Is it time to forgive the SWP?

The SWP has gone public with its plans to remove four people from its central committee: Alex Callinicos, Charlie Kimber, Weyman Bennett and Mark Thomas. Each were in the SWP leadership in 2013, the year in which that organisation tried to cover up two complaints of rape and sexual harassment. Callinicos formulated the SWP leadership’s justification for their decision to keep Martin Smith (“Comrade Delta”) in post. He wrote the article, ‘Is Leninism Finished?’ which told SWP cadres how to resist the complaints – by saying that the real issue was not what the women had suffered (“a difficult disciplinary case”) but the willingness of SWP dissidents to vote against their own leadership (“Two factions were formed in the lead-up to the conference to fight for changes in the model of democratic centralism …that the SWP has developed”). Kimber was National Secretary of the SWP that year. Weyman Bennett hinted that the women complainants were in the pay of the secret state (“I’m not saying it is MI5, but it is suspicious that someone would come forward so late”).

In the same document, the organization acknowledges that the reason for removing the four was “the legacy of the 2013 crisis, when the SWP failed two women who raised complaints of sexual misconduct”. The party talks of that legacy as “something that will pose a challenge in the year ahead”. There are at least two ways in which the crisis is likely to have an impact over the next year: members of the SWP are likely to stand for elected posts in Your Party in February 2026. If the SWP nominates such of its members as Amy Leather – who spoke on behalf of the SWP at the recent Your Party conference – other socialists will remember what those veterans did during the SWP’s crisis year. In Leather’s case, she was another SWP CC member and supporter of the cover-up. She was also more importantly, on the Disputes Panel tasked with investigating the complaint, and asked one of the questions which became notorious in 2013 (In relation to allegations of plying women with drink as a prelude to pestering them for sex, she asked: “Don’t you think Martin is just generous? Whenever I go out for a coffee with Martin, he always buys me coffee.”)

Further, in July 2026, Ebb Books are going to be publishing the book on the left, which is based on the testimony of more than 50 people who suffered in 2013, have described how they were effected, and how deeply the problems went within the party. I hope that the book’s readership will include many people who joined the SWP after 2013. They are entitled to know what the people around them did when their party was in crisis mode.

Here, though, I’m going to focus on the book on the right, which will also come into print in summer 2026. While that wasn’t written with the SWP in mind, it is trying to formulate a general answer to such questions as “Should the left try to forgive? When has a wrong-doer changed enough so that it is good politics to forgive them?” And those are exactly the questions which people will be asking next year. The book’s argument, put as succinctly as I can, is that whether you’re talking about a person, a party, or a whole society the rules should be the same. The moment at which it is sensible to start talking about forgiving people is after a revolution. In the case of a large society, I’m hoping that’s easy to visualise. In the case of two people and a complaint of interpersonal violence, that transformation might mean:

-the perpetrator admitting they were wrong,

-them spelling out exactly how they were mistaken,

-them promising not do anything similar again, and

-them doing all they can to lower themselves and lift up the victim (“reparation”) so that they have reversed the original dynamics of power and powerlessness inside which they committed the original wrong.

(One further complication; the only person who can forgive an interpersonal wrong is its victim. For anyone else watching, the issue isn’t so much whether we should forgive but more like - when does the time come when it’s working asking the victim what she thinks? For most of the past decade, we haven’t been remotely close to it).

I didn’t draw up those tests for the sake of the SWP, who get no direct mention in my Forgiveness book, but for all the world’s wrong-doers. They would apply just as well to a repentant fascist, an apologetic cop, to a boss after the workers have taken power.

From that perspective, the SWP has published an apology. The party is sacking the worst of its former leaders. On the minus side, the apology was over a decade late, and one of the two women affected declined to accept it. And, while removing Kimber and Callinicos, the SWP proposes to keep in place as its branch secretaries and as members of its National Committee the generation of people who were the leadership’s first line of defence in 2013 – the hundreds of local Amy Leathers.

Still, overall, that is actually quite a lot of progress. In terms of the list I’ve set out, the crucial omission is the second of those four points. The reason a perpetrator needs to admit what they did wrong is that without this information an apology rings hollow, and they seem unconvincing when they say it won’t happen again. Without insight, its hard to believe the contrition or any subsequent act of reparation.

The SWP still refuses to say anywhere what mistakes the organisation made in 2013. Where did the faults start? What caused them? The SWP’s 2024 apology was written without consultation with the two women. Former oppositionists had to show it, ourselves, to one of them - the SWP having made no attempt to speak to either woman. The apology says, “We were wrong in how we responded to the two cases”, how were you wrong? “The process we had in place at that time was entirely inadequate”, how was it inadequate? The SWP is willing to admit to the vaguest and most weightless of things – error – but can’t say what people did, or who was affected by their actions, or why they were so destructive.

Of the hundreds of oppositionists who were humiliated, threatened with violence, spat on, lied about, or had to watch in horror as the SWP tried to drive them out of the labour movement – to which of them is the party willing to admit it did wrong?

The same SWP document urges its members to show “zero tolerance to defensiveness”. No-one’s arguing that they should defend anything. People are saying – it’s time to end the years of bureaucratic evasions. Now tell the truth - give us your best version of the story. Tell us honestly what you did wrong.