Why many activists don't trust the Socialist Worker Party.
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The Socialist Worker Party are NOT to be trusted!

The site's mascot; a decorative image of a crab. It looks most angry.

Have you recently attended a Trans Rights Rally?

Did it look like it was organised by a grass-roots organisation, but when you arrived it appeared to be for a political party?

Were the speakers predominately CISGENDER upper-middle class people, trying to advertise their unions, with a few token trans people thrown in?

Then you may have been DUPED by the Socialist Worker Party.

Traditionally the Socialist Worker Party have attempted to co-opt other, more popular leftist movements and use them to advertise their party. Since their past and current tactics and actions have gained them a level of infamy, the are now masquerading as a grass-roots organisations to trick activists into supporting their cause.

They masquerade under the following non-exhaustive list of aliases;

It is this author’s opinion that no political party should be masquerading as a grass roots organisation, and that the Socialist Worker party are an insidious cancer on the left, which will only stand for a cause for as long as it serves them a useful purpose. This is evident by their utter failure to work with other organisations within the city of Manchester, and the work they do to try and silence certain trans voices within the community. In my experience, protests are just an opportunity to advertise for them.

Causes they would drop if it didn’t serve their interests any more:

For many in the communities for whom the SWP claim to support, they feel the SWP is purely trying to advertise their party and in general their presence is not appreciated.

Sapping the energy and resources away from real grass-roots organisations

When the Socialist Worker Party create a shell organisation and convince people to work with them under the pretence that they are a grass-roots organisation, It ultimately takes time and resources away from the cause they allege to support.

Doing this takes a lot of energy, and many of us have full-time jobs, charitable commitments, and real lives besides working towards protesting all the time. At the same time, everyone in the community feels like we need to be doing more, and are eager to work with and support groups that enable this.

Spontaneous Marches

When a reputable organisation runs a protest in this city, the organisers are usually the last to leave. They do this to protect the members of the community. The protests are open to anybody and are held in public spaces. Including to people who may wish to enact violence towards our community members. By staying behind until everyone else has gone, we can ensure the safety of everyone involved, and that the area the protest was held in is sufficiently tidy.

When the SWP do a protest, they are usually the first to leave. Since they often don’t notify the police of their protests, they often lack any sort of legal oversight. This is a wholly irresponsible way to organise a protest. It shows they don’t care about the community or their local environment.

Further, they have been known to abruptly announce that a protest is to become a march. Doing this is foremost dangerous, since people left behind at the starting location are left to fend for themselves against counter-protestors or fascist actors. Not only is this wholly irresponsible, it is also a tactic to silence voices in the community which they don’t like. In the past, they’ve moved protests from St. Peter’s Square to Sackville Gardens in the gay village.

St. Peter’s Square is a huge tram stop in Manchester City Centre. It sees a lot of footfall from people going about their daily business meaning many people will see the protest and have the opportunity to ask questions. Being visible while doing a protest is incredibly valuable. It also has many avenues for escape in case people need to leave quickly.

Sackville Gardens in the gay village is essentially a safe space. The annual Pride festival is held there, as is Sparkle Weekend, because it’s where we go when we want to be surrounded by fellow community members. Any speeches that happens here is essentially preaching to the choir and completely pointless. Further, since Sackville Garden’s has limited exits, and those exits go on to relatively narrow streets; it makes it easier for the police to enact “kettling” tactics.

While the march itself happens, it’s an opportunity for more people to see their advertisements while offering no opportunity for the community itself to speak.

Generally speaking; protests should happen in wide open spaces with lots of footfall. The gay village is reserved for joyous fun happy times.

They employed the march tactic again recently at a protest outside the Manchester Crown Court, which spontaneously turned into a march to Victoria Station before a local trans woman they don’t like was able to speak. The area outside the Manchester Crown Court is a pedestrianised, wide open space, with multiple ways out. Victoria station is an enclosed area with a handful of doors.

Message Saturation, and Silencing by Omission

When I attend a protest, I usually see a variety of placards: Home made signs, community crafted creations, and designs shared by groups like lazypins, who work hard to amplify grass roots voices.

When SWP-affiliated accounts share photos from the same protests, you’ll often see only their own placards prominently featured. Sometimes to the total exclusion of others. Weather this is due to editorial decisions, intentional framing, or just coincidence, the result is the same: Their social media posts online work to misrepresent protests as being more aligned with the SWP than it actually was.

By doing this, they mischaracterise protest groups as being in greater support of them and their actions than they really are. By posting only a subset of the protest messages, this in practice constitutes silencing the trans community.

Following a protest this year in April, which had about an equal measure of lazypins and SWP placards; graffiti appeared around the gay village saying “defund lazypins”. In contrast to the SWP, Lazypins’ placards are designed by the community, are vibrant and colourful, and feature minimal branding.

While it is unknown who is responsible for this vandalism, it is hard to imagine anyone in our movement would not be entirely in support of lazypins: With the exception of a group with a vested interest in achieving total saturation of their messaging.

Incredibly poor taste

On Trans Day of Remembrance 2023 in Manchester we had a large outdoor service. The event was put on by multiple trans and LGBT organisations, all of which came to the mutual decision that they would not be taking donations for that event.

The Socialist Worker Party, having not been involved in the organisation of this event, showed up at the entrance of the service and setup a prominent table, complete with a collection bucket.

The service, I remind you, being essentially a mass funeral for hundreds and hundreds of our friends and found family.

Not only was this incident incredibly crass, but out of all the examples shown, I believe this demonstrates best that though they purport to support workers, in practice they are happy to exploit the free labour of others within the movements they try to invade.

Unions. Not the be-all-and-end-all.

In protests either organised by or hijacked by the SWP, the speakers will usually contain a token number of community members and trans people and predominantly party members. The emphasis from the cisgender speakers will be on unions, with the effect of forcing companies to give you rights.

Your author here isn’t opposed to unions or people joining unions. But a union isn’t going to help you outside of work. In daily life. On the tram. In the shops. It won’t even help you at work in the case that either the company itself is already supportive, or the union is transphobic. They’re doing this because they’re incapable of seeing the bigger picture; that transphobia has largely been rendered legal in the UK. Trans Rights must be the focus of a Trans Protest, not an after-thought. Our protests should not have a tone of “Unions are great, you should join a union… Oh, by the way, Trans lives matter”.

They’re also poisoning the message for the unions.

When you turn up to a protest and discover it’s an SWP rally masquerading as grass-roots activism, you naturally look at the groups sponsoring and supporting the protest with a level of suspicion. The SWP work to trick them too. So if a group align themselves with a one-off protest which turns out to be setup by the SWP, it doesn’t immediately mean that group are aligned with the SWP. However, when a group or entity does so multiple times, it calls into question that groups motives and intentions. These groups are usually trade unions, and thanks to them showing up along side with the SWP multiple times, I wouldn’t trust them to represent my best interests in the work place.

They only support certain types of trans people.

They seem to apply these tactics against particular trans people.

They’re saying “Trans Rights Now”, but by applying these tactics against a particular kind of trans person, they’re drawing a line that shows they wont support certain kinds of trans people.

They’re saying;

With this in mind, it’s clear why they think unions are the ultimate solution; because the trans people they want to support likely won’t face discrimination outside of the context of a workplace.

They have an internally transphobic culture

Reading the accounts of former members brings insights to the SWP’s inner workings.

This account is harrowing and is worth reading in it’s own right; swp2023 tumblr post. Here I will just share a summary of a single section.

This account alleges that there is “constant, blatant transphobia in the party.”

While they make clear that during their time with the party, there were too many occurrences of transphobia for a complete list, they share;

They go on to state; “there just aren’t many trans people in the party. […] There are, however, plenty of cis people who think that just because they’ve attended a trans demo or two they know more about the experiences of trans people than we do.” Which would go a long way to explain why attending SWP run protests feel less like a trans protest and more like being lectured to by predominantly cisgender people.

Historical controversy

When I first joined the trans community and started making connections circa 2019, several people I met were already upset with the Socialist Workers because of allegations of sexual assault. While I personally feel like their recent actions and behaviour is reason enough to rid them from our ranks, I would be lying by omission if I didn’t say something about this. For many old-hands, this is their main reason not to trust the SWP;

In 2013, senior SWP figure Martin Smith (known internally as “Comrade Delta”) was accused of sexual assault. The party held an internal hearing rather than referring it to the police, leading to widespread resignations and a deep crisis within the party.

Since this incident, there was technically an apology. But in true SWP fashion, many felt what was supposed to be an apology was actually an advert for an upcoming conference, and it was not taken in earnest.

Following the scandal, internal leaks say they created a “disputes committee” to deal with this sort of thing going forwards. However, it is unclear how one would use the committee, or if its ever been able to successfully resolve any disputes. Its entirely likely that it only exists to help further cover up the misdeeds of the party and it’s leadership.

The incident is one of many that call into question their internal accountability and commitment to justice.

How to oppose the Socialist Worker Party at a protest.

Don’t carry one of their placards. Although the slogan of “Trans Rights Now” is sending the correct message, The fact they’re not using the trans colours, and feature their URL so prominently ultimately serves as an advertisement for their political party. We need to persuade the government. If local media shows mostly SWP banners, the government could then claim that the whole rally is simply made up of ultra-left radicals, and ignore it out-of-hand.

Ideally bring your own placard made out of cardboard. Home made placards send the message that you are an impassioned member of the community, with your own voice. Failing that, use a provided one with minimal advertising, and ideally one carrying a message you can personally identify with.

If you are offered a socialist worker newspaper, or leaflet, just say no thank you.

Do not sign any petition they may present you with.

If they try and turn the protest into a march, especially if no march has been announced beforehand, the safest thing to do is to calmly gather your friends and belongings and leave the area. Not remaining behind protects you from counter-protest agitators or bad faith actors who may be lurking, waiting for someone to be isolated or vulnerable. Not participating in the march also reduces your risk of being caught up in police action for taking part in an un-notified march or being mischaracterised as engaging in disorderly conduct.

Correct the URL on their placards.

While it is against the law to deface any private property, If the socialist worker party hand you a placard or leaflet, then they technically transfer ownership to you, and you can do anything you want with it.

The following URLs are similar to their main domain name, but will lead back to this website. You can change the domain name on their placards or materials which you have been legally given, to one of these using a marker:

Actual Trans Supportive Organisations

Stand with the organisations which are actually doing the work to support trans people in this city.

The following organisations have had no part in the creation of this website, but are actually doing the legwork to support the trans community.

Manchester Trans Liberation Assembly (A Case Study)

The Manchester Trans Liberation Assembly is a group which exploded in size in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, regarding who counts as a woman under the equality act. The group’s rapid expansion afforded the SWP an opportunity to join the group and seize key leadership positions within the organisation. While feigning support, the SWP used MTLA to run socialist-worker demos, while gaslighting the activists within the group to convince them that any perception of a take-over was unintentional or imagined. But it was clear to see from inside and out that the SWP was trying to turn MTLA into one of their shell organisations. The behaviour was called it out, and MTLA voted to reclaim the group. Now, MTLA is focused once again on trans liberation and stands as a good example of how to deal with the active danger presented by the SWP.

For the SWP

Note that the following is directed towards the Leadership of the Socialist Worker Party, not its individual members. If you personally are an SWP member, we have a separate message just for you which can be found on this page for members.

As a Christian, I believe in the power of works. And that nobody is beyond redemption.

And so, If the socialist worker party want to have this website taken down, here is what needs to happen;

At present, your absence does more good for the trans rights movement than your involvement. So start by taking a step back and let the trans community take the lead for our own rights.

Start engaging with the wider community honestly.
The best way they could support the trans community right now is by attending the protests anonymously.
Retire those old tired placards.
Though they literally say “Trans Rights Now”, the practical effect of having so many in one space is to send the message that “This is a Socialist Worker rally, and I can ignore this” - Ultimately silencing the cause.
When you run a protest, ensure the safety of all participants.
You do this by ensuring you are the last group to leave, and not leveraging dangerous tactics like spontaneously announcing marches to realms unknown.

Continue engaging in these tactics and I will work to ensure it is to no end except your own.

Conclusion

For an organisation that claims to stand for many of the same things I do, They’re certainly doing everything in their power to piss me off.

This comes at a time in which it feels like the trans community is being attacked from every direction. I shouldn’t have to put any resources towards an organisation which claims to stand for the same principles as me. But it’s important to judge a person, organisation or political party not by their words, but by their actions. And here I have shown you;

Political parties in this country use the trans community as a football and a scapegoat, and the Socialist Worker Party are no different.

The Socialist Worker Party are a cancer within our community. They will argue that we’re stronger together and that we should welcome their inclusion with open arms. But when you have cancer, if you sit and let it fester, your health will get worse until you die. You must fight like hell to remove it. The trans community, and every person therein must do everything in your power to oppose this evident bad actor in our midst.

It is my hope that by exposing the SWP, actual grass-roots action will be able to take hold in Manchester. The Socialist Worker Party’s internal practices and actions (past and current) are incompatible with principles of justice and equality. Without the SWP providing a distraction which ultimately favours the transphobes, we might be able to get things done!

Let’s clear the stage for real solidarity. Let’s reclaim our movements from those who exploit them.