15.09.2004

All sorts of issues "¦ but don't mention abortion

Sarah Morris reports from the London Respect activists meeting on September 13

London Respect activists met in Friends House on September 13 . It was a meeting in search of an agenda.

Clearly it was a sensible idea to bring together comrades in the capital and around 60 souls duly turned out, most of them Socialist Worker Party. Yet nobody appeared to have given much thought to what we would discuss before we all actually sat down.

Would we be setting up a London-wide structure, as we had with the London Socialist Alliance? This seems logical, but no clear lead was given. Instead, the main speakers - the SWP’s Lindsey German and Respect’s first elected councillor, Oliur Rahman - gave competent but unremarkable openings which did not actually focus on London at all. A little odd, as the meeting was promoted for “all” Respect members in London to discuss “issues facing Londoners today”.

Both speakers agreed that “Respect is not just about elections”, as comrade Rahman put it. “We are all knackered, after having campaigned almost without interruption in by-elections up and down the country. But now we need to take up the issues that concern the people on the ground,” he said.
“People will vote for us once, twice, three times. But if we have not delivered anything, they will not vote for us a fourth time,” said comrade German: “We need to build roots and take up all sorts of issues, so that people will vote for us next time around.”

A discussion of wider political questions was pretty much absent. SWP members had obviously been briefed to come prepared with anecdotes on the functioning of their Respect branch and the kind of local campaigns they were initiating. So Hounslow comrades told us of the fight against plans for a local incinerator; Lambeth Respect is agitating against the erection of mobile telephone masts; comrade German herself wants to do something about “these horrendous parking restrictions in Hackney” and in Walthamstow Respect is at the forefront of the fight to “bring back park-keepers”.

Now, these might all be worthy issues. But, unless linked to a general programme that actually focuses on the big national and international issues, they bring with them a risk of engendering a nano-scale localism. The SWP tops’ latest cunning plan appears to consist of letting activists do their own thing, then reap the rewards in the ballot box. When a Socialist Resistance supporter proposed that we should - like the Scottish Socialist Party - launch a national campaign to abolish the council tax and replace it with a progressive service tax, his suggestion was met with the equivalent of ‘Great idea, comrade - get on with it’. However, a suggestion by the CPGB to launch a national fight to defend and extend abortion rights was greeted with stony silence. So that’s a ‘no’ then, is it, comrades …?

Comrade Greg Tucker of the International Socialist Group argued that we set up some form of London-wide structure: “a committee or something that can draw together the different campaigns”. Again, comrade German thought this was a “good proposal”, but once again I got the impression that this was a polite brush-off.

Campaigning issues aside, the meeting also discussed the forthcoming national conference on October 30-31. The CPGB’s Anne Mc Shane made the point that an all-members conference would at this stage - when there were no properly established branches or district structures - be more democratic. The one delegate per 10 members seems to be cynically designed precisely to exclude minority viewpoints, not least ours.

“A delegate conference is absolutely necessary,” insisted the SWP’s Rob Hoveman. “We now have just under 4,000 members - there isn’t a meeting hall big enough to hold so many people.” As if all 3,500 members would actually turn up. So, unlike the SSP and the Socialist Alliance, Respect is set on a course which makes no provision for minority voices or political platforms. Instead SWP members will be told who to pick and who to choose … and you do not need to be a genius to guess who they will exclude.