Len, would I be completely 100% off the mark if I suggested that the non-SWP members of RESPECT (specifically, GG, Yvonne Ridley and the MAB-affiliated candidates) were beginning to take the piss rather in terms of making up RESPECT policy on the hoof? As far as I can tell, there absolutely had not been any decision to be 100% behind Hezbollah until Galloway said so at that public meeting. To an outsider it does not look like much of a way to run a railroad.
In a friendly and safe environment (although perhaps tomorrow, in order to show at least some token after the fact respect for the 3-posts-a-day limit, which appears to be in about as good shape as the Geneva Conventions at present), perhaps you'd care to run our American mates through, one more time, the rationale for the alliance between the SWP and (what I think I am being fair in calling) the soft-nutterist wing of British Islam? What do these guys bring to the party other than warm bodies and a million political hostages to fortune? I seem to remember that the original plan was that the RESPECT alliance was aimed at drawing the more politically aware element among radical Muslim youth into the arms of the socialist party - how is this going? Is the LGBT policy still in the complete two-and-eight that it was three months ago? I feel like the guy in "Cabaret" asking "do you think you can control them?" It is just that, once more speaking as an interested outsider of British far-left grouplet politics, the RESPECT adventure is looking rather like Napoleon's march to Moscow.
Don't do anything that might jeopardise your party membership but I would be interested in the current state of play.
best
D^2
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