29.11.2007
Respect booty prize
Madani Girls School in Tower Hamlets, east London, was the venue for the Respect (Galloway version) November 25 hustings to determine the prospective general election candidates for the two constituencies of Bethnal Green and Bow, and Poplar and Limehouse. Simon Wells reports
You could join on the night and cast your vote and there was no record of existing members, so it was basically a case of whoever could persuade the most contacts to come along and fill in a voting slip. The young lad handing them out from his armchair did not appear too concerned about who got them.
As the clock moved on well past the 5pm scheduled start time, expelled Socialist Workers Party comrade Kevin Ovenden was at pains to assure us at regular intervals that more people would be arriving soon, as would George Galloway, who had been delayed at the annual Global Peace and Unity event in the Docklands.
Eventually the meeting started an hour late, with an appeal on behalf of those affected by Hurricane Sidr in Bangladesh. Around 150 were in attendance, as comrade Ovenden announced that there was only one nomination for Poplar and Limehouse - George Galloway - and therefore it was not necessary to go through the procedures of voting. For Bethnal Green and Bow there were four candidates who were to be given three minutes each, to be followed by two questions each.
First up was councillor Shahed Ali, who announced that for personal reasons he had decided to withdraw. I will not bore the readers by describing the speeches of Hazanat Hussain, an east London teacher for 35 years, or Farhana Zaman, a community worker, and one of the few women in the room, both of whom spoke in both English and Sylheti to accommodate the audience. The overwhelming favourite was Abjol Miah, leader of the Respect group on Tower Hamlets council, who spoke in English throughout.
Miah has a vision of three or four Respect MPs after the next election, making Respect Britain's "fourth party", but to achieve that we need a "dynamic, charismatic leadership" (surely he was not thinking of himself) that will unite the "Bangladeshi community and the white working class community". This theme of unity, we were told, is part of his character as a community worker for the local council. It led him to support George Galloway for MP and helped him unseat the Labour leader of Tower Hamlets council in Shadwell ward last year.
The questions that followed were hardly challenging: how will the candidates unite the community and will those who are defeated throw their weight behind the winner? The answers were a rehash of the introductions and are not worth reporting. After a 15-minute interval for voting, and before the announcement of the result, we were treated to a speech from Yvonne Ridley, who read from a prepared script. But she acknowledged that she was not the reason why so many people had attended, glancing up at George Galloway.
Galloway said he had attended "many historic occasions" - and this was another one. He had said when he was elected in Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 that he would not stand there again, because he wanted to see a Bengali MP, which should have happened a long time ago. He said that, come the election, the choice will now be between a Bengali in the colours of New Labour and, irrespective of who we had just chosen, a Bengali in the colours of Respect. However, as New Labour will be running on a platform of war, death, injustice, inequality, privatisation, anti-terror laws and the witch-hunting of muslims, he was confident that we would have a Bengali Respect MP after the next election.
Sticking to his ethnic theme, Galloway denied the claims that Oona King had been voted out because she was a Jew: she had been voted in and voted in again, and it was her support for the war that was her undoing. This was also greeted by loud cheering and clapping. A similar fate awaited all who thought like her: "We intend to chase them, we intend to drive them out of Tower Hamlets, these criminals, these war criminals." Turning to the recent Respect crisis and split, he reported that many people had asked him, "What is going on?" - to which he would reply, "We are going on. We are going on."
By this time the counting had been completed and comrade Ovenden announced that Hazanat Hussain had received four votes and Farhana Zaman seven, which meant that the overwhelming winner was Abjol Miah, who polled 117 votes. As the clapping and cheering died down, and Miah got up to start his acceptance speech, many decided it was time to leave. You could not really blame them - Miah thinks a lot of himself and is never embarrassed by the sound of his own voice. His second speech was basically a repetition of the first, but delivered with increased volume.
The meeting came to a close, chairs were put away, old Respect posters pulled down and people filed home. These posters were the booty that the Gallowayites had claimed after they expelled the SWP from the Club Row offices. Also among the possessions claimed was an armchair, which could be vital to any settlement between the two groups. Apparently it belongs to John Rees.