The forthcoming issue of Socialist Resistance will have a slightly more polemical cast than usual. This is one of the editorials. I didn’t write it but it indicates our collective thinking pretty clearly. The contrast between the intitiative demonstrated by the Communist Party of Britain described in this report by Andy Newman and Respect’s failure to act is stark.

We’ll also be carrying a piece wading into the AWL but you’ll have to buy the paper to read that.

The inauguration of Gordon Brown and his new deputy leader at the end of June will close a period of relatively heightened debate and slightly more open-minded analysis of the state of working class politics in Britain: but it also represents yet another boat missed by the routinist and blinkered leadership of Respect, who have continued sleep-walking through the process.

The organisation which once set itself the task of building a broad political alternative to the left of Blairism has failed to seize this one-off opportunity.

It has missed a vital chance to raise its profile and present itself as a credible way forward to those considerable sections of the Labour and trade union left who had staked their hopes on a campaign around John McDonnell that might stoke the flames and rekindle hopes of “reclaiming” the Labour Party.

True, McDonnell himself was brought on to Respect platforms, and formal support was proferred to his campaign, for what that was worth: but the fact that the Labour leadership process was not even on the agenda at Respect’s National Council meeting on May 12, and the relish with which leading delegates at that meeting predicted McDonnell’s campaign “dead in the water”, and pronounced for the umpteenth time the demise of the Labour Left, betrayed their underlying indifference to the political task of winning the best of that left to Respect.

Suggestions from Socialist Resistance supporters at that meeting (just weeks after very successful interventions in a number of council elections) that Respect should produce new, targeted, campaign material, preferably a hard-hitting and political tabloid paper, designed to intervene in the Labour leadership and deputy leadership debates and hustings and in the trade unions, were ignored.

So were suggestions of meetings and other initiatives which could raise Respect’s profile as an alternative. The National Council does not meet again until September.

This failure to respond is no accident. It reflects the exceedingly limited objectives set for it by the decisive political force inside Respect, the SWP.

Remarkably, Respect’s officers have apparently decided that Respect itself is “too narrow” an organisation to focus the intervention of the SWP at the National Stop the War march that has been called on June 24 outside the Brown inauguration in Manchester.

Worse, SWP members working in Respect in Manchester, following this approach, have redoubled their efforts to ensure that the organisation does not even produce a local campaigning tabloid for distribution on June 24, after their national comrades rejected any such publication at national level.

Here we have the bizarre spectacle of an organisation that has been deliberately confined to the level of a “coalition” rather than a party to keep it broad, but rejected as insufficiently broad to fly its own banner and speak in its own name at a national demonstration. We can of course be sure that the much narrower SWP will be present with its newspaper and profile proudly on display at the Stop the War march: only Respect is to be kept under wraps.

But it gets worse: while Respect’s national officers have been contemplating their navels since the local elections, other organisations have been taking initiatives to reach out to the disoriented Labour Left and raise some form of political debate – without the slightest flicker of response from Respect.

Compass, a leftish-centre conglomeration of Labourite academics, MPs, commentators and pundits, signed up over 1,000 people to a national conference “shaping our global world” on June 9, a debate firmly within the “reclaim Labour” framework, but allowed to pass without challenge by Respect, which has no equivalent level of political dialogue, and no vehicle to promote the extensive policy alternatives it has developed.

As we report in this issue the Morning Star convened another major discussion event on politics after Blair, this time with a much more working class and trade union-based audience, but again within the Star’s continued framework of “reclaim Labour” – but again with no significant intervention or challenge from Respect.

Yet these are the type of forces that must be won towards the building of a new political alternative: shirking that political fight simply allows a regroupment of the old left, and does nothing to politically strengthen Respect or build the morale of its dwindling numbers of non-aligned activists.

The Respect website also displays this obvious disorientation and weakness: the “Events” panel contains just three feeble items – a sponsored charity run by Cllr Oliur Rahman, an art exhibition that began in January and a cartoon exhibition!

The nearest to a response to the Labour Party debate is a statement from May 17 by George Galloway, immediately after the McDonnell campaign collapsed. This boldly promises that:

“It must now be clear to everyone on the left that the main arenas for rebuilding progressive politics are very far from the Labour Party and its enervated local organisation.”

“Over the coming weeks we will be seeking to discuss with key figures in the trade unions, on the left, in the Labour Party and across the progressive spectrum as a whole what initiatives might be taken to rally and unify our forces. Respect has aspirations to advance the whole left as well as our part of it.”

But while there may be more back-room approaches to a few left union leaders for another series of “fighting Unions” rallies, there is little sign that the trade union intervention is being carried through with any real conviction. The Trade Unions section of the Respect website on June 17 had just six entries for 2007, the most recent dating back to May 29.

A good June 7 statement on the CWU strike ballot is trailed on the home page, but there is no broader sense of seeking to relate politically to the activist left in the unions that rallied to McDonnell while their union leaders grovelled to Brown.

A Respect circular on June 5 calls for volunteers for the June 24 demo, Pride on June 30 and the SWP’s Marxism event on July 5-9. Only subsequently did a hasty circular seek help in mounting an intervention at this year’s UNISON conference.

Socialist Resistance has continued to argue that Respect remains the only plausible base from which a broad and campaigning alternative to Blairism can be built in the short or medium term: but the SWP’s stubborn resistance to developing it as a party – or a coalition that acts and fights like a party – is jeopardising the gains that have been made and hobbling the development of the organisation as a whole.

We remain convinced that to build a genuinely broad and active political alternative to the left of New Labour we need more than the collapse and demoralisation of the Labour Left: we need a Respect leadership that goes out to build the organisation, and to mobilise it.

That means taking every chance to promote and pursue political debates and dialogue with those sections of the labour movement who are closest to us: it means developing real politics and political life in Respect.

It remains to be seen whether the SWP is brave enough to take on that challenge: on present showing, their narrow and limited view seems set to reduce Respect to an irrelevance on the sidelines of British politics.