It’s tricky deciding what you want to have engraved on your headstone. For me it’s a toss up between “Hey ho let’s go!” or “only cha
nge is constant”. George Galloway’s document to the Respect National Council has utterly changed the landscape inside Respect. That’s not much of an insight. What is less apparent but equally true is that the pack ice on the British left may also be starting to break up.
The Labour left has demonstrated that it is finished as a political force in the coming years. John Mc Donnell’s campaign confirmed what was already obvious. The only public criticism that Brown has received for inviting Thatcher to Downing Street was from a Tory MP. His complaint was that Brown was taking advantage of a bewildered old woman. Any reasonable person would be cross with him for not pushing her down the stairs and pretending it was an accident. Those photos of Thatcher standing beside the great hope of the union bureaucracy, Brown, are his signal that he does not even need to worry about any flak from the left in his party. His lectures to public sector workers about the need to keep their pay awards below inflation tell us which side he is on in the class war.
It is going to be increasingly difficult to sell Brown as the true spirit of old Labour inside the unions and there is where the action is going to start. All those union activists and officials who used to think waiting for Blair to go was a strategy have reached a dead end. Bob Crow’s instruction to RMT branches to investigate the feasibility of standing candidates is the first strong sign of an important union casting around for a political expression. The role of the Communist Party is going to become critical in the next six months or so. The Morning Star has already started carrying articles preparing its readers for a discussion on an alternative to Labour and the CP has a strong minority which has already voted to join Respect.
The reason I left Respect was that it felt too much like being in a SWP branch. George Galloway’s document has now opened up and legitimised several areas several previously taboo areas of debate. These include a strategic discussion on what sort of organisation Respect is; how does it try to give newly recruited members a political education; what sort of democratic and organisational structures does it need; should it continue as a party or a coalition.
Everything is up in the air at the moment. I’ve got no way of knowing if there is a willingness to compromise on either side. Certainly there is an element of truth in the criticisms they make of each other and I stand by every one of the comments I’ve made about both of them Respect may split asunder before Christmas. There may be some sort of compromise to keep things shakily on the road to give Lindsey German a chance to get elected to the GLA. A worthy enough objective but it’s chickenfeed as a political strategy. Or the period of debate and reflection which has now started may lead to an entirely new approach to building an alternative to Labour. Because whatever faults George Galloway or the SWP have neither of them have privatised anything, started any imperialist wars, scabbed on any strikes or invited Margaret Thatcher round for tea.
Those of us who are committed to the project of creating a class struggle, anti-imperialist alternative to Brown’s Labour Party have to engage with this process while the opening is there. My conclusion is that this makes it right to join Respect again. Significant parts of the organisation will be an indispensable part of this development. We have been presented with an opportunity and we need to seize it.
Liam redux 
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