It seems increasingly unlikely that the Respect conference on 17-18 November will happen at all. The Galloway faction has declared that "We no longer have confidence that the conference called for 17/18 November will be validly constituted".
Other recent news: Respect split now underway | The passwords have been changed | SWP blasts Galloway; conflict in CPB? | Galloway faction attacks SWP as lurching towards "sectarians" and "Islamophobes" | more.
Meanwhile, the SWP has called a "national meeting" - an emergency conference, with two delegates from each SWP branch - on Saturday 3 November (11.30am - 4pm Room 101 ULU, Malet Street, London). The SWP Central Committee's explanation for this (available on Liam Macuaid's blog) is that "Galloway is on the rampage" against the SWP in Respect.
The SWP CC is bothered about pro-Galloway dissent inside the SWP. Jerry Hicks, victimised former AEU/Amicus convenor at Rolls Royce in Bristol and one of the SWP's best known industrial trade unionists, has resigned from the SWP to side with the Galloway faction. The SWP CC condemns a petition which it says is circulating inside the SWP opposing the expulsions from the SWP of former leading members Kevin Ovenden, Rob Hoveman, and Nick Wrack for their pro-Galloway stance.
Jerry Hicks's resignation letter is published on the Socialist Unity blog.
He states: Galloway was and is a maverick, warts and all. We all knew this. I am not making excuses just stating the blindingly obvious.
The Big Brother experience was considered by many a mistake but his performance before the US Senate was unrivalled and made the name of Respect known across the globe.
To describe Galloway as right wing is farcical. To vilify him and demonise him as the enemy beggars belief.
The 27 members of the Respect National Council who are also critical of the SWP do not represent a “Galloway faction” as is being presented, nor are any of them right wing or witch hunters as we are being asked to believe. They include people like Ken Loach, Linda Smith, Victoria Brittain, Salma Yaqoob and Yvonne Ridley. They are all socialists, they are all remarkable people in their own right and they are all senior members of Respect.
Given that assessment, it is no wonder that he finds the SWP's tactics intolerable.
His local Respect AGM in Bristol, he writes, "was almost ruined by our full time SWP organiser who wanted to call all the SWP members out of the room 5 minutes before the AGM was due to start, leaving non SWP Respect members (a third of the meeting) sat there not knowing what the hell was going on".
He asks: "How can it be that the national Respect membership numbers only 2500 when the SWP membership is nearly 6000?" Obvious answer: the real SWP membership is nowhere near 6000, but between 1000 and 1500, and, true, many of those have little stomach for Respect..
But he doesn't ask himself how Respect can claim to be a "broad movement" when after four years even its paper membership is little more than the SWP's, and when even in Bristol - by repute, the city where the SWP has had most success in getting non-SWP leftists into Respect - non-SWPers are only one-third of the crowd.
And he shows no real awareness of the real objections to Galloway. Those are not that he is a maverick, nor even his performance on Big Brother. They are his links (most, though not all, 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.
And Yvonne Ridley? A good socialist? When she works for an Iranian government TV company?
Not a "Galloway faction"? How can a section of the organisation formerly known to voters as "Respect (George Galloway)", one which has devoted almost all its effort to boosting and apologising for Galloway, be anything other than that? When the section is defined by getting rid of the only cohesive force which had the potential (unused until its recent ham-fisted moves) to be a strong counterweight to Galloway, namely the SWP?
What is there is Galloway's whole record in public life to suggest that he will allow "Respect (George Galloway)" to be anything more than a cult following for himself?
Hicks does not ask these questions, of course, because over the last five years the SWP Central Committee has drummed it into him that to ask such questions is "sectarian" and "Islamophobic".
I am sure the the SWP CC was fully aware of all those questions, and actually thought no better of Galloway than we in Workers' Liberty did. Only they decided that lying to the SWP membership and to the public at large, by pretending Galloway was a good socialist, would help them scoop up recruits from anti-war activists and Muslim youth. It did not.
Now they are reduced to rallying SWPers against Galloway with no other weapons that administrative discipline and appeals to loyalty, and seeing fine activists like Jerry Hicks fall out of the socialist movement into the entourage of a demagogue.
