The most important task for the Socialist Party (Militant) is to ensure that it's boy Chris Baugh currently Assistant General Secretary of the PCS Union gets nominated and re-elected. He has an uphill task despite being in the post for a decade.
Marion Lloyd one of the Militants on the PCS NEC writes:
Meetings to agree nominations and motions are taking place until 26 October. These will be followed by voting meetings during November, culminating in the national Left Unity conference on 1 December.
A key issue will be who the Left Unity candidate is for the union's assistant general secretary (AGS).
Socialist Party member Chris Baugh is up for re-election. He has been the Left Unity candidate on three successive occasions since 2004, and won the union's election each time.
Chris is being challenged by Janice Godrich, the union's president. This challenge was started and is actively supported by the general secretary, Mark Serwotka, supposedly because of personal dislike and alleged inability to work with Chris.
As the rival PCS Independent Left puts it:
What we have is court politics where the King has fallen out with one of his nobles and there is battle to replace the rebel courtier.
Meanwhile the SP are making sure that Baugh is getting a high profile while this all goes on. The Socialist reports that:
Whether the Socialist Party will break ranks with the rest of the PCS left and run Baugh against Janice Godrich if he loses remains to be seen. It is certain that Janice will. She has the backing of PCS head honcho Mark Serwotka and he wants rid of the troublesome Baugh.
Meanwhile as people prepare to march against Brexit in Central London they will be happy to know that sellers of the Socialist Worker are for Brexit and won't be pestering them to buy a copy.
The SWP are using one of their front organisations Stand Up to Racism is holding an "International Conference" this weekend. The comrades write:
Now the latter part of that statement is absolutely true. Labour does have a racism problem as an elderly Jewish woman and others found out last night in the heart of Jeremy Corbyn's constituency when they were assaulted outside a meeting defending Corbyn and the Labour Party against racist accusations. Not sure that's what the SWP means but anti-Semitism is rife on the Labour left.
"We are facing the biggest rise in support for fascism, racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism since the 1930s."Speakers include John McDonell MP who shared a platform with Jenny Manson from which Jews were excluded, Lyndsey German who was a speaker at last nights event in North London. (I have asked her for comments but have yet to receive a reply). Someone from the Muslim Council of Britain which is really a window dressed Muslim Brotherhood banned in so many Arab countries and laughingly someone from the Unite Against Racism organisation which like the SUTR is a front for the SWP.
There are some legitimate speakers such as Gerry Gable of Searchlight magazine but David Rosenberg of the tiny Jewish Socialists Group is hardly representative of the Jewish Community. All this is in order to build a demonstration on November 17th.
It'll be strange beyond belief to see racists of the left marching against themselves....
Meanwhile the sole group on the far-left that actually opposes anti-Semitism, the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) has been holding meetings around the country and in an overview Ira Berkovic writes in their newspaper Solidarity:
The aim of the meetings, however, has not merely been to provide a space for debate but to convince comrades of a particular view: that antisemitism does exist on the left, and in a specific and distinct form, and that the way to uproot it is to replace the conspiracist form of anti-Zionism that currently predominates on much of the far left with a consistently democratic policy that upholds the equal right of all peoples to self-determination.
If only there were more like the AWL on the left.
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