Respect paper – issue 2 ready for orders

British politics, Political Organisations, Respect

Respect paper – issue 2 ready for orders

The second issue of Respect’s paper is now available You can get a flavour of it here. We want our newspaper and our policies to be distributed and discussed far and wide. You can help. Take out a supporter’s subscription – for just £4 per month. You will receive 7 copies of each issue delivered…

Liam

January 30, 2008

1–2 minutes

The second issue of Respect’s paper is now available

You can get a flavour of it here.

We want our newspaper and our policies to be distributed and discussed far and wide. You can help. Take out a supporter’s subscription – for just £4 per month.

You will receive 7 copies of each issue delivered to your door – or 6 months for just £20.

Send your details and payment to the address below.

Single copies are also available at £1 per month.

Send cheques made out to Respect Renewal Conference, PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU

28 responses to “Respect paper – issue 2 ready for orders”

TLC

January 30, 2008 at 11:28 am

Excellent paper. Well done to all involved.

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Bystander

January 30, 2008 at 12:43 pm

Yes, great paper but that picture of Richard Searle on page 10 is interesting- he’s changed a lot since I last saw him.

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JM

January 30, 2008 at 1:11 pm

Now issue 1 is closed, how many did you sell?

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twp77

January 30, 2008 at 1:16 pm

It’s a shame you felt no need to cover the launch of the abortion rights campaign, particularly given that you had a comrade there….

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Doug

January 30, 2008 at 1:22 pm

Yes, I got a flavour of Respect Renewal from the front page – Peace, Justice, Equality. Don’t want to frighten the horses with the ‘S’ word then?

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twp77

January 30, 2008 at 2:22 pm

To be fair Doug, it is at the bottom of alternate pages. However, where the word “justice” comes into the acronym R-E-S-P-E-C-T confuses me as well….

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andy newman

January 30, 2008 at 3:47 pm

On abortion – the whole of page 22 is devoted to the terrible consequences of Rumania’s anti-abotion policies.

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twp77

January 30, 2008 at 3:59 pm

Yes andy that’s fine – and in fact it is always nice to have film reviews which look at problems in other countries – but it would be nice to see a paper which is for all intents and purposes “local” campaigning paper to cover what is happening in Britain on abortion rights, particularly as a major campaign has just been launched around it. Why was it left out?

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the digger

January 30, 2008 at 4:27 pm

I hope the other reports on local struggles are more accurate than the one on Birmingham single status. There has been no joint Tory/union delegation to visit a minister nor is it an open secret that the union officials are moving heaven and earth to find a compromise. To date full time officials have been very supportive, of course that may change as the dispute progresses.

I suppose this may be the fault of having a local reporter, Fred Knowles, who is totally unknown in Birmingham Respect or the local trade union movement.

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the digger

January 30, 2008 at 4:41 pm

Did you also notice that like Trotsky was airbrushed by Stalin out of history of the October Revolution the editorial airbrushes out the election of Respect Councillors in Preston and Bolsover?

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andy newman

January 30, 2008 at 5:00 pm

TWP

“why was it left out”

You will have to ask the editors, I have no knowledge.

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Paul

January 30, 2008 at 5:06 pm

The Preston and Bolsover councillors might have been airbrushed out of the picture on account of their failure to embrace Islam, or join SPUC. Or possibly because Galloway discovered they strongly support gay rights. Or maybe they refused to vote for Kylie to be awarded “rear of the year.” Or maybe they did not write a column in the Daily Record to extoll the virtues of Winston Churchill, who said that he he been an Italiian in the early 1920s, he would have joined Mussolini’s Blackshirts, only opposed Hitler because he threatened Britain’s control of hundreds of millions of colonial subjects, with their precious raw materials, and who never found a picket line he did not want to smash. When are the ISG going to hold Galloway to account for all his reactionary views? When hell freezes over?

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Adamski

January 30, 2008 at 5:14 pm

More intriguing is that Respect Renewal refuse to publicly say who are the people added to their NC?

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Matthew

January 30, 2008 at 5:56 pm

Well I feel sorry for Paul and his inability to move on from childish political rhetoric. Adamski is getting a bit obessive. But the digger and TWP have good points/questions. I’d like them to hold the paper’s commitment to openness to account by writing letters (avoiding being abusive as that just gives editors reasons for not publishing things) about their respective issues – and telling us if they get rebuffed, ignored or whatever.

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psephology rules ok

January 30, 2008 at 6:09 pm

I never got an answer on the SU site so I’ll try here. How will Linda Smith determine which Respect candidates she is willing to endorse and which she turns down?
It is a case of those with postal adresses in Preston and Bolsover need not apply or what?

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Yeshiya

January 30, 2008 at 6:24 pm

Paul, just lay off Kylie right?

She can speak for herself

And don’t bring me into it either.

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Liam

January 30, 2008 at 7:10 pm

Does anyone ever wonder how some of these comments must read to people who are brought to this site while searching for fairly obscure bands, like the nice Canadian fellow who commented on the Stars show? Are they likely to think “these lefties are a sensible bunch or reasonable people”? or “Christ! I hope I never meet most of these characters in real life!”?

Paul, you are one more objectionable comment from joining that select group of the 4 people on the planet that I’ve banned from commenting on this site. Four out of 5 or 6 billion. That is some going. If you want to give full expression to your talent for fairly fluent ranting why not set up your own blog instead of raising the polemical temperature on this one? For a while the smart money bet it was some sort of Spart tribute act. Apparently not.

Yoga is supposed to be quite calming.

As for the paper, the letters page will most likely carry anything that looks like it’s trying to start a serious discussion on strategy for regroupment, key campaigning demands etc.

If anyone sympathetic to RR wants to write something about the abortion campaign all they have to do is submit a report. Why was it not in this issue? I don’t know either but I’m completely certain that even if it had been on the front page comrades who are hostile to the project would have found something else with which to find fault. Nevertheless it covers many major areas of the class struggle and is developing the breadth of contributors that a paper with a left regroupment strategy requires. It’s not perfect but it does what it says on the tin.

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twp77

January 30, 2008 at 7:50 pm

(section deleted – Liam) Your SR comrades are on the EB – I used to be on the EB of your paper – I recognise a lot of the pseudonyms that your comrades use and so forth. Terry was at the launch meeting and is largely responsible for the production of the paper. This isn’t an oversight – it’s intentional.

And you’re wrong – I would have commended you if you had carried a front page story on the new attacks on abortion rights and the new campaign which was launched.

This proves that SR and the ISG have no intention whatsoever of fighting alongside the rest of us to defend a woman’s right to choose in Britain and this is a travesty.

Calling me names like “hostile” might make you feel like you haven’t made a bad decision and soothe your conscience but it won’t do much to win new adeherents to your project.

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twp77

January 30, 2008 at 7:57 pm

PS – For anyone who is interested in women’s rights, our next issue of Labour Briefing will cover a front cover and a full centre spread on the issue of abortion rights around the world. In addition, there was a victory today in the House of Lords:

“the first anti-abortion amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill has been heavily defeated in the House of Lords.

Baroness Masham of Ilton moved an amendment on Monday 28th January to remove the sections of the Abortion Act permitting abortion for severe foetal impairment. After over an hour of debate, the amendment was defeated 22 votes to 89.”

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Phil

January 30, 2008 at 8:34 pm

I’ve had editorial roles in two radical publications (not planning to make it three, thanks). In my experience the third most annoying kind of feedback you can get is having people judge it, not on its own merits, but by comparison with the ideal left magazine that they can see in their mind’s eye. Whatever the magazine, whatever the issue, someone’s still got to write the piece; sometimes a piece comes in late, sometimes it doesn’t get written at all, sometimes it comes in but it gets nudged out by something else, for whatever reason. There’s always an element of arbitrariness in what appears in any magazine (or paper). “You didn’t write about X” is not good feedback, unless it’s immediately followed by “Would you like me to do something for the next issue”.

But that’s not as bad as the second most annoying kind of feedback, which is “Why didn’t you write about X?” What’s annoying about that question is that, very often, there’s no right answer: “we don’t care about X” proves that you’re on the wrong side in the great X debate, and “we care deeply about X but the piece came in late or didn’t get written at all or came in but got nudged out by something else” can be used as evidence that you don’t care enough about X. Sometimes it’s a question, I suppose – sometimes a reader might be genuinely curious as to why a subject wasn’t covered – but more often it’s a setup for denunciation.

But both of these pale into significance beside the most annoying form of feedback of all, which is as follows:

Adamski, on January 30th, 2008 at 5:14 pm Said:

More intriguing is that Respect Renewal refuse to publicly say who are the people added to their NC?

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twp77

January 30, 2008 at 9:00 pm

I should say that I was being rather emotional in my first response. I do in fact think it is a rather good paper overall and understand that comrades may be annoyed by nitpicking. However, I do think it is remiss to not include an article by a leading female comrade who attended on a launch event for abortion rights which was very, very good by all accounts.

Regardless the real importance is not newspaper articles but what people do in practice. I see Liam has posted the details for the event in early February here and hope to see RR comrades in attendence. The proof of the pudding and all that…. Sorry that my first response was not as measured as it should have been.

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Martin Ohr

January 30, 2008 at 9:38 pm

Well Liam, Andy you could have chosen to write articles on the abortion campaign, you managed to get stuff in on other subjects.

On the RR website burried deep in the policy pages is this excellent policy: “Respect supports a women’s right to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy, and will oppose any attempt to change current legislation on this issue which further undercuts women’s rights. Women face discrimination over pregnancy and maternity rights.
”
It curiously absent from the 14 point policy plan,on page 2 especially since points 9 and 10 are essentially the same.

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Richard Searle

January 30, 2008 at 10:51 pm

” Yes, great paper but that picture of Richard Searle on page 10 is interesting- he’s changed a lot since I last saw him”

Yes, It would appear that I’ve aged remarkablely well

Excellant paper and good balance of colour throughout

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andy newman

January 31, 2008 at 3:45 pm

Incidently, TWP’s criticism of not carrying a report of the abortion campaaign launch should be read in the context that Labour Briefing – a publicatioon that she is on the Editorial Board of – also did not cover the launch meeting.

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jj

January 31, 2008 at 11:02 pm

so its Red Ken now then!!! except for calling for scabs etc
no debate from the members of RR
ISG don’t oppose this nonsense of GG in an article or a letters page.. best not upset GG .
so this is the ISG’s strategy. really pathetic.

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twp77

February 1, 2008 at 12:14 am

Andy that’s not true – it’s on page 22 of the latest issue!

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pete S

February 1, 2008 at 1:36 am

How’d GG go from standing on principle against Nu Labour to supporting ‘Red’ Ken? This is an astonishing turnround given he becomes less red with every passing day. What is the justification for keeping with Ken when the other respect is standing L German?

Maybe you been through all that but I can’t get my head round this!!

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andy newman

February 1, 2008 at 9:14 am

Ok TWP

I missed it, sorry.

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