Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Respect Conference: The debate that will not go away

Socialist Resistance no31  |  page 6

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

for a long time. based alternative to new Labour and its neoliberal agenda. country. bers was to the effect that these would be a low priority. and campaigning leadership, one that can respond to political developments as they take place. But it has to be a leadership bership and elected committees as a whole. for Respect to move towards a regular newspaper that would new members that are needed for the organisation to grow. avoiding this if Respect is to develop as an effective and democratic organisation. but also by the tone of debate and the obvious manoeuvring behind the scenes. conference can be found on www.socialistresistance.net. list of war dead).

One SWP member tried to claim it was about who Respect was seen to be lining up with, until I pointed out that Ken Clarke and the BNP had been against the war in Iraq, so we could be seen as lined up with them.

One of the muslim activists said that the majority of the the muslim leadership were supporting the bill but he half backed down as he realised that it was obvious they were being bought off by a cynical New Labour play.

He argued it was the devil and Socialist Resistance is fully committed to building Respect. We believe it is the best thing to have happened on the left in England

Respect's conference, however, which took place on 19 and 20 of November, was a deeply worrying event. It unfortunately put a question mark over Respect's long-term development as a broad

It questioned Respect's ability to develop as a genuinely pluralist organisation, capable of embracing the bulk of the left in this

The conference passed a number of important resolutions in the session on building Respect but the rhetoric from leading memOf course we all want Respect to have an effective, proactive based on the collective development of policy by Respect's memOne proposal that was opposed by the SWP and defeated was communicate with members and give them a means to recruit the

Behind all this of course is the debate as to whether Respect should develop as a party or a loose coalition: the more structures it has, the more it takes on the character of a party. But there is no

The debate on the issues raised at the conference has continued in many of the branches. Many members were disturbed not only by the apparent opposition to democracy and accountability,

Doubts have been raised that must be answered. That's why these pages and our Editorial explore some of the issues arising out of the conference - and we invite readers to comment and join the debate that will not go away. Our full statement analysing the

the deep blue sea and whatever position Respect took would be difficult. But the position of Socialist Resistance seemed to get some sympathy. We didn't have time to discuss anything else, though I said the debate on the paper was actually about how much Respect becomes a serious party. Most Respect members in Preston would be more 'pro-party' than the SWP line, but this may be partly a result of local circumstances (see article above).