'Respect' and George Galloway

George Galloway’s Rochdale "grand alliance" to oppose Labour in the May local government elections is proving neither grand nor even very allied. But it is a threat.

On Saturday some of us were walking from a Workers’ Liberty meeting in York to the rail station. At one junction we couldn’t remember whether to turn left or right. We looked at Google Maps on our phones. Before we could see the answer there, one of us glanced at the real world. There was the station, visible on our right! With the “don’t vote Labour” agitation on the (sort of) left now, it’s an inverse problem. Look on your smartphone, and it’s huge. Watch the real world, and it’s elusive. None of the groups — Collective, No Ceasefire No Vote (NCNV), Transform, We Deserve Better, Workers...

As chatter about a “new left party” rises, the Morning Star has a proposal for what it should look like. A piece on 2 April by frequent contributor John Green advocates a new formation based upon a revival of Corbynism. But a particular sort of revival. According to Green, Jeremy’s main appeal was that he “eschewed jargon and sloganising.” So any new “left-wing formation or party” must jettison that sort of stuff: “we need to recognise that even terms like ‘socialism’ and certainly clichéd rhetoric like ‘smash the Tories’ or ‘down with capitalism,’ so beloved of the far left, can frighten and...

Over at the Communist Party of Britain and their mouthpiece, the Morning Star , there have been some celebrations. At last, things seem to be going their way both domestically and internationally. Ukraine seems to be in difficulty and Russia has been making some small but significant gains. The CPB and the Morning Star in theory condemn the Russian invasion, but many of the paper’s writers have made little secret of their hope that it will succeed. Leading CPBer and regular contributor Nick Wright, for instance, has always cheered on the invaders and, early on, gloated that anyone joining the...

Some trade unionists in Rochdale are discussing the idea of launching “Trade Unionists Against Galloway” in case George Galloway stands again in Rochdale following his by-election win on 29 February. Galloway attacked schools in his letter to voters. “I don’t like some of the things they are teaching our children”, referring to LGBT +rights. Trade unionists beyond the NEU may be interested too, since the letter was very right wing. It featured: • Belief in “Britain” • Belief in “family” and that “God created everything in pairs” (unattributed quote from the Quran); opposition to trans rights •...

The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) and the Socialist Party have endorsed George Galloway in the Rochdale by-election. Galloway’s former allies and bag-carriers in Respect, the SWP, have refused to do so. Already, in 2022, the TUSC steering committee gave “observer status” to the Workers’ Party of Britain (WPB), formed as an alliance between Galloway and the Stalin-Society-supporting Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). They have since fallen out. Former MP Chris Williamson had already been wooed by the SP when he had his own vehicle, Resist. He is now in the WPB...

Andrew Murray has finally got his way — the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and its mouthpiece the Morning Star have thrown in their lot with George Galloway. When Galloway and his (then) friends the SWP announced the formation of Respect in December 2003, Murray was one of those in the CPB who pushed (unsuccessfully, then) for the Party to sign up with not-so-gorgeous George. Murray was chair of the Stop the War coalition (then controlled by the SWP). He was regarded by his opponents within the CPB as having “gone native” and succumbed to the overtures of leading SWPers (at the time) Lindsey...

As we go to press, George Galloway is the bookmakers’ favourite for the Rochdale by-election (29 February), and has been backed by the Socialist Party. But he is not fit to become an MP yet again. He first became an MP for Labour in 1987. He was at best soft-left, by no means an outstanding rebel, with a strong Stalinist tinge such as had been relatively common among MPs for some time. As he has developed a distinctive individual profile as an “anti-imperialist”, he has become a bad smell the left seems unwilling to get rid of. While on a delegation of European MPs to Iraq in 1994 he spoke the...

Nick Griffin has endorsed George Galloway in the upcoming Rochdale by-election. What unites Griffin, the fascist, and Galloway, the self-proclaimed anti-fascist, is that both see “anti-Zionism” as a starting point from which an entire worldview can be developed. For both, “Zionism” is a world-shaping power. “Free Palestine and Britain from Zionism”, says Griffin’s Twitter profile. The musician and activist Lowkey, who has shared many platforms with Galloway, presents a video hosted by Double Down News purporting to “expose” Israel’s “secret role” in “controlling key functions of our...

Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, has a profound insight — no doubt informed by his mastery of Marxist theory and practice — into what a good result for the working class at the next general election would be: “A Labour victory at the next general election would be a better outcome than a Conservative victory, raising working-class morale and demands” he wrote in the Morning Star of 12 September 2023. That’s clear enough, isn’t it? It’s Griffiths’ next comments that might cause more confusion: “But this cannot mean voting for those Labour candidates who...