Liam McQuade reports on the speech by Nick Wrack (RESPECT National Chair) to the East London Post-election meeting THE EUROPEAN election results show that a lot of traditional Labour voters didn't vote Labour this time. . We know that many of them voted for RESPECT. Tony Blair is in deep trouble because of this. Our results will have sent shockwaves into Labour Party committee rooms all over the country and you can be sure some of these won't stop until they reach the cabinet.
Twenty weeks before the election RESPECT was an idea, not a party. It came out of the anti-war movement but it was also the product of the way millions of people feel about privatisation, Labour's racism against asylum seekers, civil liberties, health, transport and education.
Vast numbers of Labour voters couldn't put up with all this anymore and the war was the straw that broke the camel's back. •...
We have touched a rich vein of discontentment. People want something new and fresh and for many the RESPECT programme fulfils this need. We know this for sure because we got 252,000 votes and the office has been inundated with requests for information and for membership.
These 252,000 are an absolutely fantastic starting point. We won after 20 weeks' existence with only the enthusiasm of our members and supporters. We received virtually no press coverage and many thousands of our leaflets were either not delivered by Royal Mail or delivered after the election.
RESPECT's national average was 1.7 per cent. This includes the Tory shires and large parts of the country where we barely exist. But what petrifies Labour and the Liberal Democrats is what this average hides. inner city working class areas with large ethnic minorities, our results are simply staggering. Lindsey German got 87,000 votes in London. George Galloway got 91,000 votes. Both came very close to getting elected.
In the European elections in the London boroughs of Hackney, Haringey and Waltham Forest we got 9.66 per cent, 7.66 per cent and 9.5 percent of the votes respectively. This will put the jitters up the other parties who know they may lose councillors to us and that general election results now become much more unpredictable.
In Newham we came second in the European elections. In Tower Hamlets we beat all the other parties. In Birmingham our average was 7.4 per cent. In ten wards it was between 18-39 percent and in some of these Respect came first and second in areas In Preston we averaged over 30 per cent in five council wards.
You can see why Labour might be frightened of us. It also shows that the national average is a relatively meaningless figure.
Our votes are concentrated in working class and ethnic minority communities which have been taken for granted by Labour. We .... have shown that the Labour machine isn't able to automatically deliver these votes anymore.
Now we have to work out how to build on this bedrock support. This means that we have to continue developing our political programme and strengthening the organisation.
This will involve regular meetings of RESPECT members, developing local networks, involving people, recruiting new members and registering new voters