"RESPECT - The Disunity Coalition"

I have just heard the news that Newham councillors Asif Karim and Hanif Abdulmuhit have both quit "RESPECT". (Newham Recorder: Councillors quit party) It is just the latest stage in the disintegration of "RESPECT" as a political force in Newham.

In the past few years they've lost Lindsey German, their West Ham parliamentary candidate in 2005, and now two thirds of their councillors. And that's before we even start searching for what's happened to all their other one time names. Furthermore in the European elections next month "RESPECT" will not be on the ballot paper.

The two councillors in question were deselected because they were "not delivering services", nor were they attending Town Hall meetings or surgeries. It is the same old story of "RESPECT" - they get elected with a load of fanfare and then proceed to wallow in the same old extreme left infighting.

At least Asif Karim and Hanif Abdulmuhit didn't follow their Tower Hamlets counterparts in trying to create a new group on the council that also claimed the "RESPECT" name. Over there "RESPECT" split with the new group called, with not a trace of irony, "RESPECT - The Unity Coalition"!

The waste of "RESPECT"

The Sunday Telegraph has calculated the MPs who are the best and worst value for money, based upon the number of times they have voted, the number of speeches they make, the number of written questions and the expenses claimed. (Sunday Telegraph: Best and worst value MPs revealed)

At the top end of the scale are Philip Hollobone and Dennis Skinner. At the bottom end, by a long way, is "RESPECT"'S George Galloway. It is not easy for an MP who attends Parliament to make less of an impact on Westminster than a group of abstentionists, but George Galloway has succeeded with an impact on Parliament even less than Sinn Féin!

This reflects badly on "RESPECT - The Unity Coalition" as a whole (as does their recent complete failure to demonstrate respect or unity but that's another matter). Galloway is also notorious in his constituency for doing little to help most of his constituents. Instead it seems he has joined the tradition of extreme left-wing MPs spending all their time wandering around feeling important, making speeches to extreme left-wing rallies and visiting dodgy foreign leaders, all while claiming large expenses to keep them in fine clothes. And going on Big Brother.

Here's hoping that at the next election voters will reject not just Galloway himself but all the "RESPECT" candidates, putting an end to state-subsidised communism.

Liberal Democrat Run Tower Hamlets Borough Council - never ever again?!

Yesterday there was a by-election in the Mile End East ward in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The result was as follows:

Rachael Mary Alice SAUNDERS (Labour) 1208 47.3354232% (+15.11246805)
Motiur RAHMAN (Conservatives) 630 24.68652038% (+12.46136646)
Hafiz CHOUDHURY ("RESPECT") 604 23.6677116% (-3.794909334)
Jainal CHOWDHURY (Liberal Democrats) 110 4.310344828% (-17.94119431)
TOTAL 2552

(A word of caution. There are several different ways to calculate party percentages in multi-member wards, each with their own advantages and drawbacks, and I've used the method that assumes all voters used all their votes in 2006 - see Croydon Official Monster Raving Loony Party: Croydon 2006 for a summary of methods, mine is "Method B". At the last regular election not only did Mile End East have a huge amount of ticket splitting by normal standards but also Hafiz Choudhury ran as an independent, getting 5.837730871% of the vote. One could in theory add that to the "RESPECT" share, but it's not standard practice.)

It has been a good by-election to campaign in - our candidate, Motiur Rahman, is one of those people who can inspire activists to stay out far longer than they planned. The Conservative result is the best in living memory in the ward in both absolute and % terms (see Wikipedia: Tower Hamlets local elections and also Tower Hamlets Borough Council Election Results for earlier results - Mile End East takes in most of the old Limehouse ward with some of the old Bromley ward).

Now there's a lot that can be said about the various candidates and parties (and I was semi-surprised to see Rachael Saunders, a familiar name from Labour Students from years past in the NUS) but whilst the "RESPECT" vote has continued to fall (a decline even sharper when you consider the votes Choudhury got as an independent in 2006) as flash parties invariably do, perhaps the most significant long term sign is that Liberal Democrats in the borough are crashing and burning, after a long history here.

Tower Hamlets has a long Liberal/Liberal Democrat tradition - before Simon Straight Choice Hughes's victory it was the last part of Inner London to elect a Liberal MP when Sir Percy Harris held the Bethnal Green South West seat in the 1935 general election and although he lost the seat after the war he successfully returned to the London County Council, with Bethnal Green sending the only Liberals. Harris's campaign methods were in many ways the forerunner of "community politics" used in the borough. Even in the 1950s Bethnal Green had a respectable Liberal share.

More recently the Liberals/Liberal Democrats grew electorally in the borough, controlling it for eight years and producing one of the most notorious administrations in recent local government history, including being served notice by the Commission for Racial Equality. The tensions stirred up saw the first ever British National Party electoral victory in the borough. Fortunately both the BNP councillor and the Liberal Democrat administration were thrown out in the 1994 elections. But "Liberal Democrat Run Tower Hamlets Borough Council" still remains a dirty term.

The Liberal Democrats briefly reversed their decline in 2002, but then crashed again in 2006, losing nearly 2/3 of their seats to Labour (the one shift in the borough the media failed to spot) and now have just four councillors. They are the smallest party on the council and look to be in terminal decline. Does anyone believe they will one day again ru(i)n the borough?

"RESPECT" - still shaking things up!

When it was founded the so-called "RESPECT - The Unity Coalition" pledged to shake up politics and change the nature of politics. This week they've continued to do that.

Over a third of the "RESPECT" group on Tower Hamlets Borough Council have resigned the whip, feeling that their leader has "systematically acted to appease only one section of the party and community". Unsurprisingly they are the four associated with the national Socialist Workers Party. See their statement at East London Advertiser: We quit because we have no respect for Respect group leader. It's also notable that the ring leader of the four is Oliur Rahman, who stood in the Poplar & Canning Town seat at the last election. With George Galloway having decided that the "RESPECT" nomination for that (renamed) seat is his by right, one has to wonder if Rahman has a personal issue in all this. On my one encounter with him I found him to be even more stubborn minded than George Galloway and watched with bewilderment as he went on about courtesy whilst interrupting someone speaking and claimed that a point about what had been seen on Iraqi television was invalid "because the BBC is inherently biased". One has to wonder where "RESPECT" found this idiot.

But as for "RESPECT" itself, it is just conforming to the standard pattern of a flash party that springs up from nowhere, gets a bit of support and then disintegrates when its internal contradictions are exposed. And for the rest of us it's all hilarious to watch as socialists demonstrate that their most hated enemies are other socialists!

The fringe nutters of student politics

Normally I would avoid giving such views the oxygen of publicity but the Student "RESPECT" group have released a campaign video on YouTube for the forthcoming National Union of Students elections. And it shows just why they never get elected:



Now I don't wish to denigrate the anti-war movement. I believe that most people in it are good well meaning people, and like them I opposed the Iraq War. (I do, however, disagree with the idea of an immediate pull out of Iraq as I believe this will only make the situation even worse and the chaos will spread into other countries.)

But what I cannot understand is why a small (let's be clear about this - the likes of Student "RESPECT" are in no way anywhere near the mainstream of those involved in student politics) but determined group routinely seem to think it is the role of students' unions and the national student bodies to go trying to change the country's foreign policy. All it does is harm both the organisations and the activists' causes. The students' unions/NUS wind up looking ridiculous even for obsessing with issues not of direct relevance to students as students, and thus undermining their ability to be effective on matters more within their remit, whilst the activists wind up wasting their efforts and energies trying to hijack the student movement, when they could be a darn sight more effective in joining the campaign directly.

So I say this directly to Student "RESPECT": If you think the most important matter is putting an end to the Iraq War, stop wasting time trying to capture students' unions and the NUS and go and it spend it campaigning against it. You are far more likely to win support for the cause if you do this, than by seeking to divert organisations established with other purposes. The Stop The War campaign bodies are the best vehicles for stopping the war. Students' unions and the national student bodies are best at focusing on the issues that directly affect students, and for which there are no other vehicles. Don't destroy one in a counter-productive attempt to seek support for the other. Use each body for what it is there for.

And for the rest of the world, please don't ever assume that Student "RESPECT" is typical of students. Hardly any students' union election is ever won on a manifesto such as this.

A worrying trend

BBC News has a piece on the electoral battle in Tower Hamlets. This local authority contains, amongst other things, both my university (Queen Mary, University of London) and George Galloway's constituency (and very occasionally George Galloway himself).

What worries me the most is this comment:

Labour is pinning its hopes on getting white voters to the polls, to compensate for loss of Muslim support to Respect.

Turning elections into crude sectarian headcounts does nothing to improve democracy. There are many problems in Tower Hamlets but they are not going to be solved by a party being seen to owe its electoral success to one ethnic group. All it does is perpetuate the idea that the body meant to help the population as a whole is only going to support that group. This approach merely breeds political extremism as a reaction.

As the article also says:

Millwall, a ward which briefly elected a BNP councillor, Derek Beacon in the 1990s.

That was the first ever BNP victory in the country.

And they're standing candidates in the borough...