Diane Abbott, the SWP and Bob Lambert and co:

I am almost 100% certain that the person who first drew my attention to the existence of police spies in the organized left was a young Diane Abbott, before she became an MP. Memories are not always 100% accurate, but for as long as I can remember it is her name that got me to thinking about who might be a police spy in the SWP.

Whether it was Diane Abbott or not, some young woman made a very interesting speech during a massive meeting at Marxism 1986. She asked the audience why the WRP and IMG had just fragmented into a variety of warring sects while the SWP remained united. Her explanation was that those other organizations had been infiltrated by MI5, by Special Branch undercover cops. As far as I can remember, the idea that the SWP might be a target of such agents of the state had never previously occurred to me.

I recall telling the head of the Labour Club at Paisley University what she said when I next saw him. He said the SWP was not infiltrated by police spies because that would be a waste of money: we screwed ourselves up enough as it was. At this time I was still trying to persuade him and his well organized comrades in Militant Tendency to take Chris Harman’s Open Letter to Peter Taaffe seriously. None of them did. Indeed, it appeared that I was the only socialist in Scotland who took it seriously. That is why I asked Chris Harman during one of his sessions at Marxism if this was a ploy to siphon off a few dissident Militant comrades, with no intention of letting Peter Taaffe or Ted Grant join. A few Glasgow SWP members who told me this were in the audience. I never mentioned them by name, but they will have read between the lines. Chris Harman told the audience what I needed them to hear: the SWP did  indeed want a united organisation with Militant and if the entire organisation did what he was calling for and that meant the SWP was outvoted inside the new organization (since the official figures at the time were about 10,000 as against 6,000), he was relaxed about this, something I do not think was shared by all the leadership.

I believe this united socialist organisation Chris Harman and I both looked forward to probably came to nothing in significant part due to the work of sectarians in each organization (including in both leaderships) being incited into sabotaging it by agents of the state, just as such agents have been ordered to sabotage unity on the hard left all around the world for as long as everyone can remember.

I believe that Chris Bambery worked with a few Glasgow comrades to sabotage this unity. I know for a fact that this group included the then district organizer in Glasgow, Colin Philips, and, it would appear (judging from what I learnt seven years later), Mike Gonzalez as well.

Mike Gonzalez gave evidence on oath for Tommy Sheridan, for which all socialists are grateful. But he is now a key player working alongside other enemies of the SWP to destroy his party, enemies that include someone he knows to be a police spy who secretly purged SWP members unconstitutionally – former national secretary Chris Bambery!

Mike Gonzelez seems to have been involved in my being secretly expelled from the SWP on some indeterminate date, on a pretext unknown to everyone including Chris Bambery. My expulsion, I have been told, was also sanctioned by one other central committee member, the late Julie Waterson. Whether or not this is true, I cannot tell. She certainly never told me that.

If I don’t know what the pretext for my expulsion was, or who was involved and who was kept out of the loop in the central committee (possibly everyone other than Chris Bambery), why do I think was I expelled?

I believe the SWP national secretary had me kicked out because he knew I would never reconcile myself to the abandonment of the unification of the SWP and Militant. That, I am convinced, is why Bambery considered me a trouble maker who simply had to be gotten rid of. I wanted the same kind of united socialist organisation that Chris Harman defended so enthusiastically, a form of organizational unity that clearly fell out of favor with Harman’s central committee colleagues within months of his winning them to that position. In political terms it was merely the blink of an eye. But I never gave up, and I am still not giving up, although the form of this unity has to change, it is still as vital as it ever was, more so than ever before. Better late than never.

When Peter Taaffe’s supporters did exactly what Chris Harman called for, Chris Bambery lied through his teeth to sabotage any possibility of that unity. At an SWP meeting I attended (the first since Bambery had me expelled), that took place days after Militant in Scotland declared their intention to leave the Labour Party, Bambery implied there had never been proposals from Harman or anyone else for a united organisation. How he thought he could get away with such patent lies beats me. When the chair of that meeting allowed me in for a second time to respond to his bullshit, Bambery then told the meeting that Marxists have never supported standing for bourgeois elections. How stupid can you get?

Evidence of the national secretary of the SWP being a police spy was passed by me to Mike Gonzalez who subsequently wiped it from his memory. This evidence was also known to someone claiming to be Julie Waterson’s emissary. This emissary is, to the best of my knowledge, on board the SWP CC loyalist group. I am not going to name him or her today, but I for one don’t trust him or her and I don’t think anyone else should.

Evidence of Chris Bambery’s role of secretly expelling SWP members in Glasgow going all the way back to the mid-1980s was handed to Alan McCombes after I discovered that Mike Gonzalez had taken measures to deny me any chance of getting Chris Harman to investigate what the SWP national secretary had been doing. Documents were also supplied to a leading member of the AWL in Scotland, who told me he had handed them to Martin Thomas: whether he did or did not do this I have no way of knowing. It was also  passed by me, by hand, to Jack Conrad/John Bridge/John Chamberlain, who is key in the witch hunt against the SWP, alongside Bambery, Gonzalez and others up to their neck in protecting Bambery’s identity.

I am not jumping to conclusions as to why all of the above behave as do. There are alternative explanations to the obvious one. However, I am more than satisfied that Chris Bambery and Frances Curran work for the state and have done for decades. I would be astonished if they are the only ones I have had dealings with who fall into that category, including several who claimed to be helping me get this information dealt with internally within the SWP or the rest of the far left.

What about the SWP today?

I had hoped the SWP could get out of the crisis it had fallen into. But I am afraid I am far from optimistic about that anymore. Introducing pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. With no hope of a way out, some SWP loyalists will just stand back and call it a day. Others will wonder if the CC’s critics don’t have more right on their side, and that maybe both sides should just fight it out to see who comes out on top: the reality is that some of what the CC’s critics say is not wrong. The CC’s refusal to address this has allowed good people to fall into a thoroughly discredited camp. The critics are not all one reactionary mass, but many are beneath contempt. They should have been dealt with long before now.

As decent comrades stand back, this will shift the balance of forces in favor of the handfuls who are being paid to do to the SWP today what Diane Abbott (I think it was her) suggested they had helped precipitate in the WRP and IMG  thirty years ago, or the FBI did in the Black Panthers via Cointelpro.

I am going to follow what is going on in the SWP, but my fear is that a variety of mistakes by the central committee and their supporters have made the fragmentation of the organization inevitable. I hope I am wrong about that. But regardless of whether that does or does not turn out to be the case, genuine socialists need to work with the best of each side to salvage something for the future.

Left Unity, TUSC and the People’s Assembly pose alternatives to Ed Miliband’s Blairites. Their witch hunt against trade unionists in Falkirk and elsewhere can be transformed into a massive opportunity for all those who put people before profits.

Those who are uniting to destroy the SWP’s unity in the face of a clearly state orchestrated witch hunt ought to have been dealt with severely a long time ago. The CC and NC may not want to call them a cancer, but I see nothing wrong with that. Richard Seymour’s group were clearly exactly that. And they have left behind a gang of fellow-travellers working alongside Chris Bambery’s friends. Most of those who belonged to Pat Stack’s group were probably muddled, but well meaning. The way the CC have tried to stop Seymour-Bambery-Gonzalez-Bergfeld group has made a return to health impossible. Timidity in the face of their anti-Leninist and anti-democratic politics has helped them unravel the majority group. Pat Stack’s faction is not interested in abiding by majority decisions and they are now little more than a solvent whose role is nothing more than to eat away at whatever is left of the party Chris Harman and others dedicated their lives to building. United fronts with such people is inevitable. Working alongside them to build a broad workers party out of TUSC, Left Unity and the People’s Assembly is essential. But sharing a Leninist Party with them is, as far as I am concerned, unthinkable.

I am amazed that the CC has been so ineffective in dealing with Richard Seymour’s entryists. These people work hand-in-glove with former national secretary of the SWP, Chris Bambery, who is known to be a police spy by a very large number of those who are at the forefront of the witch hunt against the SWP: Peter Manson and John Chamberlain (respectively, the de jure and de facto editor of the Weekly Worker), former CPGB spy inside the Socialist Party (Phil Burton-Cartledge), of the Socialist Unity Network, a subtantial section of the Scottish Socialist Party’s leadership who worked with David Cameron’s Director of Communications and other Rupert Murdoch employees and ex-employees to send Tommy Sheridan to jail.

The perjury trial of David Cameron’s Director of Communications is going to lead to his naming names of other perjurers whose perjury was sanctioned by his boss at 10 Downing Street. Andy Coulson’s lawyers will call for Top Secret Documents to be made available to the jury to expose the fact that he was only doing what his employer at the time, Prime Minister David Cameron, told him to do.

Andy Davies of Channel Four News has exposed the fact that the head of the Special Branch undercover cop unit that tried to send the friend of Stephen Lawrence to jail (the only witness to this crime), and to undermine the prosecution of Stephen’s fascist killers, and into the bargain smear his parents and spy on all their supporters… We know that the second in command of that unit (Bob Lambert) presided over a group ninety percent of whose members engaged in sexual and psychological abuse of women victims of spying, what has been referred to (accurately) as being “state rape”.

We know that Bob Lambert lied under oath as to who he was. He lied about his name and he did not allow those framed by him to cross examine him about ulterior motives he may have for lying about other things under oath. We know that this creep says the Home Office sanctioned some (if not all) of these crimes by this out-of-control undercover cop unit.

What about those who lied under oath at Tommy Sheridan’s trial? How much of their evidence was a pack of lies? How much did the Crown know about the role of undercover cops and of their committing perjury? How much has David Cameron known? What did he know and when did he know it? How much is already known to Home Secretary Theresa May? How much is known to the intelligence committees set up to protect the people from crimes committed by the intelligence services? Malcolm Rifkind, for example?

How can the SWP be smashed to pieces by undercover cops? How can the state get so many of their agents so high in socialist organisations, with Chris Bambery capturing the job of national secretary and Frances Curran becoming an MSP?

My guess is that the best state agents without exception are going to be those who get turned. Left wing activist parties recruit young idealists. The cadres at the top tend to see drop outs as natural wastage. They high turnover of members of such organisations is far more problematic than the SWP has ever accepted. It creates a degree of bitterness that damages the party in the long term. But it also creates opportunities for Special Branch:

• “Why just walk away? Why not get revenge against these people by working for us? We will set up a secret bank account, with a great pension. All you have to do is try to make yourself indispensable to your comrades until they have no option but to trust you, then promote you until you can become useful to us. Then you tell us everything we need, and agree to commit crimes whenever we tell you to.”

Another likelihood is that left-wing activists think they are bulletproof, never taking seriously the idea that they are being watched. That is why a few of the most highly respected and courageous heroes of the left end up on the other side: Special Branch makes them an offer they can’t refuse:

• “You will go to jail for decades, at least become a figure of fun or held in contempt by your ex-comrades for something you did that is immoral in the eyes of your friends, unless you agree to work for us, unless you betray everything you have dedicated your life to doing.”

I have a feeling I may have met one or two of those people. I have a feeling that some of them may be outted during the Andy Coulson trial. Not long to wait now.