Respect as we have known it for the last four years ­ as an alliance
principally between the SWP and George Galloway ­ is over. Following the
decision of the SWP central committee last Wednesday that the Respect
conference will go ahead as planned and unchanged ­ in other words on a
completely undemocratic basis twenty one members of the none-SWP part of the
National Council have issued a call for an alternative conference that on
the theme of renew Respect. Work is going ahead to build it on the broadest
basis possible.

It is a remarkable situation. The SWP leadership have managed to alienate
themselves virtually all of the active none-SWP members of the national
among them are: Linda Smith National Chair, Salma Yaqoob National
Vice-Chair, Victoria Brittain writer and playwright, George Galloway the
Respect MP, Jerry Hicks leading industrial militant and member of the SWP at
he start of this, Ken Loach, Abjol Miah the leader of Respect on Tower
Hamlets Council, Yvonne Ridley jounalist, and Nick Wrack - the first
national chair of Respect and a member of the SWP when this debate started.

No other organisation or nationally known individual have remained with the
SWP side in this.

Faced with a Respect conference on November 17^th and 18 which is organised
on a totally undemocratic and which will have a built in SWP majority after
a campaign by the SWP for delegates 12 members of the National Council have
called an alternative conference on November 17^th on the theme of Renew
Respect. Initial speakers include George Galloway MP, Linda Smith National
chair of Respect, Salma Yaqoob, national vice chair and Ken Loach, National
Council member. It will start the process of rebuilding Respect on a
difference and more inclusive basis.

The start of the crisis was the SWP¹s disastrous reaction to a letter from
George Galloway to the national council at the end of August. This raised
some home truths about the development of Respect, which some of us had been
raising for a long time, and made some modest proposals towards greater
plurality. The letter was supportable but did not go far enough. The issue
behind it was whether the SWP would relax the tight control which they
exerted on Respect and accept some diversity particularly at the level of
the leadership bodies and the national office.

The letter could have opened up an over-due and fruitful discussion about
the development of Respect as a more inclusive organisation with a greater
national presence. If the SWP had been prepared to discuss the issues
politically, make some compromises ­ even symbolic compromises ­ to show
that they were prepared to take other people¹s views into account and that
Respect was not a wholly-owned subsidiary of the SWP there could have been a
positive outcome.

Instead they went in totally the opposite direction - confirming that they
had no intention of relaxing control. They took the letter as a frontal
attack on the SWP, with all that implies, and launched a nation-wide tour of
SWP districts vilifying George Galloway and scandalously calling him and
Salma Yaqoob (amongst many other things) communalists and characterising the
letter as a part of a right wing attack on the left in Respect.

And the George Galloway they were vilifying was the same George Galloway
that the SWP had repeatedly shielded from criticism from ourselves and
others ever since Respect was founded. They now denounced him for
unaccountability yet at the time of the Big Brother debacle they fought
might and main inside Respect to avoid a word of criticism of his unilateral
decision to go on the programme being expressed by Respect.

At the Respect National Council meeting on September 22 the dispute focussed
on the proposal in the letter for a new post of national organiser alongside
the national secretary. SWP delegates, reflecting their paranoid internal
discussions about George Galloway, came close to driving out of Respect
under conditions which would have collapsed Respect in front of an expected
general election.

The meeting ran out of time and adjourned until September 29, where
agreement was eventually reached that the post would be of equal status with
the National Secretary. There was also a consensus that Nick Wrack ­ a
former national chair of Respect and an SWP member take up the post on a
temporary basis, if possible. When this was activated Nick Wrack was
instructed by the SWP Central Committee to withdraw his name from the frame..
When he refused he was expelled from the SWP. At the same time two workers
in George Galloway¹s office who were members of the SWP were instructed by
the SWP Central Committee to resign their jobs. When they refused they were
also expelled from the SWP.

On Monday October 15 a Respect Executive Committee meeting with an SWP
majority voted against Nick taking up the National Organiser’s post and set
aside the decisions of the NC on the matter. Behind the national organiser
issue was the wider issue of whether Respect was to develop as a pluralist
organisation in which no single component part dominates or controls or one
controlled at every level by the SWP.

The following night there was a meeting of the Conference Arrangements
Committee (CAC), at which Linda Smith, the national chair of Respect, raised
the issue of the constitutionality of the CAC itself (which has never been
endorsed by the NC). She also asked for the membership and financial records
of the student members. She was unable to get such records or resolve the
problem of the CAC itself.

By now the SWP were presenting the battle inside Respect as a battle of
right against left ­ with themselves being the defenders of the socialist
camp inside Respect. This was the same SWP who have always fought to lower
the socialist profile of Respect. Publication after publication came out in
the name of Respect with the SWP in control without a mention of socialism
from cover to cover.

I was one of the first, when the SWP joined the Socialist Alliance in 2000,
to say that the turn they had made towards working with others on the left,
after many years of isolationism, was an important step forward for the
whole of the left. Now after 4 years of the Socialist Alliance and three and
a half years of Respect this turn outwards has effectively come to an end.
It is impossible to see that the SWP with its current leadership and method
of operation playing a positive role in the construction of a broad
pluralist party in the foreseeable future.

In fact even as this battle for Respect has continued the SWP leadership
have been theorising their exit from this strategy. The first bulletin for
he SWP conference (in January) has last minute CC text (written in the
middle of this debate) which argues that the period of the upsurge of
struggle in the mid 1990s and through Seattle and into the first years of
this century which created most of the left parties is starting to wither.
Right-wings currents are developing inside these parties - including the
current opposition inside Respect. It is a short step from this to
concluding that the era of such parties is over and that it is Œtime to
build the party¹. It is hard to see how the SWP can have its heart in
anything it salvages from the mayhem they have created.

Other CC documents in the bulletin reinforce and entrench the sterile model
they SWP have defended for building Respect. For the first time it is openly
argued that Respect is an electoral (united) front for the SWP and that it
is perfectly acceptable to deprioritised it between election and
reprioritise it when an election comes along.

This precisely the model the SWP insisted on imposing on Respect and the
model on which it foundered. What this got completely wrong was the
relationship between the SWP and Respect itself. This was with the SWP as
the dominant organisation with the highest possible public profile and its
own press and priorities with Respect as an electoral wing.

More precisely it foundered on the way it conducted democratic centralism
inside the SWP and the way this shaped the way they functioned in the broad
organisation. This was that the SWP membership would be regimented inside
Respect meetings and conferences in a way which alienated everyone else.
They would be told what to do and how to vote in advance of meetings and
conferences at caucuses prior to the event. In most cases they were told
what to do and how to vote not having been involved in a process of
discussion inside Respect itself.

Inside broad left formations there has to be a real, autonomous political
life in which people who are not members of an organised current can have
confidence that decisions are not being made behind their backs in a
disciplined caucus that will impose its views ­ they have to be confident
that their political contribution can affect political debates.

This means that no revolutionary current can have the Œdisciplined phalanx¹
concept of operation. Except in the case of the degeneration of a broad
left current (as in Brazil) we are not doing entry work or fighting a
bureaucratic leadership. This means in most debates, most of the time,
members of political currents should have the right to express their own
viewpoint irrespective of the majority view in their own current. If this
doesn¹t happen the real balance of opinion is obscured and democracy
negated. Evidently this shouldn¹t be the case on decisive questions of the
interest of the working class and oppressed ­ like sending troops to
Afghanistan. But if there are differences on issues like that, then
membership of a revolutionary current is put in question.

Revolutionary tendencies should avoid like the plague attempts to use their
organisational weight to impose decisions against everyone else. That¹s a
disastrous mode of operation in which democracy is a fake. If a
revolutionary tendency can¹t win its opinions in open and democratic debate,
unless it involves fundamental questions of the interest of the working
class and oppressed, compromises and concessions have to be made. Democracy
is a fake if a revolutionary current says Œdebate is OK, and we¹ll pack
meetings to ensure we win it.

This method is the polar opposite of the way the SWP has worked in Respect.
It is also the polar opposite of the way things must work in a recast and
reshaped Respect which emerges out of this crisis. In Socialist Resistance
we have long advocated such a method. We supported the way Scottish Militant
Labour worked inside the SSP ­ keeping their own organisation but never
intervining in an organisational way inside the SSP. For example never,
under normal circumstances, caususing before meeting in order to ensure that
they were a part of the process of discussion and not imposing an external
discussion. Maybe they did not keep themselved organised enough at some
stages but the general approach they pioneered is one we should continue to
aspire to.