War paves way for a new political landscape

Yet the central problem for sustaining any single-issue protest movement is the fact that its attractive power and unity stem only from people being against something. It is easy to be against a war. The difficulty arises in getting folk to agree on some positive political agenda. That is not meant to be a cynical criticism, just a statement of plain fact. Kerevan’s Rule #1 of protest politics: the bigger the protest movement the more likely it is to fragment.

Thus, the widespread opposition to the poll tax, including the violent demonstration in Trafalgar Square on 31 March, 1990, petered out the instant the tax was scrapped. Indeed, the electorate then happily traipsed back into the polling booths for the Tories in 1993. Again, the curious swelling of Pujadist anger at rising petrol prices in the autumn of 2000 quickly melted into thin air when Gordon Brown did away with his automatic tax escalator on petrol.

However, there is an exception which proves the rule. In the two examples I have cited, the government of the day was able to close down quickly the political irritant that was provoking the mass dissent. So, Rule #2: if a government can’t eliminate the cause of protests it gives the protesters time to form roots. The inability of the US Democrats to end the Vietnam war (which they desperately wanted to) led to that party being seized by the radicals in the shape of Jimmy Carter. However, note that Carter was so ineffectual - being a born protester himself - that, apart from his sorry four years, the Democrats were effectively put out of office for a generation by the Vietnam debacle.

Hence Kerevan’s Rule #3: turning protest into an alternative government is almost impossible. More likely you just debilitate the Left for decades. Thus, even when peace eventually comes, Mr Blair will not be forgiven and the deselection battles leading up to the 2004 Westminster election could be bloody and diverting - even if no-one important challenges him directly for the leadership. We could see the anti-war movement and the anti-New Labour unions such as the FBU unite in a bitter guerrilla war to replace New Labour with Real Labour. What the voters do is another matter.

I do not think we have come fully to terms with the tensions in the Labour Party unleashed by Iraq. This is not like Vietnam, the last era of mass anti-war demonstrations. One of the political peculiarities of the Vietnam war was that the then Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, resolutely kept British troops out of the conflict despite endless pleas from President Lyndon Johnston for even a token UK presence. Wilson saw keeping the Labour Party together as a priority (though he got scant thanks from the ever-myopic Labour Left). And Wilson knew sending the Black Watch into the jungles of Vietnam was the best way of ripping the party to shreds.

Iraq is a domestic British problem in the way Vietnam was not. Even if Blair is proved correct in his stance - as I think he will be - that does not imply a return to business as usual inside Labour. The fault-lines are now too deep. British politics are in for another bout of realignment, though it will play out over a decade and more.

Yet I remain unconvinced that the STWC can insert itself into this process in any positive fashion. The middle-class demonstrators of the big march on 15 February have melted away with the onset of the war. Now we are seeing protest tactics switch to civil disobedience and thousands of young school pupils are flooding into the movement.

Few realise that the apparatus of the STWC is run by my old friends, the revolutionary Left. Or that its official aim goes far beyond the Iraq war. This is: "to stop the war currently declared by the United States and its allies against ‘terrorism’". Of the 37 members of the STWC steering committee listed on the organisation’s website, I note seven separate Marxist grouplets are formally represented, plus their numerous front bodies. I also see three of my old comrades from the International Marxist Group and two senior leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Indeed, the main front person for STWC turns out to be Lindsay Germain. She is the editor of the SWP’s theoretical magazine and an SWP full-time cadre. Her views on the uses of STWC make interesting reading. At the SWP national conference in London last October, she made a major speech about how the revolutionaries would infiltrate and use the STWC as an exercise in party building.

Her talk was entitled "Our tasks in the Stop the War Coalition". She noted the SWP had played a central role in setting up the STWC as a front organisation, though this was originally opposed by the Greens and CND. She referred to the anti-poll tax movement, in which the SWP played a prominent role, as a model of how to build a successful united front. However, she cautioned SWP members there was a need to be wary of the STWC being pulled in "a rightward direction".

The SWP is Britain’s largest revolutionary Marxist party. Here in Scotland, it is hiding inside Tommy Sheridan’s Scottish Socialist Party. But the SWP nationally is tiring of our Tommy. It increasingly sees the SSP as a sectarian force that does not wish to work with the anti-Blair, anti-war forces emerging inside New Labour. Rather than create an English equivalent of Sheridan’s party, the SWP sees more fertile ground in building and leading united front bodies like the STWC, as transmission belts for recruitment.

I don’t mention all this for the purposes of red-baiting. The SWP is as entitled to its point of view as the rest of us. But its old-fashioned desire to "colonise" protest movements such as the STWC will have the predictable effect of side-tracking them into the SWP’s narrower agenda.

Thus, it was Ms Germain, speaking for the STWC on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme yesterday, who called for the deselection of Labour MPs who had voted for intervention in Iraq. Not only is that a bit cheeky coming from someone in a different political party, it is abusing her role inside the STWC. It also confirms her Leninist antipathy to democracy: parliament voted by 412 to 149 for war, including the majority of Scots Labour MPs.

PS: I marched against the Vietnam war. As a result of such protests, America withdrew from playing a stabilising force in world politics, while a decaying Soviet Empire invaded and destabilised Afghan-istan (with the support of Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro) and armed Saddam Hussein. Meantime, those nice Stalinists in Vietnam have created a basket-case country with a GDP per head of only $2,100 compared to Malaysia’s $9,000 and Thailand’s $6,600. Kerevan’s Rule #4: be careful what you march against, because other people suffer the consequences.