Respect heads fast for a split

Submitted by martin on 20 October, 2007 - 8:58 Author: Martin Thomas

A split in Respect now seems almost inevitable, around its planned conference on 17-18 November if not at an emergency meeting of its National Council called for 28 October. The emergency meeting has been called on her personal authority by Respect chair Linda Smith, citing three concerns.

1. "The decision by the National Officers' meeting two days ago, at which one component part of the coalition - the SWP - had an absolute majority" to block the appointment of Nick Wrack (recently expelled from the SWP) as Respect National Organiser;

2. Disputes over the composition of the Conference Arrangements Committee, which has been charged with amending Respect's constitution;

3. Disputes about delegations to the conference, specifically over a student delegation (while records of Respect student membership are apparently unavailable) and over Tower Hamlets, where, in the delegate-selection meeting, so it is reported, "SWP chair Jackie Turner, refused to accept an alternative slate of candidates to the SWP’s preferred list... the meeting was barracked and disrupted by SWP members led by a Central Committee member, Chris Nineham, to prevent a vote being taken... the SWP may then have unconstitutionally reconvened the meeting to vote through their own slate".

Thanks for this information to the Socialist Unity blog. More background here.

The SWP's behaviour indicates strongly that the SWP CC believe that Galloway is set on splitting come what may; the SWP is going to lose the bulk of the (few) Respect independents, and a contingent of SWPers, to Galloway in the split; and they want to wield the bludgeons of SWP discipline and loyalty to the maximum to cauterise it.

That Galloway is indeed set on a split looks probable. He can benefit from a split. If he takes away a small contingent from Respect, and can then pull the CPB (Morning Star) into the organisation, then he comes out with a troop of activists to support him (a small one, but a troop of sorts), he rids himself of the "Trotskyists" for whom he has never concealed his contempt, and he has a chance to gain effective control of such CPB assets as its daily paper, the Morning Star.

The SWP, on the other hand, can only lose in the short term from a split. It looks as if the SWP CC believes that a split is inevitable anyway; and maybe also that it has an uneasy feeling that any more concessions to Galloway, on top of the extravagant barrowloads it has offered over the last five years, would pitch it far too far down the road it has already travelled a long way in those years, of losing any public profile as a visibly socialistic organisation.

Think back to almost five years ago, when the storm broke over the Daily Telegraph giving chapter and verse for long-circulated suspicions about Galloway's relationship to the Saddam Hussein regime. Socialist Worker the next week pointedly did not rally to Galloway. After all, when Galloway had been shown by the BBC in 1994 hailing Saddam, Socialist Worker did not defend him then. It contented itself with pointing out that some Tories, too, had disreputable dealings with the Iraqi regime.

Only the next week - evidently after the SWP CC discussing and taking a cynical decision that they could gain from the pretence - did Socialist Worker start pretending to believe that Galloway was a hero and martyr of anti-imperialism.

Think back a bit further to April 2002, when the SWP first rallied to the Muslim Association of Britain (British offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood). A Socialist Alliance committee meeting was held just before a MAB demonstration, and faced an SWP proposal to back it. On the committee I protested. I knew little about the MAB, but did know that their website linked to Jamaat e-Islami, the big Pakistani clerical-fascist party with historic links to the Brotherhood. SWPer John Rees claimed to know nothing at all about the MAB himself - "oh, it's just some Muslim community organisation" - and rammed through a decision to back the demonstration. But, of course, he must have known, and must already have made the calculation that a pretence that the MAB Islamists were just good anti-imperialists with the occasional private religious twinge would serve SWP-building.

The SWP CC now suffers the consequences. They cannot deal with them politically. They can remonstrate, for example, that the Tower Hamlets Respect council group has come to represent "a narrow and conservative trend" to more secular-minded workers in the area, but they can't fight the issue on the politics.

We certainly do not reproach the SWP CC for fighting Galloway. We reproach it for getting the SWP into this hideous mess, and for being unable to fight the issues politically. It cannot fight the issues politically, because to do so it would have to tell the SWP membership, and the few other socialists shanghaied into Respect, that it has been lying to them and manipulating them for the last five years.

Comments

Submitted by martin on Fri, 19/10/2007 - 08:31

Liam Macuaid has written a participant's account of the Tower Hamlets meeting. "the meeting dissolved into a shouting mob and two thirds of the participants left. This was pretty much every non-SWP member... Having decided to stay in the meeting I voted for the secretary’s slate. On a formal level this was in order but it was politically wrong. But this was in the context of not having a clue of what the people who walked out were proposing, having sat through an incoherent shouting match..." Liam concludes: "At the moment it looks like there is a better than 50% chance of a split". SWP supporters on blogs are wildly denouncing their opponents in Respect - the same people whom they were praising only recently as the great new force of radicalism, in which only "Islamophobes" or "pro-imperialists" could find any blemish - as "the businessmen's wing" or "the homophobes".

The Tower Hamlets meeting is crucial, by the way, because that borough has over a quarter of the total membership of Respect, and thus commands over a quarter of the potential delegates at the Respect conference on 17-18 November.

Submitted by martin on Fri, 19/10/2007 - 18:51

Liam Macuaid reports that a Tower Hamlets Respect committee meeting on 18 October decided to reconvene a full meeting of Tower Hamlets Respect on 25 October and rediscuss delegates to Respect conference. This time the SWP were in the minority and walked out. A split can't be far off. But the SWP CC still haven't done anything to draw clear political lines. Nor can they, without condemning themselves for having lied and manipulated for the last five years.

Martin Thomas

Submitted by martin on Mon, 22/10/2007 - 11:40

Following the reports of rows about election of delegates to the Respect conference on 17-18 November from Student Respect and from Tower Hamlets Respect, the Socialist Unity blog reports another row over delegates from Birmingham Respect. It is beginning to look improbable that the 17-18 November conference will even happen, let alone happen harmoniously.

A position paper by Nick Wrack is also on the Socialist Unity blog. Wrack is a former editor of Militant, now a barrister, who came back into political activity in the 2000-2003 Socialist Alliance, sided with the SWP in the Alliance, and eventually chaired the founding conference of Respect in January 2004 and openly joined the SWP some time in 2004. He has recently been expelled from the SWP for failing to refuse nomination as National Organiser of Respect. the position paper was written before the expulsion.

Wrack reckons: "The reason for our [SWP's] failure to approach Respect in this way is primarily that we do not see Respect as the overarching strategic objective for the party in this period... we treat it as a united front that can be turned on for elections and then forgotten about for the rest of the time... Many comrades do not see Respect work as being an opportunity to raise our wider politics but as an electoralist, reformist operation; foot-soldiers for others. It is not surprising that many comrades have rebelled against Respect work as they see it as a watering down of their revolutionary activity".

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