Weekly Worker 620 Thursday April 13 2006 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Drawing class lines

The local elections on May 4 will be make or break for Respect. Win or lose, the pressures are likely to mount on its main component, the Socialist Workers Party, says Huw Bynon

One of the slogans prominently featured on the front of the glossy Respect broadsheet in their Newham target area in east London tells us that “Respect works for the whole community” - regardless of race, we are presumably meant to assume. And regardless of class, it is also quite clear.

We have pointed out that the SWP-Respect party is an inherently unstable political formation, given its cross class, popular frontist nature. In a February interview with Pink News - “the premier gay news outlet in the UK” - George Galloway, the Bethnal Green MP, had an odd simile for the uneasy truce within the coalition. It was “like porcupines making love, with great difficulty, carefully”, he suggested (see www.pinknews.co.uk).

A little earlier in this interview, he is explicit about the opportunist modus operandi the left has reached with the right to facilitate this co-joining: “…we’re a coalition, and we don’t bind a muslim candidate in Yorkshire to the explicitly socialist parts of our programme. Many of them are small business people and wouldn’t describe themselves as socialists and are not bound to accept it. And the same goes for other issues including tax and these issues. But the leading figures in Respect, you know who they are, their views are well known. Mine are well known.”

So, for the purposes of maintaining unity with a rightwing (a numerical very small one in comparative terms), these “well known” views - versions of socialism - are to be kept purely platonic. Nowhere in the aforementioned Respect broadsheet - or any of the other coalition material I have seen (the national manifesto is not yet available) - is that potentially prickly word ‘socialism’ even mentioned, for example.

Of course, particular attention will be paid to the fortunes of Respect as it is hoping to build on its victory in the Bethnal Green constituency in last year’s general election. However, it is a very focussed campaign. Most voters nationally will be denied the opportunity to vote for Respect on election day - only 163 are listed on the organisation’s website as we go to press, with a whopping 111 of those concentrated in its east London ‘heartlands’ of Tower Hamlets and Newham.

Elsewhere, even in those areas where it has tapped into strong pockets of local support, such as in Birmingham and Preston, Respect will run a very limited campaign (just six and five candidates respectively). Major cities such as Manchester, Sheffield or Newcastle have just one lonely Respect candidate to fly the flag.

This rather limp showing underlines two things.

First, that despite the hot air generated about the organisation, it is yet to live up to the hype. Clearly, outside of some areas with specific political/ethno-religious makeups, the organisation simply has not grown. (By way of contrast, for example, the Green Party is fielding 1,294 candidates in these elections, including 567 in London.)

Second, the organisation that supplies the vast bulk of the activists - the SWP - is clearly being mobilised nationally to bolster the work in the two east London constituencies where Respect has a chance of a breakthrough - Newham and Tower Hamlets. Most campaigns in other parts of the country are probably being left with skeleton staff and squeezed resources.

Of course, there is a certain logic in this. Respect is not a mass party and - given its stated priority in this election is to actually win seats, not simply contest or make propaganda - it clearly does not want to spread its forces too thinly. Given mass disillusionment with Labour, there is a distinct possibility that the coalition could make inroads in east London and perhaps pick up councils seats elsewhere too.

Indeed if Respect is as successful as it once seemed confident of being, it will have had a relatively substantial presence in local government, the biggest of any non-Labour left formation for a long time. Despite the lingering fear of a ‘Big brother backlash’, Respect remains officially upbeat about its prospects.  As its website puts it, “Respect intends to take control of Tower Hamlets council and put an end to the housing crisis in London’s poorest borough.”

So what could communists and the working class expect post an election night breakthrough for Respect?

The simple answer is not a lot. Quite apart from the plethora of concessions on points of democratic principle - freedom of speech, abortion, gay rights, open borders, secular education, etc, the coalition’s cross class nature will pull it in diametrically opposite directions when any important fight looms.

For example, how exactly will Respect “put an end to the housing crisis” in Tower Hamlets? Will it be prepared to do a ‘Liverpool’ and build council homes? Would its councillors be prepared to defy the law and set illegal budgets to defend the poor? Are these councillors prepared to be surcharged and made bankrupt if they do break laws to defend their constituents?

Or will the intrinsic class instincts of the “small business people” cited by Galloway, kick in. After all, they might be Respect councillors (remember what the ‘S’ is meant to stand for?), but they are under no obligation to “describe themselves as socialists”. What’s to stop them compromising and selling their working class constituents down the river? It would hardly be shocking - especially as they are “not bound to accept”, even nominally, by Respect’s non-class, empty commitment to ‘socialist’ politics?

We have already seen an example of irreconcilable contradiction in Respect break the surface in Tower Hamlets, precisely the borough where there is most at stake.

Dr Shamsuddin Ahmed, a leading muslim activist in the borough defected to the Liberal Democrats after a Respect meeting voted to select SWP leader John Rees in Whitechapel, the ward where Respect scored its most impressive results in the general election. Ahmed complained that “John Rees wants to be the candidate in Whitechapel, pushing me to Bethnal Green South, where I didn’t have any connection” - a petty personal ambition that was enough to send him scuttling into the arms of an explicitly capitalist party (Weekly Worker March 2).

The SWP is therefore playing a very dangerous game indeed. The coalition is held together on the basis of a crude populism - “a form of politics which emphasises the virtues of the uncorrupt and unsophisticated common people against the double-dealing and selfishness to be expected of professional politicians and their intellectual helpers ” (A Bullock, O Stallybrass and S Trombley [eds] The Fontana dictionary of modern thought London 1988, p668).

Populism is inherently unstable - especially as individual populists are subject to all the same opportunities for “double-dealing and selfness” as the gang they have just ousted.

Thus, let’s return to the clumsily written Newham broadsheet.  On its inside, a small piece tells us there is “No value for money from Newham council”. Robin Wales (the mayor) “is costing the Newham tax payer a packet!”.  Readers are told that “we spend twice as much to run the office of mayor than Tower Hamlets spends on their council leader. On top of this, we pay more than £600k in allowance payments to councillors who have no real authority, and just act as rubber stamps following Robin Wales’s instructions to the letter”.

There are then some details of the very generous earnings these councillors regard as fair remuneration for themselves - all good agitational stuff. However, nowhere is there a pledge concerning the financial arrangements Respect councillors will make for themselves or any categorical assurances to the local working class that any councillor for the coalition intent on feathering his or her own nest would be instantly expelled from the party.

How could this promise be given? The SWP leadership has led its rank and file in voting down motions calling for a workers’ wage for Respect’s elected representatives, denouncing this principle as nothing more than a veiled attack on Galloway. Having conceded financial autonomy to the people elected on its behalf, how is Respect going to impose control on its Newham councillors?

Local council party demarcations are notoriously porous, with councillors often ‘crossing the floor’ for reasons that are transparently self-serving and corrupt. Only firm adherence to principle - occasionally backed by some firmly applied measures of party discipline - is the only (partial, not total) guarantee against this.

Yet the Newham broadsheet makes clear that Respect is touting for votes from electors on the most hazy, politically ill-defined level: “Lib Dems? Tories?”, it snorts. “Don’t waste your vote. Respect is the only party who will be challenging Labour in every one of the 20 wards in Newham as well as standing a candidate for mayor. The Tories and Lib Dems do not have the people to stand and will only be fielding a tiny number of councillors. A vote for them is a wasted vote.”

It is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to speculate that numbered amongst the Respect candidates on May 4 there will be those in the coalition’s orbit precisely because it is presenting a ‘viable’ option for ambitious men or women - and their commitment to the organisation could prove just a fleeting as that huffy gadfly Dr Shamsuddin Ahmed, who will now be confronting Respect as a candidate for the Lib Dems in Whitechapel. (John Rees is ducking the fight with Ahmed and is now one of the three Respect candidates in the neighbouring Bethnal Green South ward! Rees has not been keen to explain the reasons for the switch, but his opponent’s local roots perhaps have prompted some swift ward-hopping to ensure Rees as a decent stab at getting elected.)

A more likely scenario than the coalition winning the council, however, is that it may hold the balance of power in a hung council. Yet, this would also heighten tensions within it. Would it adopt a position of intransigent opposition to both Labour and the Liberal Democrats? Or would the non-socialist contingent be tempted by the taste of power and jump on the gravy train? Would the non-socialist contingent outweigh the socialists within the council - could Rees and his embarrassing socialists get dumped?

Even if Respect were to stay in opposition, tensions would not lessen. What would happen, for instance, if the council sought to create a muslim city academy in the borough, funded by PFI? Would the islamic wing win the day or would the SWP’s defence of state, comprehensive education and opposition to privatisation prevail?

So, although the prospect of major advance raises some possibly painful dilemmas for Respect, the result is likely to end up as another tragedy for the left.

For these reasons, the CPGB will not be giving blanket support to Respect in the local elections. We will adopt the position we took in last year’s general elections - advocating electoral support only for anti-Iraq occupation, working class candidates.

In practice, this means we will support the openly socialist candidates standing for Respect. Respect is a cross-class formation and not a genuine working class organization. Consequently, we will refuse to support those candidates who espouse the reactionary politics of political islam, or those who simply have no recognisable relationship to working class politics of any stripe.

It therefore goes without saying that we will support all socialist parties who advocate the end of the occupation of Iraq. This applies to, for example, to the Socialist Party despite the major criticisms we have of its programme.

Yet, it also means that where a Labour candidate opposes the occupation, we will advocate support for him or her. Labour remains organically tied to the working class through the trade unions, and though it is a highly distorted workers party, we distinguish between it and other openly capitalist parties like the Liberal Democrats and the Tories. Whilst we do not espouse auto-Labourism, neither do we advocate auto-anti Labourism.

Indeed, it might well be the case that in some wards we will call for a vote for an anti-occupation Labourite over a non-socialist Respect candidate.

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