My first thought on reading Alex Callinicos’ suggestion in Socialist Worker that “The conditions are developing for the formation of a powerful radical left alternative to Labour…revolutionary socialists are needed to help initiate and build this alternative” was “Jesus! I’ve been through that before with his crew and only a mug would try it again with them.” It was also my second and third thought.

If anything, it would be worse second time around because a lot of the people who whooped and hollered and gave a man accused of rape a standing ovation when they were told about the charges are still around. I’m too well brought up to be actively rude to them but I long ago stopped being civil to them. Even former SWP members, the ones who had the moral character to walk out, think that the extremely belated apology is worse than inadequate.  

This very lightly fictionalised account involving ferret fanciers from 2008 is also a prediction of exactly what will happen in any new formation the SWP gets involved in. Its members will vote as a bloc always and everywhere, they will see it primarily as a recruitment ground for their own group and the SWP leadership will do all sorts of shady deals with bureaucrats. Rising stars and useful idiots will be cultivated and there will be no attempt to develop an internal culture of discussion and free exchange of ideas. Every local organisation of any significance will have an apparatchik allocated from HQ.

None of the former and current SWP members who had prominent positions in Respect have offered a serious analysis of what was good and bad about the experience. The Corbyn movement had many weaknesses, but at the local level there was a real flow of ideas and, whatever shenanigans Lansman and co were up to nationally, there was a sense of trust and openness that were completely absent from anything the SWP was involved in.

There is a school of thought which argues either that Callinicos is readying the vanguard for a new turn or that he’s flying a kite in the direction of the Corbyn adjacent Collective, “the engine that will drive the formation of a new, mass-membership political party of the left in the UK”. Only an organisation with a death wish would invite the SWP in. It is the same as a cuckoo moving into another bird’s nest. Let them carry on astro-turfing demonstrations with their placards and running their front organisations. Unless there is evidence in both theory and practice that they are capable of changing the habits of decades, they are certain to be an impediment to building a new organisation to the left of Labour.