On Thursday 20 November a council by-election took place in Mile End East Ward in Tower Hamlets. This is a split ward with one Respect Councillor elected in May 2006 and just a year or so ago Respect might have hoped to gain the vacant seat from Labour. But in fact the far left vote has split and declined to such an extent that Respect came third behind the Tories with just less than half the votes obtained by Labour’s Rachael Saunders.

In the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq war, the British Trotskyist left looked as though it was on the point of a historic breakthrough into mainstream electoral politics. The ‘stop the war’ movement brought together the organisational clout and propaganda skills of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) with, for the first time, a mass electoral constituency of Muslims alienated from Labour by Tony Blair’s support for the war. Labour’s expulsion of George Galloway MP over his attack on Bush and Blair for attacking ‘Iraq like wolves’ presented the new coalition with a spokesperson both in the House of Commons and, given his charismatic communication skills, in the media.

On 25 January 2004 the SWP, Muslim Association of Britain, Muslim Council of Britain and a number of non-aligned leftwingers and small Trotskyist groups founded Respect – The Unity Coalition. The new organisation went up like a rocket, but came down like a stick.

In 2004 it won 250,000 votes for the London assembly, the best result ever achieved by the socialist left outside of the Labour party. In 2005 Galloway moved from his Glasgow seat to target Oona King in heavily-Bengali Muslim Bethnal Green and Bow, and beat her by over 800 votes. Respect came second in three further parliamentary seats with large Muslim votes: Birmingham Sparkbrook & Small Heath, East Ham and West Ham, and looked set for further gains. In 2006 a campaign heavily focused on a handful of boroughs saw 12 Respect councillors elected in Tower Hamlets, taking the leader of the council’s seat, three in neighbouring Newham and one in Birmingham.

Very soon after this, though, everything began to go wrong. A letter from Galloway to Respect’s national council in September 2007 superficially talked about the party being ‘too disorganised’ but was actually the opening shot in a vicious internal civil war. On one side stood the apparatchiks of the SWP with the organisational structure that had created the party. On the other was Galloway with the cash provided by Muslim business backers and the block votes supplied by certain mosques. The internal contradictions in the Respect coalition were about to destroy it: a force combining atheist Leninist revolutionaries and conservative, highly religious Muslim small businessmen was never likely to be very stable. The SWP accused Galloway and his allies of a rightward shift motivated by the cardinal sin of ‘electoralism’ – ie wanting to win elections.

The split was rapidly formalised with the SWP keeping the ‘Respect’ name at first but later renaming itself Left List/Left Alternative and Galloway’s team confusingly branded Respect Renewal. The Respect group on Tower Hamlets council has halved in size following the split, with just six councillors remaining loyal to Galloway, five defecting to Labour – and even one to the Conservatives.

Electorally, the Muslim vote has largely returned to Labour as the Iraq war has decreased in salience as an issue. In this May’s GLA election Left List got just 22,583 votes and Galloway’s Respect Renewal 59,721.

The SWP has emerged weaker from its period of alliance with Galloway and political Islamism than when it entered it. Many members and activists have left the party in disgust at the compromising of leftwing values on feminism and gay rights to try to keep the coalition going. Areas of long-term activity and organisation – both geographical ones such as Hackney and industrial work in various unions – have been neglected in order to divert activists into Tower Hamlets.

So now we have the bizarre situation where the circumstances – a crisis of global capitalism, growing unemployment – would historically have pointed to a huge political opportunity for the revolutionary left, but the main party that could exploit that – the SWP – has destroyed itself organisationally and politically by getting entangled with political Islam and the extraordinary personality that is George Galloway – and it is too drained by the experience to take any advantage of the current economic scenario.