Reflections on the Coaliton of Resistance Conference

So I am going to report back on the two workshops which I was involved with at the Coalition of Resistance Conference on Saturday. As I was also on the conferences organising committee, I was kept busy. Others have reported on the plenaries.

I chaired the session on ‘Political Representation’ and on the panel were Billy Bragg, our own Green councillor from Norwich Samir Jeraj, Liz Davies from the Haldane Socialist Lawyers Society who was speaking in a personal capacity and New Statesman and Guardian journalist Laurie Penny, who is also an activist.

Samir started by speaking about what was happening In Norwich. He is the Deputy Leader of the Green Group there and they almost took control of the council in September. He confirmed the determined resistance of Green councillors there to cuts and his view on how these cuts could be opposed by sitting councillors. This was later added to by former Labour leader of Lambeth Council in the 80s, Ted Knight, known as Red Ted, who argued that councillors should block cuts and if necessary force officers to try and run the council with occupations by council workers and others.

Laurie Penny who had been on the protests with the school students that week said that there had been a widespread feeling among those who marched that mainstream politics was dead. Laurie’s view was that there was a huge gulf between parliament and people. Laurie is a young person and her views reflected those of many students etc. She made the point that the chants on the march had changed from ‘no cuts to education’ to ‘no cuts to public services’. MPs, according to her, were divorced from reality and from people’s priorities. In the 80s there had been an illusion of an alternative politically but now there was none. For many young people the Lib Dems had been that alternative but now the Lib Dems were in a government using the police to kettle them. Laurie’s view was that there was a total political gap between young people and the political representatives. But she singled out Caroline Lucas as one MP who was different and that she had been on the police lines on the day of the kittling arguing with them to release the young demonstrators. This, according to Laurie, was what an MP should do to reconnect with the young.

Billy Bragg spoke initially about his involvement in the anti-BNP campaign in Barking and Dagenham and how they had crushed the BNP politically there. For him the statement issued by the Coalition of Resistance harked back to Old Labour. In Barking Labour had been consistently in power since 1931 and as New Labour under Blair had abandoned the working class, there had been a political void. This was indicated by the fact that local MP Margaret Hodge had not even had a constituency office there until the election of the BNP councillors. The BNP had filled that void. It was a pity, said Bragg, that all of the councillors elected in May had been from the Labour Party, which effectively created a one party council with no real opposition. He admitted that he had voted for the Lib Dems in May as the Labour Party only received 10% of the vote where he lived.

Bragg then went on to argue for AV, stating that this was the only way to change political representation and address some of the problems which Laurie had raised. He accepted that AV was not ideal but his view was that it was a staging post on the way to full PR and argued that this had happened in some other countries which introduced AV. This had also been part of his rationale for voting Lib Dem. He argued that it was quite possible that Labour could never win again on its own under the old system and that AV was vital.

Liz Davies, whom I had heard much of but had not yet met, gave a history of her political development from Labour Party NEC member to someone who had been active in the Socialist Alliance and other Left projects. Liz made a deep impression on me as a strategic and principled speaker. She asked what the alternatives were at the ballot box as she maintained that the anti-cuts movement must have some political representation at the end of the day. For her there were three possible alternatives. The first was the Labour Party, which provided no real alternative to the cuts agenda. She pointed out that other Social Democrat parties were presiding over cuts in Spain and elsewhere. Labour only offered the choice of voting for softer cuts which was no real choice at all.

The second choice was the Lib Dems who had completely destroyed their radical credentials and who when in local government often acted hypocritically. The third choice was the Green Party, which she had voted for and although she had great admiration for Caroline Lucas as an MP, the party had a mixed record in local government and needed to be integral to the anti-cuts movement.

Finally, there was the Left ,which had tried constantly to build unity but had failed utterly. For Liz the Left had been plagued by ‘quick fix’ solutions and attempts at name changing from one failed entity to another. Clearly she had Respect and Socialist Alliance in mind here. For her any real party to the Left of Labour needed to have trade unions on board and above all needed to be built on democratic principles.

She also demolished Billy Bragg’s arguments on AV, claiming that it was a shabby compromise not worth supporting and that real PR must be the goal – the AV solution would leave the UK stuck in a half way house which could turn out to be worse in the long run for stopping real democratic change. This was the view strongly supported by the many who attended the workshop.

The workshop unanimously passed a resolution to be taken back to COR calling for full resistance from all Local Authorities to cuts and full support for those councillors opposing them.

The workshop where I spoke was on ‘Why COR?’ Paul Mackney and Andrew Burgin, both members of the Steering Committee as I am, went into some detail about the history over the last few months. I decided to take the bull by the horns and I denounced the sectarian Left and argued that we needed to do radical politics in a very different form and that despite being a historian and understanding historical events such as the Kronstadt Revolt, the fall of Kerensky etc, that we were not living in 1917 or fighting the Russian Civil War and must move beyond old and staid ways of doing things and above all be non-sectarian. I also denounced the Irish Greens and made the point that many of us had been criticising them since they entered the disastrous coalition government.I qouted also from some of Liz Davies's comments in the earlier workshop. Many of those present who were Anarchists, from Climate Camp or from local anti-cuts groups applauded my comments on the sectarian Left and echoed them in their own contributions, stating that they had to overcome their initial distrust of COR to become involved.

It was interesting that Chris Bambery of the Right to Work Campaign (aka the SWP) was also at this workshop and gave a shorter version of the speech on Left unity which he later gave to the closing plenary. I think that the SWP and others can see that the overwhelming feeling of those at the conference was opposed to sectarianism of any kind. But with four members at least of the SWP now on the National Council along with a host of other organisations, including ten Greens (mostly from Green Left) we will see how this works out.