socialist party of the UK

[ReD_ReBeL]

hey Comrades check out the socialist party of the UK website www.socialistparty.org.uk, and tell me what you think of them, personally i think there r probably the best leftist party in the UK with the best policies and i know where my next vote is going lol, tell me what u think plz cheers

[drain.you]

I'm a member. They are pretty cool and their paper is of decent quality. Don't think voting for them would be of much use as I don't think they have many MPs (if any) in the House of Commons currently and aren't going to win an election anytime soon, I think we should vote for the party (out of the three main ones) that has the leftist policies at the time. We need revolution not SP MPs anyhow though admittedly, it would be nice to have a SP MP but your vote will not count as the majority of your constituency will vote for the main parties :P

[bolshevik butcher]

www.marxist.com Socialist appeals the only other serious marxist grouping i know of. But both are probably good options.

[Cyber Communist]

The Socialist Party (SP) and the Socialist Appeal (SA) group, BOTH used to be part of the Militant Tendancy (MT).

The MT was a Trotskyist grouping inside the Labour Party and it advocated a policy called entryism.

Entryism is when a communist grouping operates and exists within a major social democratic party, like the Labour Party, in order to try and win over the working class base of support away from social democracy and to a revolutionary position.

The same tactic applies to trade unions.

Then, when the time is right, they make their move for revolution and break away from their social democratic elements that they were attached to.

This was popular in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Labour Party moved to it's most left-wing phase (although by communist standards not really left wing, just hard core Keynesian and social democratic).

However with the right-wing shift in the Labour Party under Kinnock and now Blair, the Militant broke up after threats of expulsion from the Labour Party leadership under Kinnock. The expelled group formed the SP and a small grouping reforged itself in the Labour Party, the SA.

The SP is more well known and much larger in the trade union movement and has more members. The SA is small and I have no idea if they are growing or shrinking in terms of number of members.

I personally DON'T support either the SA or the SP. I aslo strongly disagree with the entryist policy.

[Correa]

Originally posted by [email protected] 24 2005, 12:57 AM
I'm a member. They are pretty cool and their paper is of decent quality. Don't think voting for them would be of much use as I don't think they have many MPs (if any) in the House of Commons currently and aren't going to win an election anytime soon, I think we should vote for the party (out of the three main ones) that has the leftist policies at the time. We need revolution not SP MPs anyhow though admittedly, it would be nice to have a SP MP but your vote will not count as the majority of your constituency will vote for the main parties :P
I do not live in Britain, but I would vote for all SP candidates myself. Your theory would only appeal to me if Labour were to loose by 1 vote. Then perhaps a Labour vote would be justified.

[bolshevik butcher]

The SP is more well known and much larger in the trade union movement and has more members. The SA is small and I have no idea if they are growing or shrinking in terms of number of members.

Well sa is growing slowly at the moment. Hands off venezuela which is run by sa is a runaway success. I think that entryism has its advantages. It lets us get our message out to a labour party audience.

[h&s]

I am personally a member of the SP, so obviously I support them.


www.marxist.com Socialist appeals the only other serious marxist grouping i know of. But both are probably good options.
No, the SWP are the other big socialist organisation, though by many of their policies they may as well not be, comrades in the SWP do some very good work (almost as good as us :P )
Personally I think the SA is a doomed sect as the Labour Party is no longer a working class party, and is definitely not democratic, therefore entryism in that form is currently dead.

[bolshevik butcher]

Heh, we get a lot of that. oh yeh cwis a signifitcant group as well. But i think that these gorups ahve far more in common and any disagreement is usually over tactics rather than ideology.

[Scottish_Militant]

The SP/CWI are pretty much no existant in Scotland, i've only ever met one single CWI activist in my life.

[bolshevik butcher]

SP are nonexistant in Scotland i think. CWI are part of the ssp up here i think.

[DisIllusion]

I don't know about Britain, but having a Communist Party in a rotten democratic system just seems kind of hypocritical in America.

[bolshevik butcher]

Well, most of the sa and i believe sps activiteis take place outside of parliment as neither have mps just now. Just becasuee you are a party does not mean that you are part of the system as sutch.

Neither party believes in the parlimentary road to socialism anyway.

[Cyber Communist]

Well sa is growing slowly at the moment. Hands off venezuela which is run by sa is a runaway success.

I forgot to mention that in my last post.

I have noticed that Hands off Venezuela (HoV) is both very active and has now developed a nationwide following with an established activist base.

However, I would like to point out that the SA has only grown becuase of HoV. Given that, this shows that those people have been attracted to the SA for their strong, active and vocal commitment to the Bolivarian revolutionary process and not out of any support for the entryist policy, which has now really become obsolete as a general tactic among the revolutionary left.


I think that entryism has its advantages. It lets us get our message out to a labour party audience.

It does not have any advantages.

One major fault with the entryist policy is the fact that the Labour Party does not represent the wroking class. The total population of Britain is around 60 million. Over half of the workforce is working class. That means the population of the British proletariat is in the tens of millions. The Labour Party has about 200,000 members in total.

That includes the non-proletarian members who have now seen the Labour Party as the political grouping best able to represent their class interests. Also take into account the day to day process of the Labour Party cutting themselves off from the only major movement of the working class, the trade unions. Many trade union members are also correct in the view that they hold that the trade union leaders are still too close to the current Blair government and too tolerant of the neo-liberal/free market policies of this government.

I think it would be a very positive developmentif the SA were to leave the Labour Party and instead work within the trade union movement only.

In that this could help replace the corrupt and ultra-reformist set of trade union leaders now in power and to turn the trade unions from mere organisations that campaign to stop pension cuts or a factory closure to organs of workers power, enabling workers to get a feel of how they can liberate themselves and develope a workers state.

The Labour Party is beyond any repair.

It's membership has declined to very low levels. The Conservatives are not in power and have very bad problems of recruiting new people to their party, yet the Conservative Party has more members than the Labour Party.

The local Labour Party branches are either dead and empty or they are packed with New Labour puppets who instead of giving people an active night of political debate, turn the meetings into a dull dreary session were people sit in silence and listen to New Labour officials drone on in a Stalinist manner about the 'endless achievements' of the Blair government.

The is no longer any real inner-party democracy in the Labour Party and the autonomy of local groups is now a footnote in history.

Given all of that and the fact you now have to urge people to vote for aa openly right-wing free market party, entryism really has lost it's worth, if it ever had any to start with.

[Cyber Communist]

The SP/CWI are pretty much no existant in Scotland, i've only ever met one single CWI activist in my life.

The SP is non-existant in Scotland. The official long version of the SP title is the Socialist Party of England and Wales.


SP are nonexistant in Scotland i think. CWI are part of the ssp up here i think.

That is correct.

The SP/CWI have a faction within the SSP, due to the SSP being a coalition of different far-left groups, the SSP has to have factions.