Palestine Conference Was Rigged

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Former Labour Committee on Palestine secretary Andrew Hornung writes The article (Sr: Nov. 26) by Ros Kaplan on the Conference of the Labour Committee on Palestine was as scurrilous as it was inaccurate, as wrong-headed as it was evasive.

Let us begin with the facts. Ted Knight organised a contingent of mainly WRP • members and supporters to come to the Conference to vote his way. I have shown • you the registration forms from the Conference; you have seen the evidence.

Now without ambiguity and evasion, will you say whether your dispute this fact?

In last week's article you say - and it is dismaying to hear you say it - that "whether or not supporters of Labour Herald or the WRP or both packed the Conference was irrelevant"

indeed what did happen?

The WRP's known connections with the Libyan government, their support of the Iraqi butcher, Saddam Hussein, and their present contacts with Gulf rulers, mean that our attitude to the WRP cannot be the same as it would be towards some other tendency. Their record in the British labour movement, not least their instant resort to the courts against criticism from within the movement, ought to teach us to treat the members of the WRP as pariahs.

You know that this contingent of mainly WRP members and supporters was able to come into the ConTerence and vote only because their names appeared on a list of paid-up members held by Ted Knight, who until November 20 was the LCP's treasurer (and is now its chairperson).

List

You know that this list first made its appearance two hours before the Conference; that night waimed that these people had come into the Labour Herald office and paid for membership or given him the money personally; that the Heraiu office was never given as an address for the campaign; that Knight could produce no receipt-carbons, no receipt stubs, letters of application, membership slips filled in or any other corroboration of his story.

Will you then now say without evasion that no labour movement body would tolerate such a state of affairs? And, further, that this story of Knight's is simply incredible?

In Ros Kaplan's article she says "members of the WRP would have been able to attend as trade union delegates anyway." Certainly: but the key word is "would" ...and then only if their union branches were affiliated, and they had evidenre thev were delegates.

Will you now agree that only about a dozen claimed to be delegates from union branches; that these union branches were not affiliated (unless, of course, the affiliations were also being channelled through the Herald office and being kept a secret by Ted Knight!). It goes without saying that the overwhelming majority of the people of whom only Knight had knowledge and with whom the LCP had neither direct personal contact nor indirect contact through a labour movement organisation were not members of the Labour Party, and a considerable number could be identified as WRP members.

When you wrote last week's article you already knew that Knight was claiming that no written treasurer's report could be given because the relevant documents had been stolen in a break-in at Lambeth Town Hall - a break-in at his office and at the Tory office. Odd that Knight did not inform any of the officers of the LCP at the time. Odder still that there is no record of the break-in. When the Guardian asked the local CID, they said they could recall no break-in. The lown Hall's official response that there has been no breakin and that Knight is now saying the documents were lost "in transit" between his old office as opposition leader and his new office as majority leader.

Will you end the evasion and say clearly that Knight's story is unbelievable?

Let me now correct a few of the incorrect statements in your article. Your headline talks about the Conference "forming" "founding" the LCP. Knight's very words! The LCP was, of course, founded and formed in June of this year at a meeting called by Tony Greenstein and myself I take it that this fact is not in dispute.

You then write that "the recent invasion of Lebanon - and the massacres of Palestinians - ensured a good attendance at the Conference, with over 200 delegates and observers from Labour Parties, trade unions, and Palestine solidarity organisations" Would that it were true!

Half

In fact, as you know, more than half the number you mention did not come as delegates or observers and did not come from the kind of organisations you refer to. In my view there were no more than 80-90 bona fide members and delegates.

• The reason for this is that the dreadful events you mention do not guarantee big meetings. Successful events come through hard work and These dreadful events do not i organisational thoroughness, ind Knight's stooge on the ›ld committee, Penny Cole, he publicity officer - voted ›y the rigged Conference as ¡ecretary! - did not place in advertisement for the Conference in a single newspaper... except, of course, ler second home, Labour Herald.

Pledge

It is true that the final poutical resolution did "eventually" as you put it, include a "pledge to fight Zionism" • But why did you not report that this was vigorously opposed by the supporters of the WRP, Labour Herald and, more naturally, the Jewish Socialist Group, and then suddenly adopted on Knight's sayso as chair without discussion or dissent, but after the original vote to exclude such references was greeted by the Palestinians in the audience with whistles and boos.

To record clearly the sheep-like support to exclude these references and the sheep-like switch a minute later to include the gist of them is simply to describe the obvious external evidence of Conference rigging!

You do not record, of course, that shortly after all the Palestinians walked out in protest at the rigging.

Once you get these facts in focus and apply to them the norms of working class democracy that we are fighting for throughout the labour movement and in the Labour Party in particular, certain things follow: firstly that it is scandalous - what* Socialist Challenge has refused to print this letter, but agreed to take 500 words from Andrew Hornung in return for 500 words in SO. While protesting at the principle that SO should have to 'buy' his individual right of reply in this way, Andrew Hornung has accepted this and a reply from Socialist Challenge will appear next week.

Ted Knight guarantee big meetings' ever your tactical or other political disagreements with Tony Greenstien, me, Briefing or Socialist Organiser -to make us the villains of the piece: secondly, that whether you break with Knight or not, you say clearly and openly what happened - otherwise you are simply covering for Knight, Cole and the WRP.

It follows too that the claim that what was "behind this row was an attempt by Socialist Organiser to get the Conference to adopt a platform which included very detailed positions on the reactionary Arab states... is false. What was "behind the row" was a fight for the norms of workers' democracy. I thought Socialist Challenge was shoulder to shoulder with Socialist Organiser, Briefing and other leftists on this question. Perhaps not!

Factual

Incidentally, this judgement of yours contains three - only three! - factual errors: there was no Socialist Organiser resolution but one from me and Tony Greenstein who is not a Socialist Organiser supporstates" but a cursory reference, and thirdly there was no decision as to how much of that political resolution would become a platform defining membership.

Let us now turn to the contemptibly scurrilous and venomously factional part of Ros Kaplan's article.

It says: "Labour Herald supporters (did not) try to exclude Socialist Organiser supporters from the steering committee which was elected. It seemed (!) however (!) that Socialist Organiser were not happy with a committee which was not in their own pocket."

The tone is clear, Labour Herald supporters (some of whom rigged the conference) are open and democratic, while Socialist Organiser (whose few supporters there refused to tolerate this kind of practice) are the despotic wheeler-dealers. What marvellous I-r-revolutionary logic! What political norms can one attribute to a mind that can justify this?

What are the politics behind such remarkably contorted reasoning? You apply the general idea that lots of underhand things are done in the Labour Party and trade unions and you can't just walk out of these organisations because of that.

True enough. But the LCP is not a wing of the labour movement with a mass following (and more's the pity!): it is a campaign from which the key activists walked out when they saw the shake-down in progress, from which the branches have already withdrawn and from which some of the sponsors and affiliates have already withdrawn.

Argument

Tro other argument 1 hear is that to expose the rigging of the Conference is likely to feed the witchhunt going on in the Labour When I first heard this, my mind flashed immediately to those facing the show trials conducted by Stalin in the 1930s: the way they swallowed the argument that they should not expose Stalinism for fear of weakening the Soviet Union... Tell me, would you have condemned an honest ETU member who decided to expose the CP ballot rigging in 1960 and fight for a proper re-ballot?

It would be a witchhunt if we were saying that so and so who is in the Labour Party was really a member of some other organisation. I do not say this. To speak of Knight's collaboration with the WRP is to speak of a criminally unwise course of action which itself can only help the witch-hunt in the Party.

Nor am I saying that non-Labour Party members Party members. was attended primarily by non-Labour Party members - by people who are not even electoral supporters of the Labour Party, who stand candidates against Labour (as many as possible to impress their friends in high places in the Middle East), who in the last election managed thereby to lose one seat for Labour (Arthur Latham's), who do not support the return of a Labour government, and who spend a good deal of their time denouncing militants in the Party and trade union movement as being police agents.

No comrades, there is no witch-hunt. The clear implication of the suggestion that in denouncing the action of Knight, Cole and others we are feeding a witch-hunt is to say that so long as the Right keeps up its attack, the honest militants of the Left will have to permit corrupt practices in their own ranks. If that is the conclusion you have come to, you had better say that clearly.

Those who walked out of the rigged LCP Conference immediately set up a Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine. We will fight for the continuation of what the LCP was set up to do. We are supported by the branches of the LCP, we are supported by many of the ICP's former affiliates. The future will soon show whether our campaign will prosper or the LCP with its much vaunted "broad committee" which at its first meeting did not even have the independence of spirit to ask Knight for an explanation of his actions!

Of course the division is regrettable. I did not help found the LCP to desert it after a few months. Unfortunately the LCP of Ted Knight, abetted by yourselves, have squandered the chance of restoring unity by your rejection . of the proposal to hold a re-call conference on an agreed basis.

My letter is long; still, I ask you to publish it it full. The need to refute the many falsehoods and slurs of your original article and to confront the arguments surrounding the future of campaigning on the Palestine question imposes its own requirements. I believe, comrades, you have a duty to publish it.

Contact: Labour Movement Campaign

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