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Respect as we have known it for the last four years – as an alliance
principally between the SWP and George Galloway – is over.
Following the decision of the SWP central committee last Wednesday that
the Respect conference would go ahead as planned and unchanged –
in other words on a completely undemocratic basis – nineteen members
of the non-SWP part of the National Council and a number of Respect councillors
have issued a call for an alternative conference that same day, November
17,on the theme of Renew Respect.
Work is going ahead to build it on the broadest basis possible.
It is a remarkable situation. The SWP leadership have managed to alienate
themselves from virtually all of the active non-SWP members of the national
council, including Linda Smith National Chair, Salma Yaqoob National Vice-Chair,
Victoria Brittain, George Galloway, Jerry Hicks, Ken Loach, Abjol Miah
the leader of Respect on Tower Hamlets Council, Yvonne Ridley, and Nick
Wrack - the first national chair of Respect and a member of the SWP when
this debate started.
The way the crisis escalated is clear enough. It was the SWP’s disastrous,
and hysterical, reaction to George Galloway’s letter to the national
council at the end of August which determined the course of events.
This raised some home truths about the development of Respect, which some
of us had been raising for a long time, and made some modest proposals
towards greater plurality. The letter was supportable but did not go far
enough.
The letter certainly did not represent a crisis: in fact it was an opportunity.
It could have opened up an over-due and fruitful discussion about the
development of Respect as a more inclusive organisation with a greater
national presence.
Compromise
If the SWP had been prepared to discuss the issues politically, make some
compromises, even symbolic compromises, to show that they were prepared
to take other people’s views into account and that Respect was not
a wholly-owned subsidiary of the SWP, there could have been a positive
outcome.
Instead they went in totally the opposite direction – confirming
that they had no intention of relaxing control, and undermining everything
they have done in recent years to build Respect.
They took the letter as a frontal attack on the SWP, with all that implies,
and launched a nation-wide tour of SWP districts vilifying George Galloway
and scandalously calling him and Salma Yaqoob (amongst many other things)
‘communalists’ and characterising the letter as a part of
a right wing attack on the left in Respect.
If there was one point at which the SWP lost the support of the bulk of
the independents on the National Council (NC) it was this. Salma Yaqoob’s
document “Challenges for Respect” ably refuted the allegations
of communalism.
And the George Galloway they were vilifying was the same George Galloway
that the SWP had repeatedly shielded from criticism from ourselves and
others ever since Respect was founded.
They now denounced him for ‘unaccountability’ – when
at the time of the Big Brother debacle they had fought might and main
inside Respect to avoid a word of criticism of his unilateral decision
to go on the programme being expressed by Respect.
At the NC meeting on September 22 the dispute focussed on the proposal
in the letter for a new post of national organiser alongside the national
secretary. SWP delegates, reflecting their paranoid internal discussions
about George Galloway, came close to driving out of Respect under conditions
which would have collapsed Respect ahead of an expected general election.
The meeting ran out of time and adjourned until September 29, where agreement
was eventually reached that the national organiser post would be of equal
status with the National Secretary. There was also a consensus that Nick
Wrack should take up the post on a temporary basis, if possible.
But when this was activated Nick Wrack was instructed by the SWP Central
Committee to withdraw his name from the frame. When he refused he was
expelled from the SWP. At the same time Kevin Ovenden and Rob Hoveman
were instructed by the SWP Central Committee to resign their full-time
jobs in George Galloway’s office, which they had been encouraged
to take by the SWP. When they refused they were also expelled from the
SWP.
On Monday October 15 an officers’ meeting with an SWP majority voted
against Nick taking up the National Organiser’s post – and
set aside the decisions of the NC on the matter, leaving the issue for
conference.
Confidence
Behind the proposal for a national organiser was an attempt to bring more
diversity to Respect and to start to restore confidence in the way the
national office functioned. In fact, the real issue is whether Respect
develops as a pluralist organisation in which no single component part
dominates or controls.
The following night there was a meeting of the Conference Arrangements
Committee (CAC), at which Linda Smith, the national chair of Respect,
raised the issue of the constitutionality of the CAC itself (which has
never been endorsed by the NC). She also asked for the membership and
financial records of the student members. She was unable to get such records
or resolve the problem of the CAC itself.
The same night there was a major dispute in Tower Hamlets Respect, at
which the business of the meeting could not be concluded. Despite two
further meetings there is still no agreed delegation to conference in
a branch which has nearly 25% of the membership of Respect nationally.
It means that as things stand, the conference is not a viable proposition.
With up to 100 delegates disputed (Tower Hamlets plus large numbers of
student delegates elected without membership or financial records) it
would be unlikely to get past their first item – endorsement of
delegates.
By now the SWP were presenting the battle inside Respect as a battle of
right against left, with themselves being the defenders of the ‘socialist
camp’ inside Respect. What a cheek!
This is the same SWP who have always fought to lower the socialist profile
of Respect. Publication after publication came out in the name of Respect
with the SWP in control without a mention of socialism from cover to cover.
I was one of the first, when the SWP joined the Socialist Alliance in
2000, to say that the turn they had made towards working with others on
the left, after many years of isolationism, was an important step forward
for the whole of the left.
Now after 4 years of the Socialist Alliance and three and a half years
of Respect this turn outwards has effectively come to an end.
It is impossible to see the SWP with its current leadership and method
of operation playing a positive role in the construction of a broad pluralist
party in the foreseeable future.
In any case it is hard to have a broad party with no significant force
other than the SWP in it or likely to join.
Theoretical smokescreen
In fact even as this battle for Respect has continued the SWP leadership
are already theorising their exit. Not for the first time they are constructing
a strategy to justify a tactical turn – or, as in this case, a series
of blunders.
The first bulletin for the SWP conference (in January) has a last minute
piece (written in the middle of this debate) which argues that the period
of the upsurge of struggle in the mid 1990s and through the anti-globalisation
battles in Seattle and into the first years of this century which created
most of the left parties is starting to wither.
Right-wing currents are developing inside these parties – including
the current opposition inside Respect.
It is a short step from this to concluding that the era of such parties
is over and that it is ‘time to build the party’.
It is hard to see how on this basis the SWP can have its heart in anything
it salvages from the mayhem they have created in Respect.
Other CC documents in the bulletin reinforce and entrench the sterile
model the SWP have defended for building Respect. For the first time it
is openly argued that Respect is an electoral (united) front for the SWP,
and that it is perfectly acceptable to deprioritise it between elections
and reprioritise it when an election comes along.
This is precisely the model the SWP insisted on imposing on Respect, and
the model on which it foundered. What this got completely wrong was the
relationship between the SWP and Respect itself.
This saw the SWP as the dominant organisation, with the highest possible
public profile and its own press and priorities, leaving Respect as an
electoral wing, to be brought out when there was an election looming and
put into semi-mothballs afterwards.
More precisely it foundered on the way it conducted democratic centralism
inside the SWP, which in turn shaped the way they functioned in the broad
organisation. This meant that the SWP membership would be regimented inside
Respect meetings and conferences in a way which alienated everyone else.
They would be told what to do, and how to vote, in advance of meetings
and conferences at caucuses prior to the event. In most cases they were
told what to do and how to vote without having been involved in a process
of discussion inside Respect itself.
Many of those who acted contrary to the line laid down in this way have
found themselves quickly expelled from the organisation.
This has been most dramatically the case with Nick Wrack, the former national
chair of Respect, and Rob Hoveman and Kevin Ovenden. Rob Hoveman and Kevin
Ovenden, both SWP members of 20 years standing, were expelled for refusing
to carry out an instruction from the central committee to resign their
paid employment on George Galloway’s staff as an MP – positions
which they had been assigned to by the SWP.
Political life
Inside broad left formations there has to be a real, autonomous political
life in which people who are not members of an organised current can have
confidence that decisions are not being made behind their backs by a disciplined
caucus that will impose its views: they have to be confident that their
political contribution can affect political debates.
This means that no revolutionary current can have the ‘disciplined
Phalanx’ concept of operation. Except in the case of the degeneration
of a broad left current (as in the Workers Party in Brazil) socialists
are not doing ‘entry work’ or fighting a bureaucratic leadership.
This means in most debates, most of the time, members of political currents
should have the right to express their own viewpoint irrespective of the
majority view in their own current.
If this doesn’t happen the real balance of opinion is obscured and
democracy negated. Evidently this shouldn’t be the case on decisive
questions of the interest of the working class and oppressed like sending
troops to Afghanistan. But if there are differences on issues like that,
then membership of a revolutionary current is put in question.
Revolutionary tendencies should avoid like the plague attempts to use
their organisational weight to impose decisions against everyone else.
That’s a disastrous mode of operation in which democracy is a fake.
If a revolutionary tendency can’t win its opinions in open and democratic
debate, then unless the disagreement involves fundamental questions of
the interest of the working class and oppressed, compromises and concessions
have to be made. Democracy is a fake if a revolutionary current says ‘debate
is OK, and we’ll pack meetings to ensure we win it.
This flawed method is the way the SWP has worked in Respect. It is the
polar opposite of the way things must work in a recast and reshaped Respect
which emerges out of this crisis.
In Socialist Resistance we have long advocated an alternative to the SWP
method. We supported the way Scottish Militant Labour worked inside the
Scottish Socialist Party, keeping their own organisation but never intervening
in an organisational way inside the SSP.
For example they never, under normal circumstances, caucus together before
an SSP meeting – in order to ensure that they were a part of the
process of discussion, and not imposing an external discussion.
As the key non-SWP forces within Respect begin to regroup and reorganise,
Socialist Resistance will remain as a distinct current in the renewed
organisation, but one working honestly and loyally to build the broad
organisation and to win support for our political ideas within it, without
attempting to manipulate or circumvent the process of democracy and political
debate.
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