Finally, after about a month of chewing on my tongue on this one, I find my lungs may burst if I don't give vent to a massive great big scream of "I TOLD YOU SO!!". Everyone else who has got involved with George Galloway has ended up regretting it and now so have the SWP. Quel blinking surprise. I am no more likely to get into the ins and outs of who did what to who when than I am to willingly spend an evening asking a recent divorcee to explain to me whose fault it was, but AFAICT from the British blogs (many of whom are quite unpleasant people with an obvious axe to grind, but not all of them, and by reading with a critical eye, I think you can pick up the facts), the general morphology of the SWP having been somewhat screwed by a pretty blatant power grab on the part of an alliance between Tower Hamlets "elders"[1] and George Galloway's personality cult, is more or less what happened.
Lou is completely right about "democratic centralism" in his main point in the linked post, though. Len (Richard Seymour, who knew) seems like a nice enough chap, but surely he's got to realise that his credibility has been really badly damaged by the fact that not twelve months ago, he was the doughty defender of George Galloway, even when GG was on a reality TV show dressing up as a bloody cat! Nw we find out what we suspected all along - that the SWP contingent within RESPECT were as aghast about this as the rest of us, and were in fact lying when they claimed that it was a masterstroke aimed at engaging with British youth. In my book, if you tell fibs then you tend to get a reputation as a fibber, and Lou is dead on that this not-quite-straight behaviour is a big part of why lots of people don't like democratic centralist parties. I only hope that this monumental bad bet isn't going to end up fatally weakening the anti-war movement here. dd [1] Although I for one am not going to unequivocally condemn "communalist" politics. If you're part of a ghettoized community, then recognising the fact and organising around it seems to me a more sensible strategy than trying to pretend you're part of the global working class and postponing your new fridge until after the revolution. The Irish at the turn of the century were rather keen on communalist politics and they seem to have done rather better out of it than other ethnic groups who allowed themselves to be talked out of it. In as much as the community leaders in question are fundamentalists, homophobes, burka-fanatics etc, then obviously fuck 'em, but in actual fact and AFAICTWMNBVF, they're for the most part normal Bengali gadgies, several of whom drink alcohol and smoke, and the kids who were on the news in 2005 working for RESPECT in Bethnal Green certainly weren't "communalists" in the religious sense; they were pissed off about the Iraq War but that is hardly an uncommon point of view.
