The UK Respect Coalition

[Vanguard1917]

What are people's opinions of this opportunist party?

[Edward Norton]

NO!!!

It's not even socialist.

Respect's main personality George Galloway even listed Harlod Wilson and James Callaghan as socialists, despite all the evidence pointing in the other direction!

And we all know of their alliance, if not outright conversion to Islamist politics and their view that Muslims in Britain needed to be told on how to vote and wage their political struggle on the advice of some mullah or an unelected/unrepresentative clerical 'community leader'.

I won't be voting in these 'elections' for Respect or any other so-called 'socialist' party that stand in this act of mass fraud.

Stay at home or spoil your paper or picket a voting booth, thats the MOST constructive we can get come May the 5th.

[Vanguard1917]

And we all know of their alliance, if not outright conversion to Islamist politics and their view that Muslims in Britain needed to be told on how to vote and wage their political struggle on the advice of some mullah or an unelected/unrepresentative clerical 'community leader'.

I agree. That recent incident in Bethnal Green proved that.

[RevolutionarySocialist MadRedDog]

Although I'm not from the UK, I still have an opinion about this.

The respect coalition is nothing more than -as has been said- an opportunist party, which does not build the movement on the bases of socialist ideas and the transitional programme.

The electoralism of the respect coalition, affiliated with the SWP as a unity list for the elctions, also shows her illusions in reforms through the parlementary system.

The SWP/IST is only relying on the movement to support 'left' politics and helping these kinds of left governments to stay in power. They don't talk about the need for a transitional state in the first stage of communism but on the other hand they do talk of revolution as a way to a socialist society (I guess they think that socialism will be complete immediately after the revolution).

How will the revolution come to be if you don't base yourself on the working class as the one and only revolutionary class, but concentrate yourself in large part on the most times 'bourgeois left' types in the students, anti-racist and anti-war movement. These struggles have to be made a working class struggle as well: therefore the need for a socialist society needs to be evident from the slogans that are used. It's off course necessary to work together in united fronts against racism, war and cuts, but the vision that these fights remain a matter of socialist struggle needs to be mentioned consistently.

Working in popular fronts with 'bourgeois (left) parties' is therefore out of the question. Still this is what the SWP/IST does. And that's where I come back to the respect coalition again, which is reformist at most, but is becoming more and more a bourgeois left party.