RESPECT STOOD over 150 candidates and got 16 elected: 12 in Tower
Hamlets, three in Newham and one in Birmingham. The victories of
candidates standing against the Iraq war, privatisation and the other
neo-liberal attacks of New Labour and big business are welcome. However
there are also strong danger signs regarding Respect’s development.
Judy Beishon
All of their winning candidates are from a Muslim background and won
predominately on the basis of Muslim votes in areas with high Muslim
populations. Winning support from working-class Muslim and other Asian,
black and immigrant communities is an essential task of left and
socialist parties. These communities face some of the worst housing
conditions, jobs and unemployment in Britain and also suffer the
consequences of increased racism.
However, the extreme difference between Respect’s election performance
in those areas compared with areas with relatively few Muslims is
striking. Virtually all of Respect’s results in towns and cities such as
Plymouth, Portsmouth, Cambridge, Liverpool, Newcastle and Oxford were
very much lower (around 2-300 votes) than their votes in areas with high
Muslim populations.
On its website, Respect declares that their twelve council seats in
Tower Hamlets are "one more than the BNP in Barking and Dagenham". This
would be a cause for great celebration by the left as a whole, if it had
been achieved on a clear class-based programme. But instead,
unfortunately, Respect could unconsciously further the beginnings of a
polarisation based on racial division, by not countering the growing
perception that it is a ‘party for Muslims’.
The white working-class BNP voters of Barking and Dagenham will only
be won away from the BNP by a left party that puts forward a class-based
alternative. It is not so much a question of what Respect’s election
material says, but of what it doesn’t say. While it puts across
opposition to NHS cuts, council house privatisation, the war in Iraq and
other welcome positions, it does not consistently include a class-based
appeal to all sections of the working class.
As the Socialist Party has repeatedly warned, it is necessary for
socialists to stand clearly and firmly on a fighting, class-based
programme that can unite working people from all sections of society. In
Kirklees, standing for ‘Save Huddersfield NHS’, Socialist Party member
Jackie Grunsell won a council seat with 2,176 votes and a majority of
807, by appealing to both white voters and a significant Asian minority
electorate. Victorious Socialist Party candidates in Coventry and
Lewisham have also appealed to all sections of workers in those areas.
Another major challenge Respect now faces will be in living up to
expectations to improve the lives of people in Tower Hamlets. Some of its
new councillors there have a record of fighting privatisation and cuts,
but as the second largest political group on the council they will soon
be tested at a new level.
The housing, welfare and other urgent needs in that poverty stricken
borough cannot be solved with the money presently given by the government
and raised in local council tax. So Respect’s councillors will be faced
with the choice of supporting cuts in some services, increasing council
tax, or of mobilising all sections of the community into a major campaign
to demand the necessary resources from the government, as Liverpool’s
socialist councillors did in the 1980s.
Respect has already shown – particularly through the behaviour of its
MP George Galloway – that its public representatives are far from
accountable to the party. This, combined with the fact that many of its
new councillors do not come from a socialist background, is cause for
concern in Tower Hamlets.
What is needed, is a united, campaigning team of councillors, opposing
all cuts and leading and basing themselves on the struggles of workers
from all religious and ethnic backgrounds. Only in this way can a
successful campaign be launched against the New Labour government and
council attacks on living standards and for the resources necessary to
transform people’s lives.
