On 12 October, in a move to stamp the authority of the Labour left and its allies on the movement against climate change, organisers of the Liverpool COP26 Hub systematically purged its WhatsApp lists of anyone suspected of being a supporter of FRFI or RCG. Nearly 20 young people were kicked out; at least two of them had no political connection to FRFI but were banned because they were not known to the Hub organising group. The secret plan for the expulsions was revealed accidentally when one of the organisers, Labour Party supporter Rhona O’Brien, sent a message intended for the organising group into the main Hub WhatsApp chat just before the purges took place. As the Hub only meets online, clearing the WhatsApp lists excluded FRFI supporters from any further involvement.
What sparked the conflict that led to the bans was the attempt of the Hub’s organising group to use the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) to police the newly established Student and Youth group. Liverpool FRFI, a predominantly young organisation, has been visibly very active in the fight against climate change, participating in the 2019 school strikes and organising many events including rolling pickets of the city centre, and FRFI members had joined the Student and Youth group. However, like the national COP26 coalition, the Hub organisers have been determined to ensure that there are no radical or anti-imperialist politics on events such as the planned 6 November march, and they were worried that FRFI supporters would be in the majority within the new group. So they organised a senior member of the local SWP, Laila Hasan, to attend its first meeting to ensure that it did not get out of hand. The move backfired. Hasan was immediately challenged on her role. Her response, that she had specific ‘expertise’ in guiding young people, held no water. Indeed, demonstrating her ‘expertise’, she ruled that the principal matter the group was competent to address was the 6 November march, and that any talk of a student strike had to be subordinated to this aim. For 45 minutes Hasan tried to force the group to accept her authority, but the young FRFI supporters refused to concede. Unable to deal with young people questioning her authority, particularly 16-year-old women, Hasan grew more and more angry, declaring ‘this is a national coalition, it has all been decided, and if you don’t like it, just get out.’ In the end, her right to attend was put to a vote, and by 7 to 4, Hasan was asked to leave.
This was the basis for a charge of ‘bullying’ that was apparently the justification for the expulsions. The Hub organisers, who include SWP member Mark O’Brien, Labour supporters Clara Paillard and William Phillips as well as Rhona O’Brien, and Friends in the Earth supporter Don Naylor, told the Hub that there would be a statement on the purge. None has been published; there has only been a verbal report which of course could not be disputed. But when earlier Hasan had been challenged on the Hub’s main WhatsApp group to explain her role, she had refused to respond. It was left to Rhona O’Brien, a former secretary of Birkenhead CLP, to try to rescue Hasan, stating that
‘Our coalition is underpinned by a decolonising ethos. This means we can and should be operating in a non-hierarchical and inclusive manner. I would hope that all members of our coalition feel welcomed into all working groups where respectful debate is encouraged.’
A ‘decolonising ethos’ – supposedly being embraced by a member of a pro-Zionist, imperialist, racist, war-mongering party. A ‘non-hierarchical and inclusive manner’ – where a little clique of SWP and Labour members decide behind the scenes who can be in ‘their’ coalition, where ‘respectful debate’ means you either agree with us, or get kicked out, where people like O’Brien, Paillard and Phillips can oppose ‘bullying’ but support a party which in government doesn’t just ‘bully’ people or offer them ‘respectable debate’, but wages unending war on them and murders them in their hundreds of thousands.
The Hub organising group is following the recipe book the old ‘left’ uses when it creates its ‘broad fronts’ or ‘coalitions’. Its focus is on recruiting first and foremost pillars of stultifying petit bourgeois respectability such as NGO representatives, leaders of faith organisations and the moribund trade union movement. They want to create what they describe as a carnival atmosphere on the 6 November march, make it a ‘fun’ event with music and dancing – in a transparent signal to the ruling class that they are not to be seen as the slightest threat to the established order. Speakers are being chosen on this basis, and so are being drawn from the Labour Party and its supporters, and from the mainly middle aged, materially privileged people who make up the political layer which is the basis for the old ‘left’. How a ‘fun’ event can be presented as an adequate response to the disaster facing humanity defies rational understanding. In that sense it is hardly surprising that the organisers decided to drive FRFI and its communist, anti-imperialist position out of the Coalition.
And the SWP? It serves as a political police, protecting the Labour Party and the dignitaries within the Coalition from any radical challenge. Appalled at the prospect of a youth group with anti-imperialist politics, yet lacking young members to oppose them openly, the only way the SWP could deal with the situation was to join Labour in its time-honoured, dishonest dismissal of political opposition as ‘bullying’. It is a reactionary, anti-communist organisation.
All bar two of the FRFI supporters expelled from the Liverpool Hub were under 25 years old; all bar one of those who organised the expulsions were at least twice that age. Youth were the target of the expulsions not because of their age but because they stood for an anti-imperialist movement against climate change. They therefore represented an opposition to the materially and politically privileged layers of the working class from which Labour and the SWP draw their membership and which dominate the COP26 coalition locally and nationally. Had the FRFI comrades remained within the Coalition we would have established a 2010 Cochabamba Declaration group to build an anti-imperialist bloc on the 6 November march. We will now do that from the outside.
