Galloway faction attacks SWP as lurching towards "sectarians" and "Islamophobes"

Submitted by martin on 23 October, 2007 - 11:06 Author: Rhodri Evans

A blast by leading SWP member Kevin Ovenden (who has now been expelled) against the SWP Central Committee has been published on the Socialist Unity blog.

The position the Central Committee [CC] adopted and fought for in the party was that Galloway had made an electoral calculation that he needed “Muslim votes” and, with the possible imminence of the general election, he had formed a bloc with right wing and “communalist” (or soft on communalist) forces which necessitated him launching an attack on socialists in Respect and the SWP in particular...

The one piece of documentary evidence the CC produced for its interpretation was an article in the East London Advertiser, the local paper in Tower Hamlets... But the article was not authoritative. The journalist who wrote it got his steer from comments on a sectarian website not, as the CC intimated, via some briefing from Galloway’s staff...

Galloway’s letter criticises... the trade union conference organised by Respect in November last year... debatable whether the conference was the right overriding priority for Respect...

These things are debatable. And debating them does not equate to attacking Respect’s involvement in trade union work...

It is similar when it comes to Galloway’s questioning of money spent on Respect’s Gay Pride intervention... It is not... “pandering to homophobia”...

The CC, however, highlights these parts of Galloway’s letter and claims they betray a hidden motive or are subtle signals to socially conservative layers that he is distancing himself from the left for the sake of electoral advantage...

We have, rightly, over the last few years systematically resisted those on the “pro-war left” who have sought to use LGBT rights to provide a gloss for Islamophobia... The misreading and exaggeration of Galloway’s letter threatens to disorient all that.

Ovenden swipes at the "pro-war left" (i.e. not-really-left-at-all people like Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch) in order to gloss over the fact that the SWP's venom and denunciations as "Islamophobe" have been mainly directed against genuine leftists who campaigned against the US/UK invasion of Iraq but maintain a working-class opposition to Ba'thism and clerical-fascism of all stripes including the Islamic, groups like AWL and the Worker-communist Party of Iraq.

The significant thing here is that the SWP CC has evidently been forced to draw on some of the arguments of the genuine left in order to fend off Galloway's offensive. Only patchily, of course: the SWP CC could not do that in any consistent way without denouncing itself for its shameless crawling to Galloway and the Islamists over the last five years.

But let's hope some SWP members are impelled to think through the issues a bit more.

More here.

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