Dear Charlie,
Please accept my resignation from the SWP.
This is not a step I have taken lightly, nor is it something I wanted to do. I have been a member for nearly 35 years (with time off for good behaviour in the Dutch IS), and for most of that time, and for some time previously, I have seen the organisation as a wholly positive for most of that time. The list of achievements are too long to list, but the ANL has to be mentioned. Without this, the far right might have gained a toehold in mainstream politics. I think also that the IS/SWP has contributed to a radical change in trade union culture in this country, helping to strengthen the position of rank and file activists again the bureaucracy. These are things we can all be proud of.
Then came the current dispute. When the argument first broke out I was convinced that, however badly things had been handled, the party's structures would be resilient enough to sort the problem out. I turned out to be very wrong.
From the start, the Central Committee showed a lack of political nous. At the recent Thames Valley aggregate you stated your agreement with a comrade who stated “there is more that unites us than divides us”. If that had been the CC's attitude from the beginning, if that had informed your actions, then we wouldn’t have got ourselves in the state we're in now.
The CC should have tried to distance the party from the dispute at the very beginning. Bourgeois politicians understand this, which is why so many of them resign to spend time with their families. They learned the hard way in the nineteenth century how sexual scandal can damage political parties, and the Tories were reminded of this fifty years ago in the Profumo scandal. As Marxists, we should have enough knowledge of history to learn the lessons without repeating them.
The closeness of the vote on the DC report in January and the subsequent demands for a recall conference should have alerted you to the problems ahead. Sometimes fifty percent plus one is not basis for moving ahead. You should have taken action to confine the conflict, allow unity to prevail over the issues on which there is agreement. In the Oxford branch, there was a move to get us behind the call for a recall conference. We rejected this, but passed a motion calling for a review of Disputes Committee procedures. I still believe that, had the February NC meeting adopted this approach and called for all sides to make submissions to the review, then the conflict could have been calmed down.
Instead, the February NC voted for a review into leaks and the CC made threatening comments towards those who continued to dissent. The CC then decided to call a special conference – which branches had rejected. This special conference then voted for a review into Disputes Committee procedures, although in such a way that the opposition could not vote for it. Instead of a simple motion to set up the review, which would have had the chance of being passed unanimously and reuniting the party, the motion put to conference contained a whole series of clauses which couldn't have been better designed to divide us.
The special conference failed to unite the party and instead led to an increasing number of resignations, especially amongst the younger membership. In Oxford, we now have no student members left in the party.
I am firmly of the belief that democratic centralism depends on vigorous debate amongst the rank and file of the party and a willingness – or indeed a duty – on the party of the leadership to engage with them. Without this we cannot engage properly with the outside world. Last weekend's conference convinced me that this is not going to happen in the SWP within the foreseeable future. We have a leadership that is set in its way, defensive in the face of challenge and complacent. I am forced, therefore, to go my separate way.
Perhaps you should not regard this as a split but as a difference, if I may use a distinction that was brought up in the conference. The revolutionary left is too divided as it is, and it's a tragedy that those who stand in the International Socialist tradition are not standing together. I hope we will eventually be able to reunite. In the meantime, I am going to have to be building an alternative organisation to continue the IS tradition, and will be attempting to persuade other members of the SWP to join me in this project.
In solidarity,
