SWP all at sea

Submitted by Matthew on 16 February, 2011 - 2:16

The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is floundering. It had a big opportunity with the “People’s Convention”, organised through the “Right To Work” campaign, on 12 February.

The celebrity-heavy “Coalition of Resistance” (COR) and the narrowly factional NSSN had given it the opportunity, if the event were open, serious about debate, and oriented to unity, to become the centre for real networking against the cuts.

The SWP went through the motions, issuing calls for unity and inveigling the Labour Representation Committee into co-sponsoring. But on the day it produced only a drabber version of COR. The attendance was only about 500 (half COR’s), and heavily SWP.

If the event turned out to be an SWP rally, then at least the SWP could have used it to enthuse members and friends for its main anti-cuts slogan: “the TUC should call a general strike”. It didn’t mention the slogan.

Other recent events have given the same picture. When the English Defence League marched in Luton on 5 February, the SWP rightly, through UAF, counter-mobilised. But the turnout was (in proportion to UAF’s reach) small, and confined to a dull, well-”kettled” concert in Luton city centre while hundreds of young local Muslims took to the streets elsewhere in the town.

The SWP has some weight among students and its strongest union fraction is in the lecturers’ union UCU. But its National Education Assembly on 30 January had not much over 100 people, less than the SWP’s own student membership.

The SWP has been ailing ever since the Respect debacle of 2004-7. Its position as the biggest group of the would-be left gives it durability and an almost “automatic” ability to win new recruits even when stumbling. But now the ill-health seems to be turning acute.

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