Weekly Worker 573 Thursday April 21 2005

Respect eclectic mix

The fact that George Galloway is the star around which the SWP-Respect party orbits was obvious at its April 17 general election manifesto launch in central London. In case anyone was in any doubt about that brutal fact of political life, when he left early to attend a meeting with the organisation’s lawyers, the whole thing went flat.

Before departing, he told us that the SWP-Respect party plans to turn the heat up on an already bubbling contest with New Labour’s Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow with a legal challenge to what looks like very suspect arrangements for postal voting. New Labour practice in this field had “initially been on the outskirts of legality”, he said. A “legal advisor” has now apparently confirmed that Labour in the constituency had acted in a “blatantly illegal” manner, providing “limitless” room for fraud. This had stiffened the SWP-Respect’s resolve to take the matter to court seeking a suspension of the standing procedure for postal votes in the constituency - the case will probably be heard on Thursday or Friday of this week.

Respect's manifesto

Important as this issue is, it dominated the first part of what was, after all, meant to be a manifesto launch. Galloway had intended to leave immediately after briefing the assembled journalists about the legal challenge. However, he stayed on for a short time to field (competently) some mildly hostile, mildly juvenile questioning about the political nature of Respect and its real potential to rein in “global capitalism” from an east London power base. He took the opportunity to denounce the “obscene” profits of Tesco, the New Labour attack on civil liberties and its privatisation agenda that was wreaking so much havoc in public services.

Then, after a quote from John Lennon (you know the one), he was gone. “He’s very charismatic, isn’t he?” breathed the lady from The Times sitting next to me. “I’d never actually seen him before.” What did she normally cover, I wondered. Gymkhanas? But she was right: the room just wasn’t the same without the bloke.

The assembled journalists clearly thought so - but then they would, wouldn’t they? Bourgeois politics has been so thoroughly gutted of any strategic debate that the main parties are reduced to marketing themselves like soap powder and fighting over non-differences. In this arid climate and with widespread political disengagement the personalities of the party leader becomes all.

Thus, checking the seating order and official status of the top table with Lindsey German before the press conference, one cameraman asked: “And George - he’s the leader, isn’t he?” This flummoxed comrade German for a moment, but a brief consultation with another SWP-Respect comrade seemed to clarify things for her - George has no official post in party.

Similar assumptions were made by other hacks when it came to formal questions: “Isn’t it true that you wouldn’t exist if George Galloway hadn’t been expelled from Labour Party?” asked one woman after he had gone. John Rees, in the chair, dealt with that particularly effectively, firmly pointing out that yes, if New Labour had not prosecuted the war in Iraq and produced a gargantuan anti-war movement, or if it had not moved to the right so dramatically over recent years, or had not clamped down on internal democracy and expelled dissenters, then this new political formation would indeed not have come into existence. But in a significant phrase comrade Rees concluded: “And if we still had a Labour Party, it wouldn’t be necessary to build a new one.”

This underlines the mess of political contradictions that lies at the heart of the SWP-Respect party. The manifesto launched at this event does indeed have much of the feel of left Labourite versions of yesteryear with its talk of presenting “a genuinely left, anti-war alternative” and creating “a clear, radical, working class voice” to speak out on issues such as privatisation, pensions and the ravages of “unfettered global capitalism” (Respect manifesto Peace, justice, equality, pp3-4, it can be downloaded in pdf format from the Respect website: www.respect-coalition.com).

However, in what possible sense could the election of candidates defined by their adherence to a non-working class ideology - a form of political islam, effectively - be presented of as a victory for the reconstitution of proletarian politics? Apart from accidents of sociology, how can those Respect candidates close to the Muslim Association of Britain be thought of as “working class”? Clearly, the need is for a differentiation - to separate those elements that are working class politicians on some level from those who represent something very different.

Plainly, the manifesto Respect candidates will formally be standing on May 5 - reportedly drafted by Alan Thornett of the International Socialist Group - sounds more left than other platforms the party has adopted:

• As referred to above, the organisation explicitly sets itself the aim of solving the “deepening crisis of working class representation” (p7);
• Public services should be “publicly owned and democratically controlled by those who use them and those who work in them” (p3);
• “Destruction of the environment” is “inherent in the profit system” (p4);
• Respect fights for a society “where wealth is used to meet the needs of the people, not the profits of the corporations” (ibid);
• It aims for a society that will put “an end to all forms of economic exploitation and social oppression” (ibid);
• A “woman’s right to choose” is in there (ibid).
  

As you might expect, given the general programmatic level of the left, there is nothing - apart from the demand for “proportional representation in all elections” - that directly addresses the democratic deficit the document correctly says was highlighted by the mass anti-war movement (p4). The truth is that if the word ‘socialism’ had been sprinkled through the manifesto’s pages (it does not make an appearance, of course), this is a platform that the bulk of the socialist and ostensibly revolutionary left would have been more or less happy to stand on. It is left reformist, in other words.

There are obvious problems, however. First, how seriously will it be taken as a document that forms the basis not simply of individual election addresses, but Respect candidates’ actual practice should they be elected? On the tricky issue of abortion, it has already been confirmed that the SWP-Respect party’s vote in favour of “a woman’s right to choose” at its October 2004 conference was no more than indicative (Weekly Worker November 4 2004). In other words, elected Respect representatives are free to vote according to their conscience on this fundamental democratic issue. If that holds for abortion, then what guarantee do voters have that any of the pledges in the Respect manifesto will amount to more than squiggles on a sheet of paper?

After all, while comrade Galloway may not be the anointed “leader” of the party, as assumed by journalists, his high-handed manner has already indicated a lack of concern for either collective discipline or democratic niceties.

The man simply announced his candidature for Bethnal Green and Bow in the pages of London’s Evening Standard rather than go through the bother of a selection meeting (Weekly Worker July 1 2004); he made a dramatic - and unilateral - overture to the MAB over abortion when he told The Independent on Sunday in April last year that he was “strongly against abortion … I think abortion is immoral” - a statement that must have caused consternation in the SWP leadership; and then, in the aftermath of the SWP-Respect’s rejection of a principled position on immigration at its last conference, he felt free to make up policy on the hoof, telling the Morning Star (February 12) that “we should publish an economic-social-demographic plan for population growth based on a points system and our own needs” and that “no-one serious is advocating the scrapping of immigration controls”.

Respect’s manifesto tells us that the party “rejects the notion that migrants and asylum-seekers are a burden on society, or that Britain is full up and cannot take any more people” (p14). Presuming that Galloway agrees with this estimation, for him it will be a matter of contemporary detail rather than principle. That is, there could well come a time when he judges the needs of imperialist Britain to be met by the current levels of migration and thus opposes the right of any more people to enter the country.

On February 12, Socialist Worker attacked the “points system” proposed by Tories and New Labour. It wrote that the home secretary “wants to make sure that everyone allowed to live here is economically ‘useful’ - as defined by big business. Through ‘managed migration’ the government hopes to minimise spending on education, healthcare and pensions for migrant workers.”

So far, it has remained silent on its leading political ally’s very own “points system” for “managed migration”, as it has on his other unilateral policy announcements. Effectively, George Galloway has thus decided the operative Respect policy on immigration. Until it is publicly stated otherwise, the organisation must be assumed to stand for a points system and managed migration.

Victory in Bethnal Green and Bow would immeasurably increase Galloway’s ability to set Respect’s agenda, increasing pressures on the left to disavow even formal adherence to principle.

Despite the overall left tone of the manifesto, clearly the political thrust of some of its sections has been dictated by the concerns of the largely phantom right wing. For example, we are told that to beat street crime resources must be diverted from waging war into “the detection of dangerous drugs, educating young people that embracing the drug culture is a road to despair and then breaking up the criminal gangs who feast on the misery of the drug-stricken” (p15). In other words, an authoritarian solution, essentially no different from that of the mainstream parties: a recipe for state harassment of youth, growing police powers and interference in individuals’ lives.

The eclectic mix revealed in the manifesto’s pages demonstrates the type of contradictions that make the Respect bloc profoundly unstable as any sort of longer-term party formation. The question is, how they will be resolved: by the working class element differentiating itself organisationally and politically, or by a formal SWP disavowal of revolutionary Marxism?
Mark Fischer

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