Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini, 10th Duke of Chalfont, played by Alec Guinness in the 1949 film Kind Hearts and Coronets, is a man determined to get what he feels is rightfully his. In his case it is the dukedom of Chalfont. The only complication is that he has to bump off several people with stronger claims to the title, something he does by a mix of charm, deceit, manipulation and murder.

To the best of my knowledge no one has ever accused the SWP of murder, but deceit, manipulation and the occasional charm offensive are very much part of its repertoire when it comes to staying in control of things it feels entitled to dominate. The recent Socialist Worker article on Your Party should be setting off ear splitting klaxons for anyone who is familiar with how they operate.

On the face of things what they suggest is all very reasonable. Who can be against a “radical and insurgent vision of the left”? Isn’t everyone in favour of a “broad and pluralistic vision of the new left”?

In what is as much an instruction to members as a policy statement we are told “Socialist Workers Party (SWP) members are signing up to join Your Party to shape the debates about what the new left looks like.”

Anyone who has ever had any dealings with the SWP knows precisely what this means. A group of its local members will turn up at meetings of the random individuals describing themselves as retired taxidermists, something or other in Stand Up to Racism and a web designer who is very angry with stuff and that other people are angry too. What they won’t tell the meeting is that they are all members of the same organisation who have a comedy Bolshevik understanding of democratic centralism which compels them to do whatever the central committee and local organiser have instructed them to do.

It is a fundamentally dishonest method. It is lying to the working class by omission and I’m fairly sure Thomas Aquinas said that is as bad as directly lying. If he didn’t, he should have.

This is well trodden ground for anyone whose political activity has brought them into contact with the SWP. I had the misfortune to be at the 2005 Respect conference which was without doubt the most brutal and unpleasant event of my entire lifetime of political activity. It was worse than the occasion when I was beaten up by drunken loyalists and a comrade who had been through Gerry Healey’s WRP said it was more vicious than anything Healey did to people who disagreed with him. A partial account of it is here but it doesn’t really convey how hideous it was.

But in this wicked world of ours…

Now, if there was the remotest evidence that the current SWP leadership had explicitly broken with that bureaucratic, thuggish way of conducting itself in broader formations I would be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. For my money the best thing which has been written about how very tightly knit organisations with delusions of Bolshevism should function in broad parties is this piece by Phil Hearse.

Phil makes two key points which bear repeating:

“Inside broad left formations there has to be a real, autonomous political life in which people who are not members of an organised current can have confidence that decisions are not being made behind their backs in a disciplined caucus that will impose its views – they have to be confident that their political contribution can affect political debates.

This means that no revolutionary current can have the ‘disciplined Phalanx’ concept of operation. Except in the case of the degeneration of a broad left current (as in Brazil) we are not doing entry work or fighting a bureaucratic leadership. This means in most debates, most of the time, members of political currents should have the right to express their own viewpoint irrespective of the majority view in their own current. If this doesn’t happen the real balance of opinion is obscured and democracy negated.”

In an ideal world Your Party should be open to everyone who wants to join it, including members of propaganda groups which style themselves as parties. However, in this wicked world of ours it is perfectly reasonable for a new large formation to impose conditions on pre-existing currents. The first of these has to be tell the truth about who you are, followed by “tell us how you plan to operate inside the new party”, to which we can add your role in the local and national organisation will be boundaried – your members will not be allowed to have disproportionate political influence by virtue of you packing meetings and concealing things.

Your Party seems to be quite explicit about members of other national parties not being allowed to join. The website says “To join, you must be 16 or over, resident in the UK, and you cannot be a member of another national political party.” Let’s see how that plays out in practice.