Committee includes socialist film director KEN LOACH. He spoke to Socialist Resistance on the outcome of the June THINK you can see the results in two ways. If you wanted to take the negative view, you could say there was a massive anti-war sentiment across the country, and we captured relatively little of it.
On the other hand you could argue that RESPECT as a party began only a few months ago, and yet made massive inroads in some areas.
I think the truth is somewhere between the two.
To succeed in elections across the whole country we will have to learn some hard lessons. The traditional way the left has organised in electoral campaigns paid dividends in some areas -but made little or no impression in others. Profile
The key thing is that if you don't have a reasonably prominent profile in the mass media, you don't really exist in the eyes of most voters.
And since we don't have the money for a major advertising campaign, we can only get a national profile by finding ways of getting RESPECT covered in the press and by broadcasters. We have to have a much more professional way of relating to the media.
The second lesson is that we have to develop politically and organisationally.
This begs the question of whether we saw enough success on June 10 to make it worthwhile. 250,000 did vote for us, but in percentage terms this is very small, and especially small in some regions, while clearly London, Birmingham and some other areas did much better. I think we should go ahead, not only because this is a reasonable start in building an electoral base, but also because where else do you go to build a political altemative? Vacuum
The need for such an alternative is still there, to fill the vacuum left by social democracy. So we need a new movement - but what sort of movement is it going to be? Will it be left social democratic or Marxist? We will have to have political debate. In some areas we have no developed policies at all. We have been seen by some as little more than a one-issue campaign: we can't go on like that.
RESPECT has already advanced beyond left social democracy in the general analysis of the war, the driving forces behind it, and its stance in defence of the Palestinians. But we need to promote more discussion.
The starting point has to be using contemporary language to refine and reinterpret the principles we start from. And we need to develop a political hinterland - working groups, forums, drawing up policy statements. Research
If I'm working on a film, I will read a range of research material from all kinds of people to provide a base of information from which I can draw conclusions.
We need to do the same for RESPECT, starting from the bottom up, drawing in the best in research from people working in NGOs, academics, researchers - and make RESPECT a forum for debate and ideas, as the basis for the development of policies.
If we are going to move from a coalition to a party, we need not just a change of words and a constitution, we need new ways of working.
We need to ensure representation for the different political tendencies, interest groups, ethnic minorities and so on.
We need an executive to run the organisation, but it needs to be absolutely democratic and transparent in its decisions: everyone needs to feel they can have an input.
We have had some decisions that have been announced which should have been taken by the Executive: I sometimes find out second hand - and I'm on the Executive! Priorities
In my mind, the two key priorities if RESPECT is to develop as a party are a Public Relations/ Campaigns manager, and a Research Officer. Even the smallest NGOs have these, and without someone doing this we don't really deserve to be taken serously.
Finally, we must not capitulate to what call the tyranny of the next
We cannot build a new party just on activism and electoral work: we need to build its political platform, get it organised.
There is a lot of political work that really has to be done, and it won't necessarily fit neatly into the timescales for this that or even the General