Report On SWP Confeence: Lindsay German Selected As Candidate For GLA!

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Wednesday January 30, 2008 15:21

by Peter Manson

One of the more bizarre claims made at the SWP UK Conference was that Lindsay German would be elected to the Greater London Assembly. The report below covers the conference and pre-conference discussions. More at the url.

Respect is alive and well, and the politics we pursued proved to be correct. That is the pathetic message the SWP leaders want people, including their own members, to believe. Yes, John Rees, Lindsey German, Alex Callinicos, Chris Bambery and Martin Smith treat the working class with barely concealed contempt. Under their post-Tony Cliff regime the SWP has not only adopted Joseph’s Stalin’s popular front politics, but also the same utterly cynical attitude towards the truth. SWP conferences are run along Stalinist lines too. Socialist Worker boasts of the January 5-6 gathering: “An overwhelming majority supported the way the party had conducted itself during the Respect crisis” (January 12).

The oppositionists raised their voices only once the leadership decided that Respect was a dead end and provoked a split with Galloway. The oppositionists politics were those of Respect. Their rebellion was bureaucratic and narrow, but it resulted in the expulsions of Rob Hoveman, Nick Wrack and Kevin Ovenden, and the resignation of dozens more. Instead of having a no-holds-barred fight at conference, John Rees decided that the best tactic was to pose left and go for a pre-emptive strike in order to smother debate.

Though we have not the slightest political sympathy for Hoveman, Wrack, Ovenden and co, we opposed their expulsions. If a principled left is going to emerge in the SWP it needs the space to fully think things through. It needs open, democratic debate.

When Rees told delegates that German was in touching distance of success, she looked more than a little abashed. Everyone, knows that she does not have a chance in hell. Even if we were to assume that Respect-SWP, rather than Respect Renewal (the Galloway split), won the legal right to the name, where would the votes come from? In 2004 a united organisation won support from the (mainly Bengali) muslim areas of east London, thanks to the mobilising power of Galloway and the patriarchal network of businessmen and ‘community leaders’. That support has now been switched off like a tap.