Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The cruel and unusual disintegration of diss-Respect

To bring people up to date on the story so far: after a number of defections and rumours about internal arguments and rifts. The selection of a local “business wing” candidate for Respect in the recent by-election at Shadwell led to open war between the main Respect “Coalition” allies: Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).

Nearly all the paid Respect Party officials are SWP members. This went from bad to worse when the SWP officials tried to force the Muslim Bangladeshi Respect Councillors to go on a Respect float at the 2007 Gay Pride parade!

Surprise, surprise the councillors told Galloway that they have had enough of the SWP telling them what to do and if he did not sort the SWP out they would split from Respect and form a traditional community based party (maybe a local branch of the BNP, I kid you not, the “very centre right” – Bangladeshi National Party). Galloway was welcome to join them, but of course he realised that he needed not only community support to win at the next general election, but also experienced political organisers to run his campaign.

If he was to defect to a purely Islamic community party then he would zero support from white middle class extremist lefties, who “sort of” know how to canvass and run elections. So George sends his private and confidential letter (via the web) to the Respect National Council, SWP send their hurt reply, and they hold a SWP members meeting last week to have a bit of a whine and whinge about the horrid George.

My best guesstimate is that the SWP will leave and other extremist left groups (who hate the SWP “Life of Brian” style) will naively take their place and become Galloway’s latest cannon fodder.

I think for Respect the “End is Neigh”. However, Galloway will continue to use and abuse whoever to further his ego.

Below is another reply to Galloway’s original letter from (SWP)Respect General Secretary (for now - Galloway has told him to resign) John Rees, attacking George, which I think has been sent to London Respect members, but at this moment I cannot verify it – however, it looks legit (but nonsense).


"The Future for Respect

Respect has organised the most successful electoral intervention by the left in British politics in two generations. It has galvanised hundreds of thousands of voters, tens of thousands of activists and drawn thousands towards radical ideas.

But as any organisation grows it confronts new problems and must refresh its structures and modify its strategy in order to deal with them.

We regret that George Galloway’s criticisms of Respect have, inevitably, now been reproduced on many websites, including The Labour Party website, circulated on the Internet and become the subject of articles in The New Statesman, the East London Advertiser, The Independent and the sectarian left press. But if the debate they have initiated leads to a renewal of Respect democratic structures and a renewed strategic orientation they will have served a useful purpose.

Below we set out our views on the future of Respect.

1. Has “nothing changed” since we founded Respect?

George’s desire to attribute all the problems that Respect faces to organisational questions centred on the national office has led to the claim that there have been no changes in the objective situation that present us with any problems.

This is obviously not the case. The defeat of Tony Blair, the arrival of Gordon Brown, the defeat of the British in Iraq and a renewed level of industrial struggle are all quite significant changes in the objective situation that pose fresh difficulties and challenges for Respect.

Equally the development of Respect itself presents us with problems that simply did not arise at the beginning. In some areas we have been so electorally successful that we attract tens, sometimes hundreds, of candidates and supporters who simply never existed in the early days. At the beginning we never thought of worrying about Labour and other defectors joining Respect because they could be successful rather than because they believed in its politics.

Now this problem is present in every area where we are successful and the pressure on us from this direction is intense. In Tower Hamlets it has led to two defections from our original council group of 12 councillors. It makes every selection process a battle ground and it demands the requirement of strong political belief and commitment to Respect’s politics is greater than ever. It also demands greater accountability on all sides.

Look at the record in Tower Hamlets: the Vice Chair of Respect left and stood for the Liberals at the last council election; former Labour councillor Mortuza joined Respect amid much publicity then left again and stood against us for Labour; and now one Respect councillor has joined New Labour and another caused a by-election in Shadwell which Respect only retained by 97 votes after a 6.7 percent swing to Labour. If this goes on the pressure of Labourism and opportunism will break the council group in our greatest stronghold.

In other areas the problems are different. Since the very beginning of Respect we have consciously and deliberately adopted a policy of concentration of resources in order to make electoral breakthroughs in our best areas. We wished to avoid the Socialist Alliance experience of standing more widely but rarely winning.

It has been a successful policy. But every success breeds problems and in some areas Respect is less strong than it could or should be. John Rees raised this issue at the last NC and recommended that we now relax the policy of concentration and overcome the unevenness of Respect by building on a more widespread basis.

We will return to how we can best overcome these problems in the conclusion of this document.

2. Does this mean that Respect is ‘moribund’?

The council election results this year hardly support this view. We won in Birmingham, Preston and Bolsover. But the success was general where we stood. In Sheffield we doubled our base, by winning substantial votes in two wards rather that the one ward of the year before. In Bristol where Jerry Hicks original ward was not up for election we successfully created another base in a central Bristol ward. In Cambridge Tom Woodcock got a terrific vote. In Leeds and Halifax we ran our strongest ever elections campaigns. In Leicester we ran our strongest campaign since the Leicester South by election. Even in the weakest areas~like Whitstable and South Wales~we began to put Respect back on the map.

And no one reading George’s document would think that in the last two years we have sunk significant resources into creating Student Respect. This has been an outstanding success in the colleges, has had significant electoral success in local colleges and at the NUS conference. Student Respect has reshaped the left in the colleges and on significant issues moved NUS to the left. This year, for the first time ever, Respect supporters have won NUS to affiliate to the Stop the War Coalition.

George’s document questions the Organising for Fighting Unions initiative yet it has held the most successful union activists conference since the 1980s, effective local rallies, large fringe meetings at union conferences and a highly successful May Day rally. Without this initiative Respect would have had little purchase on the rising tide of industrial resistance.

3. What is the truth about the organisational and financial failure of Respect?

George is unfortunately poorly informed about Respect’s organisation. There are misunderstandings and factual errors in nearly every paragraph of his document. Here we correct just some of the most important:

· The Respect national office is neither ‘amateurish’ or ‘irresponsible’ with money. We have brought the debt of Respect down from £21,000 in 2006 to just £3,000 in 2007. There are now no unpaid long term invoices.

· Respect did not ‘lose £5,000’ on the Fighting Unions Conference. The cost of the conference was exclusively carried by Organising For Fighting Unions from its own funds raised through conference fees, trade union and other donations. In fact Respect made £168 from the sale of merchandise at the conference.

· It was a Respect national conference decision to prioritise the building of Fighting Unions. The NC resolution on this issue was passed overwhelmingly as was a North Birmingham resolution also calling for the prioritisation of OFFU work.

· The national office staff work systematically on the membership, with the result that the figures for renewed members are significantly higher than at this time last year.

· It is not possible to collect money on Pride because the organisers exclude bodies who collect money on Pride. There was no instruction from the national office to attend Pride, only a letter encouraging people to do so. Most floats at Pride cost between £4000 and £5000 but because the national office obtained a free flat bed truck and other material at below cost price the cost of the Respect float came in just below the budgeted £2000. Every demonstration costs money. This was money well spent when Respect is constantly under attack for not supporting LGBT rights. The Barking Mela is attended by 60,000 but Pride is attended by more than 500,000 people.

· There was not ‘an exceedingly poor involvement of the wider national membership’ in the Shadwell by election. Abjol Miah, the leader of the Respect group of Tower Hamlets councillors, phoned John Rees after the election to congratulate him on the wider mobilisation and to express the view that the victory would not have been possible without it.

· It was a decision of the national officers, in line with conference policy, to prioritise the Fighting Union conference leaflet on the Manchester STWC demo. There were, of course, Respect placards, Respect stalls and other Respect materials.

· The ‘Brown coronation’ demo did have a specially produced Respect recruitment leaflet.

· All appointments of national office staff have been agreed by the national officers. Any objections to the individuals or the process could have been raised at the officers group or at the NC at any time.

· Salma has not been ‘airbrushed’ from the organisation. For instance, she was invited to speak at the STW conference, to chair a major session at the OFFU conference and to speak at the Birmingham OFFU rally. She declined all these invitations. She is a member of the officers group but has not been able to attend a meeting. She is a member of the NC but has not been able to attend a meeting since the last Respect conference. Salma was a welcome speaker at the Women’s Conference in March this year.We are happy to discuss this situation with Salma if she has further suggestions for improving contact between us.

· Nearly all the members named for inclusion in the elections committee are already members of the officers group~the problem is that some of them rarely, if ever, attend.

4. Is there a crisis in the leadership of Respect?

Yes there is~but since the evidence in George’s document is not accurate it cannot be for the reasons he gives. Rather the crisis has developed like this: at the foundation of Respect there was a high degree of consensus over the nature of the organisation. This was a result of many long hours of discussion hammering out the founding statement and the programme of Respect.

But in the course of three years the growth of the organisation, the pressure of success, the changes in the struggle have all meant that new problems have arisen on which divergent views have emerged.

These are of course perfectly ordinary disagreements over strategy and tactics and they occur in any political organisation. But over time and taken together they amount to a different perspective on how we respond to the pressures of Labourism and electoralism. We believe that the constant adaptation to what are referred to as ‘community leaders’ in Tower Hamlets is lowering the level of politics and making us vulnerable to the attacks and pressures brought on us by New Labour. It is alienating us not only from the white working class but also from the more radical sections of the Bengali community, both secular and Muslim, who feel that Respect is becoming the party of a narrow and conservative trend in the area.

These pressures exist everywhere we are successful. But they do not always have the same outcome. In Preston and Newham for instance similar debates have been resolved on terms which have strengthened the original vision of Respect. And although this has sometimes meant that some would-be Respect supporters have turned to Labour it has done us no serious or long term damage. Indeed, by raising the level of politics and the coherence of the Respect cadre it has made us stronger. Remember at the last council elections the Respect vote in Newham was higher than that in Tower Hamlets even though the number of councillors elected was less.

These issues of orientation and candidate selection have now been raised as national issues by George’s document and it is important that we resolve them in ways that stop the drift away from the vision that we initially held of Respect as a radical left project.

5. More democracy and accountability

The most important thing we can do to improve the performance of Respect is to realise that the new prime minister is not only weakened on the issue of Iraq, as was Tony Blair, but even more vulnerable on issues of privatisation, deregulation and trade union rights. Brown is after all the author of New Labour’s neo-liberal economic policy and is now confronted with more industrial unrest that Tony Blair ever had to face.

Respect must therefore continue to locate itself in the labour movement mainstrean and among the core of the organised working class if it is to progress beyond its current areas of success. The launch of Fighting Unions and the intervention in Pride were meant to, and did, advance this perspective. More, not less, of this kind of work is necessary.

If we are to use the discussion provoked by George’s document productively then we must insist that there is a greater degree of accountability and democracy in Respect.

The work of our elected representatives is rarely effectively reviewed by the democratic bodies of Respect, not least because, with a few honourable exceptions, the leading elected figures in Respect rarely attend them or report to them.

Indeed one of the crucial weaknesses of Respect is that the work of the MPs office, those of the various council groups and the national office is not co-ordinated.

Important media and political initiatives, which have a profound effect on Respect, are taken with no consultation or prior discussion.

We need a return to the democratic structures of Respect as the primary site of these discussions. Those elected to the NC and the national officers group must attend and discuss their work with other elected comrades in Respect.

6. George’s organisational proposals

George makes two suggestions: that there should be an elections committee appointed and that a national organiser should be appointed after interview.

These are sudeful ideas but they need to be adopted in a way that is consistent with the democratic structure of Respect:

The committee with the personnel that George suggests (except for Yvonne Ridley) already exists. It is the national officers group elected by and accountable to the NC. All that needs to happen for this to become the committee that George wants is for the people who have never or rarely attend it to turn up. Others can be co-opted, as the Respect constitution allows, according to the committees wishes and by agreement with the NC. If we wish to make a special concentration on the coming elections the officers group can meet as an elections committee on, say, every second week.

To appoint a second committee is unwise since it gives two committees, the officers and the elections committee, a brief covering very many of the same areas with no indication which body, if there is a conflict of interest, takes precedent.

The appointment of another national office worker, whatever their title, would be very welcome. There is of course no problem with an open interview process of the kind that the national office has already used in the past.

But any worker so appointed will have to work under the direction of the elected officers of Respect.

Moreover, before we advertise such a post it would be wise to know where the wages for this employee will come from. Indeed it would be sensible if wages were in the bank before we took someone on.

7. Where do we go from here?

The discussion over the future of Respect can be one which strengthens the organisation. A renewed committment to resolving tactical and strategic issues through the democratic structures of Respect, an increase in the accountablity of all the elected officers and elected representatives of Respect and an insistence on maintaining the radical impulsed on which Respect was founded can give us all greater confidence in facing the challenges ahead.

But most of all we need to get to work on the GLA campaign and the preparations for next year's council elections and what may be an early general election. Respect's radical message wins more votes today than it has ever done. But it needs to be put more credibly before an even wider range of voters.

If we all recommit ourselves to this task the future for Respect can rise above the already great heights that it has scaled in its first years.


John Rees, national secretary
Elaine Graham Leigh, national treasurer

(what a load of rubbish!)

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey John,

Though I am no friend of RESPECT, I feel that the photos you chose to illustrate this piece were more than contradictory. First, you presumably compare Galloway to Stalin, but then you use an icepick to to illustrate his political demise. Very strange and definitely not a correct historical reference. It was Stalin who used the icepick against Trotsky; thus, if, in your scenario, Galloway is Stalin, he should have nothing to fear from an icepick.

Of course you may hhave used the icepick to portray the swipe which Galloway just took at the SWP, in which case it makes perfect - with Galloway being Stalin and, say, John Rees, being "Trotsky" (Trotsky and Rees have little in common, you know).

One last question, now. Why are you so obsessed with RESPECT? Is it because you actually believe that it could replace the Labour as the mass party of the working-class? Because I don't! An I am far - far, far - more Left-wing than you.

John Gray said...

Hi Mikael
Well spotted, originally I was going to use a picture of John Rees (who obviously tries to look like Trotsky) to make it clear but I thought the picture of Stalin reminded me so strongly of Galloway that I had to use it.

I take your point about “being obsessed” with Respect. Hopefully this is not true. However, where I live and work, the main political enemy to Labour is in fact, Respect (lucky me). I think that they are damaging my trade union and worse of all, in my view,is that they have deliberately whipped up racial hatred and divided vulnerable communities for electoral advantage.

This is unforgivable. To be frank the abuse and physical threats that I received while out campaigning for Labour, from “respect” supporters (not all of course) hasn’t helped and I must admit that I am enjoying their present “difficulties”.

No, I don’t think they will replace Labour and how do you define “left-wing”? Theory or practice?

John Gray said...

To the B(ritish)NP member who tried to post a comment at 12.44 today on this subject – I have rejected it. The comments were rather silly and immature, but there is a blogspot link to your blog, which is frankly vile (and unBritish). I will not give a platform for racists.

If you want to know my views on the BNP check out: -
http://grayee.blogspot.com/2007/09/gone-but-not-forgotten-george-woznicki.html
http://grayee.blogspot.com/2007/08/epping-forest-council-by-election-bnp.html
http://grayee.blogspot.com/2007/05/tories-lose-control-of-thurrock-and-bnp.html

Anonymous said...

Hi John,

Fair enough!

Yes, he obviously does!

"...they have deliberately whipped up racial hatred and divided vulnerable communities for electoral advantage..."

Point taken!

Both theory and practice, really. Neither ought to be overlooked - after all, it was Lenin who said " a ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory". Though I am sure you do not think very highly of Lenin (I, on the other hand, grant great validity to all that he had to say), I am sure you agree with that!

John Gray said...

Hi Mikael

Yes, you are right that I haven’t got a very high “opinion” of Lenin… No matter.

I must do a post on what happened when I was invited to meet the late Tony Cliff in 1999. At the meeting I used my only “Lenin quote” to describe he “assistance” that the SWP had given in a recent month long “all out” strike.

Can you guess the quote? To be fair, he appeared to laugh and not to mind.

Anonymous said...

It is not clear whether the John Rees response is legitimate. Only two comments so far on the Socialist Unity website and Urban 75 has not revealed anything. There is nothing doing the rounds on Respect. This comment, "Now this problem is present in every area where we are successful and the," leads me to suspect that it has been sent to the National Council or circulated to the SWP hierarchy and leaked.
Coincidentally I was renewing my membership last Monday and who should be in the office none other than Rees and Leigh. Rees looked like thunder. It apepars that this episode of Respect's life will continue and become clearer at the conference.

Anonymous said...

Hmmm... Should be able to... bummer - I could think of thousand "Lenin quotes"... none of them seem to fit... No, tell me!
:-)

I never liked Cliff (I didn't consider his passing as a "great loss for Marxism") - but, to be fair, I don't think he would have liked me either. I know for a fact that Callinicos and Rees hate me! I've only met them once (separately) and love wasn't in the air! That ought to earn me a few "Brownie-points" in your book!

Yes, you should post something about that!

John Gray said...

Thank you anon – I must admit that I am surprised that it has not been posted elsewhere. I really do not know the source. People send me all sort of stuff anon. But it does appear to be genuine. Since it clearly calls Galloway a liar (no surprise there), it may be an early draft of the “official” SWP response.

BTW – why on earth did you renew your membership!

John Gray said...

report now on socialist unity blog so must be true! (well...)

http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=746

Anonymous said...

Hi John, well yes of course we BNP supporters are immature and un- British (whatever that means to a Labour man these days!?!). However given the level of media exposure that no go parties such as Mings Lib Dems receive, it would be interesting to see the level of success the BNP would have if they had the same "allowed" status?. Quite frankly virtually everyone is seething about the mess the country has become, so if a true democratic process was put in place, I'm sure we all know that someone who represents the rapidly diminishing indigenous population would attain power, and not neccesarily BNP. Its a funny old world really, I too was once an ardent socialist, but I guess I grew up and realised that given mankinds faults, imagining that everyone who comes to Britain to live in a multicultural utopia doesnt always believe in equality, so now I have realised that everyone is welcome here, as long as they play the game and remember that my own people come first. Sensible?, well probably not to a dyed in the wool left winger, but I'm afraid I have to put my own childrens futures before anyone elses who may wish to come here and change things to their ways.

John Gray said...

Mikael
You were right! (Never thought that I would write that!) – after watching Newsnight take last night on Galloway’s war with Rees I got rid of the picture of Stalin and replaced it.

John Gray said...

Anon

“well yes of course we BNP supporters are immature and un- British”

I assume you are the same person who I deleted the comment due to the link to your website?

As a “Labour” man I am immensely proud to be British as are the overwhelming majority of members of the Labour movement (the Party and the Trade Unions) regardless of our ethic origin. There are things wrong in this country and I want radical change to further progress social justice. But traditional British values such as fair play, tolerance, freedom of religion, free speech, Parliament democracy and the rule of law are utterly opposed to alien and essentially “un-British” concepts such as fascism.

What on earth are you going on about “our people”, don’t you read history? There is no such thing as a “British race”; we are all Heinz 57 and the better for it.

There is almost a “tradition” of left wing extremists “crossing over” to fascist parties – I think Mussolini started off as an extremist socialist and certainly Mosley for a while. Some of the German Red Army terrorists also have turned to their real roots. So you are in good company.

I use to work with a bloke who was very right wing and although not BNP would come out with the sort of nonsense you are putting about. He had had an elder brother and sister who he was very close to, then one of them turned out to be gay and the other married a black women and had kids. It hit him very hard at the time. To be fair, he realised his stupidity and changed. So, who knows, it is a funny old world, there is still some hope for you?