Discussing a Brighton balance sheet I'm angry at the Left BETTER BRITAIN

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"As we see.." the new leadership hold Kinnóck: 'a soft left leadership that is open to influence from both right and left' fighting in the Labour movement for lesbiar To join or affiliate, write to Chris Richardson, 21 Devonshire Promenade, Lenton, Nottingham NG7 2DS: £5 for individuals, or for affiliated organisations, per 1000 members. £2 for low-waged individuals. £1 for unwaged. Add 50p if you want the WHERE DOES the Left go from here? I want to answer this question carefully and constructively, and to do so I wish to begin by examining our immediate past history.

I feel extremely angry and critical of the activities of the Left of the Labour Party in the past year. At the Briefing meeting at Conference, I tried to sum up those feelings and to develop an analysis of the inherent weaknesses of Left politics, with a view to preparing the ground for future struggles and our future organisation.

I argued that the Left's preoccupation with division and polarisation, personalities, and a concept of power that is narrowly-based, was and is destructive - especially of veit unity - and inhibited the slow but constructive strengthening of principled Socialist ideas and organisation, ideas and organisation to which I personally am fiercely committed.

What is meant by a preoccupation with polarisation? Let me offer some concrete examples.

First, the polarisation that occurred around that most bungled of bureaucratic interventions into democracy, the Register. The Register was used by influential and prominent figures on the Left - and I refer both to the pro-registrars and the antiregistrars - as a means of shattering a unity that had been built up (however precariously) around the reforms that culminated at Wembley in 1981.

As I sat through the most divisive and destructive political gathering I have ever attended - the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy 1983 Annual General Meeting - I tried to convince myself that this wholesale political genocide had been engineered by the Right.

But I know the people that drafted the plans for the Register. I worked with them. And without appearing patronising or offensive to them, I know that they lacked the political subtlety and political skills needed to bring down and weaken the Left.

No, they could not have done without the agency of some of the Left's most respected strategists.

The consequences of that selfweakening was reflected in last Tuesday's elections to the National Executive Committee. There have been many other consequences — as serious, but too depressing to detail here.

There are other examples of special issue of Gay Socialist. PHOTOS: JOHN HARRIS the Left's inclination to polarise and divide. Recently Briefing attempted to drive a wedge between the Women's Action Committee and the Women's Committee of the Labour Coordinating Committee - 'so that WAC's position as the only genuinely feminist campaign' could he asserted.

Now this is all very flattering and well, but where does such well defined delineation and division take the feminist project? We need all the unity we can get on the Left, and women on the Left need it more than most.

Another issue ripe for polarisation is the question of council house sales. Are you for or against, comrades? Right, when I blow my whistle, get into your corners. First a left-hook and then a right.

Forget the question of council housing as a whole; neglect the real problem of channelling political, financial and other resources into rebuilding and restoring the central political ground on which we need to fight to regain our working class base. No, concentrate on hooking the left eye.

The inclination of the Left to polarise and divide, and not to construct and build, means that often this boxing takes place in the shadows of political struggle. And such shadow-boxing results in the politics of gesture, a self-indulgent, self-righteous politics that induces complacent self-satisfaction.

We make our little gestures, we stake out our piece of untrammelled, unsoiled territory, and then we sit back and wonder Anne Pettifor is secretary of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy Women's Action Committee.

where on earth the struggle is taking place and why we're excluded from advancing the interests of principled socialists within that struggle.

The conference issue of Socialist Organiser ('Not Our Dream') reeked of the politics of gesture. Self-criticism was virtually absent, What we were offered was the subtle analysis that the Constituency Labour Parties 'had moved to the right' The paper stood aloof from those wicked revisionist activists. It pompously asserted its distance from the whole labour movement, and then argued that the great yawning divide had been created by.. the unions, the LCC, the media, etc.

Now we in the Women's Action Committee have had some serious political differences with men on the Left, and we believe that the great divide can be attributed to one or two other things.

Which brings me to the other two major weaknesses mentioned in my speech at the Briefing meeting. The first is the Left's preoccupation with personalities; the second, its concept of power.

The Left has, in this immediate past period, invested a lot of political capital in its male political heroes. The Left Expects these Political Heroes to Do Their Duty, and to lead us to Jerusalem's fair and promised land.

When they fail, as they must do - the task, after all, is superhuman - despair and disillusionment become rampant. (Members of the LCC - take note).

Worse, the Left's organisational base disintegrates. This is what happened after the defeat of Tony Benn in 1981. A lot of organisational and political capital had been invested; it was simply allowed to evaporate, with the defeat of one charismatic and inspirational man.

When it came to selecting candidates for this year's leadership elections, WAC proposed a different strategy: That should put up a woman as deputy, and that we should fight a radically different campaign, which would not have the candidate as the central jewel to its crown. Our proposal was ridden over roughshod. To put it politely.

This faith in personalities; this over-investment in individuals at the top of our particular heap, is reflected in the Left's concept of power.

To large sections of the Left, power seems to be something that can only be wielded (by personalities) in large solid blocks. For them, power lacks the properties of dispersal. Hence the Left's attack on any form of rank-and-file consultation during the leadership election, bar that of the hallowed general management committee.

I fought for the electoral col lege and automatic reselection of MPs because it would break up the solid block of power controlled by the bureaucratic and parliamentary leadership of our party. It was with some horror therefore that I watched CLPD and other groups bearing down with Stalinist immobility on all those constituency parties that were using their autonomy to devise mechanisms for dispersing that political power.

In conclusion: the Left has vital and constructive tasks ahead. It cannot abrogate these by sailing off into the sunset in high dudgeon and sulkily nursing its own self-inflicted defeats.

What are the tasks that lie ahead? First, we need to refresh those parts of the Parliamentary Labour Party that socialism has not yet reached. We must be brutally frank and acknowledge that one of the major factors in our defeat at this conference has been the sheer dearth of leftwing talent within the Parliamentary Labour Party.

And that requires that we also examine closely the records of some so-called left-wingers that we have uncritically sustained in position simply because they too are capable of the odd political gesture. Our hypocrisy in respect to them weakens us.

Second, we have to sustain pressure on the leadership to stick to conference policies. We have a soft-left, centrist leadership that I, unlike the defeatist and fatalist contributors to Socialist Organiser's conference issue, believe is open to influence from both right and left of the We cannot vacate the political space necessary to apply this pressure. We cannot let the giving up now, by sailing off to our own little island in the sunset.

Third, women within the party need to wake up from their dazed political slumber, and to discover their strength.

To do this, we need to build up the political organisation of women within the party. We very narrowly failed to get conference's endorsement for our proposal that the party's officers be instructed to call a Rules Conference to begin the task. We can say with some confidence that it is a demand that we will win next year.

In the meantime we need to build up the strength of rank and file party and trade union women so that when the time comes, our organisation will be democratically determined, not bureaucratically decreed.

In the light of last week's election of a leadership arrogantly and quite pompously indifferent to the demands of women, a leadership hamstrung by a pre-Victorian ideology that confines men and women "separate spheres' of influence and activity, Left men would do well to support women in the building up of their organisational strength.

Sulking They would do well, too, to stop sulking, to grow up and to stop whining over their injured political pride.

There is an awful lot more to political struggle than winning one leadership election. Women know, because that's one form of struggle from which they have always been excluded.

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right wing win by default, by MILITANT of the fundamental policy issues"