The following text was written for a post-Congress meeting of the SLP left in January 1998, which was called to discuss the issue of leaving or staying in the SLP.

On one level the 1997 SLP Congress was a shambolic farce. On another, it was a very creditable performance by the left in the NEC elections.

The congress was a travesty of democracy, as the statement of the 57 quite rightly said. Many people concluded that the organisation was dead. And in many ways it is. There is little possibility of winning the leadership of the party away from the bureaucrats that currently run it since they will resort to every bureaucratic trick in the book to prevent it.

However, did anyone seriously expect anything different from this when they joined the party? I for one did not. So why did we all join the SLP? It is no surprise to me that Scargill behaves in the way that he does. I half expected to be thrown out of the SLP before we got to congress. I am amazed that I not only survived to get to the congress, but that I managed to stand for the NEC as part of a slate that, according to my calculations, got 26.5% of the constituency parties vote (if the distortion of the block votes is excluded from the calculation). If we add the SLP Marxist Bulletin vote, the percentage rises to 30%. That is to say the Democratic Platform/Marxist Bulletin slates attracted nearly a third of the votes of the constituency party membership! If the block votes had not been cast in the NEC constituency section vote (the SLP constitution requires that they should not have been), as many as three Democratic Platform candidates could have been elected to the NEC. There is no escaping the fact that, despite the grotesque nature of the congress itself, this was a very creditable performance.

Perhaps even more important than the size of the vote for the left of the party was the fact that several slates were allowed to stand openly against the leadership. This means that we established the de facto right of tendencies to exist in the organisation with the right to establish their own leadership slates. Despite Scargill’s blustering correspondance and occasional expulsions/disaffiliations of ultra-lefts, the internal regime has been shown to be more fluid and more open to dissent than we thought possible prior to the congress.

Some comrades said we were crazy to join the SLP in the first place. Others now say we are crazy to remain in it after the recent congress. Well, comrades, you have to be a just a little crazy to be in radical politics today, especially in the 1990s.

We should be guided in our tactics towards the SLP not by our subjective distaste for the Stalinist methods of the SLP leadership, but by the objective possibilities of winning, not the whole of the SLP, but a significant sector of its left wing--the people who voted for us. It takes time to crystallise-out such a voting bloc into a consolidated political opposition. It requires our continued presence in the SLP to achieve this. It would be throwing away the significant gains we have made in this conference to simply turn our backs on the SLP at this point. In a nutshell, in my opinion, it would be "crazy" to leave now. Everyone is entitled to be dispirited once in while and draw overly pessimistic conclusions. But I hope on this occasion that people will be able to rise above pessimism and see the objective possibilities. What evidence is there to indicate such objective possibilities for successful struggle in the SLP?

Firstly, we were not kicked out of the party prior to, or during, the congress. This indicates that, although the party regime is still diabolical, there is sufficient space for the opposition to stand open slates against the leadership. We did not know whether this would be possible before the conference. Secondly, this opposition was able to get a third of the votes of the constituency party membership. The importance of this achievement cannot be overstated in my opinion. Consider the difficulties we have faced in the past couple of years in the party. Consider the short-shrift that was meted-out to other oppositional groups (CPGB, Workers Power etc.) who went at it like a bull in china shop, only to find themselves out on their ear before the struggle had even begun. Any consideration of these very difficult conditions for struggle, of the need for a cautious, calculated, tactical struggle (we were, disparagingly referred to as "the clever, clever" tendency by one of the sectarian rags), can only lead to the conclusion that we have been highly successful in very bad conditions. And there is every reason to believe that we can continue to be so provided we continue to conduct the struggle in the same way.

I am perfectly well aware that the above arguments will cut little ice with some comrades who have had an especially bitter experience in the SLP and who have already made up their minds to find something else to do. To these people I say: we still have something in common and we should set up a framework on the 10th January to maintain whatever collaboration we can agree upon, whether inside the SLP or outside it. We all still, I hope, want to work towards the same objective of establishing a credible, democratic, socialist alternative to the Labour Party. We disagree about which arena to work in, but we still want the same outcome. And we are not alone in this. The Socialist Alliance exists and has the same objective as ourselves. The Ken Coates defection looks very interesting and another left split from the Labour Party seems a distinct possibility in the not too distant future.

It seems self-evident to me to try and work together as far as possible with anyone who is serious about building a credible socialist alternative. One idea that Martin Wicks and I were kicking around over the phone was to maintain Socialist Perspectives as a vehicle for promoting discussion and collaboration about the best way forward in terms of establishing a socialist alternative to Labour. I would be in favour of getting it properly printed as a magazine and possibly even inviting the Socialist Alliance to co-sponsor it, participate in the production and editing of it, as well as contributing to it. But the exact nature of the relation with the SA would have to be arrived at by consensus. SLP members could write for it using pen-names. The purpose of the magazine would be to act as a focal point for those struggling for a socialist alternative to Labour and to promote some sort of network or alliance for a socialist alternative, the ultimate goal of which would be to establish a sizeable, democratic, socialist party open to participation by all left organisations. That is as far as my thinking goes at the moment.