Birmingham Respect has recently selected four prospective councillors to stand in the May 2007 local elections, and is in the process of selecting two more. These are mainly based in the inner city areas.
There are no plans to stand in any other areas, although an invitation was sent out to any Respect members who wished to stand in their local wards.
At present Birmingham Respect has two councillors, Salma Yaqoob (who is playing a very prominent role) plus a recent defector, Councillor Aziz, who represented the Liberal Democrats for the Aston ward.
He was recently deselected and soon after decamped to Respect. He reports that 45 but of 76 members of the local Lib Dems are on the point of following him. The reasons for his defection can be seen on the Respect website and seem to centre on the lack of internal democracy.
There was a large vote for the Lib Dems in the Muslim areas in previous years because of their opposition to the Iraq war; they did provide a pole of attraction that drew support away from Respect.
That effect was shown again a year or so ago when the majority section of the People's Justice Party (PJP) split to join the Lib Dems.
Whether this more recent disillusionment with the Lib Dems is a one off or represents something more widespread remains to be seen.
They have certainly not done much for their image by joining into a coalition with Tories on the Council, which is pushing through privatisation of road maintenance and schools via City Academies.
The PJP, originally set up to focus attention on the Kashmir issue, and which once had 9 Councillors, has now
The Lib been left as a rump.
However, an ex Dems have member of the PJP minority has just come across to be the done much Respect candidate in for their Bordesley Green, the place where Respect image by exploded onto the their scene in the last Euro coalition
So, there will with Tories probably be 6 candidates and the possibility of having a group of two or more Councillors after the May
In terms of local organisation, Birmingham Respect has now boiled down to the attempt to build four local branches, linked by a district committee.
These are still tenuous, and a lot of hard work and care will
be needed to make them into flourishing bodies that campaign all year certainly not round, that are intersive
and encourage internal debate and education. However, a start has been made and a more open approach from the SWP of late makes that process a little easier. It is a shame that this pattern was not followed a couple of years ago when Respect was bursting onto the scene.
A fair amount of time, goodwill and active members have been lost. and Discussion was kept almost entirely within the limits of a rally, rather than an organising conference.
It illuminated starkly the narrow bloc of alliances that Respect has managed to construct and showed that there have been no significant defections either from Labour or the union left in the last year.
The event itself, despite what the organisers may claim, succeeded in alienating many more non-Respect members than it attracted.
In the organisation's Tower Hamlets. stronghold the medium term situation is precarious. George Galloway has made clear that he will not stand in the Bethnal Green constituency again.
He has set a very strong example of an elected official working without any reference to the democratic structures of the organisation. In ous successor. It does however have an abundance of aspirant candidates from a range of political traditions and opinions.
None of these potential successors to Galloway have had
opportunity to help Respect develop its own political culture and methods.
Real political discussion about what Respect is and what it could become happens in all sorts of places but seldom in Respect itself. The emphasis is always on getting out and doing things" or "talking to real people".
This is code for "we don't discuss political ideas". Yet without these discussions to clarify ideas and forge a distinct identity Respect can only be an alliance of factions rather than an embryonic mass socialist party.
Socialist Resistance supporters have consistently argued that Respect adopts
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several of the practices of the other emerging socialist organisations in Europe. A commitment to political pluralism and a healthy internal democracy are the most important of these. If Respect continues to be seen (and, in some cases, function) as a front organisation by the majority of socialist and trade union activists it can survive but it will not flourish.
Any organisation that grows out of the practice and experience of the British Labour movement will have to include established activists, with their own perof a felony, currently at a rate of and our attitudes towards it and the suffering it perpetuates, reflect more and more the American way - a way that offers no solutions and more problems.
England and Wales have more life-sentenced prisoners than the rest of Western Europe combined - and sentence lengths continue to grow - two years ago, nine percent of shoplifters with no previous convictions were sent to prison from magistrates courts, compared with two per cent in 1993.
Meanwhile, recalls to prison for breach of release conditions has spiralled upward by about 250 per cent under new Home Office 'tough enforcement' More than half of all prisoners are at or below the level expected of an 11 year old in reading population has suffered domestic violence and a third have self-harmed. Almost half of recently sentenced male prisoners have used heroin, crack or cocaine in the year prior to imprisonment. Nine out of ten young adult prisoners say they