Comrade Tami has posted her resignation from Socialist Resistance on her blog. She is politically and factually wrong on most points. This is a quick reply. Text in italics is from her statement.
Members of SR have at various times defended the behaviour of George Galloway, refused to oppose his support for Blair to be blown up by suicide bomb and most recently, refused to recognise the absolutely corrupt nature of the organisation following the candidate selection meetings in Birmingham.
When George Galloway has done things worth defending we have done so. Nobody who had been involved for any length of in Respect would say that we have uncritically defended him. In Tower Hamlets I repeatedly tried to get Labour Movement methods of accountability introduced. In the National Council SR supporters were prominent in attempts to get a discussion of Big Brother and again were constantly raising the accountability issue. Galloway never advocated using suicide bombing.
As for the Birmingham selection process Labour Party constituencies up and down the country have known similar shenanigans. The difference is that they don’t always get reported in the left press and that Labour’s apparatus is free to drop and impose candidates pretty much at will.
Every time evidence presents itself as clearly as possible that Respect is going nowhere, SR comrades simply try to explain it away and claim that more work needs to be done to improve Respect.
That’s a bit rich from someone about to join the Labour Party. Respect haven’t voted for any wars, started any wars, sold off any public services, deported any asylum seekers, sold any peerages, facilitated bribing the Saudi Royal family, filled any prisons with the illiterate and the mentally ill. Labour has long since demonstrated its rottenness. The problems of Respect, and they are so many I chose to leave it, are tiny compared to the opportunist, careerist morass that Labour is.
Further, I have become convinced that Respect is not a socialist organisation. It is not based in the working class and gears its ideas and propaganda towards the anti-war movement alone.
Most socialist organisations in Britain made some sort of accomodation to British imperialism. One of Respect’s distinguishing features is that it has been consistently anti-imperialist. Where there have been strikes and industrial action Respect has been present and supportive. When Labour MPs were scabbing on the firefighters Galloway was speaking at meeting in support of them. Every single struggle against neo-liberalism has engaged Respect members in their areas, often in direct opposition to sell-offs and cuts by Labour councils.
Many of the recent half-hearted attempts by Respect to get trade unionists involved, such as the November trade union conference, come too little and too late. Given the unpopularity of Blair, any decent alternative to New Labour should be recruiting people by the handful – but this simply has not occurred.
This is undeniable. It is the organisation’s single biggest weakness and contributed to me leaving. This has also been a constant theme in what SR has said and written about the organisation. But the level of class struggle in Britain is at an historic low. It’s hard to point to any organisation which is growing significantly.
Increasingly, an emphasis has been placed on “getting elected” and members of SR have fallen into this trap no matter how rubbish the positions of the candidates. Most recently with the fiasco in Birmingham, one need only read the interview with the Respect candidate there to see that he has no class consciousness and may or may not have a political consciousness at all.
Have some Respect candidates fought and won on a clientalist basis? Absolutely. So have many Labour and Lib-Dem candidates. In Newham the Irish Catholic vote used to be delivered to a Freemason dominated Labour council on the basis of planning permissions and drinks licenses. That was at the time of a strong Bennite left in the area. This is what sometimes happens in organisations that are not entirely comprised of aspirant Bolsheviks. Read what most Labour councillors have to say about anything these days and they sound more like personnel managers than politicians.
Respect has had a very bad record on being honest and open about defending LGBT rights and a woman’s right to choose (abortion, not the hijab). Their upcoming women’s conference is supposed to be addressing these issues and things like the problem with “raunch culture” while their members have handed out leaflets outside mosques advocating the shutting down of strip clubs on a moral basis and Galloway called for those using the clubs to be publicly “named and shamed”.
Again nothing happens in a vacuum. A lot of what used to comprise the women’s and LGBT movements have become institutionalised and play a very small role in active politics. That and the weight of socially conservative Respect members has meant that it has been less forthright on these issues than it should have been. But remember it was SR supporters who had a fight around the issues of abortion and LGBT rights inside Respect
While the view of Respect has changed to being marginally more critical among the majority of the supporters of SR since I have been involved, it remains the case that this is a fundamental and essential campaign of the organisation and will continue to be for some time to come.
This is inaccurate. Where it is possible to work prooductively inside Respect comrades continue to. Many SR supporters are not able to attend Respect meetings because their Respect branch ceased functioning. Others have left. Others have downgraded their activity in it but remain members in anticipation of positive developments. Rather we have started shifting the focus of our activity to environmental issues, anti-imperialism and internationalism. Coming months will see us develop more fully the work that we have started on ecosocialism because we are convinced that meeting the challenge that capitalism poses to humanity in the next years will help re-define socialism in the twenty first century.
I do think that whatever comes next for the British left must be based in or around and not outside of the trade union movement. Until the LP decisively breaks the trade union link and until much more of the working class stops thinking of it as their party, I believe it is where socialists should be – not simply practicing “entryism” but participating fully in the party and supporting left MPs and campaigns of the left and fervently opposing Blairism and Brownism.
Further, I have been studying quite a bit in my British History course about the origins and history of the Labour Party and despite the New Labour leadership which is like a cancerous growth feeding off of the good will of the working class, it is evident to me that this is still the party of our class.
…still has a number of MPs who are excellent social activists and fighters who are opposed to the war and racism and for social justice.
Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and others hold political views much closer to my own and have a much clearer record of defending women’s rights, LGBT rights, workers’ rights and immigrant rights than any current Respect politician I can think of.I remain strongly committed to left unity, which is one of the most important things that I believe must happen in the future if progress is to be made.
The trouble is that Jeremy and John are the only two really decent Labour MPs anyone can think of anymore. On top of that after ten years of Labour in power not one MP from the new intakes has shown themselves to be much better t
han a gutless pro-war imperialist. Socialist Resistance was established on the basis that social democracy has begun losing its grip on the most advanced sections of the working class, that it was transforming into an actively neo-liberal organisation and that the union bureacracy are its accomplices in this. Nothing that Tami has said contradicts these assertions. Socialist Resistance will continue to be the flagship paper for socialists in Britain who want to see a class struggle, socialist, anti-imperialist, democratic mass party to break the hold of New Labour over the British working class.
Liam redux 
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