Socialist Party

and the 'Militant' tradition

From "Militant" to the Socialist Party: a collection

The Socialist Party held a special conference on 21 July to discuss issues from the conflict in the international network linked to the SP (Committee for a Workers’ International, CWI). Delegates representing around 200 members, have chosen to split away from the SP and align themselves with the majority in the CWI. Articles on the Socialist Party tradition. Background on special conference The Crisis in the CWI All articles on the Socialist Party The curious incident of the left that didn't bark (2017) An encounter with the shy Bishop Taaffe (2011) Will the SP debate Libya? (2011) Who are the...

Being anti-Labour doesn't put Galloway on the left

The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) and the Socialist Party have endorsed George Galloway in the Rochdale by-election. Galloway’s former allies and bag-carriers in Respect, the SWP, have refused to do so. Already, in 2022, the TUSC steering committee gave “observer status” to the Workers’ Party of Britain (WPB), formed as an alliance between Galloway and the Stalin-Society-supporting Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). They have since fallen out. Former MP Chris Williamson had already been wooed by the SP when he had his own vehicle, Resist. He is now in the WPB...

Israel has the right to defend itself, but not to raze Gaza. The Palestinians have the right to win a state of their own, but not to despoil Israel

To Israeli Jews, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh declared on 7 October, when Hamas forces invaded Israel to kill over 1,300 people, overwhelmingly civilians, and take over 100 hostage. “We have only one thing to say to you: get out of our land... There is no place or safety for you”. This was not an “excess” on the fringe of a basically justified struggle, but an effort to kill or panic as many Jews as possible. And probably done by Hamas as part of the network of a regional-imperialist power, Iran, pledged to the destruction of Israel. The rise of Hamas has been framed by Israeli governments’...

After Rutherglen by-election: organise the left!

In percentage terms, Scottish Labour romped home to victory in the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election on 5 October 2023. Labour won the seat with nearly 60% of the vote (compared with 34% of the vote in the 2019 general election). The SNP’s share of the vote slumped from 44% in 2019 to 28%. The overall swing from SNP to Labour was just over 20%. If the result were repeated across Scotland in a general election – although it certainly will not be – Labour would win 42 seats and the SNP would hold on to just six seats. Even so, the result strengthens the more realistic prospect of Labour...

Rutherglen by-election: Vote Labour!

The Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election will be taking place on 5 October. Although the seat is held by the SNP, it is a by-election which only Labour can lose. The seat, and its pre-boundary-change predecessors, was a safe Labour seat from the 1960s onwards. Then, in the post-referendum Labour collapse of 2015, it went SNP. Won back by Labour in 2017, it went SNP again in 2019. The by-election has been triggered by a constituents’ recall petition, after the 2019 victor (Margaret Ferrier) was suspended from Parliament for 30 days. A court had found her guilty of culpable and reckless...

The return of the 24 hour general strike

After many years, the “24 hour general strike” slogan has returned to left debates, advocated by the Socialist Party ( The Socialist, 7 December 2022 and some previous issues). It used to be a regular theme of the SP’s forerunner, Militant, almost a cure-all, and that past colours SP’s advocacy now. There is more to it now. If it means calling on the many unions in dispute to coordinate strikes — 1 February is in the air as a possible date — then that’s good, much better than the current picture of even unions in the same industry usually not fixing common strike days. A day of joint strikes...

Socialist Worker, Socialist Appeal and The Socialist on the strike wave

The publications and websites of groups that see themselves as Trotskyist provide an important source of information about the rising tide of strikes. Workers’ Liberty, of course, but also the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), Socialist Party (SP), Socialist Appeal (SA) and Counterfire. They do much better than the Stalinist Morning Star , with its well-funded journalistic apparatus and extensive connections with the trade union bureaucracy. And although the broadly “Trotskyist” groups are a mixed bag when it comes to proposing ideas for developing workers’ struggles, they tend to have much more...

Eye on the left: Two views on PCS

Since they parted ways in the 1990s, the Socialist Party and Socialist Appeal, both descended from the 1960s-80s Militant, have mutated in different directions. In civil service union PCS they take very different stances, as their reports on its 24-26 May conference show. Socialist Appeal (SA) is not very numerous in PCS. The Socialist Party (SP), which for almost two decades, until 2018, led the governing “Left Unity” (LU) bloc with the current leadership of general secretary Mark Serwotka, are more numerous. The SP is now highly critical of LU, even though LU now acts not very differently...

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