The simmering feud between the Rees/German/Nineham faction – the old leadership now running the STWC – and the new leadership of Martin Smith/Harman/Callinicos is set to explode veryshortly and may at last sound the death knell of the wretched organisation.Two leading student members at SOAS have been expelled for ‘associating with anti-party elements’ and a major bust up loms over the continuation of the ‘No platform’ policy – all nicely fuelled by scheming cabals, rival leaderships, wouded pride and vendettas – andabsolutely nothing to do with socialism. Shades of the last days of the WRP.Watch the whole sorry shower trying to outdo each other in inane militancy outside Question Time next week.
STOP PRESS: The Rees group has now declared itself as an official faction within the SWP – hilariously called THE LEFT FACTION. It appears to have no politics other than that Rees should inherit the Cliffite mantel of life long leadership……and that STWC is themost important united front since the last one. in response the Smithite leadership is quietly liquidating – sory expelling – Reesite loyalists round the country and shutting down opppositional websites like Couterfire. Should be about 5 people left standing after the purges. I can’t wait for Rees to be put on trial and to have to publicly confess his crimes. Shoot them down like patridges eh?
Ian Bone 
Fucking best news I’ve heard in ages
second that, TomC! I hope their monopoly comes to an end sharpish so we can start getting together to fight against the next government without those bloody signs-on-sticks getting in the way!
Anarchist and Autonomist groups are getting pretty exciting on the London campuses, and all the SWP can do is build their party. All glory to the fucking kids!
Great writing, hillarious stuff. Talking of that terrible excuse for a television program anyone catch it last night? I’ve never heard such bullshit, lies and nonsense and the audience were also horrible. Applauding disgusting ‘answers’ asking irrelevent questions or just plain disgusting ones…I don’t really watch it that often, in fact hardly ever probably for these reasons!! Is it always this horrible a program? Bunch of fucking gobshites the lot of em, slagging off the posties to boot. And that stupid fucking woman who wants to send all the troops into Afghanistan should fuck off there and fight if she’s so keen for others to be sent.
I never watch that programme, it just makes my blood boil – why deliberately expose yourself to things that make you feel bad? There’s enough unavoidable shit as there is.
A big fight outside the BBC might be their finest hour.
I thought you might like this item about the fire of Westminster, 1834:
One diarist caught the mood on the banks of the River Thames: “The crowd was rather pleased than otherwise; whistling when the breeze came as if to encourage it; ‘There’s a flare-up for the House of Lords.’ ‘A judgment for the Poor Law Bill!’, ‘There go their acts!’. Such exclamations seemed to be the prevailing ones. A man sorry I did not anywhere see.”
The true patriotic spirit of Britain.
I kinda got a soft spot for the SWP. They were there with their rags and slogans on sticks when NO other party was (certainly no identifiable anarchist groups, though maybe a half dozen pissed-up scarey types). They got me into political thinking (even if I quickly realised that I dont agree with much of what they say) and for that I’m glad.
Coincidentally, it was through them that I first met Ian Bone and his writings……
We need solidarity comrades with other similarly -minded people otherwise we shall surely fall when the time comes
There are lots of good people in the swp who might now be freed from the mill stone of building the party rather than involvement in working class politics. I for one won’t feel sorry for their party.
ooooh, getting better and better – twitter counterfire also arrested and made to confess >>>
It’s excellent news. The SWP was always a misnomer: not socialist but trotksyist; not workers but students; not a party but an authoritarian sect.
Over the years they’ve proven adept at wrecking independent movements and pushing dissent into the sterile Labour/TUC axis. Despite the rhetoric they remain essentially the student wing of the Labour party.
lets make shaw we aren’t clinging onto to their coat tails when they drop of the end of the world
Good riddance to bad rubbish, I’ll never forgive those bastards for what they did to the anti-war movement.
Love ’em or hate ’em the SWP have proved themselves extremely capable of steering young people to political activity street style. Many anarchos, climate activists, class war activists, anti racists etc have courted the SWP and their message and as a result have remained long term political allies outside of any SWP control. The SWP are probably the best recruiting agency the class war has.
Unless of course you are the type of revolutionary anarcho that sees the class war as redundant and the prols as a compliant, consumer led class who deserve all that they get and the inevitable leadership splits that go with the ideology.
Leaders and splits; I shit ’em. Class war? No need to explain it, just love it!
Ian,
Where did you get this ‘scoop’ from?
wcg,
Edward Ford
To be fair a brief dabble in the SWP (I was lured in by the rhetoric) when I was 13 has now got me into excellent books like The Machinery of Freedom.
There is a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We all know of the sectarianism and party building of the SWP. The problem is not building a party, which is simply a group of people who organise together around common objectives, but that they counterposed building their undemocratic party to the class struggle.
And whilst people will only see the negative in the SWP (I was expelled over 30 years from its forerunner the International Socialists) we also have to ask whether anyone else would have created an anti-war movement, however deformed, since anarchists have a tendency to act like political grasshoppers, moving from one campaign to the next until they tire of following the latest fashion and become all that they once despised (with a few exceptions of course!).
In other words the SWP had a revolving door and also pushed a lot of good people to the right, but so does anarchism with its focus on activity without any theory of how to build anything that lasts for more than a few months.
The question is whether the left will be stronger or weaker if the SWP did self-destruct. I suspect that it will be the latter
Yes, I agree with Tony.
wcg,
Edward Ford
I don’t mean any of this with any offence,
I’ve not been a member of the SWP for long and I don’t really understand the hatred for them, it all seems like anti SWP rhetoric to me with little actual arguement or evidence.
The majority of SWPers I know are not students, though obviously there are quite a few (and there should be). And I don’t understand that there is anything wrong with inviting people to join the party – if people generally agree with our politics then we invite them to join, why wouldn’t we? I myself didn’t join for quite a few months after I started attending their meetings and no one ever had a problem with it. I also don’t see that the SWP are sectarian – it’s our standard approach to be involved in broad-front campaigns, surely that’s in the spirit of working with people. And how is the SWP authoritarian? It’s a democratic-centralist organisation – the party line is democratically decided…
I’m genuinely interested to hear what people have to say – it’s like I’m missing something that everyone else seems to know about – maybe the SWP used to be bad? I don’t know I’m pretty new but there’s massive contradictions between what I see as a member and what I hear from non-SWP commentators – I’m sure there are reasons for you views so what are they?