Dave Isaacson reports on the forthcoming ‘conference’ of Student Respect

On Sunday December 3 Student Respect holds its conference in London’s School of African and Oriental Studies. The college staff tell us that the main room booked for this event holds “about 150” people and – given that the Respect website informs readers that “the conference is open to all Student Respect members and supporters”, this modest venue indicates something about the real activist base of the organisation (www.respectcoalition.org).

Certainly, it effectively punctures the windy rhetoric of George Galloway, who told the October conference that Respect had recruited 10,000 students at this year’s freshers fairs. Later Nick Wrack, former editor of Militant and now a member of the Socialist Workers Party, put forward the more modest figure of 2,000. Even then, it should be borne in mind that these numbers are not full, subs-paying members of Student Respect, but simply a rounding up of those new students, in their first heady week of college life, who have put their names on a form to register (for some, lukewarm) interest.

So we can take the spin about membership with a large pinch of salt. After all, at the same conference George Galloway also claimed that Respect itself was the “fastest growing party” in Britain despite a 1,000 drop in the preceding 12 months. However, this is not really the point. Given the decayed state of student politics in general, SR is an important player – particularly in view of its potential alliance with the far bigger and more influential Federation of Student Islamic Societies (Fosis).

For instance, at this year’s National Union of Students conference Student Respect had a sizable delegation (certainly the biggest of any left group) and easily got Suzie Wylie elected to one of the 12 non-sabbatical positions on the national executive committee. None of its three candidates for sabbatical positions were elected, but their votes were hardly derisory. And of course, at the core of Student Respect (and pulling all the strings) is the SWP’s Socialist Worker Student Society.

This paper has comprehensively documented the lack of democratic culture in Respect. Despite that we still hoped the blurb advertising Student Respect’s December 3 conference was misleading. It seemed to indicate a day-long rally dominated by top-table luminaries rather than a conference, with no call for motions from members and the constituent parts of the organisation. For the sake of clarity, we contacted the student organiser of the SWP, Colin Smith – who also sits on the national committee of Student Respect – and he confirmed our worst fears.

No, he told us, there were to be no motions allowed. The justification for this – he suggested – was that, as Student Respect is part of the larger Respect coalition, the parent body’s annual conference was the place for motions on students to be put forward and debated. He pointed out that there was a student section on the agenda at the main conference and that will be the same next year.

This is a ludicrous argument – especially in view of the fact that there were no motions on students at this year’s Respect conference. More pertinently, what is the point of Student Respect members travelling from around the country to a conference that takes no decisions and elects a steering committee that cannot actually do any ‘steering’? If SR is constitutionally barred from deciding its own strategy and tactics, the steering committee (assuming there would be any need to elect a separate body rather than have everything decided by the ‘adult’ leadership) might just as well be elected by Respect’s annual conference.

Obviously, from the point of view of the SWP, steering committee elections will give a veneer of democracy to the group. In reality control remains firmly in the hands of John Rees and other SWP apparatchiks. It looks like there will be even less democracy at this conference than at the bureaucratic NUS conferences that Student Respect has rightly criticised for … their lack of democracy.

This is the standard mode of operation of the SWP comrades in control of Student Respect. Before this summer not a single national members’ meeting had been convened to discuss how the group should operate. Of course, this minor hiccup did not prevent three members of the SWP being selected from on high as Student Respect candidates for the leadership elections at NUS conference. Neither did it stop someone (who? how? with what political mandate?) negotiating an electoral pact for that conference with Student Broad Left – a shady group that has the dirty, semi-Stalinoid hands of the troglodyte Socialist Action all over it.

At a Student Respect delegation caucus at the NUS gathering, CPGB comrades suggested that a conference was needed and that candidates should be democratically elected in future. At first his proposal was met with a deathly silence. Then an SWPer piped up and suggested that – as we were in the middle of NUS – this was not the time or place to discuss such issues. In fact, evidence of the pressing urgency of doing so came at the final caucus of the conference when SWPer Suzie Wylie announced that she would be standing for NUS president next year. Democratic? We think not …

Clearly, the Student Respect annual conference should be the ideal place to discuss “such issues” – only no motions are to be allowed and no discussions outside of the strictly circumscribed rah-rah agenda of the top table countenance. All of which underlines the sad truth that Student Respect is as much an SWP-dominated front as its parent body – a fact that will ensure its fragmentation and demise, of course, whatever ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ electoral successes it chalks up in the short term.