I haven’t a clue how many Respect candidates will be elected in Tower Hamlets. Canvassing today has not made me any the wiser. One old woman said she couldn’t vote for Respect after seeing her MP on Big Brother. Unlike comrades from a more state capitalist tradition I always say that most people in Respect thought it was an embarrassing, horrible mistake. Another couple said that they had tried to get some problems sorted out through the constituency office and hadn’t had a reply. One agreed to give her phone number so we could contact her again. The other said he was voting BNP and slammed the door shut. Yet other comrades in adjacent tower blocks had much more positive experiences.

One of the worrying things is that Respect could get a group of twenty councillors elected. Depending on who they are they could be twenty class struggle heroes. They might equally be twenty easily influenced, inexperienced novices who could be persuaded to shut all the libraries and abolish old people to save money. It reminds me a bit of the Lenin Levy that Stalin brought into the Bolshevik Party. (What do you mean you don’t know what the Lenin Levy was?)

Seize control?

There’s a lot of time wasting in every election campaign. Today it was time wasting of a world class standard. I left home just after 10am. It was after 1pm before I got to knock on a door in my own estate. There was forty minutes frantic milling around outside Liverpool Street station. A pretty impressive march of 3-400 election workers to Respect HQ. More heavy-duty milling. Splitting into teams. Arguments about size of teams for each ward. Then about ten of us headed back to this ward where we hung around for about half an hour waiting on canvass lists and literature. Until this sort of thing is more smoothly organised I’d be very reluctant to take part in a Respect led attempt to seize control of the state.

Back on the knocker at 11am tomorrow without any long detours and hanging around.

Here’s a link to a nice little video. http://www.sionphoto.com/RESPECTWMV.wmv