Militant weeps, comrades sneer and more Trots appear

While some of the comrades are gearing up for Sundays ruck with the UKIP pro Brexit march in London on Sunday there's still some paper selling days before Christmas. First up is this weeks Socialist from the remnants of the Militant tendency which is getting smaller every time I dip into their affairs.

One of the most boring papers on the left (General Election Now! Nationalise the top 100 monopolies etc...) the only item of real interest is that they have seriously got the hump that their boy Chris Baugh lost the PCS Assistant General Secretary election especially since his opponent subsequently announced she was withdrawing  from the contest next year due to health problems.

The Socialist Party have lost their major base in the unions, the largest of the civil service unions, the PCS. It was inevitable after the winding up of the mainstream opposition group, 4themembers that splits would happen in the unions big tent. The defection of so many of their leading trade unionists to the Serwotka camp (organised around Socialist View) has devastated their ranks in the union.

The Socialist reports

There was a heated debate because initially the votes of three Left Unity geographical groups, who had all voted for Socialist Party member Chris Baugh in the assistant general secretary election, were going to be ruled outbecause of 'clerical errors'.

This caused a big number of complaints from Left Unity members, in those and other groups.

While conference accepted a proposal from the Left Unity secretary to include the votes of London and Fylde, plus nine of 13 ruled-out postal votes, the votes from the West Midlands - which while known and verified but not received - were still disallowed.

These votes would have meant that Socialist Party member Dave Semple would have retained his Left Unity editor's position.

The smaller wing of Militant now known as Socialist Appeal put it another way:

Rather than accept the verdict graciously, Socialist Party supporters desperately tried to block the result at the Manchester conference. In a sometimes heated two-and-a-half hour debate, they demanded that all votes be included in the count, whether they had been received or not! The fault, they declared, was not theirs but privatised Royal Mail.

This was despite the fact that the scruitineers had made it clear that even if all the disputed votes had been included it would not have made any difference to the result.

This feeble attempt to get the results overturned was clearly in vain.

Meanwhile while the SP are obviously bitter their small but somewhat saner rivals the Alliance for Workers Liberty comment:

A Left Unity conference on 1 December agreed to include the extra votes, but Godrich still won, and Godrich supporters dominated the newly-elected Left Unity committee. Soon after, however, Godrich said that ill-health would prevent her from standing for AGS. 

As we go to press, we do not know whether Left Unity will now back Baugh, or try to nominate a third alternative. 

The political differences between Godrich and Baugh are murky. Mark Serwotka, who has been General Secretary of the PCS since 2000, is not a Socialist Party member, and was elected General Secretary without the support of the SP, but has worked closely with the SP since then: he has backed Godrich against Baugh. The SWP, a relatively small force in the union, has also backed Godrich. 

The AWL will be backing John Maloney from the PCS Independent Left.

Finally it has belatedly come to my attention that another and obviously quite minuscule group of Trotskyist group has entered the Labour Party not that anyone seems to have noticed. This group is the British Section of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency  (RCIT)(formerly known s the League for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International (LRCFI), (They love their long winded names these tiny self important groups).

Their supporters hide behind the name Red Liberation, not very well if you look at their mostly unreadable websites.  They don't like Jeremy Corbyn much though: A statement issued when they wandered into the Labour Party in 2016 is quite clear in their hostility to old Steptoe:

....the Labour leadership clearly shows they are ready to implement the government’s pro-austerity agenda. So much for Corbyn’s much vaunted anti-austerity program. Corbyn will continue to be a hostage of the Blairites until he breaks with them completely!

It is important that MOMENTUM, the campaign organization of left-wing Corbyn supporters, openly criticises the political adaption of the Corbyn leadership group to the Blairites. Furthermore, we demand that MOMENTUM operates in a transparent and democratic way. Hence it is important to have a national conference of MOMENTUMactivists in spring which democratically decides on the policy and elects a leadership.

and previously before they had their "turn":

Corbyn clearly wants to work with the Blairite section of the party now that he has been elected leader and chooses to ignore their pro-capitalist views. He is very close to the trade union bureaucracy and has a neo-Keynesian outlook.

The "International" or cult they belong to is led by Michael Pröbsting of their German Section. He is the International Secretary of the RCIT and appears to write all their books and pamphlets. They no longer seek to "rebuild the Fourth International but are working towards creating a Fifth International no less. Except there already is one organised by the Workers Power now called Red Flag and also buried inside the Labour Party.

Perhaps they should skip to the Sixth International!

If you have no paint to watch dry their websites are here and here.