'Respect' and George Galloway

On 1 February, a press release from Respect Renewal was posted on the blog of Respect Renewal member Andy Newman. It says that: "The Bethnal Green and Bow MP George Galloway has won the fight to retain the name Respect for his party. The Electoral Commission has ruled that the organisation’s national chair Linda Smith, who is a close ally of Galloway, is to remain the leader and nominating officer for Respect. "This ruling has effectively put paid to the attempts by the revolutionary Socialist Workers Party to hijack the Respect name for their own uses". Comments on Andy Newman's blog say that...

While the SWP lost dozens of its own members to Galloway’s populist, Stalinist split from Respect, Student Respect remained almost totally solid, with the vast majority of independents siding with SWSS. The positive consequence of this has been a left turn by Student Respect — in terms of a willingness to talk about women’s liberation and abortion rights, for instance — as well as a greater willingness to engage with other socialists like the AWL. Nonetheless, Respect/SWSS is still supporting Ruqayyah Collector, the very soft-left candidate put forward by Student Broad Left/Socialist Action...

Let's look on the bright side first. As against George Galloway and his Respect-Renewal, who are now backing "Red Ken", SWP-Respect is reaffirming the need for a left challenge to Livingstone as London mayor. Although SWP-Respect, even in its own private meetings, still cannot bring itself to use the words "working class" or "socialist", it calls for candidates in the London mayor and assembly elections (May 2008) that will respond to the needs of "working people" and present a "positive alternative". It is emphatic - has to be, I guess, following the split-away of Galloway and most of the...

On Thursday 27 September the London Transport Regional Council of the rail union RMT voted to call on the union to "draw up lists of candidates to stand in the London mayoral elections and GLA elections in 2008. "These lists should be drawn from RMT members, socialists, anti-capitalists, local campaign groups, etc...[and] speak to the many different issues facing workers, working-class communities and oppressed groups in London, such as education, the health service, housing, a living wage and trade union rights - while of course making the demand for a 100% publicly owned, democratically...

The "Respect Renewal" movement, George Galloway's bit of the now-split Respect coalition, has proposed a "Progressive List" to stand in the May 2008 Greater London Assembly elections and to back Ken Livingstone. Or, rather, George Galloway personally has. The proposal appears on the Respect Renewal website, but, as if to emphasise the feeble nature of the organisation, is signed only by Galloway personally. "In the broadest terms, I believe the slate needs to be based on opposition to privatisation. It needs to be anti-racist, and opposed to discrimination of all kinds. It needs to campaign...

The split in Respect though ‘finalised’ in the sense that the SWP and George Galloway are unlikely to work together again has still not run its course. In addition to outstanding issues around the legal standing of both organisations – the status of the SWP-Respect National Committee, nominating officers, financial recourses etc… - ‘official’ versions of recent events and responses to them are now being churned out. The SWP is to hold its national conference this month, a conference where some very difficult questions could well be posed to the party leadership. Chris Harman – the editor of...

11 articles on the SWP's political collapse into a decade of alliance with Islamic clerical fascism. Solidarity has commented on the SWP's ongoing political collapse at each stage. The "Reactionary Anti-Imperialists" The Prophet and the demoralised opportunists An open letter to Chris Harman of the SWP: Break with Galloway and the communalists How the "IS tradition" was shaped by the ILP The IS tradition and the birth of Respect - An open letter to a SWP leader The Sharia socialists Ms German replies to her critics Respect woos the Muslim vote Tony Cliff on the "Clerical-Fascist" Muslim...

The International Socialist Organization of the USA has thrown its weight on George Galloway's side in the Respect split. The ISO is perhaps the most important group in the world, after the SWP-UK, with the same general politics as the SWP, but was expelled by the SWP from its international network in 2001. Then, the SWP claimed that the ISO was "sectarian" , specifically towards to the "new anti-capitalist" milieu manifested in such actions as the famous demonstrations against the World Trade Organisation meeting in 1999. In fact, as far as I can see, the ISO's approach to the "new anti...

Many people reading this article may ask themselves “why join the SWP in the first place?” Others still will ask “why go on to join the AWL?” These are legitimate questions. In fact, the answer to the question “why I left the SWP” revolves almost entirely around answering the other two. Some people fill hours of their lives writing lists of incidents, outrages and ‘crimes against socialism’ carried out by the SWP. This documentation is a time-consuming and important work, but this article will be no such list. Others have provided us with impressionistic sketches of leading SWP ‘personalities’...