LIndsey German on Peter Tatchell. posted by Richard Seymour

The Guardian allowed Lindsey German a reply to Peter Tatchell:

Respect where it's due

Lindsey German responds to accusations that her party is dead in the water following last week's elections

Friday June 18, 2004

Peter Tatchell: Green is the new red

I fear that Peter Tatchell is premature. In his desire to officiate over a hasty funeral for Respect - with no flowers and few mourners - he is ignoring the very healthy level of support that we now have and on which we can certainly build.

Peter also makes some implications that should not stand. His inference that our politics prevents us from relating to those outside the left's traditional orbit is the exact opposite of the truth. In its few short months of life, Respect has reached into communities that the left has never touched.

Our candidates reflected that: 48% women, the biggest number of ethnic minority candidates - including Asians, Afro-Caribbeans and Kurds, the biggest number of young candidates with five under 25s in London alone. Our lists included people from Muslim, Sikh, Jewish and Christian backgrounds.

No other party, including the Greens, came anywhere close.

Peter is also slightly disingenuous in his omissions. You would never think from his article that the Greens actually lost votes across London compared with four years ago, and failed to hold onto one of their assembly seats in the capital.

Their candidate for London mayor, Darren Johnson, promoted widely as the fourth mayoral candidate - including extensive coverage in the media - in fact came seventh. My vote for mayor of London placed me fifth, behind Ukip but ahead of the BNP and Greens, despite little media exposure compared with all the other parties. Respect came within a whisker of winning an assembly seat and polled heavily in north and east London.

All this is ignored in Peter's desire to use the European elections to bury Respect. He claims that because we failed to make an electoral breakthrough, we mark another false dawn for the left. Now it's true that our headline figure across the whole of England and Wales amounted to only 1.7% of the vote. But that is still more than a quarter of a million votes.

Take a look at some of the local areas where we polled strongly. In Leicester we received over 9% of the vote, in Birmingham over 7%, in Luton 6%. Towns like Peterborough and Slough - not traditional bastions of the left - recorded high votes. And George Galloway scored nearly 5 % across the whole of London, with remarkable successes in east London especially, topping the poll for the European elections in Tower Hamlets.

Indeed, the aggregated votes for the four boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest and Hackney put Respect in third place after Labour and the Tories, ahead of the Lib Dems, Greens, Ukip and BNP.

For a party that didn't exist five months ago, that seems pretty good to me and is a base on which we can build.

But all of us on the left have a responsibility coming out of these elections. It is a shame that Peter feels the need to respond to them by attacking Respect, with whom he agrees about so much. We are, after all, anti-war, in favour of greater spending on public services, in favour of decent public transport which can help cut pollution, and against the attacks on asylum seekers which have become such an unwelcome feature of the British political landscape. We are also faced with the rapid rise of a right wing populist party, Ukip, and with high votes for the fascist BNP in some parts of the country.

Surely our first conclusion from the results should be that we have to find ways of working together - whatever our differences - to promote those issues on which we agree and to strengthen the values of social justice, peace and equality.

Respect has made a good showing in some parts of England but we are not complacent. We have to build on our successes and gain roots in areas where we are weak. But the Greens have no reason to be complacent either. Both the London and European elections show that they have not grown stronger in the past four years, and incidentally performed far worse than they expected throughout the country, failing to gain any new MEPs.

This highlights an issue that Peter Tatchell raises but then rejects: if we could unite our forces we would be very strong. In London we would probably have beaten Ukip, and that would have been the big story.

We tried desperately to obtain such an electoral pact with the Greens before the election, but we were rebuffed on every occasion. Even after the election results, the Green website contained witch-hunting attacks on Respect that only aid the right.

All those who voted for us, and many more who would be attracted to our ideas, will expect us to try to work together, to avoid electoral clashes where possible and to unite our forces to present a stronger challenge.

That, rather than attacking each other, is what we should be concentrating on. So no funerals, Peter, but hopefully causes for celebration in the not too distant future when we can hold Tony Blair to account not on the basis of narrow nationalism but on the values that we all share.

· Lindsey German was Respect candidate for London mayor

(Via Respect ).