP has been left with no more than 200 active members. Richard
Seymour says its rump of “worker-ist activists” is “brain-dead, unpleasant and
thuggish” – and destined to become more so. “It is toxic,” he says. “It’s
doomed.”
Rosie Warren’s verdict is even more damning: she says the
only thing left for the leadership to do is to issue a full apology, and then
“declare that anything that was ever good about the SWP has been utterly
destroyed, and pack up and go home”.
