One of the contentious issues in the run up to the Socialist Alliance Conference on December 1 is the question of whether and how a new Executive should be elected coming out of the conference.
Firstly, there has been opposition on the Conference Arrangements Committee from both the Socialist Party and the CPGB to the idea that this conference should have elections at all.
The idea that you should put this much energy into holding a conference to sort of a constitution … and then carry on with the same old structures until some time in the future, seemed extraordinary to the rest of us.
This would take some of the guts out of the conference itself – and worse, leave us without an adequate mechanism to carry though its decisions what ever they may be. There needs to be a new leadership elected which reflects the Socialist Alliance as it now is and which is committed to taking the organisation forward to its next stage.
It is certainly true that there are logistical problems with fitting in elections at this conference as we have now set it up – as time has gone by it has become more and more apparent that the ISG was right to argue for a 2-day conference.
This would have allowed much broader discussion on the campaigning priorities of the Alliance and would help to ensure that we can develop as a political alternative to new Labour.
It would also have made elections much more straightforward and easier to follow – there would have been enough time between agreeing a system of election and implementing it to ensure that the process ran smoothly.
This will be particularly difficult to ensure given the fact that the different constitutions put forward as proposals to the conference give different shapes to the executive and different voting systems.
The next Executive Committee of the Socialist Alliance on November 17 will debate this question and put a recommendation to the conference as to whether the elections should take place or whether a subsequent conference should be held.
The ISG will continue to argue that it is vital that a new Executive is elected on December 1. Given the substantial development of the Alliance over the last year, it would be completely wrong to just continue with the existing leadership.
This from our point of view is the key argument – though it would take a good deal of resources that could be better used elsewhere to organise another conference.
Nor do we believe that the position of the Socialist Party on this question is actually about the formalities of the situation – in reality they don’t want an election precisely because they are not committed to seeing the Alliance develop further – despite all their formal raising of the question of a new mass workers’ party.
The second issue that has aroused some heat is the question of the system of elections. The ISG, together with the SWP and others is proposing that this be done on the basis of a slate system.
In our view this is vital because the Executive we need coming out of this conference must be able to be assessed as and to work as a team. Only a slate system allows the presentation and election of a politically and practically balanced team anyone can do it
This proposal seems to have met with a fair amount of opposition – though many of the arguments have happened on e mail lists, in meetings or conversations which make them more difficult to pin down than if they were on the printed page.
There is an assumption running through these arguments that the SWP, as the largest organisation involved can control the outcome of an election by slates – though apparently not by other means. The further implication is that such apparent control will be used to exclude others.
There are a number of problems with this argument.
Most importantly, at a political level, there is nothing in the current development of the Alliance, which suggests that the SWP have any intention to act in this way.
The submission of the protocol on the elections makes clear their commitment to a pluralist Alliance. To adopt any other position would be to fragment the important unity the Alliance has been able to develop. The SWP have no more interest in doing this than anyone else.
Nor are there any easy organisational ways round such a danger, were it to actually exist.
The Socialist Party, it is true, sets out a system whereby the National Executive would comprise a number of different sections elected in different ways, with the existence of "members’ platforms" with the right to direct representation.
There is nothing in principle wrong with this sort of proposal, but we don’t think that it represents the stage of development that the Socialist Alliance has actually reached.
The irony is that the rest of the Socialist Party’s proposals, as we have argued before, actually seek to further federalise rather than centralise the organisation – but they then put forward proposals that would be more appropriate to a more developed, centralised organisation.
Worker’s Liberty supports the alternative vote system put forward in the constitution we support, but then come up with proposals that members can form a caucus and get guaranteed representation. There is no way that such a proposal could work in the context of elections at this conference, which Workers Liberty supports.
More importantly the proposal seems based on the projection that a slate supported by the SWP will be guilty of some heinous crime and then tries to work its way round it. While this proposal, in many ways a simplified version of members’ platforms is not wrong in principle it does not meet the needs of the Socialist Alliance at the present time.
The proposal from the CPGB (as well as a proposal from Geoff Barr of Exeter) is that the Executive should be elected on the basis of Single Transferable Vote. The problem with this proposal is that in practice STV becomes a popularity poll.
In particular, it means that independents who are from a relatively small local alliance and for whatever reason have not yet played a high profile national role are likely to receive short shrift through such a system. In Geoff Barr’s version we could end up with a highly unbalanced Executive, much less representative than by any of the other mechanisms.
The CPGB have a suggestion to get round this by putting forward the possibility of an election preparation committee, which would develop a recommended list. Again, this is not a proposal that should be automatically thrown out of court in the long term.
However, in the here and now it does not get anywhere. This conference could not elect a representative committee to do this work; there is not the basis to do so. And the very idea of a list ( slate) is undermined by the fact that the votes will then take place on individuals, which could well lead to a situation where balance is lost on the basis of who is best known.
As the Socialist Alliance grows and develops, many further discussions will need to take place about what sort of leadership best meets our needs at a particular stage. In the meantime, the best approach the conference can adopt is to resolve to go ahead with elections and to support a slate system to carry this through.