The South Tyneside May Day 2000 Committee, which is representative of most working class and fighting organisations in the borough, as well as having many individual workers on the committee, has organised a rally and celebration for the working class of the area. The Committee, at its last AGM in July 2000, took the decision to invite Arthur Scargill, President of the NUM and Leader of the Socialist Labour Party, as national speaker. Eric Trevett, an Honorary President of the Korea Friendship and Solidarity Campaign, has also been invited by the committee as international speaker at the rally and celebration, which will take place at the South Shields Labour Club on Tuesday, May 1, in the evening.

In March this year, the Labour Party leaders in South Tyneside called, in an emergency motion, for Labour Party members to boycott the South Tyneside May Day Rally in South Shields on May 1 because Arthur Scargill was speaking and because he is “standing against the official Labour Party candidate from Hartlepool”. The issue made front-page headlines in the South Shields Gazette on April 5 with supporters of the May Day event condemning this stand of the Labour Party. Whilst such a stand of the Labour Party in the area will not seriously harm the success of the May Day event the issue that it raises is of utmost importance for the working class movement of the area. What the local Labour Party leaders are saying is that workers should only vote for the “official Labour Party candidates” because maintaining the Labour Party in power is the paramount task of the workers, which takes precedence over all others. In calling for a boycott of the May Day event, they are also going further in suggesting that no discussion should take place among the workers on the programme the Labour Party has been carrying out while in office, and that it plans to implement when re-elected. To call for a boycott is to suggest that the political unity in struggle of the workers of all lands, as embodied in the celebration of May Day, is considered secondary to the ideological positions and calls of New Labour. It is to suggest that the workers should submit to having these positions and calls imposed on them, rather than to themselves occupy the space whereby they can work out how to transform this old world with its attendant crises.

The local Labour Party leaders appear not to want workers to have an informed view on the Labour Party programme nor of the views of the President of the National Union of Mineworkers, who is also national leader of the SLP. Equally serious is that they appear to adhere to a view that the workers should simply activate themselves politically as voting fodder for the Labour Party. Any conception that workers should have the freedom of conscience to make any informed choice of candidates at election time, let alone themselves select candidates as workers politicians to represent their interests in government, seems to be the furthest thing from the considerations of these local Labour Party leaders. For them, the matter is done and dusted by declaring that the Labour Party is to be considered the “official” party of the working class. It cannot be said that the Labour leaders of South Tyneside are alone in their views. A number of political forces argue that it would split the labour movement to support any other but Labour Party candidates, unless those candidates themselves urged the electorate to vote Labour. That Arthur Scargill might effect the defeat of the Labour Party nominee in Hartlepool, in this argument, becomes a factor for great agitation. However, this notion about splitting the labour movement appears to miss the point. The workers’ movement is objectively split between those who are striving to bring into being and to nurture the independent programme of the working class and those who are working to conciliate the workers’ movement with social democracy. This split will not disappear simply through calls for the unity of the labour movement. What will build the unity of the class and provide a converging point for the workers to put forward their own alternative programme is for it to become a burning issue for the whole workers’ movement to address what stand should be taken to the deep all-sided crisis of British capitalism and how to lead society in overcoming this crisis. What is urgently required is to raise the whole level of political discussion and political culture, not to extinguish it. If the workers can celebrate their unity in struggle irrespective of ideological differences, as the South Tyneside May Day Rally sets out to achieve, and openly discuss what should be the agenda that they adopt in defence of their rights and to open the path to a new society, should not this be a case for genuine rejoicing?

Many consider that the stand of the South Tyneside May Day 2000 Committee has been one of raising the level of politics in the area. The speakers were not invited because of the election but to celebrate May Day on May First. To call for the boycott of the rally is actually to indulge in sectarianism in the name of upholding the unity of the labour movement. Should not workers take up politics themselves, become worker politicians and take a decisive stand against the “Third Way” programme? Should they not intervene in the election by supporting candidates that embody their own alternative fighting programme and consider that voting for them they are voting for themselves, their own rights and interests? We think they should. This is the way forward. We assess it as harmful to the workers’ cause that a call for Labour Party members to boycott the South Tyneside May Day Rally and Celebration has been given, and call on all workers, Labour Party members or not, to reject the call.