Respect’s only MP has been telling meetings in his constituency that he is not going to stand for parliament in the next election. In its current state of organisation that is a hammer blow. The other side of the process is that it begins to force Respect to think about what happens when George Galloway is longer addressing the rallies of one and two thousand people and the organisation’s highest profile member is pursuing another career.

The 2005 Respect conference is the opportunity to begin to put the structures in place to prepare a real electoral challenge to New Labour outside the heartlands. In this issue of Socialist Resistance Ken Loach identifies Respect’s absence of a well defined programme as a weakness. At the moment Respect has no culture of debating politics, economics or the roles of elected officials.

By the summer of next year Respect will have several more councillors. It may even be the largest group or possibly in control of one or two London councils. Yet even the strongest branches lack the mechanisms to keep them under political control. We can be confident that the experienced socialists are not likely to be persuaded to sell off the council libraries.

The problem is that we cannot tell how the newly elected councillors who are relatively politically inexperienced will be persuaded to avoid the traps laid for them by council officers and New Labour to oblige them to cut and privatise.

This requires a bedrock of well researched Respect policy, national and local leadership structures which give clear political guidance and means of communication throughout Respect which allow members and branches to support each other. We can predict that if the discussions on politics and economics are not conducted in front of the membership and Respect’s working class electorate they will happen in the offices of the council officers.

Socialist Resistance has consistently argued that Respect is making an essential contribution to the development of a new party for the British working class. At the moment it has not persuaded the majority of the left of the Labour Movement that it is a welcoming home for them.

These militants are used to having their political discussions and activity inside organisations with structures which facilitate them. Rightly or wrongly they do not feel that they will get this in Respect. This are the issues we address in this issue of Socialist Resistance and the positions for which we fight inside Respect.

12 November 2005