"But anybody who has had the excitement of living through a faction fight in a Trot organisation – hi, Liam! – will be well aware these things can develop a dynamic of their own. The story may not yet be over."

And faction fights are not good for the health either. How, for example, is that appealing to disillusioned lefties who are sick of the LP, want an alternative and see Respect splintering, becoming fractious and impoding?

It is not a good and viable prospect. This will damage the Left make it more fragmented, weak and fractious. And more burnt-out and pissed-off lefties will drop out.

Dunno how many more nails need to be driven in the coffin of the Left. Case of RIP.

And it is depressing the obsession around Respect/SWP. Yeah, it is major to a certain degree but put some perspective on it. It shows how small we are as we pore over the latest entertaining gossip-mag style debacle in Respect/SWP and wait for the next instalment (replace Britney Spears with John Rees and you could have a version of "Closer" magazine renamed "Catastrophe".)

The world has not stood still while we pick over the bones of Respect while some think a viable future is possible, a phoenix rising from the ashes or charging a few volts a la Frankenstein style to resurrect it. While we are overly preoccupied with this, oppression, wars and other such shit is still happening under this society.

The Left needs to seriously get its act together.

Dave: "Respect is no more and no less communalist now than when it was launched four years ago,"

I would agree in the sense that resepct was not communalist then, and is not communalist now.

It is slack to bandy around the term communalist with no attempt at a definition, and no attempt at evidence.

Once, a very long time ago, a picket was called of Winson Green prison in Birmingham to support some criminalised striking miners who had been transfered there.
These were in the glorious class war days of the miners strike.
When Tony Benn could nearly lead the Labour Party, the miners could nearly beat the full forces of big business, the police, the military, and the secret services.
And the Labour movement - with help from Libya obviously - could raise enough money to sustain thousands of workers on strike for a year.
Anyway this picket of the jail was called and only me and John Rees turned up.
These things stay in the memory so I always want to think well of John whatever people say about him.
And I suppose my anecdote tells us that really nothing changes.
Small steps, building alliances where we can (even then John was SWP and I was in the Labour Party), patient work in trades unions and campaigns, winning arguments, and spreading ideas.
There isn't a quick fix.
The SLP wasn't one, the SSP wasn't one, Respect isn't one.
We just have to carry on with everyday struggles and look outwards not inwards.
For example supporting jailed trades unionists together is more important than rowing over dogma.

"This picket was called"? Yeh, but by whom? I bet it was those splitters from the People's Front of Judea. Wankers.

Galloway was ut recruiting fake members down at the East London Mosque last week.
Corrupt Communalist.

the test for people in politics is not whether they go to a picket line or not, the real test is what they do when they have power or the smell of it

I even remember a time many years ago, when the likes of Jim Fitzpatrick, then an SWPer could be found on picket lines, now he's new Labour through and through, and probably on the right of Hattersley, Fitzpatrick is Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Employment Relations and Postal Services, Minister for London

power is the test for politicos

with help from Libya obviously

Sure about that?

Sometimes faction fights are positive and this one in Respect might well be such a fight. After all it already looks like it will lead to the exit of the SWP from Respect the populist coalition and that is a very positive development.

And there is a left/right, better yet working class versus petty bourgeois, element to this faction fight despite the claims of many including Dave O. After all the SWP, guilty though they are of having colluded with the populist communalists these last few years, do represent a socialist and working class program while the Galloway/Yaqoob forces represent something very different. Indeed the SWP's gamble on joing Respect was that its then potential base among some Muslim communities could act as a springbaord towider support amongst the working classes generally. A stupid idea as some of us said at the time but to be fair that was their position.

"Having had the experience of working politically with Mr Rees in the Socialist Alliance, I can vouch for his possession a certain penchant for duplicity and a willingness to resort to the old stiletto between the shoulder blades routine for those with the temerity to deviate from Marxism-Leninism-John Rees thought."

Yes, and as you know, Dave, when I was acting SA press officer, I was told to do over yourself and Paul Mason. This was in response to your authorship of the Socialist Alliance Budget for the LSA election campaign, in which you both did a fine job against major deadline pressure caused by Rees's own tardiness. Not being Rees's creature, I declined, as I did on other occasions.

Unfortunately, when this inevitably made me a target, you guys couldn't be seen for dust, and neither could the SA committee who refused to look at what was happening. Considering we were not only in the same organisation, but were comrades in the press committee, your continuing silence throughout the subsequent intensification in bullying and ever since, raises certain questions.

It should be possible to work in the movement according to your conscience and not be compelled to blindly follow orders based on personal ambition and rivalry rather than politics. This culture could never have taken hold if there had been genuine solidarity. As is Rees's MO, he was picking us off in ones and twos and nobody kicked up until it happened to them. So perhaps lessons could be drawn concerning the acquisition of spine, guts and other viscera MIA.

Andy: Respect was communalist then and it is now. We can enter into a debate about the meaning of the term if you like but I really don't see the point of doing so unless you feel the need to have a meta-debate to define every political term which you use in the course of any argument.

The bottom line is that this is a fight between a group of socialists (albeit deeply, deeply stupid, flawed, censorious and cynical ones)one the one side, and a politically dreadful stitched-together vanity vehicle for various egos' political ambitions on the other. The latter group's political muscle also coming from some of the worst reactionaries in politics today.

What I don't get Andy is why an apparently decent bloke like you would line up with the latter group.

Support the SWP!

Andy, Respect calling itself 'the party for Muslims' in its own literature is communalist.

And try this ... Go to the Respect website, do a search on the term 'working class' and a search on the word 'Muslim'. How many hits do you get for each? (To save you the trouble, it's a 304-94 storming victory for 'Muslim'.)

Well this is how I see the politics of thing. I wonder whether or not certain sections of the left don’t have a blind spot regarding political issues connected to the logic of the electoral process, probably in the same way that many are dismissive of analyses which focus on the ‘trade union bureacracy’ as merely ’sociological’ and not ‘political’.

it is remarkable how reticent people are to actually look at what sparked these arguments. They were all focused around the issue of candidate selection. The argument was that the SWP was being ‘divisive’ by having arguments about this. Maybe so. However in each case the SWP lost. And then went on to provide the bulk of activists to campaign for the candidates (who won). Then George intervenes and, basically, implies that we should not even have arguments about these things. The SWP says no, thats a step too far. And then an attempt is made to mount a coup in TH Respect, in one case a transparently dodgy attempt to pack a meeting in the second simply refusing to count the votes of people who are either in the SWP or support their arguments (interestingly by this stage, the section of the councilers doing this were losing the ability to command a majority, its been suggested to me that this was one reason locally things came to a head so rapidly and so nastily). The poisen out of this embitters existing tensions nationally.

Whats the politics of this? Essentially the relationship between activists on the ground doing the campaigning and mantaining the branches, and those elected as councilers or MPs. Its not unusual in the history of the municipal left.

Obviously there might be all kinds of things about the style of particular organisations or individuals. There might also be all kinds of things about how we mantain pluralism in a broad coalition (or how the coalition should be organised). But they’re hardly likely to be resolved when this kind of thing is going on. I think there is a fair bit of naivity about all this amongst some left bloggers, as well as a tendency not to know anything about the real politics of local situations (this is particularly so amongst islamophobic idiots actually).

There is also a tendency for people who don’t have a dog in the race not to understand that in such situations those on the left who command no forces won’t be seen as a threat and therefore no one objects to them standing around smiling and making friendly noises. Its an added bonus if they start going on about the ‘control freakery’ and otherwise unpleasent behaviour of those socialists who do have an organised presence on the ground of course.

To read the fine and nuanced programatic declarations of some well meaning individuals about all this is, if you have some knowledge about whats actually happened on the ground in the last few weeks, a deeply surreal experiance.

In the context of inevitable clashes like this what needs to happen is for an understanding on both sides that this is a fight that cannot be fought to the finish if Respect is to survive (its why many of the more ‘programatic’ arguments are not so much damaging but irrelevent). Arguments about how nice individual swp members are (i would not expect to hear such inanities on a sophisticated blog like this of course!) in the context of what is locally a straightfoward left/right fight in the time honoured traditions of local electoral organisations, rather remind me of people who used to claim that they really liked muslims on demos just as long as they didn’t turn up in groups.

disengenuous crap really.

Dave,
you provoked me into a reply. The short version is that GG's letter is a challenge to the SWP's internal regime and they want to move away from the mass party tactic.
The long version is at my site.
And during the long winter nights how better to pass the time than a faction fight?

But the odd thing is that its not really a faction fight. There is a wholly imaginary argument going on in the world of left wing bloggery including some trots, and some vengeful islamophobes and on the other hand there is a real fight going on inside Respect which is about quite different issues. Trying to shoehorn these into long standing arguments between different groups on the left casts zero light on this. This is, ahem, hardly unusual however, and in no way suggests that politics and issues of principle are not involved. Its just got almost nothing to do with the parrallel universe of blogdom.

There is a wholly imaginary argument going on in the world of left wing bloggery including some trots, and some vengeful islamophobes and on the other hand there is a real fight going on inside Respect which is about quite different issues.

Just for future reference, could you tell us how we can tell we're entering the Twilight Zone - I mean, the parallel universe of blogdom - and starting to deal with wholly imaginary arguments? Should we disregard Neil Williams' RESPECT supporters' blog, for instance? How about Liam's blog? Liam's not only a member of RESPECT but a member of Tower Hamlets RESPECT - does the act of writing a blog induce a divorce from reality? How about the statements by Ger Francis, Nick Wrack, Kevin Ovenden, Jerry Hicks and Linda Smith which have been posted on Socialist Unity recently - should we assume all of these people are also living in a fantasy world?

To be blunt, it seems to me that all you're really saying is "a lot of people posting on blogs see things differently from me". Which is true, for everyone all the time.

Not really a faction fight? Jesus! Two sides challenging the validity of the other's list of delegates. Members not being allowed into meetings without their credentials being checked. Screaming rows at meetings. Pre and post meeting caucuses. Petitions circulating. Councillors resigning the whip. Statements being issued. Passwords being changed. Accusations of red-baiting and witch hunting. These are not things that Neil, Andy or I made up.
If that is not a faction fight what would one look like?

Liam seems to have re-joined Tower Hamlets Respect because he thought it was a Faction Fight and that there would be a chance to put foward his own politics in a way he didn't think possible before. What he's actually walked into is a situation where a group of elected councilers are treating the activist base that got them elected like vermin and expelling any councilers who don't toe the line. This is because they want the organisation to be controlled by its politicians rather then its activists. The line of march here is away from attempting to build a political home for activists moving away from Labour and towards building local electoral machines which may or may not have politicians who espouse good general positions on such issues as war and social justice. My argument is that the language of 'faction' fight is inaccurate in this situation, and that people who see it like this are in for a rather nasty surprise.

The fact that people make formal statements about a range of questions (which they may very well believe) does not always capture what is really happening, as very often political results depart from individuals intentions. It is therefore foolish simply to add togeather formal pronouncements and see which set are closer to ones 'program'. A coalition of the left which subordinates its activists to its elected councilers and MP's and effectively tells the activists to shut up or get out has its own logic.

Long term members of the Labour Party surely have some experiance of this.

I think the account I give above is an accurate enough summation of the line of development of the crisis. Which, yes, is how I see it.