Why The British Left Sucks in 2006: Episode I - The Not So Phantom Menace

In the first of what will undoubtedly be a series of...one profile of the myriad factions that make up the left-wing of the rorschach nightmare of grass and concrete we call the UK, the focus turns to perhaps the biggest trot sect ever, the Socialist Workers' Party.

What is your name!? The SWP.

What is your quest!? To flog copies of their reliably incandescent weekly tabloid to teenagers who should know better. er, I mean, the SWP differs from most Trotskyist factions in two main ways. Firstly, it calls itself a Party. This is important for a particularly stupid reason: as heartwarmingly nutty as they invariably are, trotskyist sects are painfully aware that they can normally count their membership on the fingers of the Central Committee's hands. So they do not call themselves Party, because the Party is the mass movement which will lead the workers to power, not fifty angry professors from Islington arguing about the class nature of the USSR. The Swerps, however, set out with the ambition to be that party, and astonishingly, have had some measure of success.

How many of you are there!? Which brings me to distinguishing feature number two: there's thousands of them. Yes, they're in four figures.

You might remember me from... They're everywhere, you know. Whenever there's a protest, it's them organising it, or if it isn't, they're planning a hostile takeover (as was the case with the Stop The War movement, Respect, the list goes on...). They're in every town centre regularly, pimping Socialist Worker and collecting signatures ostensibly for some petition, but really to get your address, all the better to PESTER YOU FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.

Pros: The range, visibility and fervour of their activism has an allure of its own. Also, Mark Steel, motherfuckers!

Cons: Give or take a couple of welcome deaths, their leadership has remained essentially the same since the party's formation. Fine, if your group has 50 members. when it has two or three thousand, you expect some degree of internal democracy to assert itself, but no. This arrangement has led to hubris of the most terrifying kind, and a near-stalinist paranoia regarding dissenting views. This is all the fault of one Tony Cliff, the chief figure in the Party's formation and its de facto leader until his death, who, shall we say, took criticism very badly. Also, their previous incarnation, International Socialists, gave the world Christopher Hitchens, which in fairness probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

Overall: The 'gateway drug' to hard-left politics for more or less everyone, but rarely the lasting addiction. Perhaps it would be, were the leadership less batshit insane.

For people with too much time on their hands, I heartily recommend you take a look at More Years For The Locust by Jim Higgins, which is a mischievously funny account of where they came from, and why they aren't necessarily good news, from a figure once at the leadership clique's heart - and just a generally good laugh at the absurdities of life as a leftie.