Bad result for Respect in Mile End

Mile End East Novemeber 20th by-election result:
Labour 1208
Conservatives 630
Respect 604
Liberal Democrats 110

Go to Socialist Unity or Liam McQuaid for discussion, much of it on tried and true (or tired and terrible) sectarian discussion.

Worldwide Socialist Website on SWP and Respect

Britain: the SWP and Galloway’s Respect Renewal on the economic crisis
By Chris Marsden 29 October 2008
Last Saturday the Socialist Workers Party and George Galloway's Respect Renewal held separate meetings where they discussed the economic crisis gripping world capitalism. Galloway's event was his organization's annual conference, but took less than a full day. The SWP's event was a debate entitled "Marxism and the Economic Crisis."

It is just over a year since the SWP and Galloway, then united in Respect, split acrimoniously. Galloway did so amidst accusations that the SWP was ultra-left and that its undemocratic efforts to dominate Respect were an obstacle to building a broad alliance of generally left and democratic forces. The SWP somewhat belatedly discovered that Galloway was orienting towards Muslim businessmen and that he is moving to the right.

The two conferences served to demonstrate how both organizations are continuing their rightward lurch. Their response to what Bank of England Deputy Governor Charlie Bean admitted two days earlier was "a once in a lifetime crisis, and possibly the largest financial crisis of its kind in human history" was identical in all major respects. They sought to downplay the scale of the financial disaster, to reject any possibility of mobilizing the working class to fight for a socialist alternative to capitalism, and to advance instead Keynesian-style government intervention to stabilize the world capitalist economy while securing a number of minimal social reforms.

Even before Respect Renewal met, Galloway had made clear his opposition to any socialist response to the crisis of the profit system. On October 17 he appeared on "The One Show," hosted by Andrew Neil, who asked him, "Will capitalism die?" Galloway replied in the negative. "There is a fire raging in the forest," he said, but we had to hope "that the forest doesn't perish before the flames go out." Capitalism is "not dead because there is not an alternative system ready and waiting to take over. Socialism is not dead either, but it pretty nearly died and it will be a long time before it is in a position to compete as an alternative."

Efforts to "save the forest" supports by Galloway include the Labour government's £500 billion subvention to the banks, which will be paid for by working people. His statement on Prime Minister Gordon Brown's bailout declared that "at last the government is taking action which may begin to shore up the banking system."

"It was essential the government propped up the banks' capital base," he added, warning only that "many in the City" believe that more is needed. There would be further demands on taxpayers "unless more is done to pump prime our collapsing economy now."

Respect Renewal's conference policy documents said very little on the economic crisis other than to call for a defence of "working people, the poor and vulnerable in the current economic climate" by freezing council rents and service charges for a year and implementing wage increases in line with inflation.

The primary role of left apologist for Galloway since his split with the SWP has been played by Alan Thornett's International Socialism Group, the British section of the Pabloite United Secretariat. Thornett's own resolution to the conference was basically identical to Galloway's position, insisting that "Democratic control over the economy through Parliament is essential if a further plunge into crisis is to be avoided" and pledging to "campaign for the public ownership of the financial institutions."

At the conference Thornett's group took second place to Galloway's preferred political partner, the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain. Galloway writes a semi-regular column for the CPB's Morning Star and is anxious to use the party's continued influence within the upper echelons of the trade union bureaucracy as a source of financial and organizational clout in order to advance his own political career. To this end, pride of place alongside Galloway on the platform was given to CPB General Secretary Rob Griffiths.

Galloway has long combined an admiration of Stalin's Soviet Union and Castro's Cuba with Catholicism and an opportunist glorification of various despotic regimes, including Saddam Hussein's Iraq. His claim that socialism "nearly died" refers to the collapse of Stalinism.
Galloway's performance at the Respect Renewal conference made clear that his alliance with the Stalinists is rooted in his deep and abiding hostility to Marxism, Trotskyism and opposition to social revolution.

Galloway addressed the 200 or so delegates in overtly anticommunist terms. We need to stop talking about "dead Russians," he declared (to which someone in the audience added, "And dead Germans"). The break from the SWP was necessary because it was a "Marxist-Leninist far-left party," out of touch with the masses. What was required instead was a new "realistic" left movement with ideas that people understand—to be formed by making "unity" the watchword.
All the problems of the "left" were rooted in the actions of "splitters" and "Marxist sects" who spoke of a "catastrophe" facing world capitalism.

Galloway's statements were so right-wing that even Griffiths was somewhat embarrassed. He agreed with Galloway that Marxism had been supposedly "discredited" by talk of the "crisis of capitalism." But he cautioned a real crisis was now unfolding.

SWP rejects possibility of socialism
Having worked in Respect with Galloway for three-and-a-half years, only for this unprincipled electoral alliance to end in a debacle, the Socialist Workers Party has recently been trying to rescue its credibility by projecting itself as an orthodox Marxist Party. However, the SWP continues to advocate a left regroupment based on a rejection of any possibility of building a revolutionary socialist party.

Saturday's conference was held under the auspices of the SWP's theoretical journal, International Socialism. Its latest issue contained the International Socialist Tendency's October 1 statement on the global economic crisis. Littered with references to "a major economic crisis" that "originated in the very heart of the capitalist system, in the United States," the statement advocates "the nationalisation without compensation of the banks" and little else.
As to the prospects for class struggle and socialism, its verdict is extremely negative. "The relationship between economic crisis and the class struggle is complex and mediated by the political context in which they interact," the IST/SWP states, meaning that "the precise combination of job losses and higher prices in a given country is likely to have a major impact on whether workers are likely to respond with aggressive resistance or demoralised acquiescence" (emphasis added).

The task is not to build a revolutionary leadership, but to develop "a broader radical left that can begin to present a credible and principled alternative to capitalism."

Building this "broader radical left" last Saturday took the form of a debate between leading SWP members, including Chris Harman and Alex Callinicos; the academic Robin Blackburn, a former member of the United Secretariat and contributor to the New Left Review; Peter Gowan, the editor of the New Left Review; and the Keynesian economist Alan Freeman.

Harman kicked off proceedings by stating that though there was talk we were facing another crash like 1929, "To be honest, nobody knows."
His statements are far more sanguine than those of leading financiers, who have acknowledged that the crash is at least as bad as 1929 or, in the case of Bank of England governor Mervyn King, is the "worst since the First World War." Even now share prices in Europe have dropped by more than a quarter and, excluding a bounce, Wall Street will have fallen further in October than at any time since Black Monday 1932.
Despite this, Harman declared, "I don't expect a crisis as bad as the 1930s, as the state will intervene.... I think it will be more on the basis of the Japan crisis"—a reference to the bursting of the speculative property bubble in the early 1990s. James McCurry wrote of such comparisons in the October 28 edition of the Guardian that "the notion that financial crises are a throwback to an era that ended with the death throes of the ‘lost decade' is being exposed as so much folly.... In truth, though, the immediate future promises to be one of unremitting pain for the world's second biggest economy."

When contrasted with Harman, the Keynesian economist Alan Freeman sounded left. While insisting that "you'd have to be really dumb and seeking early retirement not to be a Keynesian now," and that Keynes was better than Marx for understanding the "sort term" development of capitalism, he did warn that the efforts of the capitalists to "reorganise the world politically" may involve "violence and war.... The real cause of the crisis is the decline of the US as the world hegemon.... It is now using its military clout to prevent the day of reckoning and will have to take on its own working class."

Freeman then declared that we were only seeing the beginning of the end for US hegemony and that this could take a hundred years, as it had for the British Empire. To prevent war and fascism meant exerting maximum pressure for the capitalists to employ the "visible hand of the state" to regulate "the invisible hand of the market."

"Neither 1929 nor 1873 (the last crises on this scale) led to any socialist revolution," he said. "Does Keynesianism provide a way out of the crisis of capitalism?" It must do because, "We are not yet on the edge of a socialist revolution."

Harman did not disagree with this appraisal other than to insist, "I don't think the US will crash. Several states will crash but not the US."

For his part, Blackburn had little of substance to add, other than to warn, "We shouldn't make the mistake of saying that all finance capital is bad."
Finance capitalism should merely be brought under control, he said, while the left should call for a set of reforms to be implemented by the capitalists.

These demands were not socialist, he acknowledged, but of a "state capitalist nature." That is all that is possible, Blackburn insisted. The situation is not like 1917 "when no one knew what to do and Lenin put his hand up at the back of the room and said I will take responsibility for this mess," he said to laughter from the hundred or so present.

Posing the question, "But aren't we trying to get rid of capitalism?" he replied, "What we are getting towards are publicly responsible democratic forms of financial governance."

In the closing debate, Alex Callinicos focused on what he claimed were the political consequences of the crash. In a rambling survey, he largely confined himself to insisting that the United States, though weakened, would remain the world's hegemonic power, as neither Europe nor China was in a position to challenge it.

The financial crisis would get worse, he added.
The problem was that political radicalisation in the anti-war movement has developed "well in advance of working class economic resistance.... We need to close the gap between political and economic resistance."

Peter Gowan did little other than to explicitly back Keynesian-style regulation of the capitalist market. "I remember the old International Socialism Journal and us Trotskyists [the IMG] used to oppose the idea of structural reforms. Now the left needs to advance them," he declared.
In the brief debate that followed, a member of the Socialist Equality Party asked, "Speakers have spoken of the depth of the crisis. I have heard solutions like structural reforms and transitional demands. What do the speakers think is the prospect for revolution and do they think the working class will lead it?"

The question was greeted with laughter and ignored by the platform, other than Callinicos stating, "Of course I am for a socialist planned economy. It is important to start talking about that stuff again."

Respect #5 July 2008

The latest copy of the Respect newspaper (July 2008) has a front page devoted to Education & helath, 'SALE, Everything must go'. George Galloway has a page. Salma Yaqoob has a column. Alan Gerard calls for the nationalisation of the banks. Yvonne ridley has been to Guantanamo. Patrick Reynolds writes about the Irish NO to the Lisbon Treaty (headlined 'Stuff the Irish?) focuses on the manoeuvres of the EU elite. On the quyestion of whether it was a vote from the left or the right the answer is 'a motley coalition'. There's more, but I'm a bit bored by it all.

Respect: What do we do next?

Receiving a surprising lack of attention (even among the regular carriers of news from Respect like Socialist Unity and Liam Mac Uaid's blog) is thism discussion document from Nick Wrack, which seems focussed on ways to make Respect more like a party.

Respect: What do we do next?
Now that the elections are out of the way we need to consider how we can strengthen the organisation.

Below are some brief outlines of proposals we put forward for discussion.

Respect is still in its infancy. We are still not even five years from our birth. Yet we have achieved successes beyond those of any other organisation to the left of Labour, with the election of George Galloway and our 13 councillors. Respect remains the only organisation on the left with the remotest chance at this stage of winning seats in the Westminster parliament and making serious advances in local elections. We congratulate Nahim Ullah Khan on his victory in Sparkbrook and welcome him as our newest councillor.

A key task for the next period is to ensure the re-election of George Galloway, albeit in the different seat of Poplar and Limehouse, and to send him reinforcements in the House of Commons. We have already selected Salma Yaqoob to stand in Birmingham Sparkbrook (where she polled 10,498 votes (27.5%) in 2005, coming second to Labour on 13,787) and Abjol Miah to stand in Bethnal Green and Bow. We need to win new councillors and have real possibilities of success in Tower Hamlets, Birmingham and Newham in 2010.

The recent election results show that we have the capacity to win extra parliamentary and council representation. But victories in elections are not automatic or easy, especially for a small, newish party like Respect. We also need to build where there is not, as yet, the prospect of early electoral success. In most areas of the country we are starting from nothing and it will take time and energy to win the support of large numbers of working-class people.

Our growth will not be even, or in a straight line. There may also be electoral set-backs. This only demonstrates the importance of having a long-term perspective for developing Respect as a party that has a completely different vision for society from that of the other parties – a society run by and in the interests of working-class people.

We must have two things in mind. First is our vision, second is a ‘plan’ for turning our vision into reality.

As yet we do not have a ‘national’ organisation in terms of branches across the country. But we do have a national profile through our MP George Galloway and his association to the name Respect. We need to map a way forward that takes us over time towards a party with a reputation and presence across the country.

We need to build our own party, Respect. At the same time we must present ourselves as willing to work with all others who want to build a left-wing alternative to New Labour. In this way, over time, we will win a reputation for being serious about building an open and pluralistic broad left party for working-class people.

So, our task is twofold. One is to strengthen Respect. Two is to build links with others. Maintaining a balance between the two will need constant review and reappraisal of how we are performing.

Everything that follows is premised on a need to tackle the key political issues facing working-class communities, from the economic to the social.

1. Building the branches
We should organise regular monthly local branch meetings on the same day of the month (e.g. third Thursday) to give a routine around which activity can be organised. The monthly members meeting should be advertised on the national and local websites and in the paper. We should have regular newsletters to communicate to all members and supporters. Public meetings and social activities should be organised to draw people in and to raise funds. Each branch should map out a strategy for building: where does it want to be in 6 months/12 months time; what geographical areas are going to be targeted, which communities? Progress towards the targets should be reviewed and the strategy revised as necessary.

2. Communication between National Office and members
We propose that the paper is sent to every member every month. In addition, there will be a national members’ bulletin. This will be sent in PDF format to everyone with e-mail and in hard copy form to everyone without.

3. Membership
We need to have a drive to recruit, both in areas where we are already established but also in other areas, trying to get members in areas where we currently have none. Membership will be one of the most important ways of gauging our successes as well as weaknesses.There should be a membership pack, sent to every new member. This will have a welcome letter, membership card, pamphlet on Respect with our policies, any current material and details of local and national events. Every new member should receive a telephone call from the office or local Respect contact within one week of joining and be allocated to a branch. We currently have branches in Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, Stockport, Bradford, Dorset, Milton Keynes, Tower Hamlets, Newham, Southwark, Haringey, Islington, Oxford and Cambridge. There are other areas where we have members but no branch. Our aim should be to consolidate the existing branches, to organise new branches around existing members where we have no branch and to create completely new branches in areas where we currently have no members. In London we aim to use the information about our votes in different wards to organise public meetings with GG, concentrating initially on where we did best. We need to do the same in each inner London borough, pulling new people around us and then giving support to those who attend to set up a branch.Our aim should be to establish new branches in Waltham Forest, Redbridge, Lewisham & Greenwich (where we already have a good nucleus), Wandsworth, Lambeth, Hackney, Camden, Hammersmith & Fulham, Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea. This has to be done patiently and systematically without running the risk of overstretching the organisation. Progress must be reviewed regularly.

NC members and branch membership secretaries should receive a regular update on membership figures – both nationally and locally. Branches should set reasonable targets for recruitment. We should have one national membership system – though local branches may wish to have a parallel membership number for their own records. Students should be recruited to the national organisation – regardless of whether they need a local college membership of a society. We should investigate a method a renewing annual memberships via Direct Debit.

4. Public profile
We can do a lot to develop our profile by participating in broad campaigns and initiating them ourselves. Initiatives such as the ‘Charter for East London’ and a campaign around the Olympics are important in this respect. Getting our point of view across in the media by developing spokespersons on issues will be one way to achieve this.

The website: This needs to be become the main public face of the party. This means making it much more attractive, lively and interesting. We need a website editor with a team to help her/him. This is a political issue rather than a technical one. At present we have limited human resources but we must attend to this urgently. Today, without a well-designed, lively website we will not reach our potential audience, especially among young people. We must pay attention to having material translated to cater for immigrant communities.

We also need to develop the use of video to present our ideas, with short clips of Respect’s leaders and members presenting our ideas in a simple and accessible manner.

The Paper: We need to maintain and develop the paper. To achieve a national paper was a success of the split. It demonstrates our serious approach to developing a national profile. However, it needs time to evolve and to become the property of the members so that it becomes a really useful tool in building Respect. It needs to become more accessible and relevant both in its content and language. Regularity of production, which is now agreed, should help branches use the paper more effectively. The paper can be one of our tools in recruiting and building our membership, reputation and influence by spreading our ideas to a wider audience. We must also make the content available online between issues.

Pamphlets: We should produce a series of cheap, short, simple pamphlets on key aspects of our policies, e.g. Housing, Health, Education, Transport, etc. We could produce 10 -12 pamphlets over a short period of time to cover most of what we stand for.

Press and media: we do remarkably well given our lack of personnel dedicated solely to this aspect of work but we should find ways of gaining more access to the TV, radio and newspapers. Local papers are an important medium for us to use more.We need to project ourselves across the county in a way that matches our larger name recognition, intervening in events in an upbeat way. Once we have a new logo we should have that prominently displayed wherever we do our work – banners, flags, etc. On demonstrations and protests we need to be more visible, including using placards. Our publicity on public events should be innovative and accessible. We need to plan our interventions in national events as soon as we know they are happening so we don’t miss out. Our stand alone publicity should complement the paper but also seek out the non-paper-buying audience.

5. Translations
We should give more thought to creating a bank of translated material – in pdf form – on the website. We are proud to be a party that supports, and is supported by, migrants – translations show we are serious about engaging the whole community in our politics. We should aim to have leaflets setting our basic ideas and policies in as many languages as possible. These should be on the website and advertised in our publications.

6. Elections 2009:
There are European elections across the country in June next year. Consideration is already being given to standing in London. This needs to be decided quickly. It would give a focus to our work in London, allowing us to consolidate our position in East London while building outwards across the rest of London.

2010: General Election and local elections
2012: GLA elections
Elections give us the opportunity to present ourselves to vast numbers of people. But we have to utilise the time in between to carry out regular activity to demonstrate who we are and what we are about. We cannot just turn up at an election and expect to get a good vote.We reiterate our commitment to stand in Birmingham and Tower Hamlets x 2 in the General Election. We now need to consider Newham and other areas.

7. Finance
All of the above costs money, and lots of it. We currently have an office and one part-time member of staff and some volunteers. We must build fund-raising into our activities. Fund-raising gigs/events such as the Manchester united nations meal, the London Burns night, the Mark Steel gigs on the French Revolution in Bristol and Southwark are examples of how political events can be fun and raise money and attract new people. Party, party, party! We need to build up the regular income on standing orders.

8. National Conference
We now need to plan for a conference in the autumn to launch our party. The name should be discussed. We suggest ‘the Respect Party’. We should aim to use the conference to involve as many of our existing members as possible and to bring new people to it.It would also be an opportunity to reach out to many others on the left by inviting them to attend as observers, if they do not want to join us at this stage. This Conference would agree a Political Programme and Constitution and elect a leadership for the next year. The conference and the launch of ‘the Respect party’ would give us the opportunity to revamp the website, redesign the logo and our ‘corporate’ image and generally re-launch ourselves.

9. Reaching out
Whilst we must emphasise building our own forces we must not lose sight of the need to make links with others on the left. Having a sign board which states our openness to work with others for common goals is vital for the longer term building of a bigger left-wing party, involving others who may be reluctant to join Respect but who in the future would be prepared to build something new together with us.We should, therefore, maintain links already established and seek to establish new ones with those opposed to New Labour. We need to have an orientation towards the trade unions, establishing links wherever possible.

10. Young people
This must be a central aspect to all our work. Without new young members Respect will not grow. We must develop young leaders of Respect, giving assistance when needed. We have already a layer of young activists who should be nurtured and promoted within Respect. Work amongst young people in the communities, in schools, FE colleges and universities will bring in a new layer of energetic and imaginative members, impatient for things to happen. We must develop strategies to attract students and young workers.

11. Leadership
The leadership of Respect should reflect its members and supporters. We have tremendous capital in the young Asian women and men who are leading our work in Birmingham, Tower Hamlets and Newham. There has to be a conscious emphasis on promoting new leaders from within Respect’s ranks.

12. Local Government
We should work to create and publish a detailed alternative plan for Tower Hamlets, explaining how we would run the council. We should aim to do this in consultation with trade unions and community groups. This plan should differentiate between what we can achieve with existing powers and levels of funding, and those that require extra powers and funding that we would campaign to force the government to provide.The leadership, knowledge and expertise of the activists and councillors in Tower Hamlets will be crucial in the success of such a plan, but they should not be saddled with the whole responsibility, and should be given practical support and advice from the party at a national level.

13. Respect in the political landscape
Spreading out from our existing strongholds in terms of electoral success could be a very long process. However, we should seek to gain leverage from our advantage of having an MP and several prominent councillors to place ourselves more quickly within the mainstream political landscape in terms of policy development and debate. We should explore opportunities to develop joint position papers with left Labour MPs, for example in Compass or the LRC, or with Plaid Cymru or the Green party, or with single-issue think-tanks and charities, on social issues where we have very similar policies. To facilitate this, Respect should encourage members to participate in party policy sub-committees on issues such as crime, women’s rights, climate change, etc.We have achieved a lot in just four years. Our achievements are even more impressive when we consider the recent split. In that respect, our recent election results are very encouraging. But we are only at the beginning. Over the next 12 months we must put our organisation on a firmer footing: better organised, more widely located and more deeply rooted.

Agreed by Respect National Council 17 May 2008
Paper presented by Linda Smith and Nick Wrack incorporating amendments from Clive Searle and Andy Newman

Socialism Today 114 Dec 2007-Jan 2008

I don't look at the Socialist Party's magazine Socialism Today very often, but the latest issue has at least two big articles that are worthy of attention.

First is 'The crisis in Respect', in which Hannah Sell has the task of delivering an obituary for Respect, criticising both sides, explaining how it was flawed right from the start and that the SP has been right all the time, as opposed to the opportunists of the SWP. And although the failure of Respect might be temporarily confusing this crisis and split isn't actually a 'substantial obstacle on the road to mass independent political representation for workers in England and Wales'.

The other big piece is Peter Taafe on 'Problem of building new workers' parties', which is mostly interesting for its positive emphasis on the experience of Brazil and developments in P-Sol. Of course from the perspective of the SP what broad workers parties really need are viable 'Marxist-Trotskyist' spines, in this case identified as the Socialismo Revolucionario (SR) current, which I'm guessing is affiliated to the CWI. This is seen as much stronger and better than left currents in the Italian PRC or German Left Party. Of course the thread of correctness runs back from the CWI to Trotsky to Marx and Engels.

There's more, including a contribution to a debate on China, a Vincent Kolo on China's capitalist counter-revolution and a review of Robert Fisk's Great War for Civilisation in Indicting imperialism.