Respect and George Galloway's letter
Talks2000sAlan Thornett at a forum in September 2007, after George Galloway's letter to the Respect National Council opened the crisis that split Respect at its November conference. He was then on Respect's National Council and a supporter of the Respect Party Platform. The statement he says will be out “tomorrow” is “George Galloway’s letter, where we stand”, by Alan Thornett and John Lister. The recording, uploaded as “Respect forum Sept ’07” on Liam Mac Uaid's YouTube channel, begins as he starts. Transcript corrected from the automatic captions, 10 Oct 2026. Square brackets mark words supplied or not clearly heard.
A corrected transcript of the recording. The recording is the authority.
00:00 Alan Thornett: Yeah. Well, I suppose the short history of Respect is that it was formed in January 2004. It went through its first year
00:30 in which it pretty rapidly expanded and generally went forward. It then, for its subsequent two and a half years, has basically gone into reverse and into decline, to the extent where now it has around 2,000 members, just over. I think the
01:00 brief explanation of how that decline came about was that it reached the point when people realised, a, that the SWP were exercising a very top-down control in Respect, and b, that they had a perspective for Respect which
01:30 certainly we disagree with, and a lot of the independents in Respect disagreed with. And that is that they treated it as really just another campaign, or a united front of a special kind, or the electoral arm, the electoral initiative, of what they do. And we have always argued against that. We've always argued that to build a new party to the left of Labour that can
02:00 seriously challenge in British politics, you can't half do it. It can't be just a bit of what you do. You can only do it if it's the overarching thing that you do, and if you build it as a political party. Because unless you build it as a political party you can't develop it politically for the task. Because clearly, if an
02:30 organisation is going to challenge for political office, and challenge for political power, and put itself forward as an alternative, it has to do that on all political fronts. And that means developing as a political party: having an internal life, having its own political education, doing all the things that political parties do, in order to shape itself up to carry out the task. And for the last two and a half years at least, since this kind of
03:00 clarified, that's been the battle that's gone on inside Respect. And it's happened at the last two conferences. The conference before last, when there was a confrontation over it, when George Galloway told us that we had a very good leadership, we should all enjoy it and get on with it, which caused a fair amount of friction. And then the last conference,
03:30 by which time the Respect Party Platform had come together, mainly from people that became critical of its direction at the previous conference. At the last conference the Respect Party Platform and we put forward a number of things to try to push it in the direction of becoming a party, and basically we got
04:00 trounced at the conference: fairly small votes, and a huge list of speakers against us, denouncing what we were doing, and so on. And after then, generally, it has gone no further. More have left. I think, for example, people in [Camden] that we talked to immediately before that conference basically said, we'll give it one more shot and see if it's going anywhere. But it didn't, and they
04:30 left. So it's got narrower and narrower, and more and more predominantly SWP. That's been the process. And that general approach has existed really as an alliance between the SWP and George Galloway, as far as we can see. [inaudible] However,
05:00 over the last few weeks we've had George Galloway's letter. And George Galloway's letter takes up quite a few of the things that we've been taking up over that period of time. We had a Respect Party Platform meeting on Saturday, and we welcome
05:30 the things that George Galloway is raising, and we can support most of them. We can certainly support what he raises in terms of democracy inside Respect. But he raises it from the point of view of appointments in the office, and people pop up and who knows who appointed them, and all this kind of thing. And he also raises it from the point of view of decision-making, or
06:00 more precisely the carrying out of decisions. He complains that you can make all kinds of decisions at National Council meetings, but only certain decisions, that fit in with certain other agendas, are the ones that are picked up and run with, and others are allowed to, as he says, wither on the vine. And it's absolutely true. That's a method that has gone on. If it fits in with another agenda, then all the power goes behind it;
06:30 if it doesn't, then you never hear anything else about it, and you can bang your head in the office and you don't get anywhere. And those are valid criticisms, and we certainly support him on that. However, democracy would have to go quite a bit further than that. And the issue that we've raised over the last two years has been the issue of the accountability of elected represent-
07:00 atives, which he doesn't mention. And we would have to insist that this is really an extremely important issue. It's an issue both in terms of Westminster and in terms of local government. And it's a two-way thing as well. It means that there has to be, and there isn't really in Respect, a proper mechanism for what the MP is doing in Parliament feeding back into
07:30 Respect. There isn't a proper mechanism for what the councillors are doing feeding back into Respect, and there isn't a proper mechanism to ensure that what they're doing is in line with the policies of Respect. Now, it wouldn't necessarily be on all occasions; there would be times when there would be clashes on policy. But they need to be properly regulated, in an agreed way, through the leading bodies. None of this has ever happened.
08:00 But we certainly agree with him on that. We certainly agree with him when he says that Respect's public profile is entirely inadequate, and when he praises the Manchester Respect branch for producing its own newspaper, producing a tabloid. He says without that tabloid you wouldn't be able to find Respect was at the demonstration at the Labour Party conference;
08:30 you wouldn't be able to find it was at the coronation of Gordon Brown, if it hadn't been for the tabloid. And that's fair comment. However, we raised at every Respect conference the need to have a national newspaper, its own national newspaper, both to put forward its views and as a mechanism for developing collective political experience and developing Respect politically. It's always been rejected, both by the
09:00 SWP and by George Galloway. So if he's having second thoughts in terms of a newspaper, then this would be an extremely important thing to happen, and so we hope that's the case. We also support him on the issue of Respect's inability to take up the debates after John
09:30 McDonnell's failure to get on the ballot for Labour leader. We had a National Council just before John McDonnell failed to get on the list, but it was already clear that he was going to fail to get on the list, and we had a National Council discussion on it. And a lot of proposals were made along the lines that this is another watershed for the Labour left, and for all those that argue it's possible to reclaim the
10:00 Labour Party. This is another watershed, and Respect needs to be initiating these debates. It needs to take initiatives to discuss with the Labour left, the trade union left, the Morning Star and the CPB, and all these kinds of forces that must be in some kind of turmoil as a result of the failure, the first failure since the thirties of the Labour left to mount a challenge in a leadership election. And nothing came of it. And
10:30 he's absolutely right to take it up. The Morning Star had a conference, the RMT had a conference, that promoted discussion on this, but Respect had nothing and did nothing. And he's certainly right to take that up. And in fact, if we look at the last week, Fred has drawn my attention to the Morning Star over the last week. Because we've been arguing this. I don't
11:00 know how much I've passed it around, but I made a proposal in June myself to the Respect officers for an initiative towards the CP and the Morning Star, and the trade union left, people like Bob Crow, to open up a fresh discussion on [political] representation, given that the whole situation was compounded by the McDonnell defeat. And it's never been discussed. This was June, early June, and it's never
11:30 been discussed. We now find in the Morning Star this week that Rob Griffiths, who's the general secretary of the CPB, is raising the issue for the first time. He's raised that it may be necessary to eventually draw the conclusion that the [Labour Party] can't be reclaimed, and it might be necessary to form a new party. He says: "The final crisis
12:00 approaches for the whole trade union movement and the non-sectarian left. Are we to have a mass party of labour in Britain? If the labour movement cannot or will not reclaim the Labour Party from the privatisers, the warmongers and the Thatcher fans, it would have to re-establish one. Does our movement have the leadership and vision to fulfil such a historic responsibility?" I mean, it's quite a statement. Now, I'm not saying
12:30 that the CPB would, as a result of that, all immediately change. But that is a direct result of McDonnell's failure. They were all [saying] the McDonnell campaign was going to be a big step forward for the left in the Labour Party, it was going to be the point at which the left starts to regenerate, and it went straight down the plughole. And that's the result of it. And it also shows that it's been a big mistake of Respect not to intervene on that, and to
13:00 be already discussing on that. So we agree very much with George Galloway on that. But there's one thing in particular that George Galloway doesn't raise in his letter, and that's the issue of the political profile of Respect. By the political profile I mean the policies and programme that
13:30 appear on its election material in the course of an election. I don't mean so much what's in its formal manifesto, but what appears on the streets, in its leaflets and broadsheets, in an election campaign. Because something, again, that we've taken up now for the last two years is that there's been a general dumbing down of political material, public material, to very basic
14:00 things, anti-neoliberalism, all this kind of thing, but actually with no socialist content. Very rarely does the word socialism appear, and very rarely is there an explicit socialist content. There is in its manifesto, but not in what's reproduced from that on the streets. And in my opinion, and I've argued this in the current edition of
14:30 Socialist Resistance, any left organisation that wants to go into this election with bland politics will get absolutely nowhere against Brown. It'll be necessary to go in with clear, radical socialist politics, clearly showing the left alternative. It'll also be necessary to have, very upfront and worked out, a
15:00 programme on ecology and climate change, because this is something else that hardly ever appears on the leaflets. And it's not going to be possible to win votes away from the Greens, or to have a clear intervention, without a very strong ecological content to it. Now, he hasn't raised any of this, and my guess would be that on this issue we would
15:30 probably have a difference with both the SWP and George Galloway, in terms of that kind of political profile. But it is a very important issue. Because George Galloway's starting point is very good. I mean, clearly he looks from the big picture. He has clearly decided that he's going to stand again for Parliament; whatever he's been saying about it, he's now decided he's going to stand again for Parliament. And he's looked at the landscape
16:00 and realised, a, there's going to be an early general election. Now, we don't know whether it's going to be... it could be this year, it could be the spring of next year. But it's rather unlikely that it won't be; it seems the most likely option, because the Brown bounce is there, and the crisis of the Tory party is there, and it might be the best shot he'll get. So there's likely to be an early general election. And he's looked at Respect and drawn the
16:30 conclusion that Respect is in no state to fight a general election, now or in the next six or nine months. And so the problem is that he will be standing, and Respect is in no state to fight the election. That seems to be the starting point, and it's a pretty reasonable starting point.
17:00 So he's putting the letter to make a challenge to the situation. Now, if you read the letter, I think it's reasonable [to say] that it is a pretty systematic critique of the politics of the SWP and how they run Respect. It's inescapable that it is. And so from the time that the letter was
17:30 issued, the issue really has been how the SWP would respond to the letter, as the leading, overwhelmingly the leading, group inside Respect. And I've held the view right from the start, since I saw the letter, that if the SWP take the position that this is a big attack on us,
18:00 and we're going to defend the party, and drive towards a confrontation, then it's very difficult to see how Respect would survive such a confrontation. Now, as everybody will know, no doubt, there has been a meeting between the SWP Central Committee and a delegation led by George Galloway. And I don't know what
18:30 happened at it, but it didn't resolve anything. At the end of it, it didn't resolve anything. And since that meeting there has been an all-London meeting of SWP members, last Friday night, 200 or so SWP members, to discuss the situation, and
19:00 everything else. I've had no first-hand account of that meeting, but from several second- or third-hand accounts, which seem to fit together quite well, it's fairly clear what has happened at that meeting, and the way that things are currently lining up in Respect in terms of debate. And in my opinion it's dangerous. The Respect Party
19:30 Platform on Saturday decided to draft a statement on all this: where we stand in terms of George Galloway's letter, and where we stand in terms of the debates that are now happening between the SWP and George Galloway and everything else. And that will be out in the next couple of days; it's just being finally agreed. But what the SWP is saying about George Galloway now is that the
20:00 divide in Respect is between the left, the SWP and others on the left, who defend a kind of socialist framework for Respect, and George Galloway and others, who have gone over to communalism. This is what's
20:30 being said. It's very dangerous. Well, first of all, the use of "communalism" is a whole problem in itself, in terms of its connotations and everything else. But if we leave that aside, and we accept that what's being meant by communalism is a major overemphasis on one particular
21:00 minority community, and making political concessions in the process, if that's what is meant by it, which it probably is, then a lot of things arise from that. Because it is true that there have been elements of that, and this is something else that we've taken up. There have been political concessions of that kind. In fact I think the
21:30 support given to the religious hatred bill was such a concession. So there have been political concessions. But that hasn't all been an issue of George Galloway. That's been something that's been, in my opinion, as much [the SWP] as it has been George Galloway. And it was a problem, because
22:00 you can't discuss that without looking at the kind of gains that Respect has been able to make in places like Tower Hamlets and Birmingham, where they have got big votes and won council positions and made very big gains for the left. And there were always major issues in Tower Hamlets in particular. Birmingham is different, because [inaudible] is different. But in Tower Hamlets there's always been a big issue about
22:30 how that Respect group develops, and everything else. There's always been an issue of what kind of political education you have, and all that kind of thing, and how you bring people that came towards Respect on a very hard anti-war position and anti-imperialist position, how they're won over to a much wider socialist perspective. That has
23:00 always been an issue in there, and it's a difficult problem. Nobody would pretend it's other than a difficult question. But now it's being said, oh well, all these problems now in Tower Hamlets. And my reply to all this about those problems in Tower Hamlets is that I've sat on the National Council, and the National Council has never had a discussion about problems in Tower Hamlets. Never had a
23:30 discussion on it. It's had some very useful reports from the council group to the National Council about what they're doing in the council, doing this and the other. It's had that. But nobody's ever come to the National Council and said, oh, there are these great conflicts going on in Tower Hamlets and they need discussing. Never happened. So to suddenly say now that it's all George Galloway's [going] over to communalism is a very dangerous road, and
24:00 I think that we have to oppose that. And we also have to say, I think, for the last couple of minutes: George Galloway has made various proposals. He made a proposal at the end of his document for a new, high-powered committee, in which he's on, and I'm on, and some more, to run the next election campaign. And
24:30 basically it's a broader-based thing. It weakens the SWP representation, strengthens others; that's basically what it does. And he makes that proposal as a way forward. And there is a certain merit in that. But I think there are a few things we have to say about it as well. And that is that if all that happens in Respect between now and its conference, or after its
25:00 conference, because all this is now heading for conference in November, the next conference is going to be like no other Respect conference, heading for a conference in November: if all that happens as a result of all this is that a new committee gets set up, with nothing else substantial having changed, then the new committee will have an absolutely hopeless task. That's the problem. And so we could support the setting up of a new committee, but it
25:30 must go alongside substantial other changes. That's what it really means. And really, if we get down to the bottom line, at the present time Respect will have difficulty in surviving. It's a crisis. George Galloway said it's a crisis; it's an even bigger crisis than when he wrote it. If it's going to get through this, there's only one possibility, and
26:00 that is that the SWP makes major concessions: major concessions in terms of how Respect is run, how its decision-making processes go, its public profile, its political profile. There have to be concessions on all these things; otherwise it's very hard to see how it's going to get out of this crisis. So that's the conclusion of the Respect Party Platform statement, when it comes out tomorrow. So we
26:30 do need to play, all those of us active in Respect, we need to play an active role in this. [SR] has already had a discussion on it, had a discussion on the document last week. Local branches should discuss it, and all its implications. And the only possibility is full and frank discussion right through Respect, right up to the conference, and some serious changes being made. Otherwise it's hard to see where the whole thing is going.