Support the SWP!

As against George Galloway and his close friends, our sympathies in the split now taking place in Respect cannot but be with the SWP.

We protested when the SWP trashed its alliance with other socialists, in 2003, rallying its members behind the demagogue Galloway on the false principle that telling lies to boost Galloway was a small price to pay for scooping a few more anti-war activists and militant Muslim youth into the SWP. We can't be other than glad that the SWP is now breaking that alliance, so discreditable for the whole socialist left.

Short of a miracle, the split in Respect is now pretty much an accomplished fact. It has gone public in the mass-circulation press, in the Observer on 28 October and the Guardian on 29 October, and the Galloway faction has already said that does not recognise the forthcoming Respect conference on 17-18 November as validly constituted. Now it is just a matter of who comes down on which side.

Our objection to Galloway is not that he is "a maverick" (as some on his side of the Respect split admit), nor even his performance on Big Brother. They are his links (for the most part openly admitted) with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq and with governments in Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Pakistan; and his links with the Muslim Brotherhood (around the "Cairo Conferences") and other Islamic clerical-fascist groups.

Galloway is indeed, as he says himself, "not as left-wing as you might think". The best he has ever been is a Stalinistic Labour soft-left. Inside the Labour Party he was never even left-wing enough to join the very tame Campaign Group. Not only is he strongly opposed to abortion rights, he used the major press interview he had in the 2005 general election campaign to emphasise that stance.

He took a stand against the US/UK invasion of Iraq? Well, so did Saddam Hussein's deputy Tariq Aziz. And Galloway admits that he had close friendly relations with Aziz, visiting Baghdad roughly every month in the decade before the invasion for talks with top officials of the regime. What distinguished Galloway from the many other MPs who opposed the invasion is that he did it from a position tainted by his association with the Saddam regime.

To break with Galloway is good. But the SWP Central Committee has done it in such a way as to maximise the number of good-willed but naive socialists - including long-time and prominent SWP members - thrown onto Galloway's side.

To do the job properly the SWP CC would have to tell the truth about Galloway.

They would also have to tell the truth about the Muslim Association of Britain - courted persistently, though mustly unavailingly, by Respect - namely, that it is the British offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest and biggest clerical-fascist movement in the Middle East.

They would have to tell the truth about the fascistic regime in Iran, about the treatment it has given to trade unionists like Mansoor Ossanloo.

But to do that the SWP CC would have to condemn itself. Instead it has conducted the struggle against Galloway entirely by appeals to SWP loyalty; administrative discipline against SWPers who can't see why they should not continue on the pro-Galloway political line of the last five years; and rather bleating appeals for sympathy on the grounds that the SWP (in control of the Respect party machine and probably the absolute majority of the Respect membership) are being "witch-hunted out".

So to SWP members and sympathisers, and socialists in Respect, we say: break with Galloway. But also: do it politically! Then settle accounts properly with the SWP leaders who drew you into this demoralising, destructive mess!