Papers: Weekly Worker: Postscript - Missing 'Party democracy'?

Click above to turn pageVery strange. I got a call from Peter Manson telling me he had decided to spike a Red Platform article which he'd previous listed for publication. I argued hard, and in the end Peter fell back on telling me that he had no choice, as he had been 'mandated by the PCC'. I later spoke to PCC member Tina Becker on a different matter, and without knowing what Peter had said, she innocently mentioned that the PCC meeting had had to be cancelled that evening as too many people were absent.

So Peter had simply lied. The Red Platform published the story on our website:

...It later transpired that there had been no meeting of the Provisional Central Committee on Sunday. Comrade Manson, and three other members, had arrived at the conclusion that there had been "too much Red Platform" during a discussion after a party seminar, and comrade Manson had simply used his authority as editor to implement their wishes. He has since apologised for saying he had been mandated by the PCC, but it remains a strange thing to have said.

The Red Platform protest in the strongest possible terms not merely the decision, but the bizarre way in which it was taken and communicated. We call on our comrades to check out the facts explained above for themselves, and add their voices to that protest.

The really disturbing thing was that this lie caused no protest at all from other members. In the end, this was just additional weight to the argument that it was time to leave the party and go home.

Click here to download Weekly Worker issue 529.

Weekly Worker 529: 20 May 2004

The Red Platform originally planned to run another article in 'Seeing red', but the editor, comrade Peter Manson, decided that to publish comrade Richards's reply to his own criticism of our politics in addition to our planned 'Seeing red' would give the platform "too much prominence" in this issue, and insisted we ran one or the other. We strongly disagree. The Red Platform represents over a 10th of the CPGB's membership, and democratic norms suggest the right to proportional representation in our paper: actually more than a page every week.

We have, in fact, sought far less than this in the two previous issues, but, as the editor himself chose to write a piece criticising our politics, we feel we should have been allowed a full page this week to deal with his arguments, and continue our series on the points of our founding statement. Given the insistence that we run one piece or the other, we have chosen to reply to comrade Manson's critique here, but our full argument on this question, plus the article we planned to run (ironically, on the subject of 'Party democracy'), can be found on our website, at www.cpgb.org.uk/red/democracy.