‘Cllr Aziz was elected as a Liberal Democrat councillor in 2005 and resigned the whip in November 2006 to sit as an independent. He becomes Respect's second councillor following the election of Salma Yaqoob in 2006.’

Look, I don’t know this guy, his political outlook, or the circumstances surrounding his decision to change parties. But Respect itself admits that Aziz’s failure to secure reselection may have been a factor:

‘Councillor Aziz was deselected by the Liberal Democrats in the wake of a row over the all-white leadership of the city council under the Tory-Lib Dem administration.’

But did he have any objection in principle to being part of a joint administration with the Conservatives? We are not told:

‘Councillor Aziz commented: "I left the Labour Party because of its support for the Iraq war, and hoped the Liberal Democrats would provide an alternative for the people of Aston. Unfortunately they have proved to be as bad as Labour when it comes to control freakery. They have let the people of Aston down."’

Oh well, welcome to your new party, Cllr Aziz. Will you be staying long?

Just to avoid misunderstanding, I am not suggesting there should be any kind of bar on former Lib Dems moving over to leftwing parties, although I would surely quiz them on why they want to take the step before letting them in.

Many Liberal Democrats are instinctive democratic radicals, and it easy to understand how they could evolve politically towards democratic socialism.

Paul Foot and Hilary Wainwright are obvious examples of that process at work. And just maybe Abdul Aziz is, too.

At the risk of sounding heretical, better a background on the Lib Dem left than cutting one’s political milk teeth in some of the nastier ‘democratic centralist’ sects out there.

The WRP and CPGB diaspora notoriously contains some of the worst trade bully boy union fixers and Labour Party apparatchiks of the lot. Hiya, John Reid.

But then again, the vast majority of council candidate-level activists in Ming Campbell’s mob are unprincipled, opportunist, careerist, scheming, hypocritical, double-dealing, two-faced, pavement politics obsessed inner and outer tossers.

I only hope, for Respect’s sake, that Abdul Aziz isn’t one of them.

From: [deleted]
Date: 12 April 2007 15:47:21 BST
To: [deleted]
Subject: Last Reminder! All London Members GLA Meeting

We hope to see you there!

If you are wondering who will be chosen, don't hold your breath. I'm told that the Socialist Workers' Party is anxious to avoid a re-run of the recent Birmingham fiasco, which saw a Muslim small businessman selected to run for the Moseley & Kings Heath council ward next month, in preference to an SWP activist.

The same mistake will not be made twice. The prefered names will be as per those nominated by the SWP-controlled Haringey & Enfield branch on March 27: Lindsey German will get to put up against Red Ken and head the GLA ticket, where only the number one slot stands an outside chance of being elected. Making up numbers will be Ken Loach, Victoria Britain, Elaine Graham-Leigh, Sait Akgul, Abdullah Afrah, Gary McFarlane and Simon Hester.

And as somebody somewhere once remarked, when the line is decided, organisation decides all. But as my source points out, it's interesting to see that high profile Muslim names are not being pushed this time.

Waiseul Islam – a Respect councillor in Tower Hamlets – has defected to the Labour Party. Here’s how he explains his decision, in a press release issued yesterday:

"This has been a long and carefully thought out decision by me to leave the Respect Party and to join the Labour Party. I have always believed in the principles of Labour and what it stands for and I have never felt comfortable within Respect since the election in May 2006. I have been more and more frustrated with Respect which offers little in the way of policies, direction or service to the local community in Tower Hamlets, which is the real reason why I entered politics. I reject the notion of dividing the local community for political gain, which is what I believe Respect are effectively doing.

"Labour is the only party in Tower Hamlets with both the record and the vision to improve the lives of local people. I am glad that Cllr Islam will be joining us in this work and I am sure that his constituents in Whitechapel as well as the people of Tower Hamlets as a whole will benefit from his principled decision. Respect has long claimed to be what they are not and now we have heard the real truth from one who knows - he has said that Respect stands for division and inaction and have nothing to offer the people of the East End."

Anyone know the breakdown of councillors in Tower Hamlets now?

[Hat tip: Pregethwr in the comments box]

Murshid - pictured - last made the headlines when he was suspended from Tower Hamlets Labour Party two years ago, following his arrest on eight charges of theft from a local children's project. He was subsequently acquitted on all counts.

He told the paper:

"After more than two decades in the Labour Party, I have decided to resign and will do so publicly on Tuesday.

"The people of East London and particularly the Bangladeshi community have been treated very badly by Labour over the years."

As the Advertiser notes, Murshid's resignation comes after his exclusion from the Labour shortlist for the Bethnal Green and Bow parliamentary selection, and the selection of Rushanara Ali.

It speculates that he could be in the running for the Respect nomination when sitting Respect MP George Galloway steps down at the next election. Galloway will be joining Murshid at the press conference.

{Hat tip: Macuaid]

Brent London Borough - Dudden Hill: Lib Dem 1262, Lab 1177, C 412, Respect 160, Green 156. (May 2006 - Three seats Lib Dem 1460, 1277, 1195, Lab 1163, 1099, 1017, C 579, 551, 527, Green 381). Lib Dem hold. Swing 1.8% Lib Dem to Lab.

Don't get me wrong. I don't hold with the argument that far left groups should never run against Labour. All political parties have the right to stand for election.

And of course, it cannot be assumed that Respect voters would opt for Labour in the absence of the chance to back Respect. Indeed, comparing the figures for May 24th with those of May 3rd, it looks like most Respect support actually came from former Greens.

Ultimately, no candidate ever loses a contest because another candidate 'split the vote'. They lose because they do not convince enough people to vote for them.

But far left electoral interventions - especially those which have zero chance of success - need to be properly judged. That's why the Socialist Party's decision to fight John McDonnell in Hayes and Harlington in 2001 was tactically a bad call. And where's there is the risk that the Lib-Dems or the Tories will gain as a result, there's a reason to think twice.

It’s well enough established that I am not an admirer of Mr Galloway or a supporter of his Respect party. In one of my better-known contributions to the left press over the years, I insisted that the MP was wrong in principle to accept money from the Saudi royal family, a repellent bunch of brutal kleptocrats who run the most repressive regime on the entire planet.

What's more, what sort of message did that act send to the proletariat in Saudi Arabia? What did it tell Filipino and Bangladeshi guest workers about the principles - or lack thereof - of the European left?

All of this should come as elementary socialist morality, I would have thought. But not to some. The article is still cited by Respect supporters today as evidence of my alleged 'rightwards drift'.

Yet I remain convinced that neither individual socialists nor socialist organisations should take financial support from bourgeois sources, both on the grounds that money generated by class exploitation is inevitably tainted, and that it could not conceivably come without strings attached.

Leftwing parties should restrict themselves to cash raised from supporters or donated by the collective organisations of the working class. Labour’s decision to ditch reliance on trade union backing and emulate the methods of the Tories, which essentially boil down to passing round the begging bowl in the salons of the super-rich, angered me to the point that I was motivated to write a book about the process

Ultimately, the problem here is that politicians come to accept the outlook of the sundry billionaires that pay the piper. So any measures that limit the whims of the super-rich in the interests of ordinary people are automatically politically unacceptable. Wealthy businessmen expect a return on their political investments, as they do with all their other investments.

That the Conservatives and the Lib Dems are in on the racket too is no excuse for Labour to cash in. Higher standards are applicable to progressive parties than those that obtained for John Major’s Tories.

So before it is in any position to throw the book at Galloway, New Labour needs to ask itself some pertinent questions here.

Did the Mariam Appeal do more to lower public opinion of politicians than Labour did when it accepted a £100,000 donation from a pornography publisher, or delayed legislation on tobacco advertising after pocketing £1m from a sports promoter who benefited extensively from the largesse of cigarette manufacturers?

Sure, Galloway was guilty of ‘concealing the true source of Iraqi funding’. But wasn’t Lord Levy equally guilty of trying to conceal the true source of funding for New Labour by using loans as a mechanism to avoid disclosure?

None of this is to argue that Galloway is in the right. But it is a call for consistency when Scotland Yard finally hands in its dossier on cash for peerages.

Or will the commissioner for parliamentary standards suddenly transmogrify into the commissioner for parliamentary double standards?

But I’ve just discovered that the family tradition of political activism goes back further than just two generations. Here’s a story originally published in what sounds like an extremely rightwing Russian newspaper and subsequently picked up by, well, the Daily Mail:

… Russian political analyst Gleb Pavlovsky, who is close to the Russian President, has claimed Mr Miliband inherited anti-Russian sentiments from his family.

"David absorbed anti-Sovietism, as the saying goes, with his mother's milk," said Mr Pavlovsky.

Hang on a minute, Mr Pavlovsky. Maybe I’m missing something, but if Grandpa M was given to bumping off anti-commies under the direction of the then-commander of Lenin's Red Army, surely that’s pro-Sovietism at work, no?

Oh, and am I alone in detecting just the teeniest soupçon of anti-semitism in this outburst?

Extract from this week's edition of the SWP internal bulletin, Party Notes, as published over at Socialist Unity:

Two week’s ago Respect won a spectacular by-election in Shadwell in Tower Hamlets. For Respect activists and the Labour Party it demonstrated that Respect had not gone away and had a real chance of winning a seat in the GLA elections and George Galloway of winning the seat of Poplar and Limehouse.

Sadly, last week George sent out an eight page document to all members of the Respect National Committee outlining major concerns about the direction Respect is going in. George’s document also makes a number of criticisms about the way the Respect Office operates.

The SWP disagree with George’s claims and we have sent a letter to the 14 SWP members on the Respect National Committee refuting the technical issues George has raised.

Obviously the situation is very serious for Respect. The SWP is 100% committed to the Respect project and is currently doing everything it can to keep the show on the road. Next week a meeting will take place between George and the SWP to attempt to resolve the issues he raises. We will be holding a members meeting for all SWP London members to discuss the outcome of the above meeting. We will also be holding meetings for members outside London soon.

Typically, the SWP's membership - let alone the rest of the left - is not told the nature of the issues at hand. But blogger Liam Macuaid has seen what Galloway has to say, and adds in the comments box:

GG’s document is a thorough critique of the SWP’s method. My favourite section is his description of how Respect tends to “anathematize” political voices critical of the leadership’s way of working.

On reading GG’s document I was struck by its similarity to a lot of the points Socialist Resistance has been making over the last couple of years.

Intriguing. But after a long day dragging Daddy's Little Princesses round Legoland, I'm too bushed to think of anything particularly original to add. Presumably the document will surface somewhere online before too long. More comment then.

The post below details what little is so far known of an eight-page critique of the SWP's role in Respect, penned by none other than the solitary Respect MP, George Galloway. Here's a couple of initial observations on the development.

First question: why did Galloway write it? Given that he has connived actively with the SWP's undemocratic administration inside their common front organisation throughout the four years of its existence so far, the assumption must be that he has been happy enough with the set up until now.

Most observers felt that he had little interest in building it into a real political party, as his intention was to serve one further term in parliament and before permanent departure for the netherworld of b-list celebritydom.

If he now wishes it function in a manner that incorporate independently-minded activists and perhaps even other leftist groups, does that imply a shift towards a more long-term perspective?

Second question: why has the SWP made all this public at such an early stage, instead of trying to keep word of the document under wraps? Does this indicate that this is more than a minor spat?

UPDATE: The full document is now available on Liam Macuaid's blog. It would be superfluous to repost the whole thing, especially as the bulk of it is rather tedious. Instead, I'll just offer up a taster and encourage those interested to check out Liam's site:

Relations between leading figures in Respect are at an all-time low and this must be addressed. I have proposals to make which are not aimed at a change of political line, still less an attack on any organisation or section within Respect.

They are aimed at placing us on an election war-footing, closing the chasm which has been caused to develop between leading members, together with an emergency fundraising and membership drive to facilitate our forthcoming electoral challenges. Business as usual will not do and everyone in their heart knows this.

The crossroads at which we now stand can take us either down the Shadwell route or the road to Southall. Instead of three MPs and a presence on the GLA we could have no MPs and no one on the GLA by this time next year. A few honest moments thoughts should suffice to calibrate where that would leave us. Oblivion.

I cannot imagine that any member of the National Council wants to see us arrive at the destination where now lies the wreck of left-wing politics in Scotland and so I hope that these proposals will be considered with the best interests of the Respect project uppermost in our minds.

The continuing collapse of Respect has reached the point at which not even the Socialist Workers’ Party can maintain its traditional aloofness in such matters and is forced to put its position publically. Hence an editorial in this week’s Socialist Worker:

Socialist Worker has never been one of those papers obsessed with the manoeuvres of left groups. But the present division in Respect is so important it demands comment.

Curious. Why conflate what is supposed to be broad coalition with a mere rival Trot sect? The article goes on to bemoan just how much political and organisation support the SWP has provided to Galloway over the last four years. Now the ungrateful wretch has turned on his strongest supporters:

Now, in a concerted push which should appal those who want to see a radical alternative to Labour, Galloway has begun to attack the core of the left in Respect. He has decided that the political vision which has sustained the project no longer fits.

He denounces members of the SWP as unthinking “Leninists” who listen to nobody but their shadowy and unaccountable leadership – a classic right wing stereotype of revolutionaries. Inside Respect a campaign has been launched against the SWP in an attempt to drive us out.

It ends with confirmation that the SWP is going to fight this one down to the wire, even if that means taking the entire project down with them:

The SWP is not going to be driven out of Respect. We played an important part in creating Respect and have done as much as anyone to make the project work. We are also going to continue to stand up for Respect as a coalition that defends all working class people and tries to meet the urgent need for a left alternative to Labour.

We urge everyone to support our position that we need to defend Respect as a project that has socialism as a central part, that will not make endless concessions in order to win votes, and that stands up for democracy.

Responses from other far left organisations have been rapid. Workers’ Liberty makes some telling points:

Missing from the editorial is any suggestion why Galloway should want to do such bad things. In fact Galloway has never been anything better than a Stalinist-minded one-time Labour "soft left" with dodgy connections (admitted) to the Saudi and Emirates monarchies and successive Pakistani governments and to Saddam Hussein's hideous regime in Iraq.

Some SWP members will remember how the SWP trashed the Socialist Alliance, ditched socialist approaches in elections in favour of the claim that Respect were the best "fighters for Muslims", and steamrollered the rejection of mildly-worded pro-secularist motions at Respect conference with the allegation that they were "Islamophobic", all with the excuse that this was going to get the SWP into the political "big time".

The Socialist Party also sticks the boot in, in an oh-so-reasonable way, of course:

Some have argued that Respect the Unity Coalition – the political initiative launched by George Galloway MP and the Socialist Workers' Party in 2004 – could be a positive step towards a new mass workers' party. We would support any positive step on the road to a new party and for this reason discussed with the leadership of Respect at the time of its launch, and again in 2006.

However, while we welcomed the election of George Galloway as a Respect MP in 2005, we concluded that we could not join Respect because we believed that Respect's mistaken organisational and political approach meant it would not develop as a positive step towards a new mass workers' party but, on the contrary, could form an obstacle to the development of such a party.

Finally, Harry’s Place has a round robin from the Galloway faction that will make depressing reading for partisans of the Respect project here.

I’ll post some thoughts on where all this leaves the idea of a new left party - once the debris clears - later today.

I had promised myself not to post on Respect today and to pick a ‘real world’ subject instead. But developments are coming thick and fast and deserve some comment.

A meeting seeking a compromise conference delegation slate for Tower Hamlets fell to pieces in acrimony last night. Meanwhile, the Tower Hamlets council group has split into 'Provisional Respect' and 'Continuity Respect' factions. Read all about it over at Liam’s if you really want the gory details in slo-mo.

I’ll restrict myself to a brief comment on the politics of the Respect split: there aren’t any.

Correct me if I’m wrong – the comments box is open - but this entire crisis seems to have stemmed entirely from a breakdown in the personal relationships between John Rees on the one hand and George Galloway and Salma Yaqoob on the other.

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.

I’ve not campaigned with either the Gorgeous One or Ms Yaqoob and so have no knowledge of their political modus operandi. It may be that they are not above criticism in the events of recent weeks.

But it is utterly disingenuous for the SWP to try to dress up a personality clash as a left versus right issue. Moreover, it is utterly ludicrous for them to dress themselves up as upholders of democratic functioning in working class organisations.

Yes, it is perfectly true to say that Galloway is pandering to a communalist agenda. But there one is reminded of the immortal words of American crim “Slick Willie” Sutton. Asked why he robbed banks, he replied: “Because that’s where the money is.”

Galloway will prefer accommodation to populism over socialist principles every time, because that’s where the votes are. Sadly, he has convinced a layer of erstwhile ‘revolutionary Marxists’ that this is the way to go.

Respect is no more and no less communalist now than when it was launched four years ago, and the SWP leadership damn well knows that.

The central committee will no doubt be hoping that the de facto split will cauterise the situation. But anybody who has had the excitement of living through a faction fight in a Trot organisation – wotcha, Liam! – will be well aware these things can develop a dynamic of their own. The story may not yet be over.

The Socialist Workers’ Party are only carrying on with the charade of running a ‘coalition’ that doesn’t actually include anybody else in order to save face.

John Rees is displaying the same mentality as Lenin did in branding his supporters the Bolsheviks - which roughly translates as ‘majority faction’ - when it was actually in a minority of the RSDLP. There any similarity between the two men ends.

Once the SWP has been through the motions of running an abortive ‘Lindsey for Mayor’ campaign - and collecting an embarrassing and demoralising vote in the process - it will quietly fold up its Potemkin village ‘united front of a special kind’.

The political price it will pay for the follies of the last few years will by huge. The experience of the Socialist Alliance, the Scottish Socialist Party and now the break-up of Respect has sharply shown up the SWP as a toxic ally. Even if it says it is really, really, really sorry and promises never to do it again, nobody on the left is going to trust it for at least a generation.

The future of the Galloway grouping doesn’t look much brighter. Like it or not, the SWP provided the activist backbone of Respect up and down the country. Now that the Russian Dolls have upped and outed, the infrastructure will collapse outside one or two small pockets.

The few remaining socialists had better watch out; the political weight of the Islamists inside Respect Renewal will be qualitatively greater and the social conservatism more pronounced. Once Galloway loses whatever seat he tries to fight at the next election, the new formation’s game is up.

Socialists involved in either side of this debilitating split ask themselves a few questions. Respect has was hatched in secret, behind the back of the Socialist Alliance, with no provision for internal democracy and no broad support in the labour movement. How were any of you ever daft enough to think that could possibly work?

There is no problem with attempting to appeal to religious individuals or groups on the basis of class politics. But it is an abandonment of basic socialist principle to appeal directly to religious sectarianism, as ‘the party for Muslims’ indubitably did. Why did you play ball with that? Will you continue to do so?

As long as the Marxist left in England continues to fluff the construction of a new left party - something that has been successfully done in every other major country in Europe - the social constituencies that it claims to speak for will continue either to abstain from politics or vote for New Labour.

Pic: George Galloway, John Rees and Lindsey German in happier times

Press release just in from Rifondazione Respectista: George Galloway has been declared the Respect candidate for Poplar and Limehouse at the next general election, being the only nomination. No shocks there, then.

But slightly more surprising is the statement that ‘[a]t the same meeting four candidates were shortlisted for selection for Bethnal Green and Bow - Councillor Shahed Ali, Mr Hasanat Hussain, Councillor Abjol Miah and Tower Hamlets Respect Vice Chair Ms Farhana Zaman.’

It had widely been assumed that Kumar Murshid – the former Livingstone race adviser who defected from New Labour to Respect earlier this year – was a shoo-in for this one. Has Murshid gone with the SWP, or is there some other explanation?

Update: I asked my source what happened to Murshid, and was told:

Again, all part of the split. He still wants to be PPC for BGB, but Galloway's backing Abjol Miah, so he's taken umbrage and joined the Rees/Rahman group. He then accuses Miah et al of "village politics".

The last time I heard that expression was when I was chatting to a Bangladeshi cab driver in downtown Riyadh. I asked him what he thought of the Saudis, and he told me in a tone of complete contempt: ‘They are all villagers, Sir. Villagers!’ So I take it the term is not a compliment.

However, this raises the prospect of rival Respect campaigns slugging it out on the streets of Bethnal Green and Bow come 2010. This is all getting beyond parody, isn’t it? To paraphrase Guevara, 'two, three, many Respect candidates!'

[Hat tip: email informant]

SWP loyalists are doing their best to make light of Hussain’s transfer of allegiance. As they rightly argue, this is hardly the first time in socialist history that a Trot has flipped over to the right, even though the process has been unusually rapid in this instance.

But the move - coming on the day that Respect candidates secured nugatory votes in two local government by-elections, despite significant SWP mobilisations for their campaigns - nicely underlines the collapse of a priority scheme that the theoreticians of Britain’s largest far left grouping theorised as ‘a united front of a special kind’.

That Respect would come to grief in this fashion was written into its political DNA from its inception. It was from the get-go - and remains, in both the versions now trading under that name since last year’s debilitating split - essentially a communalist project, in which revolutionary socialists did the leg work to ensure that a Mosque-directed bloc vote was channelled behind George Galloway and elements of the Muslim business community, in the hope of slipping a handful of their number unnoticed into the council chamber.

Some leading figures seem not even to know what trade unions are, let alone have any concept of solidarity with working class struggle. Others - such as Hussain, pictured with his new political chums at Central Office - obviously have more nous, and are ready to do whatever it might take to advance his political career. The SWP? The Conservative Party? It’s all the same to this guy.

I hate to say I told you so, but what the heck; I told you so. I have voiced this critique repeatedly since 2003, and routinely been denounced as an ‘Islamophobe’ and a ‘sad sectarian’ for doing so. One would like to think its validity is now self-evident even to the most braindead SWP rookie.

In fairness, Respect did recruit a handful of rather better people than Hussain; Oli Rahman, another of the councillors, comes to mind. But he comes from a background of trade unionism, and is precisely the sort of working class activist who could have been recruited directly to a socialist organisation.

That brings me neatly to my main point. What was so wrong in the involvement of the SWP and the ISG - the other ostensibly Trotskyist component of Respect, now in the Galloway faction - was precisely their abandonment of class politics.

The normal reply on this point is that the Bangladeshis of Tower Hamlets are part of the working class; and of course they are. But Respect has sought to appeal to them not as workers, but as Muslims. Any comparison with the principled approach of the Communist Party to East End Jews in the 1930s is entirely spurious.

What the SWP is now witnessing is the logical consequences of its decision to wind up the Socialist Alliance so that it could realign itself with George Galloway. Had it been patiently built, on the basis of consistent class struggle politics, it could at least potentially have secured local government representation and acted as a pole of attraction to leftwing Labour Party members.

That recent events have not produced a backlash inside the SWP underline that it is effectively dead as a serious Marxist current. Further shocks for the membership may yet be in store at the likely trial of Tommy Sheridan, but I guess that will cause no eruption either, just continued drip-drip erosion of the SWP’s already declining membership base.

That won’t matter to the central committee. There is a lot of money sloshing around its structures, if the blogs of some former leading members are to be believed, so it will undoubtedly continue to secure its existence without the need for any meaningful base of working class support.

Meanwhile, Galloway’s Respect Renewal faction is standing increasingly exposed as a one-man band, at least in labour movement terms. Its leader’s appeal for a ‘Progressive List’ for the London elections underlines its Billy No Mates status. My sense is that neither of the organisations seen as the most likely allies - the RMT transport union and the Communist Party of Britain - are likely to sign up. International workers’ day is likely to prove mighty humiliating for both camps.

It is now almost 12 years since the formal launch of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, and the idea of building a socialist political party to the left of Labour - something I threw myself into in the 1990s - is now clearly unrealisable, perhaps for a generation. So disoriented are large chunks of the far left, they are incapable even of realising that.

A NUMBER of blogs today carry reports of the Respect conference in Birmingham on Saturday, which seems to mark what even previously unquestioningly loyal supporters of that organisation are describing as a shift to the right.

In one apparently bad-tempered debate, those calling for an orientation to the ‘son of No2EU’ general election challenge were soundly defeated by the majority perspective of closer ties to leftwing Greens.

The latter category includes Peter Tatchell, who won the endorsement of Respect MP George Galloway. It will be interesting to see how those in Respect who consider Britain’s best known gay activist to be an irredeemable Islamophobe will square that circle.

Meanwhile, Galloway is said to have repeatedly slammed ‘Trots’ and ‘Communists’. This seems a bit rich, given that the Socialist Workers’ Party was the main mover behind the foundation of Respect, that the British section of the Fourth International is still ostensibly a component of the grouping, and that great efforts were initially made to get the Communist Party of Britain on board.

Worryingly, former SWPers state that they will seek to ‘pulverise’ the oppositionists, and openly hint that leading leftists on the Respect national committee should reconsider their membership of Respect and ‘move on’. We can all guess where that one is going.

It is not quite clear whether another edition of ‘The Respect Paper’, a project largely the work of the residual Trotskyists, will ever see the printing presses.

Apparently, the outlook now is that Respect will secure three MPs within a matter of months, at which point socialist groups will form an orderly queue to seek some kind of tie-up.

I am told by Brummies that Salma Yaqoob has some chance of securing a Birmingham seat, although cannot be considered a shoo-in; none but the self-deluded can honestly believe that either Galloway or Abjol Miah are in the running in East London. But this is for the electorate to decide.

Yet however one evaluates the politics of these three candidates, not one can meaningfully be described as a socialist. I have argued from the start that Respect has never been a viable vehicle for a new party to the left of Labour; that contention is probably about to see its decisive test, and I suspect that some comrades I love dearly will soon be looking pretty bloody stupid.

Elsewhere, the SWP is still committed on paper to some form of electoral intervention. But it is currently in the midst of a faction fight, with further expulsions reported in the northeast. Things may or may not get nasty, but it is doubtful whether it will be in any shape to mount more than token efforts in this direction.

There will be some sort of slate around the Socialist Party, backed by some leftwing trade unionists in a personal capacity, but not now the CPB. Its prospects must accordingly be limited.Workers of the world, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your deposits.

I actually spent last Saturday at the annual conference of the Labour Representation Committee, which brings together what is left of the Labour left. While I am not making out that it is on the verge of some kind of breakthrough, it at least offers a cohesive game plan.

The reality is that the only socialists in the next parliament will be those elected on a Labour Party ticket. Anybody that really wants to see a continued hard left presence at Westminster should direct their efforts to the relevant constituencies. Anything else is either at best tokenistic, and at worst simply sterile.