For many decades, some terrible examples of far left crazy polemics have emerged from the British State. In general, this happens when organisations are not capable of accurately reporting the views of people they disagree with. It looks like the British “Socialist Worker” is sinking into a bog of irrationality over its deeply mistaken policy concerning Russia’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine.

The article below, republished on the Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières Site (ESSF), is written by Dale Street. Comrades on the left in Ireland can observe, perhaps with a feeling of amazed disbelief.

John Meehan June 21 2023

Socialist Worker (SW), paper of the Socialist Worker Party (SWP), is ecstatic.

At last it has found a trade union (the UCU, which organises workers in post-school education) that has passed a motion at its annual congress backing the Stop the War Coalition (StW) line on Ukraine.

True, the motion was passed by just nine votes. True, the motion contained an antisemitic trope jumbling up Ukraine and Israel as imperialist outposts. True, Jewish UCU members critical of the motion have been targeted for antisemitic abuse. True, another, and far better, motion on Ukraine was passed by a much larger majority.

All that is true — but, with the exception of the antisemitic trope (which SW, of course, supports), all of it goes completely unmentioned in SW’s coverage of the UCU congress vote.

True also that the passing of the motion has triggered a wave of revulsion among broad swathes of the UCU membership, with many members taking to social media to condemn the motion and, in some cases, resigning from the UCU in protest.

This applies in particular to people who know what they are talking about. Such as Ukrainian members of the UCU and other academics who specialise in the study of Ukraine, Russia and Eastern Europe.

In the best traditions of Stalinist slander, however, SW portrays the backlash against the motion as a ruling-class conspiracy.

The backlash, says SW, was the work of “a vast army of pro-Nato trolls. No one should imagine that this was a spontaneous reaction.” NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Latvia, explains SW, recommends “using pseudonyms to mislead social media users”.

SW and its readers should take a reality-check. A statement condemning the motion issued and signed by UCU members (some of them now former members) at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies has attracted nearly 300,000 views.

That institution really does exist. Those signatories really do exist. No-one needs to “imagine” this was a spontaneous reaction — it simply was a spontaneous reaction.