SWP and Morning Star: bare-faced liars

By Darren Bedford (on the Workers Liberty website, where it is headed ‘Obvious lies used in Ukraine debate)

Sharp criticism of one’s political opponents, including within one’s own movement, is an inevitable, even necessary, aspect of political discourse. 

What is neither inevitable nor necessary is telling outright lies about those one disagrees with. 

In a leaflet distributed to delegates at the recent conference of the public sector union Unison, a Socialist Workers Party leaflet described Workers’ Liberty, the group which publishes Solidarity, as “pro-NATO”. No evidence is provided to substantiate this; it is simply asserted. 

This is perhaps just as well, as no evidence exists, since Workers’ Liberty is not “pro-NATO”. A cursory search on our website can find articles such as “Why we oppose NATO”, “Internationalists must oppose NATO”, and “Defend [within the Labour Party] the right to criticise NATO”.

The latter article states plainly: “NATO remains far from a benign force. It is imperialist. We oppose NATO expansion, call for British withdrawal and advocate the organisation’s dissolution.”

The SWP’s claim is not a serious political critique. It is a verifiable falsehood, a fabricated slander functioning as a substitute for engagement with the substance of an issue.

The same SWP leaflet claims Standing Together, the left-wing Arab-Jewish social movement organising both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel, is “Zionist”. If by “Zionist” the SWP means “accepts the right of Israeli Jews to self-determination in some form”, then Standing Together is “Zionist”. So, by that definition, is the Palestine Liberation Organisation. So was Mahmoud Darwish. So was Edward Said.

The composite resolution on Palestine at Unison conference, which all SWP-supporting delegates voted for, included a commitment to a two-states settlement in the form of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. By the SWP’s presumable definition, this is considerably more “Zionist” than Standing Together’s actual position, which says only that both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs should have equal rights, including national rights, without prescribing a constitutional form for realising that.

Here, again, we encounter not a serious critique but political swear words the SWP uses as slurs against opponents to avoid having to engage with their arguments.

Even more risible, but equally mendacious, was the Morning Star’s description, in its coverage of the same conference, of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign as “NATO-backed”. Here the “pro-NATO” slur is taken up a notch — again, without a shred of evidence. Anyone who has not entirely surrendered their critical faculties might demand evidence before believing that NATO, the world’s most powerful military alliance, chooses to operate via a visibly shoe-string activist network. But the Morning Star, the “daily paper of the left”, does not stoop to such quibbles. Throw enough shit — “pro-NATO”, “Zionist”, “NATO-backed” — and enough of it will stick to ensure those trained in a culture of slander will seek to ostracise those targeted.

The SWP and Morning Star are entitled to attack Workers’ Liberty’s positions, as vigorously as they wish. Indeed, we would welcome more direct polemical exchange with other currents on the left. Workers’ Liberty is one of only a very few socialist groups internationally that makes a point of seeking direct debates, in print and publicly, with our political opponents — on the right, but also, and perhaps more importantly, within our own political milieu. Sadly, many of those opponents prefer to proceed by fabrication and slander rather than actual debate.

Democratic socialism requires a culture that educates and empowers workers to take ownership not only of economic production, but of collective political deliberation and discourse — the production of ideas. That requires a basic commitment to telling the truth. 

What would a “socialism” built through the left’s current culture, of heresy-hunting and outright lying, look like?