While the SLP is an important development, it remains small and marginal in real terms.

The fact that the SLP can call a conference like Reclaim our Rights, involving half a dozen national unions, indicates its potential. However, as a party, the SLP has not yet achieved a breakthrough in electoral terms. The SLP has lost a certain amount of momentum in the period since the General Election.

Meanwhile, a crisis is developing in the ranks of the Labour Party. If the SLP cannot win the best elements in the Labour Party then it will not develop into the mass socialist alternative that we all want it to become. At the moment the SLP is not recruiting these people from Labour. Exhortations to "come and join us" are insufficient. If the best elements of Labour will not come to us, then we have to go to them. The SLP needs to set up a Labour Party fraction. It needs to send people into the Labour Party to work alongside the Labour left and prepare the ground for a deeper split than that represented by the SLP. Labour will not, of course, allow known SLP members to join its ranks. However, it does not require a great deal of imagination to devise a plan for sending in SLP members who are not known by the Labour Party witch-hunters.

The end of the honeymoon period is now at hand and the growing realisation of the extent of the bankruptcy of Blairism in the ranks of the Labour Party means that the SLP can now come into its own. But things rarely happen in a straightforward way. The SLP can only realise its potential if it actively intervenes into the internal crisis of the Labour Party. Close, comradely relations with the Labour left are essential for this to happen. Sending people in to help the Labour left is one way of achieving this.

The SLP has failed to call for a vote for Labour candidates in areas where it is unable to stand itself. This is a big mistake. If we are going to set up close relations with the Labour left, if we are to win the best elements from the Labour Party, if we are going to prove to them that Labour is bankrupt, then we have to call for a vote for Labour in constituencies and wards where we are not standing. Why? Because the only way to prove that Labour is bankrupt is to put it in office where it will be clear for all to see.

Is it, or is it not, easier for the SLP to grow at the expense of Labour now that Blair is in power openly attacking the working class? Of course it is! Would it have been easier for us if our refusal to vote for Labour had let the Tories back in? What would the best elements of the Labour left have thought of us then? We would have been regarded as lepers, the bastards, who let the Tories back in. The SLP would have been totally and utterly discredited. The chances of winning anyone from Labour would have been zero.As it happened we were lucky this time and Labour’s landslide was not undermined by the SLP abstention vote. But it might have been different.

But by voting Labour are we not supporting Blair? It depends entirely on the way we call for a vote. We do not, of course say "vote Labour, Tony Blair is wonderful". On the contrary, we denounce Blair and warn the working class electorate that he will stab them in the back. As Lenin put it in the 1920s: we support the Labour Party electorally "like a rope supports a hanging man". In other words, we put Labour into office because it will open the eyes of the working class to the real nature of the Labour leadership. While in opposition Labour can more easily deceive the working class by appearing to oppose the Tories. In office, Labour has to deliver or be immediately exposed as the agents of the ruling class. The SLP must be flexible in its tactics towards Labour while being firm in its principles as it intervenes vigorously into Labour’s crisis.

It remains to be seen however what the SLP leadership will do with this conference. Of course the danger is that it will become an annual platform for trades union bureaucrats to make windy speeches, sounding-off about the evils of the anti-trades union legislation followed by no action.

What should be done with it? We have seen in the 1920s a very good model of what ought to come out of such an event as this: the Minority Movement (MM) and the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU) set up by the then revolutionary Communist Party. RILU was an international federation of revolutionary trades unions and trades union minorities. In Britain, the revolutionary minority in the trades unions was known as the Minority Movement. The Minority Movement set up caucases in many trades unions which were linked together on a national basis.

Today there is no rank and file movement in the trades union movement which could compare with the MM. The far left does not have the weight in the trades unions to organise such a movement although there have been various attempts: the SWP’s Rank and File Movement, the WRP’s All Trades Union Alliance etc.

The SLP is better placed to initiate such a movement, but Scargill has a history of unwillingness to intervene in the ranks of other trades unions, which was one reason, incidentally, for the defeat of the Miners Strike in 1984/5. A new Minority Movement would involve precisely such a factional intervention into other trades unions around a militant programme representing the independent interests of the working class. And of course, any trades union leader who sponsored such a movement would very soon find himself unpopular with the other trades union leaders.

Does Scargill have the intent or the political will to undertake such an endeavour? If his history is anything to go by, the answer to this question must be "no". More likely, the Reclaim our Rights campaign will be a big rally which will be followed up by more rallies and remain little more than a mailing list and a fairly innocuous pressure group. But we will see. Instead of building a Minority Movement, Scargill called for a "new TUC" at the 1997 TUC. This is reminiscent of the "red unionism" of the Communist International in the early 1930s which isolated it from the vanguard at a time when fascism was on the rise. This ultra-leftism must be strongly opposed.