The political commentor Alex Philips has said something that has made me sit up and take notice. She has pointed out the very heavy involvement of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the various so called ‘anti racist’ demonstrations that have sprung up in the UK. These demonstrations from what I have seen from descriptions of them and video footage of them seem not to be supported by ordinary Britons but instead by the far Left. The SWP have also been heavily involved in promoting and providing bodies to the various pro-Hamas hate marches that have been going on in the UK ever since the Hamas pogrom in Israel on 7^th October 2023.

Ms Phillips said on X

I have no idea why a single credible journalist hasn’t investigated who the leaderless, shadowy Socialist Workers Party are, who appear at every massive street protest. Who funds them. What they want. Why they wreak havoc and undermine peace and security. Useless lazy media in the UK.

She’s correct when she says that this group is shadowy and that the media has been remarkably incurious about them however less correct when she says that they are leaderless as information about the SWP’s leadership structure and members along with its history are readily available.

The claims of being shadowy on the other hand are on quite solid ground as the SWP often work through front groups or groups where the SWP have a lot of influence. Rock Against Racism, Stand Up to Racism, the Respect Party and the Stop the War Coalition. A lot of the time if you go to left wing demonstrations there will be SWP people in organisational positions or providing protest materials such as placards and unless you know what you are looking for and have not attended many left wing demonstrations before, then you might not know what evidence to look for that shows SWP involvement. They also very very rarely stand for election under their own names and instead resort to entryism and at one point were quite effective at infiltrating the Labour Party youth movements. They have also been part of various short term socialist coalition parties that have stood for election in the UK but which have achieved minimal votes from the public. The SWP also use their actual membership to recruit those who might be left leaning or who are supportive of stuff like opposition to the Iraq War or other causes that might be considered as broadly left of centre. They tried this with me once decades ago when I made the mistake of giving my address to a group that was, unknown to me, a front for the SWP and the next thing I know I’ve got a, quite attractive I must say, ginger haired female SWP operative at my front door one day trying to flirty fish me into joining the SWP. Thankfully for my own future sanity I refused and I now shudder to think what my life would have been like had I succumbed to this lady’s flirty fishing.

The SWP are very very effective at organising demonstrations that might attract people who might not otherwise be full on supporters of the SWP. There are a lot of naive people on the political Left who might be willing to attend an event or a demonstration about for example racism who would not be that motivated to join the SWP or go to one of their meetings. The issue is that these naive lefties do end up attending SWP run events and demonstrations it’s just that these events and demonstrations are put on in the name of one of the SWP’s front groups.

The SWP are also active in the Trade Union movement. When I’ve been a Trade Union member I’ve seen them occupy leadership positions in local branches/chapels by default because normal union members have other things to occupy their lives such as families, education, hobbies and other things that are more attractive for them than sitting in or taking part in meetings. Therefore the vacant places on the committees that once were occupied by ordinary working men and women are now occupied by Trots. Using these positions of Trade Union political power they then over time bend first a branch/chapel and then other parts of a union towards an SWP friendly position.

The SWP as Ms Phillips points out are not harmless. They are not a tiny bunch of nutters who attach themselves to other left wing demonstrations and causes such as the Stalin Society. They are considerably worse than that.

The SWP are full on Trotskyites with all that this political current entails. They are certainly not democrats and not even what I would class as the democratic Left. Their philosophy is based on revolutionary socialism with its roots in the beliefs of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin and if you know anything at all about politics you will know that revolutionary socialism has been an abject failure wherever and whenever it has been tried. Since the turn of the 21^st century the SWP has also been building links with some quite nasty Islamists or Islamism adjacent individuals. The Respect Party vehicle that was dominated by the SWP, at least in its early days, sought to mobilise disaffected Muslims and in particular Muslim youth with the intention of these Muslims becoming part of the group of foot soldiers who would help to bring about revolution. Before it’s ultimate electoral demise it was basically an Islam party in all but name but with a sprinkling of SWP members. The Respect vehicle has also been used on occasion in at least one London borough to my knowledge by councillor who’ve fell out with Labour to threaten Labour with hoovering up the Islamic votes that Labour now regard as essential for their survival. This gave one councillor I saw a cudgel to beat Labour with during an internal party dispute within Labour. A big influence in the decision by the SWP to pivot towards Islam and Islamism was SWP high up Chris Nineham’s book ‘The Prophet and the Proletariat’ published in 1994, a publication that has had much malign influence on the left both inside and outside the SWP.

Ms Phillips asks a very pertinent question about the SWP and that is how it’s funded. There’s little doubt that the SWP is not a fiscally poor organisation but where does its money come from? Web searches I’ve made recently do not conclusively answer that question but I would suggest that a big tranche of their funding comes from sales of the Socialist Worker publication and from providing print and design facilities to other organisations of the Left via the SWP’s printing subsidiary. The cost of producing things like Socialist Worker is considerably less than it would be for a normal publication because they are not paying their paper sellers, who are doing it for the cause and I suspect that those who write for this publication have other sources of income. There’s also the possibility that at least some of the donation boxes that are rattled in people’s faces at left wing demos are collecting money not just for the stated cause but also for the SWP. Putting money in a bucket labelled ‘Palestine campaign’ might not be going to where you think it should go. It may go to promote the ‘Palestine’ cause but it will be the SWP’s campaign for this cause and not to a campaign entity that the SWP doesn’t control or influence. The SWP also gets money from subscriptions, membership fees, voluntary donations and entry charges to events like Marxism UK which is the SWP’s big annual shindig and whose speaker list is stuffed full of the sort of people that sensible people would cross the road to avoid.

The possibility of foreign money coming to the SWP cannot be completely discounted although it will probably take investigators who are better and more connected than I am to discover whether this suspicion is true or not. However, other parts of the British far left have not been immune to the lure of foreign money and the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) in the 70’s and 80’s took money from both Gaddafi’s Libya and Saddam Hussain’s Iraq for their ‘revolutionary activities’. There is a precedent in the case of the WRP for iffy money going to British far left groups and it is probably correct for someone to look into the SWP and see if a similar situation is occurring there.

As the SWP looks and behaves very much like some sort of cult I would not be at all surprised if the SWP were squeezing lots of money out of its members, especially those in higher paying jobs, for ‘the cause’. Cults, whether they are of a political or a religious nature are very good at extracting funds from members and supporters and I suspect that the SWP benefits from monies extracted by guilt tripping its members and from the free labour supplied by members.

As for the marked lack of enthusiasm for competent journalists in the mainstream media to do any close examination of the SWP then I find this troubling. Whether it’s because journalists sympathise with the SWP or if contact with them at university (journalism is no longer a learn on the job profession, it’s now a graduate one) has led them to believe that they are harmless nutters is difficult to say, but I agree with Ms Phillips in that the media and journalists need to take a closer and more critical interest in the activities of the SWP. The SWP have fingers in so many extremism pies whether that be ‘Palestine’, astroturf anti-racist campaigns, anti-cuts groups and so on and so on. They have an outsized influence in Trade Unions in comparison to the size of the SWP (6000 registered members with 2500 financial members and its members and supporters are in our healthcare and education systems along with SWP sympathisers in the Civil Service and in academia.

I’m at a loss as to why there’s not been much media interest in the SWP since the ‘Comrade Delta’ sexual assault allegations that came to light during the 2010 to 2014 period. Whilst it was good that the media took an interest in sexual assault allegations against senior SWP figures a questioning view of the SWP by the media shouldn’t have stopped there.

The SWP is a problem. It does take over other leftist campaigns and run them for the benefit of the SWP. It has hobnobbed with some pretty nasty Islamists and Islamist fellow travellers and it has a record of entryism into other left wing parties of a sort that when Militant Tendency was doing it to the Labour Party caused the then Labour leader Neil Kinnock to go all out and expel supporters of Militant from the Party.

Those of who know about the SWP and can see the signs of their involvement in campaigns can clearly see that the recent pretend spontaneous ‘anti racism’ demonstrations that we’ve seen popping up in Britain in response to an almost non existent ‘far right’ threat have had a significant input from the SWP. Because of stuff like this, their capture of a multitude of other left and soft left organisations, their members in influential jobs in health, education, local government etc and their oversized influence on Trade Unions, we can no longer afford the luxury of treating the SWP as an irrelevance as we would the Stalin Society. We need to treat the SWP as dangerous and destructive and they are joining forces with and supporting those who are a dire threat to security and peace.