People Before Profit Alliance

national | anti-capitalism | news report Tuesday October 18, 2005 08:45 by OQT

The ‘People Before Profit Alliance’ will be launched by the SWP at a meeting in Dublin this week.

Over the last few years the SWP in Ireland have been working hard to create the conditions that would allow them to launch something akin to the RESPECT coalition created by their comrades in England, here in Ireland. This is based on what could be called the ‘Sticky Peach’ strategy: create an organisation which is controlled from the inside by a hard revolutionary organisation but attract lots of naïve ‘soft’ left/liberal people, who accept the siren words of the comrades and at the same time attract a big name or two, such as George Galloway in the case of RESPECT, to the stick to the peach. This has worked in England, primarily because of Galloway’s profile and the attraction of sections of the Islamic community to the strong anti-war message of the coalition.

Things have not been so easy in Ireland for three reasons: The rest of the left won’t touch the SWP with a barge pole, Sinn Fein already occupy the ‘market niche’ that such a coalition/front would fill, there isn’t a large enough or sufficiently organised Islamic community to provide an electoral base and so far no Irish George Galloway has emerged. Undaunted by these obstacles the SWP has decided to go ahead and give it a try by launching the “People Before Profit Alliance” at a meeting to be held on October 21st. Unusually for the SWP, the decision to launch this front has caused some internal tensions, with some of the older, more hardened comrades expressing doubts about the move to the right, in contrast to the enthusiasm of the likes of young Rory Aherne. PBPA is indeed just another SWP front but with a slightly different twist: this time the emphasis on creating a recruitment pool is secondary to electoral success. Unlike their other fronts, the primary target of this one will be community activists and single-issue campaigners. These are people who have enough standing in their own communities to attract people to what from the outside will look like a genuine initiative but are sufficiently inexperienced in the ways of the far–left to allow the SWP to run the show at a central level. With no one else from the far-left involved there will be no one to check the comrades when they get up to their usual manipulative naughtiness.

The key question is: can they recruit credible independent figures to the new formation? If they can’t it will be seen for what it is: just another cynical SWP attempt to hide behind a front and will head for the dustbin of history along with Globalise Resistance, the Irish Civil Rights Movement, Another Europe is Possible and all the other ‘organisations’ that shrank to nothing more than a convenient tag to use when the SWP wanted to organise a demo without using their own name (The IAWM is the only model of a front which has retained sufficient non-SWP involvement to maintain credibility, largely, to be fair, because they have put real effort into keeping it afloat, despite their undemocratic purge of opponents). So who have they got so far? The simple answer is: maybe Frank Mac Brearty. But even with a high profile like his, that’s not enough and so they are working night and day to lure others: independent local politicians, any independent T.D.s they can sucker in, the Rossport Five and their families, other victims of high-profile miscarriages of justice and well known single issue campaigners. To date they have had no joy but if they can get two or three of these to hop on board, they’ll be ready to go public.

One key part of this strategy is to outflank the rest of the left, especially the Socialist Party. The SWP know that as long as they have no elected representatives, or at least ones that they control, they will never have the credibility of the SP. If this front takes off and makes any sort of electoral breakthrough then the reckoning is that the SP will either be forced to come to come to terms with their old enemy or else will face oblivion a la their English counterparts. The success of PBPA would also finish off any independent initiatives that excluded the SWP, such as that taken by Seamus Healy and some independent lefts earlier this year. As for the smaller left groupings, they, hopefully, will be cast into the outer darkness, completely adrift from the ‘movement’, consigned to irrelevant sectdom.

At the moment the prospects don’t look good for the new front. Despite all their efforts and the example of RESPECT, the SWP don’t seem to have learnt much because for a supposed “alliance” its strange that local branches have already been set up (and announced in the Socialist Worker newspaper) in Ballymun and Dun Laoghaire, fronted by…well surprise, surprise…Kevin Wingfield and Richard Boyd Barrett, local stalwarts of the SWP. All the signatories to the invitation letter to the meeting are members of the SWP. Their effort to gain support from the Rossport Five campaign has failed and it seems like the ‘Davitt League’ that was supposed to act as the conduit for them, has turned out to be a damp squib, simply a title that can be attached to Maura Harrington’s name.

So the usual health warning: joining an SWP front can seriously damage your (mental) health, give this one a miss.

What the SWP say: http://www.swp.ie/socialistworker/2005/sw249/sw-249-8.htm