Respect – in retrospect (2007)

From the December 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look at the shipwreck of yet another attempt to organise a left-of-Labour reformist party.

Respect – acronym for Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environment, Community, Trade unionism – was set in January 2004 by George Galloway and the Socialist Workers Party to try to make political capital out of the widespread opposition to the Iraq War.

The SWP is a Leninist vanguard party and as such is always on the look-out for protest movements to take over with a view to recruiting more members and followers for itself. Before the Iraq War the front organisation which the SWP pushed, in a bid to create a left-of-Labour political party it could influence, was the “Socialist Alliance”. But they had been thinking about “playing the Muslim card” since the time of the first Gulf War.

According to “author and academic” Jamal Iqbal, writing in the East London Advertiser (8 November):

“Leading figures in the SWP had been advocating the alliance with religious groups for some time. In the 1994 pamphlet, Prophet and the Proletariat, Chris Harman – then as now one of the SWP’s chief ideologists – argued that the party should make common cause on the issue of ‘anti-imperialism’ with Islamists, in part as a way of recruiting their members”.

Much to the annoyance of others who had participated in the project, the SWP decided to pull the plug on the “Socialist Alliance” so that its members could concentrate on building up and controlling Respect. For a while the strategy of building up Respect as a left-wing alternative to Labour seemed to be working. In the 2004 European Parliament and London Assembly elections Respect polled over a quarter of million votes. Then, in the General Election the following year, Galloway scored a spectacular victory in the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency in the East End of London over the sitting Labour MP, Oona King, becoming the first left-of-Labour MP to be elected at a General Election since 1945.

Galloway’s victory was followed by an equally spectacular breakthrough at local level, when 12 Respect councillors were elected to Tower Hamlets borough council where they became the official opposition to Labour ahead of the Tories and the Liberals. Some on the left saw this as the beginning of an electoral challenge to Labour from the left which could spread. But they overlooked two things. First, that all 12 Respect councillors were of Bangledeshi origin and had been elected, not as leftwingers, but on the basis of Muslim “communalism”, of playing the Muslim card to win the Muslim vote. Second, that not far away in Dagenham there was another spectacular result: the British National Party with 11 councillors emerged as official opposition. Their votes had been obtained by playing the “white working class” and “anti-Muslim” card – and there are more “white workers” in Britain than “Muslims”. What Respect and the SWP were doing was splitting the working class on religious and communalist lines and in effect opening the door for the BNP.

Now the whole thing has blown up in their face. In September Galloway issued a circular denouncing the SWP’s stranglehold on Respect. He and his supporters began to organise to put the SWP in its place. The SWP responded by expelling some of its members who refused to break with Galloway and then provoking a split in Respect.

At local level, in Tower Hamlets, this took the form of four councillors breaking away from the Respect group and forming a new “Respect (Independent)” group on the council. Their leader was Councillor Oliur Rahman who, as Respect candidate in Poplar and Canning Town at the 2005 General Election, had come third, polling a respectable 6573 votes or 17 percent. According to the local paper, their press conference on 29 October to announce the breakaway “was overseen by John Rees, the main man in the Socialist Workers Party and still currently the national secretary of Respect” (East London Advertiser, 1 November).

In a letter in the local paper the following week, expelled SWP members Kevin Ovenden and Rob Hoveman revealed that two of the breakaway councillors were card-carrying members of the SWP. Their letter was also revealing in other respects as it was written by two people who until a month or so ago had been leading SWP “cadres” (even though, as Galloway’s parliamentary assistants, their salaries are paid out of his expenses as an MP):

“It is extremely regrettable that a fundamental division has occurred in the Respect between the leadership of a very small organisation called the Socialist Workers Party and almost everyone else in Respect. The SWP acquired a stranglehold over our organisation, which has caused a deep rift at national level. Our MP George Galloway (Bethnal Green and Bow) raised criticisms of the direction the national organisation was heading in August. Instead of a reasoned response from senior SWP members, the criticisms were met with growing hysteria. This has finally come to a head, with the SWP leadership seeking to undermine the democratic structures of Respect and abusing many of its leading members. The SWP has also sowed the seeds of division which have seen four Tower Hamlets councillors turn their backs on Respect after trying to stage a coup against the democratically-elected group leader. Two of these councillors are SWP members and the other two are the SWP’s closest allies. If they had any principles, they would stand as SWP candidates – but know they would get no votes.” (East London Advertiser, 8 November).

Respect’s annual conference was to have been held on 17 November. What happened was that two conferences were held that day, one organised and controlled by the SWP and the other by Galloway and his supporters. Respect has split into two rival organisations. It remains to be seen what the political fall-out will be.

There are a number of lessons to be learned from this.

First, the dishonest tactics of Leninist groups such as the SWP which set up front organisations to attract the support of well-meaning people concerned about some issue. The honest approach would be to say “we are the SWP, this is what we stand for, join us if you agree”. But this is not how Leninist organisations operate. For them, workers are not politically intelligent enough to work things out for themselves and so need to be led – by them. They see themselves as leaders and discontented workers merely as foot soldiers to be used to further their political influence and, ultimately, to help them into power. They really are officers looking for infantry.

Second, as workers are not that stupid, they eventually get found out. This happened once before, in the 1970s, when the SWP (and its predecessor IS) managed to obtain considerable influence over the rank-and-file shop stewards movement of the time. They thought they were using the movement for their own Leninist ends. The shop stewards went along with this because they welcomed the research work done by SWP academics and students and the printing facilities the SWP provided. At some point the SWP leadership decided to tighten its control. The shop stewards demurred and eventually a whole section of the SWP was expelled for syndicalist deviationism.

Third, playing the Muslim card always was playing with fire. The Islamist groups the SWP worked with and hoped to influence were never going to be manipulated by secular Leninists. Once again it was a question of who was using who and of when those who the SWP thought they could manipulate would turn on them. The SWP – together with Galloway and his supporters – must take a heavy responsibility, having encouraged a split in working class in Britain on communalist lines. The SWP might now try to take up a more secularist position, but the damage has been done. Not only have they burnt their own fingers, but they have left a legacy which genuine socialists will have to undo by re-asserting the need for working class to organise on class, not communal, lines.

Adam Buick

Galloway’s Workers Party: A sheep in wolf’s clothing (2024)

From the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Following their leader George Galloway’s victory in the Rochdale by-election, the Workers Party of Britain (WPB) is making a bid to be the standard-bearer in the coming general election of the anti-Labour left. But what do their stand for?

They claim to be a socialist party but nowhere do they clearly define what they mean by socialism.

They are ‘committed to the redistribution of wealth and power in favour of working people’ (which is what the Labour Party committed itself to in its manifesto for the February 1974 general election; in more emphatic terms in fact, as ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’). This ‘redistributive economics’, however, assumes the continued existence of a wealthy class some of whose wealth is to be transferred to working people. So, they are talking here about a change within the capitalist system. Its reform not its abolition. Socialists, by contrast, stand not for a less unequal ownership of wealth but for the common ownership and democratic control of the places where what society needs to survive is produced.

The WPB ‘believes in an economy that works for the working class people, the vast majority’. All parties say that, and not just the Labour Party either. The question is what is being proposed to try to make ‘the economy’ work in this way. Perhaps surprisingly, the WPB does not envisage the widespread nationalisation of productive industry that the Labour Party’s old Clause Four did. Not that nationalisation — the state take-over of some industry or business — is socialism. It is state capitalism under which workers still work for wages and are treated in the same way as by private employers, as many workers have learnt from experience.

Their position on this is that ‘we are not afraid of selective nationalisation especially of dysfunctional utilities and for strategic assets’:

‘Our nationalisation policy is based on a simple proposition that anything that is a monopoly or essential to the functioning of the country, especially those businesses strategically required in times of crisis, should be considered for re-nationalisation or nationalisation’.

These are precisely the reasons the Labour Party used to give to justify nationalisation when it supported this.

They go on:

‘We say ‘considered’ because full nationalisation may not be necessary in every case, such as national logistics, if the industry concerned is prepared to operate constructively in line with national planning guidelines and places the nation before investors. If we have to legislate to give the national interest priority over the market, we will not hesitate to do so.’

Since there aren’t any monopolies outside the railways and the utilities and since the Bank of England is already nationalised, the most that is envisaged would be a return to the pre-Thatcher situation in the 1970s which would still leave most productive industry in the hands of profit-seeking private enterprises.

They want ‘the state to guide the economic life of the country.’ Given their position on nationalisations, this means the state directing and trying to plan an economy in which large sections of productive activity remain in the hands of profit-seeking private enterprises. Reformist parties have tried this many times and have always failed since such a mixed economy means the government is at the mercy of the private sector which will refuse to invest unless there is enough profit in it for them and no ‘direction’ or ‘legislation’ can compel them to do so. This is why all previous Labour governments have ended up accepting that profits have to be made and themselves applying this capitalist imperative. A Galloway government would be no different.

Like Old Labour, the WPB sees its goal as being achieved gradually: ‘It may take many years to transform Britain into a secure democratic socialist state.’ In the meantime, there are ‘some things we can do immediately.’ There is a ‘Ten-Point Programme’ of immediate demands full of vote-catching reforms (but which doesn’t include any nationalisation measures) such as:

• ‘Useful, secure jobs for all in decent conditions, with living wages, paid holidays, sick leave, maternity leave, etc.
• Decent, cheap, secure housing for all.
• Free and comprehensive healthcare with no waiting lists.
• High-quality, free provision of all necessary support services for the
• disabled, as well as the elderly.
• Universal access to a cheap or free fully- integrated public transport system and all essential amenities: water, sanitation, heating, electricity, post, telephone, internet’.

Apparently, they believe that capitalism could be made to provide all that, but these free or subsidised services would have to be paid for out of taxes which ultimately fall on profits. In fact, profits would have to be taxed so much that it would undermine capitalist enterprises’ incentive to produce, provoking a slump in economic activity.

To be fair, they do get a couple of things right.

They define the working class as:

“It is the 99%. The workers are anyone who has to sell their labour power for wages. What does that mean? It means that if you have to earn wages, do jobs for money, you are a member of the working class.’

And they have seen through the Labour Party (as we did right from its start in 1906):

‘Labour are Labour in name only. Labour do not represent the workers, they serve the elite, the class that does not work: the ruling class. But Labour likes to pretend it is on the side of the workers. It has stolen the name “Labour”. Labour is the wolf in sheep’s clothing.’

On the other hand, they commit themselves to defending the state-capitalist regime in the old USSR.

“We defend the achievements of the USSR, China, Cuba, etc.”

“We shall defend the positive historical legacy of the Soviet Union”.

The Communist Party of Britain and the Scargill Labour Party (SLP) take the same position. It hasn’t done them any good. Quite the reverse. It is more likely to put people off as there is already a widespread understanding that the USSR wasn’t socialist but, as in the West, a class-divided society ruled by a privileged elite.

In short, the WPB is not the ‘socialist alternative to the corrupt Labour Party’ that it claims to be. It is just a return to failed, Old Labourism.

Adam Buick

George Galloway’s ‘Workers Party’ (2024)

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Rochdale by-election on 29 February was prompted by the death of the previous Member of Parliament for that constituency. From 1972 onwards the seat had a mix of Liberal and Labour MPs. Labour no doubt expected an easy win there, which they may have achieved under pressure, even though a previous Labour MP, expelled from that party and then representing Rochdale as an Independent was standing for the Reform party. Their slogan is ‘Let’s Make Britain Great’, an obvious nod to Trumpism.

Also standing was George Galloway of the Workers Party of Britain (WPB), formed in 2019 by himself. Their slogan is ‘Building a New Working Class Politics in Britain’. Galloway was a Labour Party member for thirty-six years, and while presenting himself as radically left he is essentially a Fabian.

We write this before the result of the by-election is known but the odds on Galloway winning did shorten a little after the official Labour Party candidate got himself into trouble with his own party for remarks he made.

Based on media coverage it did appear that Galloway was concentrating on canvassing support based upon his long-standing support for the Palestinian cause and his complete antagonism toward Zionism.

The WPB Manifesto says:

‘The Workers Party of Britain is a socialist party but we are not Utopian, nor are we bound by abstruse theory. We have a common-sense analysis and a practical mission. The Workers Party is committed to the redistribution of wealth and power in favour of working people’.

Not the abolition of capitalism, note, but change within capitalism.

Their Manifesto goes on to list ‘some things we can do immediately’.

‘We will immediately increase the personal tax threshold for the poorest paid, removing tax entirely from the first £21,200 of wages for two million low-paid workers, and at the same time we commit to a one-off wealth tax on all estates valued fairly at over £10 million to make a start on redressing the colossal gap between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population.’

Yup, truly revolutionary. Amongst other irrelevances to the working class:

‘Rebuild British industry… to provide useful secure jobs for all…’

‘We support campaigning to preserve the right to use cash.’

‘We will ensure working-class representation throughout the governance of the Bank of England.’

So much for the claim to be ‘a socialist party’ and the commitment ‘to offer a long-term and well-organised socialist alternative to the corrupt Labour Party…’

Despite all the firebrand rhetoric Galloway just wants to reform capitalism, which is no doubt trembling in its boots at the thought of him being a Member of Parliament.

Dave Coggan

Blogger's Update:

Galloway did indeed win last night's bye-election. 

Proper Gander: Radio Ga-Ga (2020)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Switch over from TV current affairs programmes to those on DAB radio, and you’ll notice quite a shift in tone. The telly’s news bulletins and shows like the BBC’s Question Time or Newsnight appear airbrushed and staid when compared with the more blunt discussions found on the commercial talk radio stations.

With nearly three million listeners each week, the heavyweight in the market is LBC, which as the London Broadcasting Company was the first licenced commercial radio station, back in 1973. It became more widely known after relaunching nationally on the DAB platform in 2014 with the self-aggrandising boast of ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’. In 2017 the station gained further publicity from its interview with Diane Abbott MP when she made a hash of explaining Labour’s funding plans for the police, and also when it ditched Katie Hopkins as a presenter for advocating a ‘final solution’ following the Manchester Arena bombing. Not all of LBC’s hosts are poisonous rent-a-gobs like Hopkins or Nigel Farage, whose regular programme was dropped a few months ago. James O’Brien’s phone-in slot often shows up racists and xenophobes for what they are, and he wearily ran rings around Jacob Rees-Mogg when interviewing him about the practicalities of leaving the European Union. Frosty conversations are a hallmark of LBC.

Less popular, but more populist is TalkRADIO. This station, relaunched on DAB in 2016, follows a similar format of having phone-in discussion programmes helmed by opinionated hosts wearing headphones. While LBC presenters are more likely to try and catch out their interviewees, TalkRADIO hosts tend to bring in guests who reinforce their own opinions, which are invariably of the patriotic, right wing libertarian variety. This stance reflects who ultimately owns the station: along with Virgin Radio, Times Radio and Talksport, it’s part of Wireless Group, which is part of News Corp, owned by pro-Trump Rupert Murdoch.

Among TalkRADIO’s regular presenters is Mike Graham, who refers to the station as being ‘the home of common sense’ for the ‘silent majority’. He lays out his trade when he says on one show ‘we don’t need any lessons in history from the Guardian reading yoghurt knitting lentil munching morons who think that there’s something wrong with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. As well as presenting The Independent Republic of Mike Graham, he chairs Plank of the Week, where he sits with a couple of other pundits to slag off people recently in the public eye. One ‘plank of the week’ was Banksy for his efforts in arranging a boat to rescue migrants at risk in the Mediterranean Sea.

Another frequent target is ‘woke’ culture, which the station associates with transgender activists, Black Lives Matter (‘a ghastly, horrible organisation that would like to see the destruction of everything that is good about Britain’, according to Mike Graham) and Extinction Rebellion (‘pathetic’, so says another presenter, Mike Parry). The station particularly focuses on its rival the BBC’s emphasis on diversity. For instance, Ian Collins in his show called the BBC directive about training its staff in avoiding racial bias ‘absolute cast-iron bonkers’ and other presenter Dan Wootton slated the BBC for being obsessed with ‘vile, toxic, tribal identity politics’.

The ‘wokeness’ of the BBC is also criticised because having a ‘liberal London groupthink’ means that it isn’t as impartial as it is supposed to be. On one of Mike Graham’s shows, regular guest and TV presenter Neil Oliver says that news is expected to be neutral, ‘a magnolia paint colour version of events’, and that the BBC gives this impression to disguise its left-leaning bias. On one of his shows, Ian Collins adds that BBC presenters should leave their political opinions on subjects such as Black Lives Matter outside the studio. But he, and the other TalkRADIO presenters, aren’t shy to inflict their own views on us. They simultaneously berate the BBC for being biased while making the most of their own biased broadcasting.

Whether or not the BBC is partial in the way TalkRADIO accuses, it’s right to point out that the BBC isn’t impartial. And it can’t be impartial, because it is part of the establishment, and therefore reflects the ideology which maintains the status quo. It’s partial towards acceptance of the system overall. TalkRADIO is the same, just in a more extreme and in-your-face way.

While the BBC has to stick to stricter editorial rules than TalkRADIO or LBC, all news broadcasters have to follow Ofcom’s code of guidance about ‘due impartiality’, which means that alternative views should be considered. Earlier in the year, TalkRADIO was found not to have done this and was fined £75,000 after former presenter George Galloway discussed allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party and the role of the Russian state in the Salisbury poisonings. When the station’s presenters do cite different opinions or interview activists, it’s invariably with a dismissive, sneering tone.

TalkRADIO’s preoccupations are shown by how it repeatedly latches on to the same kind of subject in the same kind of way. Its recent fixations have included dance troupe Diversity’s Black Lives Matter routine on Britain’s Got Talent and the possibility of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ being removed from the Proms because of associations with colonialism. While these and any topic should be discussed, TalkRADIO doesn’t scrutinise, for example, Donald Trump or Sky News. Nor does it have programmes about poverty or exploitation or environmental threats or war. The subjects the channel doesn’t cover tell us as much about its stance as those which it does.

TalkRADIO’s critique (if it can be called that) of left-wing ideology would be of interest, but it’s based on a caricature, and it comes from a cynical, cold place. A distorted worldview. Listen to TalkRADIO for too long, and you’d think Britain is divided only into ‘lentil munching morons’ infatuated with diversity quotas, and the Union Jack-waving ‘silent majority’ fed up with ‘political correctness gone mad’.

Mike Foster

No thank you, Mr Galloway (2004)

From the March 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Mr. Galloway,

We received an invitation (addressed to our former General Secretary) to join your Unity Coalition.

This invitation was considered at a meeting of our Executive Committee on 7th February 2004. The following resolution was passed:

That the secretary write to George Galloway to decline his request for support as he does not agree with our Object and Declaration of Principles; and that we challenge his organisation to debate on the case for socialism.

The very title of your old website – http://www.blairout.com – indicates the extent of your agenda: the removal of a specific politician from office and, presumably, his replacement with yourself or one of your allies. Whereas, our object is very specifically:

The establishment of a system of society based on the common and democratic ownership and control of the means and instruments of producing and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole community.

Your website gives a list of demands around which you intend to campaign along with the removal of Tony Blair. These are:

To withdraw troops from Iraq and to let the people of Iraq decide their own future; Halting the privatisation of essential public services; Defeating the Euro and the proposed European constitution; Protecting and enhancing our environment; The restoration of trade union rights; For equality, tolerance and a multi-cultural society.

We are unable to support this list of demands. None of them addresses the essential problem of our society – the ownership of the means of production by a tiny number of capitalists and the enforced exploitation of the working class through the wages system. So long as the essential resources for living are controlled by their owners – whether as western style private capitalists or monopolist state bureaucrats, like that of the Soviet State-Gangster Capitalism you so venerated – the strife and anguish of the class struggle will remain.

The job of Socialists is to bring the class struggle to an end, not to try and accommodate themselves with this system, or with the likes of George Monbiot and their schemes to make the market system work better with international financial controls and dreams of petty national autonomy.

Liberation for Iraq within a world divided into state of property would merely mean liberation for the owners of Iraq, not its beleaguered workers, who would continue to be exploited.

Halting privatisations would merely mean having to pay capitalists interest on the bonds they sell to the government rather than directly for their services.

Defeating the Euro would merely leave workers using money with The Queen’s head on rather than without.

Protecting the environment in the context of the profit drive means an eternal struggle against the basic impulses of the companies whose taxes you’d need to pay for the nationalised services.

Restoring trades union rights, however welcome, would still leave us struggling against our employers and still prey to organised labour’s Achilles’ heel of unemployment.

As for tolerance, as Tom Paine wrote, tolerance is for Popes: it implies someone with the power or right to ‘tolerate’. Socialists seek a society of universal equality – the world over – based upon the free association of producers working collaboratively to produce for each according to their needs as individuals, not as interest groups. For us, the whole community means the whole community.

That is, we hold that:

That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex.

and

That this emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.

Which necessarily excludes working with ‘faith groups’ whether Christian or Islamic whose antiquated views serve only to divide the working class, and conceal their real causes of their social subordination behind ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ supposedly shared across classes.

The effect of your Coalition’s campaign will be to help continue this mystification and confusion of the workers as to their own interests, as well the sullying of the name of Socialism by including it as part of your RESPECT acronym. Socialism is not milk-and-water reform, it is not a vague concern for ethics compatible with every opposition campaign or grouping within capitalist society. Without the clear aim of establishing the common and democratic ownership of the means of production and living, RESPECT will merely repeat the folly of Labour, in finding itself needing to run capitalism against the interests of the workers.

Thus, we reiterate our principle that:

… as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain, therefore, enters the field of political action determined to wage war against all other political parties, whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist, and calls upon the members of the working class of this country to muster under its banner to the end that a speedy termination may be wrought to the system which deprives them of the fruits of their labour, and that poverty may give place to comfort, privilege to equality, and slavery to freedom.

Consequently, we decline to join you in your campaign for self-aggrandisement at the expense of the working class; challenge you and your organisation to justify itself against the socialist case; and commit ourselves to openly campaigning for Socialism and against RESPECT in any up-coming elections.

The World for the Workers,

Bill Martin, Assistant Secretary.

15 February 2004.

Letter: Galloway defended (2006)

Letter to the Editors from the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Galloway defended

Dear Editors

Pik Smeet’s article (July Socialist Standard) is yet another criticism of George Galloway which to my mind, although there are perhaps some valid points made, is not really very helpful in the immediate struggle that we of the Left need to advance against the creeping neo-fascism excreting from Number 10 and Washington D.C.

Galloway, regardless of his personal motives, is a voice in Parliament roundly criticizing the murderous policies of this mutant ‘ersatz’ Labour Government and its Washington cohorts. Where are the other voices?

Galloway is able to speak to the masses via the media. Maybe he’s not a one hundred percent ‘kosher’ socialist but ordinary people are hearing him and know about him and are thinking about what he is saying. ‘It’s no damn good refining our socialist ideas, concepts and understandings amongst ourselves. Socialists need to be out in the community at large offering the light of reason to the people. Galloway, for all his faults , is doing that.

Leo Aliferis (by email)

Reply:

The message Galloway projects is hardly an advance for the working class. We refrained from retelling his ghastly support for Saddam Hussein: he went so far when he appeared on Big Brother as to claim that the Iraqis supported and were happy with that vile old-style fascist dictator; he even saluted Hussein to his face for his “strength [his] courage, [his] indefatigability”.

Far from being a voice for the oppressed in the mass media he is the voice of wealth and power in the Middle East, and his role in the workers’ movement is to poison it. Ordinary people hear this poison and think it has something to do with socialism.

 He and his ilk are just as great an enemy to the spread of socialist understanding as George Bush, and the Socialist Party must oppose them.

– Editors.

Where is Labour going? (2021)

From the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Batley and Spen, a constituency in West Yorkshire, had a by-election on the first of July. There were a number of surprises – most notably, that the seat was held by Labour. The election was taken to be something of a judgment on the Labour Party as a whole, with polling suggesting that it would be a 6 percent lead for the Conservatives (Survation, 18 June). Losing Batley and Spen would have been a particularly painful blow for Labour, as it was the constituency of Jo Cox, the Labour MP who was murdered in 2016 by a neo-fascist, Thomas Mair. Her sister, Kim Leadbeater, won the seat this year by 323 votes (a lead of 0.85 percent of the vote, having won about 35 percent overall). The seat had been Tracy Brabin’s, a Labour and Co-op MP, since the by-election following Cox’s death. Her leads were 16.7 percent (55.5 percent overall) in the 2017 general election, and 8.7 percent (42.7 percent overall) in 2019. While Labour’s holding the seat was unexpected, considering how narrow the victory was, and how the seat has often historically been Labour’s more strongly, this is by no means a turning-of-the-tides.

Workerism

One of the other surprises was that almost 22 percent of the vote went to George Galloway’s ‘Workers Party’, which he describes as ‘the working-class patriotic alternative to fake woke anti-British ‘Labour’’ (Telegraph & Argus, 12 May). The party’s Deputy Leader, Joti Brar, is vice-chair of the CPGB-ML. Whoever they represent it is not the workers. Their website announces that they are a ‘socialist organisation’, but also that they ‘defend the achievements of the USSR, China, Cuba etc’, and that the party ‘believes in the importance of a planned economy, in the directing role of the state. Free-market fundamentalism has gutted Britain of its industries (…) castrating our society and adversely destabilising proud working-class traditions, culture and way of life.’

One would be hard-pressed to find a better example of what one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party Bordiga derided as ‘the typically opportunist conception of the labourist or workerist party to whom all those individuals who are proletarian in terms of their social condition are admitted by right’, to say nothing of the alarming fetishisation of oppressive state-capitalist regimes, past and present.

Socialism’s goal is not to preserve ‘working-class traditions, culture, and way of life’ – on the contrary, in an important sense, it is to abolish those things. We demand the elimination of class, not the extension of the proletarian way of life to the whole of society. Indeed, isn’t it dissatisfaction with the proletarian way of life that gives motivation to socialist sentiment in the first place?

Panic

At any rate, the result was astonishing. Galloway took himself to be ‘standing against Keir Starmer’, and that 22 percent backed the Workers Party, placing it third overall, can reasonably be read as an indictment of the Labour Party as it stands. Indeed, perhaps the only reason Labour didn’t lose is sheer luck. The week before the election, the news broke of then Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s affair and breach of the social-distancing rules he himself set out. This and the Conservative Party’s reaction (or lack thereof) did not reflect well on them, and presumably led to a drop in Tory turnout on the day of the vote. Keir Starmer’s declaration that ‘This by-election is a turning point (…) Labour’s back, and the promise of a better future is back too’ (Guardian, 2 June) is certainly too quick. Indeed, comparing leads over the years, it is not a turning point at all. It is a continuation of the dwindling of victory margins Labour has seen.

Indeed, some of the party’s campaigning tactics showed signs of panic and desperation. Leaflets were distributed showing PM Boris Johnson with the Indian PM Narendra Modi, of the radically Hindu nationalist BJP. This was to appeal to the Muslim vote, especially given continuing human rights abuses in Kashmir, a region disputed by India and Pakistan for generations. The frantic appeal to votes led to some internal division within the party, with Labour Friends of India requesting withdrawal of the leaflets. The vote still remained divided: Kim Leadbeater was heckled and intimidated after being questioned about her stance on LGBT rights, Palestine, and Kashmir (Guardian, 27 June). One man who chased her said he was acting on behalf of Muslim parents concerned about LGBT-inclusive education. Across given demographics, then, Labour has not won many hearts.

Lucky

The victory will, of course, still be welcomed by the Labour party. But it is not a victory that they can take much comfort in. Indeed, looking at it as anything but an immense stroke of luck is probably mistaken. The signs point to a need for change in the Labour Party, if they want to win again – and that change, contrary to what Starmer has suggested, has not already taken place. George Galloway’s Workers Party is an important surprise in the election – Labour would be remiss to not take some note. Handing over 22 percent of the vote to a rival left-leaning party is not a concession they are in any position to make.

Labour’s position is somewhat precarious now, with no signs of a forthcoming reversal in fortunes. The reason they won seems to have as much to do with the Conservatives’ blunders than their own successes. Starmer’s jubilation had better be a mere façade if Labour is to return to serious positions of power in parliament. He writes that ‘Batley and Spen was an important win – in the most difficult of circumstances. But it is only the start.’ Even this might go too far. Perhaps it isn’t the start, but a mere confirmation that Labour is going nowhere fast.

M. P. Shah

George Galloway: would-be Populist Leader (2021)

From the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the day the results of the recent Batley and Spen by-election were announced a Labour Party supporter responded to a comment about the meagre majority achieved. He was insistent that the 323-vote margin would have been 8,000+ higher had it not been for the appearance of George Galloway for the Workers Party of Britain.

From a purely psephological point of view the Galloway performance was remarkable for a representative of a small, leftish party. Nearly 22 percent of the vote secured a comfortable third place, a good 7,000 votes ahead of the Liberal Democrat, 5,000 or so behind the winner.

So perhaps the disgruntled Labour supporter had a point, except, of course, there is a large presumption involved. There is no way of determining whether an absence of Galloway and his new party would have resulted in in his 8,000 votes defaulting to Labour. Indeed, the experience of the previous by-election in Hartlepool suggests the Conservative candidate might have been a beneficiary too, especially given Galloway’s pro-Brexit stance.

There is a strong suggestion that Galloway profited from an alienated Muslim vote who may have perceived themselves as being tainted by Labour’s broad brush anti-Semitism accusations levelled at almost any anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian. It must be galling for a community more often the target of racism to feel themselves viewed as racists by the party they traditionally supported.

There is surely little doubt that the impressive vote was for Galloway personally rather than being an ideological breakthrough by the Workers Party of Britain. He has a background of championing anti-Zionism and favouring Islamic causes. There have even been suggestions that he converted from Roman Catholicism to Islam, although he has denied this.

The Workers Party of Britain appears to be a left-wing manifestation of that recent political phenomenon, populism. On its website the Party states it is a response to a need following the defeat of Corbynism. It believes:

• The importance of a planned economy directing the role of the state.
• Free-market fundamentalism has gutted British industry, castrated society and destabilised the working class.
• The state should guide economic life.
• The working class needs to be united on shared class interests to struggle for socialism.
• Countries that have tried to build the socialist new world include the USSR, China, Cuba et al.
• Brexit is a positive move to secure Britain’s independence to pursue fiscal and monetary policies and take key utilities and transport into public ownership.

There is ‘A ten-point programme for workers’ promoted on the Party’s website that sits easily with left-Labour aspirations. It has garnered the support of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), which situates itself in the tradition of Stalinism and Maoism. Indeed, Galloway’s deputy leader Joti Brar is from a family closely associated with the CPGB (ML). For the Workers Party of Britain the problem is free-market capitalism, the solution… state capitalism.

Galloway has been here before of course. In 2005 he did even better, winning the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency for Respect, a political grouping backed on that occasion by the Socialist Workers Party. A parting of the ways quickly followed and it would seem he has moved from the neo-Trotskyist camp to the neo-Stalinist one. Either way, the prospects for democracy would be dim should such a grouping ever succeed.

Is it a party at all, or a Galloway supporters’ club? It seems highly unlikely that some John or Joan Smith standing for the Workers Party of Britain in Batley and Spen would have garnered anything close to 8,000 votes and their performances elsewhere have been derisory.

Personality politics blurs the line between those who’d style themselves left or right wing. Thus George Galloway was quite sanguine about sharing a platform at a Brexit rally with Nigel Farage. The public moment being far more crucial than principles.

The charismatic leader, or a leader who thinks himself charismatic, becomes all important. A previous attempt to displace Labour as the party of the working class in Yorkshire was the now less than marginal Socialist Labour Party led by Arthur Scargill who tried to politically exploit the prominence he gained from the 1984/85 miners’ strike. Indeed, the CPGB (M-L) was a split from it.

What these parties have in common is being political cul-de-sacs. Setting aside implications of serious democratic deficit in its politics, should the Workers Party actually succeed in displacing the Labour Party nothing much would change for the working class.

With Galloway as prime minister implementing his 10-point plan the workers would still be working for wages that represent only a portion of the value their labour power creates. After all, ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ has successfully created numerous billionaires while the working masses most definitely do not have control of the means of production and distribution.

In other words, the Workers Party in power would replace capitalism with capitalism, and a less successful version of capitalism if some the models quoted on the Party’s website are anything to go by.

The Batley and Spen by-election is a demonstration that there are no answers to the problems created by capitalism for the working class in any of the parties on offer, major or minor, left wing or right wing.

Kim Leadbeater MP made the usual platitudinous vague promises to serve all the community, bring people together and further local interests. Had the Tory won he would have spouted an almost identical speech. Similarly, the LibDem. Galloway would undoubtedly have been more vocally belligerent, but it would have amounted to the same.

This is because community divisions, Brexit, economic decline and the plethora of other problems are rooted in capitalism. The dreadful murder of Kim Leadbeater’s sister Jo Cox, the then sitting MP, was an extreme example of politics under capitalism. It is a system wasteful of human lives that is immune to political point scoring.

The Labour Party supporter decrying George Galloway for undermining the Leadbeater vote remains politically blind, as presently all too many are. There are no short cuts, no inspired leaders, no previous models to draw on. Only a majority recognition of the need for a system of common ownership of economic means, moneyless and cooperative – socialism – can address those problems people have in common, even as they seem to be divided.

Until popular delusions can be effectively dispersed the people of Batley and Spen and everywhere else in the world will continue to labour for the pecuniary benefit of the capitalist few.

Dave Alton

Islam and Socialism (2005)

From the October 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Socialism and Islam are very close, other than on the existence of God” (George Galloway, Sunday Times, 14 August).

We’ve heard of Jesus the Socialist. Now it’s Mohammed the Socialist. What next? As the MP for Bethnal Green, elected by Muslim votes and with the help of the SWP, Galloway would say this. Even so, it is a curious statement for him, as a Catholic who claims to be a socialist, to have made, acknowledging as it does that socialists don’t accept “the existence of God”.

Since, like all religions, islam lays down precepts for organising life on Earth as well as on what to do to get to heaven (and avoid hell), is there any basis for Galloway’s claim that islam is very close to socialism if its religious side is overlooked?

The French historian and orientalist, Maxime Rodinson, who died last year and who adopted a generally Marxist-materialist approach (even though, like Galloway, entertaining some illusions about Russia), certainly didn’t think so. In his Islam and Capitalism (1966) (written to refute the view that islam was an impediment to the economic development of Muslim countries), he wrote:

“Economic activity, the search for profit, trade, and, consequently, production for the market, are looked upon with no less favour by Muslim tradition than by the Koran itself” (p. 16).

“[T]he justice advocated by the ideology of the Koran is not that which socialist thought has established as the ideal of a large section of modern society. Muhammad was not a socialist” (p. 23).

“The alleged fundamental opposition of Islam to capitalism is a myth, whether this view be put forward with good intentions or bad” (p. 155).

“[T]he notion that it is possible to use the traditional concept of property found in the Sunnah, and the relative restrictions it imposes, in order to advocate and promote a move by Muslim societies towards socialist structures . . . is utterly fantastic” (p. 175).

In a previous book (1961), Mohammed, Rodinson had provided a materialist explanation of the origins of islam. In Mohammed’s time (he was born about 571 of the present era and died in 632), the Arabian peninsula was, we can see now, in a process of transition from tribal society, which was breaking down, to a state, for which Mohammed was to be instrumental in laying the foundations.

As Rodinson described it:

“A mercantile economy was growing up in the chinks of the nomadic world. As well as barter, money transactions using dinars (gold derniers) and dirhams (silver drachmae) were becoming commonplace. The Bedouin borrowed from the rich merchants of the towns, got into debt and were sold into slavery or at any rate reduced to dependent status. The disintegration of tribal society had begun. Large and prosperous markets grew up, like the one at Ukaz, attracting foreigners as well as Arabs from every tribe. The tribal limits had been overstepped”.

Mohammed himself, although from a modest background, had become one of the wealthy merchants that had emerged, but he realised that something needed to be done to keep Arab society from completely disintegrating under the impact of the unbridled spread of money-commodity relations. His solution was to create a new Arab community welded together by a new religion that would regulate the emerging money/trading economy by imposing some obligations on the rich and some relief for the poor.

Of course as a mystic, Mohammed was not as rationally calculating as this but expressed himself in religious terms. Thus, in the koran (which he believed was dictated to him by the archangel Gabriel, but which in fact, whether he realised it or not, expressed his own thoughts), the greedy and selfish rich are denounced (it is Allah, the Zeus of the pre-islam Arabian pantheon who Mohammed makes dismiss his fellow gods as fakes, who is purportedly speaking):

“Whoso is mean and bumptious on account of his wealth,

Who denies the most excellent reward,

We shall smooth his way to ultimate misery.

His fortune shall not profit him when he falls into the abyss”

(Koran xcii, 8-11)

Rodinson describes some of the regulations that Mohammed brought in when in 627, after slaughtering the previous rulers, he became the ruler of Medina:

“There are a number of articles laying down fairly strict rules about inheritances. This was apparently necessary in the unsettled situation which resulted from the disintegration of the tribal structure. The stronger must have found it easier to lay hands on the family or tribal possessions of the weaker. The rule of the Koran guaranteed everyone his share, which was worked out in a somewhat complicated fashion. Women were allowed a share in the property. (This seems to have been the custom in Mecca, although not in Medina.). Admittedly their share was only half that of the men . . . Slavery, naturally, persisted. People were urged to treat slaves well and encourage them to gain their freedom.. . . Loans at interest or, more probably, some form of them, were forbidden. This prescription seems in practice to have been aimed chiefly at those who, in the early days of the move to Medina, refused to make loans to the needy without interest . . . But there seems to have been no intention of prohibiting the normal practices of Meccan trade.”

So what does Mohammed’s “socialism” amount to? Only certain rules to prevent the excesses of the rich from leading to the decomposition of society in 7th century Arabia, but which still accepted the basis of the money/trading economy that had emerged and was spreading. The economic precepts of the koran laid down a framework for the less disruptive functioning of such an economy, placing some obligations on the rich to help the poor while still accepting the division of society into rich and poor.

No doubt it is these limits on the unbridled and selfish accumulation and use of wealth by private individuals that is behind Galloway’s claim that “socialism and islam are very close”. But this reveals more about his conception of “socialism” than it does about islam. As a former Labour MP, he still thinks in terms of socialism being the control or regulation of capitalism in the interest of the non-rich. But that’s not socialism, but reformism. Islam is no more incompatible with this than it is with capitalism. In fact, it is very close to it, except when the religious element which gives its clerics an undue say is brought back. Socialism, properly understood as a non-monetary, non-market society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, and islam have nothing in common.

Adam Buick

Red Snapper: Sound bites and unsound nibbles (2005)

The Red Snapper column from the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

” I don’t look like a millionaire, I don’t act like a millionaire, I am not a millionaire.”

George Galloway, RESPECT MP, ahead of addressing the Washington senators who have accused him of receiving vouchers for millions of barrels of oil from Saddam Hussein’s regime. Daily Mail, May 17th.

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” They chose me. Can’t you find it even within yourself even to congratulate me?”

George Galloway again on his election victory to Jeremy Paxman, from The Guardian, May 7th.

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” We expect the Revolution will create entirely new genres to expand the definition of video games,” he said to loud cheers in the hall.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, on a new console, BBC Technology, May 17

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“People remembered why they had lost trust in Tony Blair, but they couldn’t see any real difference between the Tories and Labour, so we lost out on that.”

Lynton Crosby, Tory Party campaign director, Independent, May 20

” A student who misbehaves gets two verbal warnings, then detention for one hour and finally a day in the isolation unit. It is very rare that a student gets sent there for three days.”

Sir Dexter Hutt, executive headmaster of three schools in Birmingham, where he has introduced isolation rooms, Sunday Times, May 15

Red Snapper: Sound bites and unsound nibbles (2005)

The Red Snapper column from the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

“A moustachioed demagogue.”

Labour MP Oona King’s election team on George Galloway. Guardian, April12th.

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“The tension, the atmosphere [in Israel] looks like the eve of the civil war. “

Ariel Sharon on the current situation in Israel. Independent, 12th April

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“All my life I was defending Jews, now for the first time I’m taking steps to protect me from Jews. ” 

Ariel Sharon again, Independent, April 12th

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“I love a fight…I love coming out to Tories’ seats and roughing them up a bit. That is what elections are all about.  “

John Prescott, Guardian, March 19th

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“You can walk down the street and see who’s working class and who’s middle class. It’s in the way we drive, the way we are, the way we dress. I am not getting back into whether I am middle class – clearly I am! “

John Prescott again, Guardian, March 19th

A so-called socialist in parliament (2006)

From the July 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Respect MP George Galloway, backed by the SWP, is a counter-example of how a lone Socialist MP should behave.

George Galloway is a corrupt and corrupting man.  Not corrupt in the sense in which a good capitalist would understand – grubbing for money in brown envelopes, a wide boy with an eye for the main chance when the price is right.  His success in the libel courts, which only understand the pecuniary corruption which is such a threat to capitalists’ profits, underlines this.  His corruption is one of a sort more familiar to the workers’ movement: a man giddy on success and status born from his ability to be at the centre of things.

The US Senate enquiry – in which he displayed his prolixity with sufficient robustness and deftness as to be able to have scored a victory by speaking truth to power and rebutting their slanderous lies – proved the point despite all his bluster.  The outcome of their enquiry was not that he had trousered cash corruptly obtained from the Oil For Food Programme set up by the UN under the Iraq sanctions regime – no matter how much they wanted that to be the outcome and the press trumpeted that likely outcome.  The truth was subtler than that.  It revealed how Galloway’s Mariam Appeal had been funded chiefly by a man called Fawaz Zuriekat – who was in all likelihood (according to the Senate investigation) a recipient of such theft.

Whether Galloway knew this or not is irrelevant.  As he rightly notes, the rest of the cash came from a handful of Saudi princes and potentates; but therein lies the real truth of his corruption.  Everything he is now is based on the success and prominence the Mariam Appeal won for him – it made his reputation as an opponent of the siege and attack on Iraq; but that appeal was funded by powerful capitalists with vested anti-working class interests in the Middle East and beyond.

The effect of this can be clearly seen in his parliamentary behaviour.  At the best of time a notoriously lax MP (he famously managed to miss a key vote on the terrorism act that the Government only won by one vote); however, when he does raise questions they almost always relate to Israel and the government’s behaviour towards it.  His primary purpose is to be a cheerleader for the ruling class in the Arab world against the ruling class in Britain and America – presumably in the name of some sort of  anti-imperialism, a doctrine long used by capitalists in relatively weak countries to try and pursue their ends.

The indication of his worthlessness was on 8 May when he secured an adjournment debate.  This is an opportunity open under parliamentary procedure for all MPs to be able to make speeches and have a reply from a government Minister on the subject of their choosing, lasting about 40 minutes all told.   The MP, who maintains that the fall of the Soviet Union was the saddest day of his life and whose biographies still refer to him as a socialist, chose to spend his nearly two thousand words in a fifteen-minute speech not on attacking capitalism, revealing its brutalities and its failure.

Instead, true to his egomaniacal form, he chose to discuss press regulation and call upon the government to make “thorough caps on media ownership, especially ownership by foreign billionaires whose loyalty is certainly not to this country.”  He dwelt extensively on how beset and abused he himself was by the media, as a basis for this call for a reform.  This, apparently, is the tribune of the working class, the voice of the oppressed majority – a so-called socialist in parliament.

What a Socialist could do

As the Socialist Standard has demonstrated for over a hundred years, two thousand words is plenty to incisively damn capitalism and point the way towards socialism.  The condition of the working class is such that it would be easy to find detailed cases and generally observable trends that need and deserve the light of day – ignored by the mainstream parties in their open support of capitalism.  The endless sophistries from their own mouths are meat enough for socialist attack. 

Galloway, however, is a living confirmation of the Socialist Party’s case of avoiding leadership and leaders in our movement.  The SWP and its Respect front are tied to this man and his spurious reputation.

Obviously, he is not the first.  The Communist Party had MPs in Parliament – even the trotskyist Militant Tendency managed to claim some MPs as their own in the 1980’s.   Usually, they were part of a minority of one, unable to make any real effect on the proceedings of Parliament.

The Socialist Party, though, maintains its intention to send delegates to parliament.  Not as leaders, but as servants of the cause – with a specific job to do.  The very minimum we could expect of a small number of socialist MPs is that they use the resources of parliament to uncover as much detail and information as they can about what is happening under capitalism to the working class.  The machinery of government collects vast reams of data in the course of its daily business, but data is worthless unless it is put into context and turned into information.

They could add to this by using the weapon of the parliamentary question, to try and force the government to give up more information and to ensure that it has an incentive to collect the relevant data in order to be able to answer such questions.  This would have the added advantage of giving the opportunity of getting our agenda onto the television and other media.

Whilst the votes of a small handful of MPs may not matter overall, their voices also would carry weight – and socialists in parliament would be able to put the case for socialism alongside defending the interests of the working class in their day to day struggle – such as during any major strikes or the like.  This would allow us to expose the sitting MPs of the capitalist parties and assist workers in rallying to the cause of their class – a platform from which to speak to the whole world.

Moreover, we would use whatever votes we would have while a minority to vote in the interests of the working class.  This would not be something for the still small conscience of our delegates but a matter for our movement to decide and instruct them upon – a means of being grit in the parliamentary machine as well as one of demonstrating our greater democratic legitimacy.  The growth of the socialist movement is the advance of the working class movement.  Until such time as the movement is able to take control of the whole of society, we will push for our common interests.  Not with some plan of making capitalism work for us, or with a set of reforms in mind but as a mill stone round the neck of capital.

The case for socialism rests on the understanding of the workers.  The working class’s support is needed for the ongoing existence of capitalism.  Once we understand our real interest and begin to consciously organise to get it no leader or deceiver is going to be able to deflect us from our course, and the days of the likes of Galloway will be numbered.   Until then the workers get the leaders and representatives they choose and deserve.  The job of socialists here and now if to promote the case for using our party as a weapon in the class struggle.  We don’t need to be in parliament to demonstrate how worthless Galloway and his followers are to the workers’ movement. 

Going to Parliament is not the act of good boys but of rebels fighting canny.

Pik Smeet

RESPECT: the “unity” coalition (2004)

From the April 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

A new political gathering on the left wing has been formed and is attracting some attention to itself of late. But what is this group and what will it mean for the working class?

R.E.S.P.E.C.T, standing for “Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environment, Community, and Trade Unionism” was formed on 25 January when over one thousand people gathered in central London for the launching of the new organisation.  The group has been initiated by ex-Labour MP George Galloway, posing as some kind of figurehead, and the Socialist Workers Party, the Stop the War Coalition, and various smatterings of other left wing groups and trade unions.

The initial declaration of this new organisation uses the language of socialism: “We want a world in which the democratic demands of the people are carried out; a world based on need not profit; a world where solidarity rather than self-interest is the spirit of the age”.

Observers will have noticed that they remain silent on how this new world is to be obtained, instead focussing on the mass discontent whipped up by the political blunderings of George Bush, Tony Blair and other spokesmen of the western capitalist class, in particular on the recent invasion of Iraq and the anti-war sentiment this provoked.

The anti-war movement was vast up to a point, and served as yet another example of how capitalism’s interests are not tied up with those of the workers. The spontaneous outburst of protest against imperialist war was an inspiring event for any socialist, but, as we know, the movement was massively ignored by the powers-that-be, and led to a feeling of let-down among those workers who thought that capitalist parties represented them. Now that the war has reached its conclusion, many people may be searching for a new “political alternative”.

Respect has stated on several occasions that it wishes to be that alternative. For instance:

  “But the yearning for a political alternative is even wider than the anti-war movement. Pensioners, students, trade unionists, Muslims and other faith groups, socialists, ethnic minorities and many others have been deeply disappointed by the authoritarian social policies and profit-centred, neo-liberal economic strategy of the government.”

However, so far they have held back from talking about how they intend to get to this new alternative or even about whether they think it will work within the present economic system. The majority of their propaganda to date consists of highlighting the recent problems of the capitalist class in Britain and elsewhere, but where they fail is that they seem to be under the impression that the current administrators of capitalism are unpleasant, lying manipulators and exploiters by choice rather than the system itself being to blame.

On some level it is perhaps unfair to judge just yet, since Respect is young and has yet to make an impact on the political scene, and on one level they are correct: there is a yearning for change. There has been a yearning for change ever since class society developed, that yearning of course is more generally known in socialist circles as the product of the class struggle. The class struggle is the irrefutable antagonism of interests in present society between the class that owns and profits from the means of production, and the class that creates the wealth but does not possess any means of producing wealth of their own. Those who “yearn for change” are certainly aware of some form of injustice or antagonism inherent in present-day society, and may be attracted to the new Respect coalition. Unfortunately, since Respect is not direct about what exactly they are aiming for, and how it is to be achieved, they run the risk of becoming caught in the quagmire of popular but ineffectual reformism.

List of Reforms

To date, Respect has provided the working class with promises for a better world, peace instead of war, riches instead of poverty, happiness instead of misery, but is quite silent on a possible future away from capitalism, and have instead stated the following aims to adjust the present economic system:

1. An end to the war and occupation of Iraq. We will not join any further imperialist wars.
2. An education system that is not dependent on the ability to pay, that is comprehensive and gives an equal chance in life to every child no matter how wealthy or poor their parents, from nursery to university.
3. A publicly owned and funded, democratically controlled NHS, free to all users.
4. Pensions that are linked to average earnings.
5. Raising the minimum wage to the European Union decency threshold of £7.40 an hour.
6. Tax the rich to fund welfare and to close the growing gap between the poor and the wealthy few.
7. The repeal of the Tory anti-union laws.
8. Opposition to all form of discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs (or lack of them), sexual orientation, disabilities, national origin or citizenship.
9. The right to self-determination of every individual in relation to their religious (or non-religious) beliefs, as well as sexual choices.
10. The defence of the rights of refugees and asylum seekers. Opposition to the European Union’s ‘Fortress Europe’ policies.
11. We will strongly oppose the anti-European xenophobic right wing in any Euro referendum. But we oppose the ‘stability pact’ that the European Union seeks to impose on all those who join the euro. This pact would outlaw government deficit spending and reinforce the drive to privatise and deregulate the economy and we will therefore vote ‘No’ in any referendum on this issue.
12. Support for the people of Palestine and opposition to the apartheid system that oppresses them.
13. An end to the destruction of the environment by states and corporations for whom profit is more important than sustaining the natural world on which all life depends.

So ends this rather lengthy list of reforms and promises.  It is aimed at drawing in many disillusioned people eager to see the better world promised come to realisation. The reforms won’t work though, because of a basic misunderstanding of the type of society we live in. We live in a capitalist society, a society where goods are only produced for profit. In such a society, it’s logical that the creation of profits must take precedence over everything else. Hence the Socialist Party’s policy of not advocating reforms, since attempting to attack this profit-making machine with piecemeal reforms, rather than consistently aiming for the complete abolition of capitalism itself, is doomed to failure and frustration.

There is a chance those among the SWP already know this, since it ties in with the Trotskyist approach to reforms and struggle, but as long as they hold that the working class as unable to develop a revolutionary understanding of society, they will continue to attempt to deceive us by providing us with “transitional demands” in the hope that the workers will become so enraged at capitalism being unable to work in their interests that they will want a revolution. In reality people can simply become disillusioned with the reforms put forward by the left wing and abandon any interest in politics.

It would be of interest to see just how large a hold the SWP has on the rest of the coalition, as they reportedly made up half of the delegates at the founding conference. Speculation on the chance Respect may go the way of the Socialist Alliance seems already to have entered the minds of many people, and it’s a strong possibility that infighting between the SWP and the other groups may break out just as it did in the SA.

Voices from the remnants of the Socialist Alliance

At the conference to launch Respect in Portsmouth, it was interesting to note that questions from the audience and replies from the speakers hinted that the Socialist Alliance was a spent force, and one that nobody would wish to see again. It seemed to be held by the audience of students and workers that the SA had failed miserably, and that its policies had been ineffectual and misguided from the very start.

While this would be a ray of hope to revolutionary Marxists that the working class are starting to become increasingly annoyed at Trotskyist attempts to manipulate them, it’s of interest how some of the parties who made up the SA are reacting to the Respect Coalition.

The so-called “Socialist Party” of England and Wales (SPEW, formerly known as Militant Labour) have issued a statement to the new coalition, claiming that they will support them in the European elections but feel unable to join with them for the moment. They dredged up the past where they butted heads with the SWP inside the SA, with the end result that they left the organisation and the SWP consolidated its stranglehold. They also appear to be upset that they were not invited to join with the coalition earlier, a strong indication of the antagonism between Militant and the SWP, but since they are not a part of the new coalition (something the SWP is certainly pleased about) it seems they will have little effect on the future of Respect.

Although the Communist Party of Britain (who publish the Morning Star) never was a part of the Socialist Alliance, their reasons for not joining with the Respect Coalition shed light on the SWP’s relationship with the rest of the Leninist Left. In a statement on the new group they said:

    “We reject participation in the Respect Coalition proposed by George Galloway and  others. It is a narrowly-based front for the SWP which has emerged from the remnants of the failed Socialist Alliance, and is likely to divide not only the labour movement but  the anti-war movement as well. Its main constituent organisation holds quite different views to those of our party on the role and potential of the trade union movement and its leadership,     on the national question and the nature of imperialism, and on the socialist countries past and present.”

The text is somewhat sceptical as to the ability of the non-SWP factions in Respect to resist an attempt by the SWP to overwhelm the entire organisation, but time will tell if such scepticism is well founded.

Other statements follow that the CPB believe the new coalition could be harmful to a movement that wishes to “recapture” the Labour Party and “return” it to the interests of the working class. How exactly a pro-capitalist party such as Labour, which is and always has been for the continued existence of capital, can be turned towards the interests of socialism is something that will remain a mystery.

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) remained in the Socialist Alliance, and is a small but vocal group of Trotskyists, so far refusing to join Respect and heaping all manner of warnings of impending disaster on its reformist and opportunist tactics. Focussing on George Galloway, who has been set up as a “leading figure” in the coalition, they have attacked his pathetic claim that he needs “£150,000 a year to function as a leading figure” and also his shady ties to the former dictatorship in Iraq. The AWL attacks Respect’s soft approach to socialism, in so far as Respect’s only mention of the word socialism is that it makes up the “S” in the word R.E.S.P.E.C.T.  Up to now the AWL has been the most eloquent voice of protest and warning heard from the Leninist Left, but its repeated calls for the standard Trotskyist demands of nationalisation and state control do not impress the revolutionary Marxist nor any worker who does not simply wish to see the current free market regime replaced with a system based on state capital.

While the CPGB (not to be confused with the old CPGB whose name they picked up and who publish the Weekly Worker) has joined with the Respect Coalition, like other groups, it has voiced concern about overwhelming SWP involvement in the new coalition’s politics, via a leaflet that they distributed at the Portsmouth meeting, which is summed up in the following:

 “In order to keep a disparate alliance together, the Socialist Workers Party, which will surely make up the bulk of the convention, and its allies are     junking principle after principle to launch Respect.”

We are certainly hearing voices of caution from several groups, some outside of the Socialist Alliance and some within, who are wary of SWP interference in this attempted new movement in left wing politics.  This could be a simply matter of political feuding; some left groups may be jealous of the SWP’s numbers and disturbing tendency to use this to pack meetings or on some occasions intimidate and/or initiate violent attacks on its political opponents.  

However, we should not forget that a lot of these groups would not for a moment hesitate to act in the undemocratic and pushy manner that the SWP do, if they thought it would hasten their aim of introducing a state capitalist regime in Britain such as that which was started by the Bolsheviks in Russia.

Conclusion

While it may seem unfair to judge a new political movement before it has had an effective chance to prove itself, it would seem that we should not get our hopes up for Respect. As stated and proved, they have made it clear they are advocating reforms to capitalism, and while these reforms may at first seem attractive, it is certain they would always be at odds with the very nature of the economic system we live in, i.e., capitalism. Lacking an honest revolutionary stance for a new society, reformism becomes caught in a pointless and frustrating circular battle with an economic system that is based on exploitation. As long as the accumulation of capital takes precedence, either in the hands of the individual capitalist or state institutions, the primary concern of exploitation of labour and making profit will take precedence over the concerns of human need.

It may seem cynical to write off the coalition completely, but when even former allies in the Socialist Alliance are showing such doubts on its ability to create a new workers movement, it’s clear to socialists that Respect should be treated with caution if not scepticism. The fact that if and when Respect have any success, George Galloway is bound to come under attack by the media for his supposed friendly links to the old regime in Iraq. A man such as Galloway with such a dubious political background can only spell trouble for Respect’s appearance as credible left wing organisation, but for the moment they seem oblivious to this danger.

One thing is certain though, a socialist organisation will get nowhere without a firm grasp of democracy, sound Marxist principle, a disdain to conceal its socialist objective, and a membership in full possession of the facts about current society and the revolutionary alternative. Respect has none of these organisational principles, and is showing no sign of understanding or desiring to develop any of them.

Dan Read