Category Archives: Journalism

Labour has welcomed the draft treaty on European monetary union tabled by the Dutch presidency of the European Community this week, although it is rightly scornful of the ridiculous “get-out” clause in­cluded only to help John Major avoid a massive schism in the Tory Party. Labour believes that many of the points it has been arguing for have been taken on board by the Dutch – most of all, an enhanced role for Ecofin, the European Council of Finance Ministers, in overseeing the workings of the planned European cen­tral bank, particularly in determining exchange rate policy.

Tribune shares Labour’s enthusiasm for a single Eu­ropean currency. Much detail remains to be sorted out, and the transition period in the run-up to Euro­pean monetary union will be difficult for a British economy weakened by more than a decade of Tory mismanagement. But there is no alternative: the era in which medium-sized nation states had the ability to exercise a substantial measure of control over their economies is long since past, and the creation of a sin­gle European currency is a precondition for the EC be­ing able effectively to fill the economic policy gap.

Labour is also right to argue that the European cen­tral bank must be made politically accountable. Its role will be far too important to be left to the Euro­pean equivalent of Treasury bureaucrats. But Labour’s position does not go anywhere near for enough.

Giving increased powers of oversight over the central bank to the EC’s finance ministers is better than nothing, but it is not as good as giving those powers to a select com­mittee drawn either from the national parliaments of the EC or, better still, from the European Parliament. The European Parliament is directly elected in EC-wide elections, and is the nearest thing we have to a democratically representative EC institution. There is no reason that it should not oversee the European central bank just as the United States Congress oversees the Federal Reserve.

No one in the Labour Party wants anything like those defeats to happen again, and it is reasonable for Labour nationally to do what it can to minimise the risk of by-election embarrassment. Regrettably, but un­avoidably given the vulnerability to hostile media cov­erage of Labour candidates, that includes the national party intervening in the local selection procedure to ensure that candidates can withstand the inevitable heat during the campaign – even in seats in which the proverbial donkey wearing a Labour rosette would have no difficulty in a general election. Hemsworth might be one of the safest Labour seats in the country, but then so were Glasgow Govan and Bermondsey.

That does not, however, excuse the heavy-handed way in which the National Executive Committee panel dealt last week with the selection for the November 7 by-election in Hemsworth in Yorkshire. Ken Capstick, the vice-chair of the National Union of Mineworkers  Yorkshire area, had been nominated by half the con­stituency’s branches and most of its affiliated unions. Hemsworth is a mining constituency and Mr Capstick is, from all accounts, a decent man and a popular local figure. He is on the left and perhaps a little unenthusiastic about certain elements of current Labour policy; but he is by no means a wild-eyed Trotskyist, and it is no crime to have views at variance with party policy – just about everyone does on something or other. It is difficult to see how his selection could possibly have prejudiced Labour’s chances in either Hemsworth or Langbaurgh, the Tory-held marginal which also has a by-election on November 7 and which Ashok Kumar should win for Labour.

In short, on almost any grounds Mr Capstick would seem to be an acceptable candidate. Yet the NEC panel decided to remove his name from the shortlist and, when the constituency party refused to make a selec­tion from a shortlist that did not include him, simply imposed Derek Enright as the Labour candidate.

The Hemsworth party is up in arms, and it has good reason to be, although not because the NEC committee decision has somehow deprived the NUM of a god-giv­en right to choose whomsoever it wants to sit for Hemsworth. One of the main advantages of an electoral system based on single-member constituencies is sup­posed to be that MPs are first and foremost representa­tives of a local community rather than mere parliamen­tary lobby fodder. For this reason, local parties should have the major say in selecting parliamentary candi­dates. In Hemsworth that did not happen.

Mr Enright is a good candidate and will no doubt get full support from the Hemsworth party as soon as the campaign gets into swing; he will undoubtedly retain the seat for Labour. But Mr Capstick was the members’ choice. At very least, the members deserve an explana­tion of why he was deemed unsuitable: the criteria used by the NEC panel in judging by-election candi­dates should immediately be made public. In the longer term, the Hemsworth selection debacle should force Labour into a serious reconsideration of its procedures for by-election candidate selections.

They are unlikely to succeed. Perhaps the Tories do not intend to float hospitals on the stock market. But their record of starving the NHS of resources suggests that they are quite happy to see it turned into a safety – net service used only by those who cannot afford to go private: in that sense, Labour has been quite right to accuse them of wishing to privatise health care. Equal­ly important, their current programme of introducing market forces into the NHS shows that they are more worried about the cost of the service to the taxpayer than its quality to the patient. Even if that is not, strictly speaking, privatisation (though it could all too easily be a prelude to it), it is commercialisation, an in­troduction of the ethics of private enterprise to a sphere in which most voters do not wish to see them.

The NHS is a potential election – winning issue for Labour: the party should shun the advice of those now suggesting that it should let up in its assault. But it will not be enough simply to attack the Tories. In the peri­od between now and the election, Labour must make its positive alternatives to Tory policies on the NHS much clearer and much more detailed.

Two events in the past fortnight have illustrated perfectly how little John Major’s 11 months in office have changed Tory policy on the railways.

First, Malcolm Rifkind announced last week that the high-speed rail link from the Channel Tunnel to Lon­don would not, after all, pass through Tory south- east London but would instead be diverted through Labour east London. The change means that the completion date for the line, already laughably distant by conti­nental standards, is put off to 2002 at the earliest — four years after the tunnel opens. British Rail, its plans in tatters, was understandably outraged.

Then, this week, BR announced fare increases of roughly double the rate of inflation (except, that is, on routes which Mr Major believes offer a poor service, in­cluding that from King’s Cross to his own constituen­cy). The reason is simple. The government, alone in Europe, wants to privatise the railway system and, alone in Europe, is reducing its subsidies while BR, its revenue hit by recession, does not want to cut its in­vestment programme. BR’s only option is to increase fares. The increase will drive more and more passen­gers into using the private motor car – leading to more pollution, more traffic jams and, unless there is a change of government, more fare increases next year.

But the fact remains that Labour conference did de­cide last week to advocate cutting British defence spending to the west European average, and it is per­fectly reasonable to ask how the Labour leadership can dismiss that decision in such a cavalier fashion. After all, it is perfectly happy to accept the legitimacy of con­ference decisions when they go its way, however am­biguously worded the motions. If conference decisions are acceptable only when they are in tune with leader­ship thinking, the notion that conference is there to de­cide policy becomes meaningless.

Labour’s leaders must learn that they have to take the rough with the smooth. If they are worried about the ambiguity of the motion, they should be looking at ways of ironing out the ambiguity, not announcing that they will ignore the conference vote when drawing up the manifesto.

If there is an alternative to the pro-austerity Euro-social-democracy currently advocated by Labour, it is not the package on offer from the group of left-wing economists, trade unionists and politicians which was advertised in Tribune a fortnight ago and is en­dorsed by Ken Livingstone this week.

Much of what they say is unexceptionable: on training, low pay, defence diversification and international economic co-operation, the differences with Labour policy are of degree rather than of kind. Where they part company is in advocating devaluation, exchange controls and nationalisation – the meat and potatoes of the Alternative Economic Strategy of the seventies minus the import controls.

The problems with all this are multiple, but the most important is that there is no reason to believe that an essentially national economic programme can possibly work for a medium-sized country in the modern world. Capital is increasingly mobile and the main effect of Britain attempting to carry out a national alternative economic strategy would simply be to scare it away.

Instead of putting forward a nostalgic vision of plucky little socialist Britain standing alone, possibly outside the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System, the left should be exploring the pos­sibilities for European alternative economic strategies. The fact that this task is more demanding intellectual­ly than recycling yesterday’s panaceas is no reason to shirk it.

This is the first issue of Tribune to be produced entirely on desktop publishing equipment. Our thanks to everyone who made it possible by giving generously to our appeal. Tribune will be back to 12 pages a week just as soon as we have mastered the new kit – which should be before the end of the year.

This week’s Labour Party conference in Brighton has been the least fractious ever. The Labour leadership is keen to show itself not just fit for government bat ready for it, and delegates have willingly buried differ­ences in the interests of giving the impression of party unity in the run-up to the election, which until Monday night many expected to happen as soon as November. Everyone in Brighton knows that Labour stands a very good chance of winning; and everyone knows that the implications of losing are too horrible to contemplate. No one wants to rock the boat. And if the result is a rather boring conference, with rows of empty chairs except when a frontbench spokesman or spokeswoman is giving a keynote speech, so be it.

But although party unity is a necessary condition for winning elections, it is not in itself sufficient. At the beginning of the week, the challenge facing Labour was not just that of projecting an image of unity: it also had to advance a coherent and attractive vision of the future for Britain under a Labour government The party needed to put behind it the jibes that it no longer stood for anything, that it was unnecessarily timid, that it wasn’t really very different from the Tory Party.

So how has Labour shaped up? On the whole, not badly. This week has seen the party making a determined effort to emphasise its differences with the Conservatives on the welfare state, on education and training, on industrial policy and, most notably, on Europe. The message in speech after speech, but particularly in Neil Kinnock’s address to conference on Tuesday, has been that Labour is a mainstream European social-democratic party that will bring Britain into line with the rest of Europe on everything from the minimum wage to environmental protection.

There is still plenty to do, however. Labour’s enthu­siasm for Europe remains short of detail or fudged on several key points. The party still gives the impression of timidity in certain areas, particularly after George Bush’s announcement last week of sweeping cuts nuclear arms, defence policy. Labour is also going to have to handle Tory attacks on its taxation proposals rather more convincingly than it has done this week. Neverthe­less, the party can afford to feel a little pleased with itself. If it can keep up its momentum, Mr Kinnock should be inside Number Ten within nine months.

Tribune does not oppose the suspension pending investigation of alleged membership of the Militant Tendency of Dave Nellist and Terry Fields. Militant is a conspiratorial revolutionary party with its own disci­pline and programme which has stood candidates against Labour and plans to do so again in the general election. Membership of Militant is incompatible with Labour Party membership. If there is a prima facie case for believing the two MPs are Militant members they should be investigated and, if found guilty, expelled. Whether or not either is a good bloke or a fine constituency MP is wholly beside the point.

The process of investigation must, however, be fair and seen to be fair. In particular, given that a November election is no longer on the cards, nothing must be done to find alternative Labour candidates for the two men’s seats unless and until the National Constitutional Com­mittee comes to the conclusion that they are indeed guilty as charged.

There is an air of unreality about the Labour Party’s deliberations on electoral reform, which looks set to be the most controversial policy topic at the party’s annual conference in Brighton next week.

Everyone knows that Labour’s prime task is to win the next election under the existing first-past-the-post system; and everyone knows that it is unlikely that supporters of change will convince conference to back anything more specific, at least for the House of Commons, than keeping all options open, except for ruling out the multi-member constituency, single transferable vote system favoured by the Liberal Democrats.

That, in a nutshell, is the position taken in July by the interim report of the Labour Party’s commission on electoral reform chaired by Raymond Plant, and it is the only one that will preserve party unity. This does not mean, however, that Labour Party members need not bother to work out what they think. Keeping options open is a temporary measure: soon after the election, however Britain votes, Labour will be forced to make up its mind.

Plant laid down a series of criteria for judging electoral systems, the most important of which were whether a system would yield parliaments in which the number of seats held by a party is proportional to the votes cast for it, whether a system would maintain a close link between MPs and their constituents, and whether a system would produce stable and effective governments.

In the past couple of months, three options have emerged with significant support: no change, the Alterna­tive Vote, and the Additional Member System. On ba­lance, the system that satisfies most of Plant’s criteria is AMS, in which MPs elected in single-member constituen­cies are topped up from regional lists. Crucially, neither no change nor AV, in which single-member constituen­cies are maintained but voters list their preferences among candidates, adequately satisfy the criterion of proportionality.

Critics of AMS argue that it would hand disproportionate influence to centre or fringe parties, would create two classes of MP and would allow party machines too much influence in determining candidates for the regional top-up seats.

The last of these objections is the least serious: a democratic regional party selection process would ensure that parly members and not party bureaucrats would determine the party list. The “two classes of MP” argu­ment is stronger, though hardly decisive: it would be easy enough to organise a system whereby regional list MPs were allocated constituency-type duties in areas of their region where no single-member constituency MP had been elected.

The most important argument against AMS is that it gives Centre or fringe parties too much influence, inevit­ably yielding coalition governments which emerge after secret wheeling and dealing behind closed doors in the immediate aftermath of an election. Against this, it is rightly said that political parties are themselves coali­tions, that no system, even FPTP, rules out coalition government, and that AMS would not rule out creation of a single party forming a government if it really had majority support among the electorate.

Nevertheless, the issue of disproportionate centre or fringe party influence – which also applies to AV – cannot be ducked. The choice in the end is between a system in which the centre or the political fringe might have greater influence than their support warrants and one which has given the Tories 12 years of massive parliamen­tary majorities on a minority vote. On balance, the former has to be the lesser evil.

Will John Major go for a November election? It is unlikely that he has finally made up his mind, but it is  quite likely that he will opt for the autumn rather than hanging on until spring. The Tories are ahead in most opinion polls, and they believe that the economic tide has turned in their favour. With the strong possibility that any upturn will be temporary and with the danger that the Tories will be badly split over Europe by the end of the year, Mr Major will almost certainly go for November if his party is leading clearly in the polls after the Tory conference.

With this in mind, the Tories are mounting a political offensive. Perhaps it will work – but it is difficult to see how. The Conservative strategy seems to consist of little more than accusing Labour of incompetence, claiming one day that Labour has a hidden radical agenda and the next that it has given up its principles. The Tories have little in the way of a positive programme to offer the voters. Their Citizens’ Charter is a damp squib; their remaining major privatisation plans are unpopular; and their “council tax” replacement for the poll tax is at best uninspiring. They are incoherent on Europe and outdated on defence. Add their appalling record on economic policy, the health service, education, training, transport and the environment, and it is clear that they are going to have serious problems winning support.

But Labour cannot afford to rest on its laurels and hope that a well-behaved conference and slick party political broadcasts will make up the gap in the opinion polls, so that Labour wins a November election or, if the surge comes sooner, forces Mr Major to put off the election. Labour is better prepared for an election than ever before, and the confidence exuded by the party leader­ship is not just for the television cameras. But the whole party will have to work hard to win. The task is not merely to persuade the voters that Neil Kinnock is a fine fellow with a competent team behind him but to convince them that Labour has a cogent and attractive vision of a future Britain. If Labour comes across as being the same as the Tories, with a few slight differences on education and the health service, the party will not win, nor will it deserve to.

The cash crisis at the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has prompted several premature obituaries in the right-wing press. They are premature not just because CND members have responded generously to its appeal for money (although more is needed) but because the campaign still has a crucially important role to play.

Despite the end of the cold war and the collapse of Soviet communism, despite the seemingly rosy prospects for far-reaching arms control agreements, the political and military establishments of the nuclear powers (with the apparent exception of what was the Soviet Union) remain as committed as ever to the insane idea that threatening the use of weapons of mass destruction is essential to maintain credible defences.

Even as the Soviet Union ceases to be capable of threatening the security of Western Europe and the United States, the Western military and its political friends raise the spectre of nuclear-armed Third World dictatorships as the justification for maintaining their nuclear arsenals. Even as obsolete weapons systems are negotiated away, new weapons systems are being de­veloped. The American and French nuclear weapons programmes are still racing ahead.

All this is absurd and obscene. Yet without CND there would be barely a squeak of criticism in British political life. Labour in particular has spent most of the past four years running away from a critical stance on nuclear weapons. Unilateral nuclear disarmament was jettisoned in 1989. In the past few months Labour’s leaders have gone further. Instead of remaining vague about how they propose to negotiate away British nuclear arms, first Gerald Kaufman (ambiguously) and now Neil Kinnock (unambiguously) have promised that a Labour govern­ment would keep British nuclear weapons for as long as anyone else was nuclear-armed. Meanwhile a Labour government would do its best to get British nuclear arms included in the second round of the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, and would press hard for rapid prog­ress towards massive cuts in the world’s nuclear arsenals.

Looking on the bright side, this position is still better than the Tories’, which remains unambiguously pro-deterrence, opposed even to British involvement in START 2. So far, Labour’s leadership has not gone so far as to embrace the notion that nuclear arms really do constitute a deterrent: they remain, at least in the small print of party policy, merely bargaining chips to secure reductions all round. A Labour Prime Minister would not, one can safely surmise, press the button.

But by promising to keep British nuclear arms as long as anyone else has them, the Labour leadership has come perilously close to making a mockery of its criticisms of deterrence and, in the process, has made any future Labour government a hostage to the willingness of the other nuclear powers to negotiate total elimination of nuclear weapons.

A nuclear-weapons-free world is cer­tainly desirable, and a Labour government should attempt to facilitate it in any way it can. But it is easy to construct scenarios in which British insistence on retain­ing nuclear weapons as long as anyone else has them scuppers a far-reaching nuclear disarmament deal which nevertheless falls short of total elimination of all nuclear weapons in the world – for example, an agreement to eliminate all submarine-launched ballistic nuclear mis­siles. It will be essential to put pressure on a Labour government, from inside and outside parliament, on nuclear arms. Without CND, that task will be infinitely more difficult. The campaign deserves our support in its hour of need.

Strange as it might seem to anyone unfamiliar with the recent history of the Com­munist Party of Great Britain, its leadership is rather pleased at the way things have turned out in the Soviet Union.

The CP condemned the August 20 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, welcomed its collapse and even backed the suspension of the Com­munist Party of the Soviet Union, for so many years its political master.

“I think it is essential that the party’s monopoly of power is broken,” says Nina Temple, the CP’s general secretary. “When you’re talking about the Soviet Communist Party you’re talking about a cross between a political party as we know it and something like the Freemasons. The top level of the party was so involved in the coup that it is impossible complete­ly to distinguish the party from the coup organisers, and the coup orga­nisers have to be brought to justice. We will be moved to protest if there isn’t the development of a climate of tolerance and pluralism in which legitimate left voices can be heard.”

For most of the party’s 70-year existence, such a response would have been unthinkable. Until 1968, when the CP condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the par­ty had loyally .supported every twist and turn of Soviet foreign policy, and it was not until the early eighties that its criticisms of Soviet foreign policy were more than half-hearted. Foreign policy aside, the party’s programme identified the “actually existing socialism” of the Soviet bloc as essentially benign until the late eighties.

Yet the position of the CP lead­ership should not really cause sur­prise. The seventies and eighties saw the party drift further and further away from its traditional pro-Soviet position. Last year, prompted by the collapse of “actual­ly existing socialism” in Eastern Europe, a special party congress abandoned Leninism, opting to “transform” the CP into a non-vanguardist organisation with a new name – Democratic   Left”  if the leadership gets its way at a party conference this November. One reason for the party leadership’s enthusiasm for the failure of the coup and collapse of the Soviet party is that it will have the effect of reducing to impotence the resist­ance to the change of name.

Whether the CP will get through to November without itself being reduced to impotence is a moot point, however. The party was at its weakest ever even before the coup and is unlikely to have been done any favours by the Soviet crisis. An obituary might be premature, but it is certainly difficult to credit that for its first 50 years the CP domin­ated political life to the left of Labour.

It was never an effective electoral force, winning only three par­liamentary seats in all that time, and it never really achieved a mass membership. Before the second world war, at no time did it have more than 18,000 members. After peaking at 64,000 m 1942, at the height of popular enthusiasm for the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, its membership de­clined inexorably, hitting 45,000 in 1945 and 30,000 ten years later.

More than 10,000 members, in­cluding most of the party’s leading intellectuals, left after the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian re­volution in 1956. By the early seventies, membership was 15,000 and still falling, and the CP had yielded its dominance of the far-left to the 57 varieties of Trotskyism.

But the influence of the CP was never primarily a matter of size or electoral success. Its strengths were its ability to set the left’s political agenda and its strong organisation in trade unions.

In the twenties, the arrival of the CP, singing the praises of a “suc­cessful” socialist revolution in the Soviet Union, transformed British socialism, effectively eclipsing the participatory democratic socialism, with workers’ control at its core, that had made the running among British socialists in the first two decades of the century.

As John Callaghan put it in his recent history of the left, Socialism in Britain, “Leninism changed the radical socialist catechism. Hence­forward the focus of Marxist activ­ity was party-building for the pur­pose of smashing the bourgeois state, crudely understood as ‘bodies of armed men’. Meanwhile, social­ism rapidly came to mean the sys­tem of power in the Soviet Union which, it was noted, was perfectly compatible with the most barbarous practices developed in capitalist in­dustry.”

The CP rapidly established a power base in the trade unions despite the opposition of the right. By the late thirties, with the econo­mies of the capitalist world in crisis, social democracy seemingly ineffec­tual and the Soviet Union apparent­ly the only bulwark against fasc­ism, the CP’s identification of the Soviet Union as a beacon of socialist hope had become almost hegemonic on the British left.

Uncritical pro-Soviet feeling on the non-communist left dwindled after the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939. It was revived by the wartime alliance, and then underwent a long post-war decline with the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe after 1945, the suppression of the Berlin workers’ revolt in 1953, Hungary 1956, the building of the Berlin Wall and the invasion of Czechoslo­vakia in 1968.

Yet, even as late as the sixties, many, if not most, British socialists still saw the Soviet Union as a model for a successful socialist eco­nomy, however much they dis­agreed with its lack of democracy or its foreign policy. The CP retained a degree of intellectual credibility.

The party’s economists were among the main proponents of the Alternative Economic Strategy which became Labour policy in the early seventies. Communist indust­rial organisation remained potent, though hardly as influential as was claimed by politicians and the popu­lar press right up to the beginning of the eighties.

The party played a significant role in student politics in the seven­ties and a smaller one in the peace movement in the early eighties. It lost a few members over the 1977 draft of its programme, The British Road of Socialism, with a diehard pro-Soviet faction defecting over some rather mild criticism of “actually existing socialism” to form the New Communist Party (which distinguished itself last month by backing the coup; but at the begin­ning of the eighties, the CP remained a force to be reckoned with in British left politics.

Today, all that seems very dis­tant. The eighties saw the CP riven by feuding – first between pro-Soviet advocates of “class politics”, grouped around the Morning Star newspaper, and the rest of the par­ty, and subsequently, after the ex­pulsion of the Morning Star group (some of whom formed another Stalinist breakaway, the Communist Party of Britain), among the va­rious factions that remained in the party.

Membership, long in decline, be­gan to plummet, and the party’s trade union base shrank rapidly. Outside Scotland, where the CP retained its influence in the Scot­tish TUC and was instrumental in reviving interest in home rule, just about the only CP success story of the eighties was its monthly maga­zine, Marxism Today, edited by Martin Jacques.

In mid-decade, Marxism Today analysis of “Thatcherism” as a hege­monic project of the Right played an important part in persuading the Labour left that it should support the Labour leadership’s attempt to shift Labour towards the centre. Later, its advocacy of the idea that capitalism had entered a new era of “post-Fordism”, and that these “New Times” demanded a wholly new response from the left, lent left intellectual credibility to Lab­our’s abandonment of the tradition­al socialist programme of nationa­lisation and planning.

Ironically, Marxism Today’s suc­cess served to weaken the CP still further: as the magazine moved away from Leninism, pressure grew from within the party to retain the word “communist” in its title, and many in Scotland said they would create an independent Scottish Communist Party if the name-change went ahead. After the momentous events of the last two weeks, such voices have been less in evidence, but even among supporters of “transforma­tion” there are worries that whatev­er emerges from the process will either lie directionless or insuffi­ciently politically distinct to sur­vive.

Temple, who has been general secretary since early 1990, when she look over from Gordon McLennan, brushes aside such criticism. Democratic Left, she says, has a clear purpose. “We’re hoping to use our organisation and resources to give a kick-start to a culture of progressive democratic left politics in Britain. Labour suffers from a deep-rooted anti-intellectualism and is too tied to electoral politics; Democratic Left will help to fill the gap.

“We’re not trying to do the same thing as the Labour Party,” she says, “There’s a great need for Labour to win the next general election, and I don’t accuse the Labour leadership of betrayal. But as well as a progressive govern­ment, you need people demanding change from below. I see Democra­tic Left as a forum where people try to develop their politics and where they can network together.

“I’m not saying that all move­ments will come from Democra­tic Left but I do see it as facilitating the development of broad, bottom-up campaigning movements.”

Even Temple admits that there is plenty still to sort out about the whole project, however. “Whether our objective is the creation of a new left party or whether our role is to facilitate development of co­operation among existing parties is still being discussed.”

For the time being, the priority is to seek out partners in other politic­al parties and organisations for discussions. No one left-of-centre is ruled out but it is clear that the main targets are the Labour’s “soft left”, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and non-party social movements.

Whether anyone will want to play ball with Democratic Left is as yet unknown, however. There are few signs at present of much interest outside the CP. Another problem is whether the CP’s remaining trade union base will adapt to a more amorphous structure. “We still have a lot of members who have positions of re­sponsibility within their unions,” says Temple “But that’s a resource that hasn’t been very effectively used in recent years.

“We’ve rejected the old way of working in the unions – small groups of people meeting in smoke-filled rooms deciding who they’re going to put forward and what the line is – but we’ve not found a new way. Part of the problem is that the party has been organised on a branch basis. A lot of trade union­ists weren’t involved in their local branch so they didn’t have input into the party.”

The British politician with most egg on face after the failed coup in the Soviet Union has to be Eric Trevett, general secretary of the tiny ultra-Stalinist New Communist Party. In a letter to the Morning Star on August 22, the day that the coup collapsed, he welcomed the removal of Mikhail Gorbachev as “a setback to US imperialism, whose plans for global domination have been dealt a body blow”.

“In the Soviet Union the emergence of a leadership dedicated to communist values deserves our full solidarity and support,” he went on. “Nor should we waver in giving this in the face of some social unrest.”

The Morning Star itself surprised many readers by refusing to give the coup its backing: “It is difficult to see how democratic economic and political change can be brought about by authoritarian means,” it warned on August 20, adding that “what has happened could have the opposite result to that intended”. A similar line was taken by the Communist Party of Britain, the small pro-Soviet party that split from the Eurocommunist Communist Party of Great Britain in the mid-eighties. (The NCP split in the late seventies). Its general secretary, Mike Hicks, called for a peaceful resolution to the crisis “fully involving the Soviet people in resolving political and economic difficulties that have been exacerbated by a narrow form of nationalism in some republics”.

Less surprisingly, the CPGB unambiguously conde­mned the coup, calling for the immediate release and re-instatement of Gorbachev. “The complex economic and constitutional crises that have developed in the Soviet Union will never be solved by resorting to Stalinist methods”, proclaimed a group of leading figures in a letter to the Guardian published on August 21.

After the collapse of the coup, the CPGB, which is almost certain to adopt a new democratic constitution and change its name to “Democratic Left” in Novem­ber, gave a warm welcome to suggestions that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union should dissolve itself into a new democratic left party. But the Morning Star and the CPB were not so sure. Monday’s Star leader announced that “the Soviet people will need a reformed democratic Communist Party .. . So­cialism and democracy remain the only way out for the working people in the Soviet Union”. If only the working people of the Soviet Union saw it that way …