Stuart, let me explain something.
The national secretary of your organisation, a man approaching 50, has a sexual relationship, in flagrant violation of any duty of care, and abusing his position of authority with basically a school girl.
She claims that two years later he raped her.
Despite that fact that she was only 17 to 19 while this was happening, your disgusting, debased and amoral “disputes committee” questioned HER about her previous sexual history!
they congratulated themselves that they did not consider questions of age imbalance relevant, because they were “revolutionaries”
It so reminds me of Gerry healy and what he called his “activities with the youth”
In 2011 at your conference, the leadership of your “party” presented the issues as a relationship between peers gone wrong, and encouraged a standing ovations and foot stomping for the foul pig stepping down as national seceratry, and the other “revolutionaries” allowed him to continue on your central committee.
We have been here before, and we know how it ends.
At UNISON womens conference last week, delegates were so angry at the SWP that only 5 people voted aginst a motion calling for UNISON not to share a platform with rape apologists – which the SWP were described as from the podium.
You will have no option to be an “interventionist party”, because the idea of joint work with the SWP makes makes many of us sick.
At the moment, there is a process of demonisation of your opponents and a bit of an adrenelin rush for you as the more fantasist inclined in your organisation try Daddy’s clothes on, and imagine this is the split between the Bolsheviks and the Menshaviks; and the bellicose Simmon Assaf thunders about the people you don’t want any more.
You stage a provocation of trying to take Chanie into a closed meeting, along with a “SW journalist”, that graduate of the Ted Crilly school of finaincal management, Simon Basketcase. When they are denied entry, this allows you to fulminate about how the opposition are the devils, etc, etc.
On march 10th, your confernece will be a cauldron of hate, and the organisation will split. You have chosen to side with the non-viable group of 500 older people who think it isn’t even about rape, after all who could get so upset about that, when there are serious issues at stake like lack of discipline on the Internet and eclectic thinking.
BUt we really have been her before, with the Mitchel, Torrence, Redgrave side of the WRP split. After the adrenalin excitement of the faction fight you will be ashamed of each other, and you deserve to be ashamed, because you are the lowest rape denying, sexual abuse excusing, lynch mob threatening, bullying, swaggering scum; excusing the inexcusible and justifying it to yourself because of the glint of Messianic destiny that you see reflected in the shards of your broken mirror.
What you are doing is worse than a crime, it is a sin. You behave this way because you have mentally reduced those you disagree with in your own perception to being less than human; we are “sectarians” and “filth” and “outsiders”. You have elevated your allies to more than human, they are the “leadership” and the “party”, indispensible to the cause of socialism, and the future liberty and happiness of mankind. And as such you have stripped yourself of the dignity of humane proportion, and you have instead become machines who can justify to yourself the appalling abuse of power that has the lecherous hot breath of your overbearing national secretary panting over an idealist girl young enough to be his granddaughter. While the withered and dessicated souls of your disputes committe, lacking conscience and bare decency, probe about her past sexual history, and ambush her with evidence from their long term friend and colleague that she hasn’t seen.
“My activities with the youth” in the words of Gerry healy. “Not Proven” says candy Unwin; “You have run out of time” says Karen Reissman.
After your blood red rally on 10th march, you will be resplendent Bolsheviks, rid of the wavverers like pat Stack and ian Birchill, those weak hearted menschaviks who were not prepared to entirely abandon their humanity and debase themslves before the God of central committe power, and the thrill you have of sublimating your will to obey the iron historical destiny of Lord Acton’s cousin [Callinicos], and David Cameron’s old school chum, Charles Kimber.
You will be rid of those eclectic thinkers like China and Seymour, who however tentatively, self-importantly and verbosely, have tried to think for themselves about the world they live in, instead of rote recitation of holy scripture of partial insights into a Cold war world now long dead.
Hurrah, the doubters and the weak are gone, you will cry. The CC and the Disputes Committee are victorious. But then dull reality is that your weekly meetings will be sparser attended, older, and there will be no young or new recruits. You console yourself that the street sales are still the same, purveying boring papers to the random curious and the bewildered. BUt you will be shunned paraiahs in the unions, in the universities, and in the social movements. The penny should surely have dropped after UNISON womens conferecne. Former allies will not return your calls, people will not share platforms with you.
BUt worse than that will be the shame. You destroyed the SWP you claim to love, in order to defend the tawdry, abusive womanising of a nasty and ignorant bore; and the vainglorious comic opera revolutionary pretentions of Lord Snooty and Bertie Woostser. You defended, against everything that your heart must realy be telling you, the scandalously inappropriate trivialistion of rape allegtions. The shame will not leave you, and the regret of years and decades building an organisation that you believed would contribute to the building of a new and better world, but when looked at in the cold hard light of day was an abusive cult that rallied round to defend the abuse of power for the coursest and most vulgar motives.
And I hear that there is more to come about Delta, and worse.
You live with it Stuart, you have made your choice.
