Jim Grant recounts the last few acts of another left tragedy

The in-house student organisation of Respect, nattily named Student Respect, turned out to have had a significant role in the terminal crisis within its host body. It’s worth reminding ourselves of SR’s history.

Student Respect was formed in summer 2005, essentially by the SWP ‘turning over’ its Socialist Worker Student Society (SWSS) infrastructure – wholly or partially, depending on the campus – to the task of building Student Respect. There was very little thought that went into the organisation’s formation – it was more that Respect just felt that they should have a student society like the big kids of bourgeois politics.

There was never any real doubt that this was simply a transmission belt to get ‘adult’ Respect’s politics – to the extent that it had any – onto campus; no contortions about the autonomy or otherwise of the new student body were necessary. Indeed, over a full year passed before the powers-that-be even felt the need to call an SR conference. When it came, in December 2006, it was very much a conference like the Conservative Party’s: that is to say, basically a rally, in which “over 100 people” (over a hundred!) were talked at by such luminaries as John Rees and Rania Khan, who drew shocked gasps from the crowd by highlighting] “the redundancy of the New Labour leadership” (www.respectcoalition.org/index.php?ite=1264). Unsurprisingly, no motions were taken – something that even the (rightly castigated) New Labour student bureaucrats manage.

Getting a hundred people into a room to – sort of – talk politics (unofficial estimates put the actual turnout at 70-80) is, in some circumstances, cause for celebration. Communist Students would certainly be pleased to hit three figures at our conference. The reason the pathologically upbeat tone report of the Respect student conference caused quite so much amusement at the time was that at the full Respect annual conference the previous October, George Galloway had claimed over ten thousand had signed up at freshers fairs. The attendance at SR conference now seems underwhelming – perhaps Deal or no deal was on (or reruns of Big brother maybe?).

And now all the hype has rebounded – the Galloway faction alleged that the SWP was using Student Respect as a wedge to get more delegates at conference than it was entitled to. A big dispute erupted over whether or not the students were full members of Respect. The blackly humorous fact stands thus – nobody really knows. At the 2006 conference it was an irrelevance, because Galloway was best of chums with the SWP. After all, the SWP has consistently voted down motions calling for elected representatives to be accountable the membership and to accept only a worker’s wage.

But now, suddenly, the massively disproportionate dominance of the SWP over Student Respect was a threat. The rest, as they say, is history (the umpteenth time as farce).

There is a moral to every story, and in this case there are several.

1. History has no use for an organisationally stillborn student group. Questions such as is precise function, its independence or otherwise from the parent body, are all-important. You may forget such defining tasks, but they will not forget you.

2. If you are going to have a separate student body, there has to be some kind of delegation of responsibility. There has to be a point. There was absolutely no reason for Student Respect’s existence, because it did not even play-act at making its own policy decisions in any area.

3. The whole story smacks of the rotten, undemocratic nature of today’s left. The SWP misleadership now has the sheer audacity to criticise George for his fat earnings and – wait for it – his Bonapartism in Respect. Yet this is the SWP’s own method – not honest politics, but the promotion of collective amnesia in its ranks, so that its membership can be moulded to suit the next turn of the leadership.

If we want more than another sorry story such as this one to be sarcastic about, we will have to sweep this damaging bureaucratism aside and start taking our own movement and its organisational forms seriously.