Left "unity" in the ost-Kinnock era

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Thank you for your comments on our reply to the Labour Coordinating Committee (LCC) Open Letter.

Your rejection of coalitionism convincingly scornful. And yet •.. you don't actually take up the point we made, which was not that the LCC is coalitionist, but that certain layers of the left are, layers which overlap at certain points with the LCC.

You support Neil Kinnock. Some LCC leaders are in Kinnock's entourage. Kinnock chaired a Labour Party Conference fringe meeting at which Eric laws. Hobsbawm advocated such policies. The implication was that Kinnock, and others who have jumped on Kinnock's bandwagon, might be less scornful of coalitionism than your letter is.

Let's hope your attitude to coalitionism is and remains dominant in the LCC.

Unfortunately, you also ignore many of the other points in our reply to your open letter. The question of Stalinism, for example, (which, in turn, is closely tied up with coalitionism).

On this, too, you could probably have cited your own anti-Stalinist opinions. But everybody knows that layers and regions action and render it ineffective. (Scotland, for example) of the LCC are tinctured - and on certain questions, deep-died -with Stalinism.

And it is no small question, comrade Hain, nor can our raising of it now be dismissed as mere factional expediency or malice.

Perhaps our comments about it in. your 'electoralism' were unjust. You do advocate more than mere electoralism. Yet it is not at all clear to us that you practice what you preach. And, comrade Hain, you can't hope to practice what you preach against narrow electoralism in tandem with Neil repeal the Act. Kinnock.

Why did you not respond - if only 'for the record' - to what we said about the LCC's relationship with the new Kinnock leadership? Your comments would have movement? been very interesting, especially some explanation of the LCC's retusal to back the left's candidate for Leader of the Party:

You ignore our central reply to your proposal for 'unity' around Kinnock and the new status quo - that it is a demand on the serious left to disarm and a veiled threat that it will be isolated or expelled if it doesn't.

Let us briefly restate the case. The status quo is not what the serious left has been fighting for. the beginning. policy. against the past but against the future. Kinnock has to be measured against what the labour movement needs to do to drag Britain and the labour movement out of decay and disintegration.

To sincerely settle for Kinnock and for what he stands for is to be ensnared by a mirage created 'by the interplay of Labour's wretched past on one side and by the pressure of Thatcherism on the other. It is to brutally scale down the hopes and aspirations of the last four years of discussion and struggle in the Labour Party - and of socialism in general. The vote for Kinnock shows that many have been persuaded to do this.

The LCC is foremost amongst them. Naively sincere or cynically career-serving? We don't know for sure and it doesn't affect the results - that you are now part of the new Establishment. That, in these circumstances, the appeal for unity by the LCC which was the first group to break up the unity of the left in the Rank and File Mobilising Committee - is in fact a ploy by that establishment against the serious left which continues to hope and work for better things than Kinnock is likely to bring.

It is not with malice - factional or otherwise - that we note the shifts and changes of the ICC. The implications of this and other symptoms of left retreat are too serious for the entire left to leave us any room for satisfaction.

But, comrade. Hain, it is certainly with a great deal of hypocrisy that the LCC now talk to the left about 'unity'.

Finally, we were surprised that you didn't comment on our point that a number of proposals are OK, if commonplace. Are you prepared to discuss with us a campaign on workplace branches?.

Yours fraternally, The Editors