Letter to Green Left Weekly about the SSP Crisis
The following letter was sent to the Australian socialist newspaper Green Left Weekly on 14th August 2006. The editors decided, in their wisdom, to abridge the letter, deleting whole chunks of it--about a third of the text. Here is the unabridged letter. The deleted words are in bold.
Unabridged text of letter
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Sheridan
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 14:32:01 +0100
To: glw@greenleft.org.au
Dear Green Left Weekly Editor,
I have have just received your e-mailed article about the crisis in the SSP.
I don't agree with your approach or conclusions. You appear to have made up your mind before hearing Sheridan's response to the one-sided August 7th SSP bulletin reflecting the views of McCombes and Sheridan's other political opponents in the SSP. How can a one-viewpoint document of this kind possibly "set the record straight"? Any truly democratic party would present all viewpoints side by side--not just those of the apparatchiks.
Sheridan is a fighter whose willingness to struggle on behalf of the working class has seen him go to jail and made him an MSP and a well known public figure. Public prominence brings vulnerability to attack by the right wing gutter media. Galloway is the other obvious example and he has had to go to the courts on many occasions to restrain these reptiles from libelling him to hell. What other way is there to stop these low-lifes from spreading lies about him and throwing mud?
This whole SSP affair is thus about the elementary right of vulnerable socialist public figures to defend themselves against the media. McCombes tries to belittle this issue and the importance of the smears in the News of the World. This is disingenuous in the extreme. It won't wash. I wonder if McCombes would be so blasé about this kind of thing if it were his good name being dragged through the mud in a national tabloid newspaper.
Sheridan quite rightly saw this as a straight fight between himself and Murdoch--one of the most miserable anti-union reptiles to ever crawl on the face of this planet. You people in Oz ought to be aware of this more than anyone else. The fact of the matter is that Sheridan had every right to go to the courts and defend himself. And Sheridan is more than a match for Murdoch--as we have just seen. It is not often that Murdoch loses, but he has lost badly on this occasion.
Sheridan had every right to expect the support of his comrades in this struggle. But they failed to support him at the critical moment. As Galloway quite rightly put it at the time: "they have done him down". They have behaved like wimps who can't see the wood for the trees. I am not in the least bit interested in Sheridan's private life or whether he may or may not have lied to a capitalist court about it. Read Lenin's Left Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder and see what it has to say about the need for socialists to lie, if necessary, to defeat the class enemy. This issue of whether Sherdian is lying is completely subordinate to the question of defeating a vicious representative of the class enemy and making the semi-fascist porno-comics pay dearly every time they take a pot shot at a socialist. Galloway has made over £4 million suing these swine and the money is funding the anti-war left at this very moment. We have to speak to these gentlemen in the only language they understand--money and the sort of public humiliation they mete out to others every day. In my opinion, McCombes and his cronies are adopting a phony moralistic stance on this question--typical of the Calvinist hypocrisy that prevails in certain quarters of the Scottish petty bourgeoisie--including, evidently, in some sectors of the left intelligentsia.
The SSP "comrades" who failed to defend Sheridan should hang their heads in shame. Sheridan had every right to defend himself in court against their hostile testimony. They are indeed the "mothers of all backstabbers" and "scabs". They have brought their own present misfortune on themselves.
Chris Edwards
Manchester. England