I don't know who Tony Evans is, but if this is the same Ian Donovan as I think it is...
Ian Donovan is an ex-member of the International Bolshevik Tendency, ultra-orthodox Trot group which split from the Sparts in the late early 1980s. Donovan has his own paper ('Revolution and Truth') and has spent a fair amount of time (fairly honestly, but in my opinion senselessly) digging through the history of the Spartacists to find out where they went wrong (on the assumption that they had the 'correct line' at the time of their split with the US-SWP in the 1960s).
Anyway, the debate on Red Action, the BNP and immigration politics in the UK misses out some pretty key points. The SWP's slogan 'Refugees are welcome here' combines two tendencies that are unfortunately deeply embedded in the way they work - on the one hand, playing into the genuine refugees vs. 'illegal immigrants' division which is the bastion of liberal capitalist xenophobia, and on the other hand, maintaining the distinction between refugees/migrants and the 'British people'.
Bill-posting is a weekly activity for SWP activists, but actually building up networks of support and solidarity is, if not outside the SWP's ambit, at least not consistently supported by the leadership. The result is, of course, making the SWP central, instead of building local campaigns against the rising tide of racism and xenophobia. If there are any members of the UK-SWP on this list (I doubt it), I don't mean to be sectarian, but there is something deeply fucked-up in how the SWP methods of working constantly set up a division between the 'politically correct' (in the original sense) SWP and the 'great unwashed working class', which only merits preaching to.
Anyway, Donovan's response seems to be to a partial version of the Red Action article. I don't know who Red Action are, but what they say here is worth quoting:
http://www.redaction.org/news/june_2000.html#13_06_00 ASYLUM SEEKERS AND ANTI-FASCISM
13th June 2000
On June 1, an audit commission report entitled Another Country warned of the political dangers of a breakdown in the compulsary dispersal of asylum seekers. It highlighted in particular the 30 million shortfall between what local councils spent on supporting asylum seekers and what they have managed to reclaim from the government.
It urges urgent action on this including the possibility of a lottery cash injection. 30 million was after all what the government recently granted the Dome. In the meantime the report finds evidence of some doctors refusing to register asylum seekers because consulatations take three times longer, while some schools are resisting the acceptance the chidren of asylum seekers if they cannot provide language support.
The report also warns councils not to provide services to asylum seekers that are not available to other residents. It cites cases when asylum seekers were given money for furniture that was not avalaible to homeless people. In another case asylum seekers were provided with taxis to take them to new accomodation while local people had to use public transport. This appears to be a lesson the liberal left seems determined not to learn. Rather than take government to task for their failure to properly fund hard pressed councils they are eager to be seen championing the rights of the refugees over and above, and at the direct expense, as the report shows, of the host community. There is no awareness that even if the perception of preferential treatment that they and Guardian editorials demand was a myth it would still have to be sensitively addressed for fear of compounding working class alienation.
Instead of demanding not only adequate, but extra resources to help 'grease the wheels of local integration' the liberal left, with the SWP prominent, feel their time and money is better spent plastering run down estates with posters insisting 'Refugees wecome here'. 'You'll take it and like it' is the authoritarian message. A strategy that is determined to lay down welcome mats for the BNP in areas where till now they have had no resonance cannot be anti-fascist. No weasel words can disguise the fact that in the real world this is not anti-fascism but its opposite: not 'bravely confronting prejudice' but recklessly creating it.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844