Benn's Campaign: Fighting the Authortar an

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THE 'Open Letter to Tony Benn' by Euro-MP Janey Buchan, published in abour Weekly' and the 'Daily Mirror', has rallied the 'soft-left' opponts of Benn - and brought protests from the militant Left.

ICHEL LEVER and JOHN O'MAHONY take up the debate in an Dear Janey Buchan, You have publicly charged and branded Tony Benn with being engaged in pushing us all at full speed towards the Stalinist Gulag. You reached this odd opinion and you try to prove it to your readers by way of the well-tried Goebbels-Stalin techinique pronouncing him "guilty by association"

You link Benn with some remarks of Arthur Scargill's and then identify him with your own fantastic 'interpretation' of Scargill's words.

Attack The attack was big news and good news for the press, which faintly praises the old Labour Party by ferociously cursing Tony Benn and the present Labour Party.

'The Observer' has devoted a page to praising you and the 'Daily Mirror' which pays good money for articles, printed your open letter.

Now if one were to judge and label you and your attack on Tony Benn by your associations and go on to identify you with those who have cheered your "Open Letter to Benn" greeted your "contribution to the debate" as a blow on their side, lauded you and - yes - possibly paid you, then there would not now be many tatters left of your left-wing reputation.

And unlike your comments on Benn and Scargill, it would not depend on farfetched 'interpretation' to show your friends in the media to be socially reactionary, right-wing and enemies of a socialist labour movement.

But of course it would be unjust and misleading, wrong and ungenerous to judge you like that: it would also be to miss the point.

Your 'Open Letter" painfully confused, but it is clearly a genuine cry from a representative of Labour's 'Old Parliamentary Left' which is nowfaced with the fact of being by-passed by events and maybe with forcible retirement Fuzzy Conditions in Thatcher's Britain have clearly made the techniques of the "Old Parliamentary Left" ineffective and are making them redundant.

All the typical 'Old Parliamentary Left' techniques of fuzzy thinking, evasion of the real issues and small-beer demagogy are on display in your 'Open Letter' demagogic Open Letter to Janey Buchan.

you are!

Arthur Scargill said that those MPs who vote against Tony Benn will be giving tacit support to the politics of the right. Benn is the only candidate for this key party office who supports Party policy. This -you say — is the same principle as that followed by the rulers of the East European Stalinist police states - 'those who are not with us are against us" and then you say it must lead directly to totalitarianism.

Armed

The armed intolerance of a totalitarian police, state and of its bureaucratic ruling caste is thus equated with • an attempt to get elected as a Party official someone - Tony Benn -who will support democratically decided Party policy instead of one - Denis Healey - who fought bitterly against the key party policies and who will use any position he holds to continue to fight them and to sabotage them.

Scargill calls for Party officials who will respect and defend the democratic rights of Party members instead of abusing the positions of power and responsibility to which they are elected. And that, you say, will lead us to the Gulag!

Isn't that preposterous? Isn't that the same as saying black is white? And when you feed it to the media for use in their anti-Benn campaign in fact, an anti-Labour campaign)isn't it slanderous and poisonous too?

In fact, Scargill's words, like Benn's candidacy, go right to the heart of the issue, to the choices and dilemmas facing the labour movement now.

These are:

* whether to be satisfied with paper victories on democracy and leave those who oppose those policies in a position to sabotage their operation, gut them of meaning and, should it be necessary, eventually reverse them; or else to put supporters of new policies into office;

* whether to sort out the politics and organisation of the labour movement now to make it capable of offering the working class an alternative to Thatcherism and capitalism; or else to settle for a seductive but illusory unity with our own pink Tories against Thatcher's Tories now - at a cost later of not having adequate socialist or working class answers for the crisis of our society once we've settled with the Tory government.

The traditional "Old Parliamentary Left" answer - your answer -is to pass resolutions and leave it at that.

The "Old Parliamentary effectively put an end to the movement for change in the Party - compromise, for example, like the notorious attempt to gut reselection by way of one-man 'shortlists'.

Benn's candidacy posed the question of accountability sharply and concretely in reaction to the as yet unrealised decision for accountability. It put stop to the cosy drift.

Turned

By calling out the right, Benn has forced the 'Old Parliamentary Lefts' like yourself to declare where they stand and most of them - like you - have turned on him.

It is clear from the Open Letter that you feel opp ressed by what is going on. And like someone labouring under a strong feeling of being 'got at' , you lose your sense of proportion and balance: things around you take on strange shapes. You say that the movement for democratic change is "being twisted into an unacceptable (sic) version of authoritarianism"

Authoritarian? That when the labour moven lent insists on having real 3ontrol over what those we elect do in its name organise to ensure that Party officers shall carry out Party policy.

If this is authoritarian what then was liberty? Liberty must have been -and must be now - the situation where the MPs and Party officers could do what they liked once elected, without fear of being held to account; when they spat on the Party and the rank and file, on their socialist aspirations and even (as : with the recent wage-cutting Labour government) on their immediate interests. Tolerance? That was when the labour movement put up with such an • outrageously undemocratic situation.

Janey Buchan: it is clear from this that yours is the standpoint of the most anti-democratic - and in its days of control, extremely authoritarian - segment of the labour movement -that of its Parliamentary oligarchy.

Elitist in the extreme is your attack on Benn for putting himself forward for Deputy Leader before the Tribune Group of MPs jhad a chance to object to him doing so. Why should a loose association of Parliamentarians have had the right to decide whether he stood or not? He has mass support among Party members. Clearly the habit of thinking of the PLP - or any part of it - as being all and the rest of the movement as nothing dies hard, even with one as anxious as you obviously are to shine up her left-wing credentials.

You advise 'tolerance' of the 'intolerant right! If they manage to get the upper hand now, the left had better watch out!

More important, you miss the central point: people like Denis Healey represent capitalism in the Party. Toleration of the right is toleration of an entrenched and powerful group who are determined to stop us preparing the movement to settle with the Tories and their capitalist masters.

For all that, and despite your talk of intolerance towards 'honest dissent' nobody is proposing to do anything to the 'honest dissenters' , or to Denis Healey, except to stop them using key positions against Party policy.

Win The Old Parliamentary Labour Left never fought to win and even when it did manage to win - as it did, for example, on unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1960 - it ran away, instead of seriously fighting to consolidate its victory.

It never showed signs of wanting to grow up to responsibility: it preferred words and political adolescent fantasies for itself and to let the right keep control and responsibility. It was a left of gestures and pustures not of deeds and achievements. Essentially it was symbiotic with the Right and inseparably entwined with it.

Today most of its members hate Benn because -in however limited a way -Benn is vigorously fighting the right and • spoiling things for the soft left.

In fact this left, whose character traits your letter sums up so nakedly, has no future. To take on the Tories in the present crisis, the working class needs a new class struggle left rooted in the factories, as well as in the local Labour Parties, relying on the rank and file and expressing the democratic spirit of the shopfloor organisation of the working class, instead of the oligarchic spirit of the PLP.

It must vigorously fight the class struggle in the factories and in the streets, as well as in the sphere of conventional politics, to smash capitalism. To do this it must be armed with policies and a programme for the replacement of capitalism by democratic working-class social st rule.

It will reject both the elitist (towards the rank and file) and supine (towards the right wing and the establishment) spirit of your politics and the narrow self-defeating sectarianism of those groups which grew up outside the Labour Party in the last 15 years land which were shaped negatively by the experience and the spectacle of the Old Parliamentary Left).

Only a left like this will be able to ensure that when we get rid of the Tories we will have something worthwhile to replace them Such a left is taking shape. Part of it is ised around SO.

list FOLLOWING protests from nine branch secretaries in the Tower Hamlets Labour Party concerning the adoption of council candidates for next year's election, an inquiry has been called by the London Labour Party.

The officers report to the Tower Hamlets Labour Party executive recommended short lists for each ward's selection meeting -and in some wards the number of nominees shortlisted equalled the number of council seats available.

Branches are still free to add names to the recommended short-list, but such a list goes against the spirit of democracy. No time has been allowed for challenging the composition or for drawing up a Manifesto.

To highlight this and other matters of Labour Party democracy Target '82 (Tower Hamlets) and the Rank and File Mobilising Committee have held a large local meeting on the Benn deputy leadership campaign. Accountability was the strongest reason that came over for the support of Benn. Nigel Williamson of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy executive contributes the CLPD column this week.

THIS IS a difficult time for the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. After Blackpool and Wembley, even a few of our own supporters began to wonder whether CLPD ought to lie low, at least for a while.

One MP asked for his name to be no longer linked with CLPD as he believed that MPs had not been made accountable and the fight for democracy had been won.

Just how mistaken a view that was, has become readily apparent.

And even when mandatory reselection has been finally implemented in the way conference always intended, even when we have secured a democratic and accountable process of drawing, up Labour's manifesto, the struggle will not be over.

Clearly there is still a long hard road to travel before Labour's elected representatives become truly accountable to the rank and But the immediate struggles must revolve around reselection and control of the manifesto. Almost every week, new 'horror stories' of the abuses of mandatory reselection come to light, and regional organisers still fail to inform selection conferences that the NEC has ruled that shortlists of one are not normal practice"

Therefore in view of the way in which the NEC guidelines to this effect are still being ignored, the only way to prevent the shortlist of one abuse is through a further constitutional amendment.

The other major issue that must concern us this year is the need to give the NEC the final say in drawing up the Party's election manifesto.

This was won at the 1979 conference but lost again by only 117,000 votes the following year. Since then, the APEX conference has carried a resolutión which clearly implies that, for the first time, their delegation to the Labour Party conference must support NEC control of the manifesto.

Balance Their 109,000 votes would be enough to swing the balance in favour of democracy and accountability this year.

However, APEX General Secretary, Roy Grantham, has since disputed this somewhat unconvincingly in a fascinating correspondence with the CLPD in the pages of the Financial Times (SO supporters can be forgiven if they missed this!)

Nevertheless, the message is clear. Whether the APEX delegation renege on their commitment or not, there is a very real possibility that the manifesto is an issue which can be won this year. And above all, which ever way the votes go at Brighton in October, there can be no let-up in the Campaign.

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Left" yearns to settle into 'compromises' that would

time to lir OW