In early September Respect MP George Galloway circulated a letter to the Respect National Council entitled “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. The letter appears to point to a possible early disintegration of the “Unity Coalition.” Galloway makes a series of bitter complaints about how Respect is run, ranging from complaints over office procedures to accusations of ineptitude in election work and a general lack of accountability and democracy. He ends by warning that Respect may be facing oblivion. Although he does not mention by name the organisation he holds responsible for all this, it is quite obviously the Socialist Workers Party. Read more...

The campaign for the French presidential elections, due on 22 April and 6 May, is now in full swing. The two front-runners: Nicolas Sarkozy for the right wing UMP party and Ségolène Royal for the Socialist Party (PS) have already launched their campaigns. Sarkozy is in the lead. These elections come on the heels of intense class struggles over the last two years – the successful campaign against European Constitution, the uprising by youth in the banlieues (the neglected outer suburbs of French cities) and the mass youth struggle against the CPE in 2006. Read more...

The origins of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) lie in the programmatic disputes in the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), the British section of the Fourth International, in the period after the Second World War. Before his assassination in 1940, Trotsky had anticipated that Stalinism in the Soviet Union would not survive a war with Germany and that the war itself would lead to the kind of revolutionary upsurge that had followed the First World War. In such conditions, the Fourth International, with its record of maintaining the revolutionary tradition of the Bolsheviks and the early Communist International and armed with a programme that called for political revolution in the Soviet Union to regain control of the planned economy and a social revolution based on workers’ councils and workers’ militia in the imperialist countries, would be able to play a similar role to that of the Bolsheviks at the end of the First World War. Read more...

The latest pamphlet from the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) group argues for a “two states” solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Read more...