that Respect is standing up for their rights too.
Respect had precious little to say on the environment in its manifesto or during the election campaign.
Combining environmentalism with anti-capitalism is an attractive mix for young people who see little to choose between the other parties on these issues.
The election of Matt Wrack as general secretary of the FBU, Mark Serwotka's determination to resist the attacks on civil service pensions and the RMT's anti-privatisation march during the election shows that there is a small group of union leaders who don't want to make peace with Respect's has to develop. A regular newspaper would help consolidate branches and groups. John Lister For Respect members and supporters in many parts of the country, May 5 was so much not an opportunity to vote for a left alternative, more a sharp political dilemma: where no Respect candidates was standing (and only two dozen seats were targeted) how should people vote to show their opposition to the war, Blair and Blairism
While Socialist Resistance supported the decision to focus on relatively few target seats, rather than wage an underresourced campaign spread thin and wide across the country, we have always pointed out that it needed to be combined with publicity and information to help resource and build Respect branches everywhere.
For many people outside the target areas, the celebration of Respect's strong results of the campaigns in East London and Birmingham has been tempered by a strong sense that we have a mountain to climb in building a broad but radical left wing alternative in our own. towns and cities.
And the whole election period itself had been marked by a complete absence of any general publicity material setting out Respect's policies.
Plans for a mass-distribution tabloid, carrying extracts from Respect's manifesto, were dropped by national officers at the last minute, without offering any explanation.
One firm conclusion from this experience is that it is vital for Respect to press ahead with the implementation of the conference decision last October to launch a national publication that can unite and mobilise the whole organisation, and share some of the positive experiences of the campaigns in the strongest areas.
An organisation with several thousand members and a layer of experienced campaigners on its National Council should easily be able to generate the resources for a regular newspaper, which would give local branches up to date information and the means to communicate with potential supporters and recruits.
But the decision to allocate resources to this task requires agreement at the top level of Respect that this is a priority, and that the necessary steps have to be taken to make it happen.
It is clear that even though the resolution to establish a newspaper was carried without opposition at last October's conference, sections of the National Council have yet to commit themselves to implementing it.
Of course this type of development poses further issues.
Any form of regular newspaper for Respect would demand a development of policy on a range of issues - and this in turn would help focus on the need to operate more clearly not as a permanent "coalition" of disparate elements on the basis of negotiation, but more as a party, developing a common programme and a democrațic machinery to decide on contentious questions and establish a common
If it is to attract and retain a new layer of activists in the aftermath of its electoral successes, Respect must be more than an electoral machine focused on the organisational details of leafieting and raising funds.
More attention needs to be paid to what is in the leaflets, and what other issues the organisation needs to be raising locally and nationally: this requires a much higher level of political discussion and debate at every level in Respect.
This must be driven from the top, with much more regular and consistent functioning of Respect's leading bodies, which have up to now been largely sidelined, and sometimes over-ridden by the dayto-day decisions of the National Office and national officers. Let's hope these developments do not get swept to one side in the short-term euphoria after the May 5 results, or Respect will miss an important aspect of preparing itself to go further, reach wider and build broader.