Respect was set up in 2004 as a coalition consisting of George Galloway, some mosque leaders, the Socialist Workers Party, and its friends, including some people from the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB).
For ten years George Galloway was the "MP for Baghdad Central", the closest friend in Britain for Iraq under Saddam's totalitarian Ba'th regime. Galloway (on his own account) travelled to Baghdad every month or so to meet top officials, acting as a fixer for the regime in its relations with UK business people and the media. Galloway proposed to the British government that he become a go-between for it, too.
Galloway denies his activity was funded by Saddam, but says it was financed (to the tune of £900,000) by the semi-feudal regimes of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates and by a businessman connected to Saddam. He admits to being on close terms with Saddam's deputy, Tariq Aziz.
MAB is the British offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest, oldest and richest Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Arab world. MAB claims it's a "reformist", modernising type of political Islam. But it's still political Islam, dedicated to subordinating society to supposed sacred texts from over a thousand years ago.
In embracing these forces, the SWP has gone into a negative spiral. While keeping the "anti-capitalist" elements of the Marxist programme, they've tossed out the positive socialist and democratic elements of it. They've lapsed into what Marx in the Communist Manifesto called "reactionary socialism".
In cuddling up to political Islam, the SWP has betrayed young people, women, and secularists in mainly-Muslim communities who fight against religious restrictions.
In Iraq the SWP backs the sectarian "resistance" against women, the working class and the emerging
labour movement. It has cut adrift from independent working class politics.
In its politics (left demands but no allegiance to the working class), in its structure (personality-based) and in the figures it promotes (Galloway), "Respect" represents middle-class politics based on crude stunts. It offers unthinking left activists a political vent through a vote for "left" demagogues, not independent working-class political self-assertion.
