As ye sow...

Submitted by Anon on 16 July, 2006 - 10:27

Ira Berkovic reports on “chaos” in Tower Hamlets Respect

According to our friends in the Communist Party of Great Britain (Weekly Worker), serious friction is afoot in Tower Hamlets Respect – which is, of course, the spiritual home of Gorgeous George’s “Unity Coalition.”

Believe it or not, there seems to have been some conflict between the two main organised elements in the organisation – the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), and small business people from the local Bengali community.

The Weekly Worker carries a report of “a clumsy attempt, apparently supported by council group leader Abjol Miah, to unseat the main Socialist Workers Party-backed officers and replace them with members from the ‘Bengali community’.

“Miah, together with fellow councillors Shamim Ahmed Chowdhury and Mohammed Mamun Rashid, were among those who boycotted Tower Hamlets annual general meeting in protest at the barring of 45 new recruits. The new applicants had allegedly been pulled in to vote for an alternative slate of officers.”

We have no inside knowledge. But the idea that an undemocratic coalition led by a Stalinist demagogue and predicated on an uneasy alliance of sometime revolutionaries, small businessmen and a layer of clerics would throw up some pretty fractious internal disputes is not too difficult to believe. If disputes like this signal the beginning of the end for the Respect project, you won’t find the AWL crowing with glee. We might, however, allow ourselves to say “we told you so.”

For a full report (written in the Weekly Worker style we all know and love), see www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/632/respect.htm

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