Respect in Tower Hamlets plans to contest all fifty one council seats. Earlier hopes of taking control of the council have been dashed by the Big Brother fiasco. (The photo above is evidence of what a fiasco looks like.) Nevertheless the selection panel fulfilled its brief of selecting a slate of candidates that represents the organisation’s political and cultural diversity. This slate was unanimously approved by an officers’ meeting prior to being ratified by a members’ meeting.

Ten candidates are SWP members. Twenty three are Bengali men. Eight are Bengali women. Two are Somali women. The remainder are white and mixed race. This is broadly in keeping with the profile of both the local organisation and the borough. The members’ meeting to discuss the slate was the most heated in the history of the branch. An opposition emerged which had been silent through the selection process and had not been voiced at the officers’ meeting. Its argument was that some wards needed to have entirely Bangladeshi slates of candidates to maximise the Respect vote.
This view was opposed by the explicitly socialist wing of Respect. No ward in the borough is ethnically homogeneous and having slates which are mixed on the basis of race and gender is a principle. What was being fought out was a clash between the reformist principle that the only thing that matters is winning votes and the idea that an organisation has to have representatives chosen on the basis of their politics.

Forty eight voted for the selection panel’s slate. Many of these were Bangladeshi. Twenty five voted for the minority position and have been fighting an ugly rearguard struggle for a wrong position. This is a debate that had to emerge. The organisation still lacks a framework to bring these ideological conflicts into the open to allow them to be settled in a comradely way. They will emerge under the pressure of events and for Respect to survive and flourish it must provide the space for them to take place.

At the time of writing the situation is still fluid. Respect has a strong slate of candidates. Many of them have had recent experience of involvement in local campaigns and are rapidly developing into very effective leaders. In May several of them will be sitting in the council chamber.

(This Nokia 6230i phone is great. You can get reasonable quality images straight into the blog.)