Alerting the Socialist Party to an omission on their website

The following letter was sent to the Socialist Party alerting them to an omission in the archive of their paper (The Socialist). As of the date of this posting (21 August) our letter has not been acknowledged and the issue is still missing from their archive.

To: info@socialistparty.org.uk
Date: 1 August 2023

Dear comrades,

I write to bring an omission on your website to your attention.

I clicked on a link referencing a politically significant quote from a 2006 interview by BBC Radio 4’s Shaun Ley with Peter Taaffe but the link did not work so readers would be unable to verify if the quote was accurate or not.

I noticed that you had changed the back issues section of your website a couple of years ago and so I assumed the other site must not have updated their link. The link was to the 29 June 2006 issue of The Socialist (#446).

However, that issue of The Socialist is missing from your list of back issues for 2006 (https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/the-socialist-back-issues/the-socialist-back-issues-2006/). Being a curious chap, I looked through all the years in your back issues section and discovered that #446 is the ONLY issue missing from your otherwise comprehensive archive of every issue starting from #140, 17 December 1999, through to #1237, 26 July 2023.

Fortunately things never really disappear from the internet and I was able to find the transcript of that interview with Peter Taaffe at http://web.archive.org/web/20180314180001/https://www.socialistparty.org.uk/html_article/2006-446-index?id=militant.htm from a 14 March 2018 copy web.archive.org had taken.

The web.archive.org site also has the other articles from that missing issue so this unfortunate oversight can be easily remedied by your website team for others who might wish to verify for themselves that the quote is indeed accurate.

Revolutionary greetings,
Alan Davis for the Bolshevik Tendency