News from the Spotting Front Line: Chris Williamson to start “real socialist Party”, denounces anti-racist group Hope not Hate, Labour Against the Witch-hunt in Vicious Internal Battle.
Fall Out in Labour Against the Witch-hunt.
Chris Williamson has been busy recently.
His Orga, Resist, has decided to launch itself on the path to a new socialist party.
Britain’s most celebrated Vegan is the creator of the definitive recipe for the radical peasant dish, Vegan Carrot Cake.
Now he’s off to new cuisine: attacking anti-racists and anti-fascists.
It’s a good moment to boost Greenstein who is said, according to well-established rumour, to be a bit down in the dumps in recent days.
The South Coast’s most celebrated struggler has his plate full this week as he engages in a war to the death, or bun fight, with the CPGB (Provisional Central Committee). It’s no secret that it’s over the future of Labour Against the Witch-hunt (LAW). The united front that brought together Jackie Walker and the Brighton Battler, the support of Ken Loach and Noam Chomsky looks as if it’s about to fissure, permanently.
Why Labour Against the Witchhunt & Labour-in-Exile-Network Should Merge
“With the Collapse of the Corbyn Project there is a clear choice between Building a Socialist Movement or Retreating into the Politics of Sectarianism.“
Frying it up non-sectarian sauce, Greenstein states,
The blame for this state of affairs can be laid at the feet of Jeremy Corbyn and Lansman’s Momentum. It was they who accepted the false ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative of the right-wing, that Labour was ‘overrun by anti-Semitism’. It was they who supported the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism. It was Corbyn and Lansman who supported the expulsion of Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson and myself.
Now who could possibly be against this “merger” of Labour Against the Witch-hunt (LAW) and Labour in Exile Network (LEIN)?
The LPM (Editor’s note for those already lost, Labour Party Marxist, led for many years by Cde Ken Keable), which is the Communist Party of Great Britain, which produces the Weekly Worker. It is a small group of around 30-40 members which has stayed approximately the same size since it was formed from The Leninist over 30 years ago.
Their strategy, if it can be called that, is to form a mass revolutionary Marxist party which will, with the support of the unions, force the Labour Party into becoming a ‘united front of a special kind’. In the meantime LPM simply writes off the hundreds of thousands of people who joined the Labour Party after the victory of Jeremy Corbyn and the millions who voted for the 2017 manifesto as having the ‘wrong’ politics. There is a complete failure to understand what the Corbyn project represented and how to build on it.
LPM is therefore fiercely opposed to such a merger or indeed any attempt to build the left other than temporary alliances with already existing left groups like CLPD or LRC in the Labour Party. It dismisses all attempts to build anything outside the Labour Party as a Labour Party Mark II.
In measured tones the seaside resort’s most celebrated dapper gent states,
“What they are advocating, behind their talk of Solidarity with all victims of the Labour witch-hunt! Step up the fight! is nothing less than an abandonment of any fight whatsoever. “
At the meetings on November 26 and 27 Esther Giles and myself will be moving a motion calling for the ‘consolidation of Labour Against the Witchhunt and Labour-in-Exile-Network into one organisation’.
There will therefore be a clear choice facing members as to whether or not to continue the fight against Starmer, but not necessarily on Labour Party terrain since that has now become enemy territory.
This is an Open Letter hammering out the line of Greenstein and the faction, Carel Buxton, Roger Silverman, Esther Giles, known as GB-SG (Non-Continuity).
In the unlikely event of anybody being interested further here is the Weekly Worker rival line:
Deserting the fight
Plans to close Labour Against the Witchhunt and form yet another amorphous broad-left outfit are not only, by definition, unprincipled: they are bound to fail, writes Paul Demarty
we have a call to abandon ship. This constitutes the effective basis of the motion, presented under the names of Tony Greenstein and Esther Giles, which will be debated at LAW’s all members’ meeting this Saturday.
Tendance Coatesy 
Anti-semites annoyed at being called anti-semites
Kevin Algar
November 26, 2021 at 11:19 am
I reckon the attack on Hope not Hate (uncontested ground for almost all – 99% -of the left) is a sign that that the brown is starting to drown out the vestigial red. Looking at the 3 participants, I simply can’t be arsed to even have a quick look.
David Walsh
November 26, 2021 at 1:00 pm
I skimmed the Greenstein blog post on which this video is no doubt based. It is the usual Monster Raving stuff.
Hope not Hate organised a meeting some years ago in Ipswich at which, amongst others, the entire left turned up.
Andrew Coates
November 26, 2021 at 1:05 pm
In related news, Williamson’s mates at the Canary are gloating:
https://www.thecanary.co/breaking-news/2021/11/25/the-canary-cleared-of-antisemitic-discrimination-by-independent-press-regulator/
mrtusks
November 26, 2021 at 3:17 pm
Labour Heartlands, which claims to have something to do with Labour has picked up the story,
“Resist have been building steadily over the last 20 months despite the setback of the pandemic disrupting its initial momentum. It has become one of the many Left wing organisations filling the vacuum created by disillusioned Labour Party members and supporters.”
Andrew Coates
November 26, 2021 at 6:32 pm
How many Left of Labour parties in England now? 20? 30? What’s the point?
IainF
November 26, 2021 at 9:06 pm
The ones offering something avowedly ‘different’ – the various ‘revolutionary’ and ‘Leninist’ groups, certain left-libertarian or impossiblist currents, etc. – may have a rationale for their existence, convincing or otherwise. It’s these groups which claim to be offering an improved, purified, ‘socialist’ or otherwise cleansed version of Labour which baffles me.
Francis
November 26, 2021 at 9:17 pm
I don’t think it’s that odd. There always were small break-aways in local politics, a few councillors in an ‘independent Labour’ group. Not to mention the idea that somehow Corbyn was something different to Labour, a ‘real’ socialist, encouraged some let loose the moorings when he was no longer leader, no to mention his suspension. I would not be surprised that if if you scratched many of these people you find a big diversity of ideas which means they would tend to unite around things like being ‘real Labour’ real labour movement, and so on,
Being able to broadcast your existence to the world through social media, having your own web site (no need for a printing press or duplicators), the list is long in factors enabling people to set up their own dream parties.
Whole political ‘parties’, La France insoumise (Mélenchon), La République en marche (Macron) , in Italy Movimento 5 Stelle, have been founded around these technological instruments, with only a ‘virtual’ democracy and casual ‘membership’ (that is not real membership at all, no proper voting rights, no right to form ‘factions’,).
These party-start-ups run by Management with only supporters and willing activists only seem to have right wing parallels here, the Brexit Party and the Reclaim Party. What us baffling is that no left group seems to have imitated them here.
Andrew Coates
November 26, 2021 at 10:41 pm
Here’s one even us eagle-eyed spotters missed (and according to people who live there, not exactly well known):
Andrew Coates
November 26, 2021 at 9:33 pm