Respect rally. posted by Richard Seymour

There's good news and bad news. The bad news is, if you weren't there you missed a fantastic evening. The good news is, what a fantastic evening! Let's talk about turnout first of all. I arrived early and did a quick count of chairs, while John Rees was nervously pacing about and a few people I recognised were setting up equipment. (A stalker complimented me on my undies). 11 rows of 16 seats, that's 176 seats, plus standing room for thirty. I expected most chairs would be filled, with a few standing at the back. Er, no. It was packed. Not only was the room filled to capacity, but another room had to be booked upstairs which had twice as many people in it. 200 downstairs, 400 upstairs. The speakers had to continually disappear to do speeches in the other room. The presence was also significant in that, so far from it being just another outing for the old Left, it mixed a large local contingent with young anticapitalists and greying soixant-huitards.

Craig Murray, the UK's former ambassador to Uzbekistan, spoke first. I expected the cut of a former bureacrat who'd thrown a hissy fit, something on the order of the shabby Steve Moxon. Instead, this quiet, softly spoken man launched into a ferocious attack on imperialism, racism and the attacks on civil liberties of this government. He's standing against Jack Straw , of course, but he didn't have to speak for Respect and to defend in particular the rights of Muslims under attack. He also noted that the people being carted off to prison on the basis of 'intelligence' often extracted through torture were having their liberty done in on account of evidence that would be laughed out of any court. "I've seen this evidence," he said, "and it's dreck!" Big roar from the crowd at this point.

Oli Rahman, struggling with a mic that had suddenly gone to techno-heaven, nevertheless cut some impressive moments. He told of how he had been a Labour supporter, but in the run up to the war on Iraq, had gone to Oona King's constituency office and explained "if you support this war, I will do everything I can to get you out of office". She replied, bless, that "it's not very nice of you to threaten me in my own office." "That's not a threat. It's a promise." A promise looking to be well met, I have to say. Lindsey German also did her usual efficient job, but looked strangely mumsy in her little specs. No pyrotechnics from Lindsey, just a consistent and sometimes witty exposition of the case for Respect, ranging from domestic issues, poverty, housing, education, hospitals and so on to the war. There was a lot of spontaneous warmth for her, deriving from her leadership of the Stop the War Coalition.

Janet Alder, the sister of the late Christopher Alder who died in police custody, startled me with her northern accent at first. I'd been expecting East End for some curious reason. Never mind. This woman was not a professional speaker - she was a natural. In particular, she didn't simply talk about the huge injustice inflicted on her and her family, but universalised - the CCTV pictures of her brother dying, the photos of Iraqis being beaten and tortured by British and American soldiers, the human beings who are clad in orange jump-suits, shackled and led off to extra-legal torture facilities - all part of the same landscape of state oppression. Her voice carried passion, and conviction of the kind that I have never seen arise from the lips of any of the servile New Labour creeps that get sent out to Question Time - like the repulsive Margaret Hodge, whose unctuous smile wilts as though her waxen face was melting, and whose phoney attempt at being 'stirring' fell flat before an audience in Grimsby last week.

Abdul Khaliq Mian struck an entirely different note. He's a soft spoken sort of geezer, who gently adumbrates and extemporises for his audience with undemanding dignity. The religious stuff spoke to a section of the audience, which is fair enough. But more striking was where he decided to talk about life. Seriously. "What happens to us? We are born, and if we are lucky enough we might be born on a hospital bed and not in the corridor. We grow up, go to school. And if we are lucky enough..." You know the drill. He finished by remarking that we are told that we can work hard, and retire with a decent pension. But now we find the pension money is squandered, and we have to work and work longer and harder. "So, you work and work, then you drop dead," he said, pausing for a second, before adding "I think we have endured enough."

Tariq Ali is larger in the flesh than I had remembered him. Last time I saw him speak, I had the impression of a short man with a pronounced pot belly. In his denims, however, he looked tall and broad-shouldered. A street-fightin' man, no less. He sat there, diffidently gazing at the crowd, arms folded tightly, refusing to applaud or laugh when everyone else did. I half-expected him to drift off to sleep until his turn to speak came. Come it did, and the mane of hair bounced over to the mic. The usual sardonic wit and rhetorical flair, the little bit of inside information that he often drip-feeds his audiences when he's just come back from Pakistan or the Middle East. As it happened, this time he had been to Qatar and spoken to the head of Al Jazeera news. "And do you know what he told me?" Al Jazeera had got footage of a US tank firing at a car filled with Iraqi civilians. It was able to do so because it has eighteen reporting teams working in Iraq, and naturally enough, it broadcast the footage. The tank firing shells, the shells hitting the car. Man, woman, children in back all disappear into a conflagration. Within hours of having shown this, the US military commander in Qatar had arrived in a car with bodyguards and backed by a row of military vehicles. He stormed into the director's office and said "you owe us an apology for showing that, you have placed our troops in danger!" So, if a news channel broadcasts evidence of US atrocities, it isn't America who should apologise, but... The director of Al Jazeera, to his credit, said he couldn't apologise for showing the news, but in fact the US army owed Al Jazeera an apology. For blowing up its headquarters in Afghanistan, and for killing its chief correspondent in Baghdad. "When you make a public apology for that, we can talk".

And Galloway. Of course, Galloway. I don't know what lit his bloody fuse, but he took off from the second he hit the mic with a hilarious, impassioned speech, and never touched down. He talked, of course, about the war, but spent most of his time talking about the needs of the East End and of working class people in general. He made tremendous fun out of the Goldman Sachs banker who was so utterly replete with wealth that he didn't notice his secretary had stolen £3 million from him - even when she went to work in her yacht each day, parking it at St Katherine's docks! Then, in the other direction, Bethnal Green and Bow, with its enormous queues of people who have been waiting for houses for five years, and a sitting MP who supports the privatisation of the remaining council houses. With its police stations busily serving ASBOs on poor kids who've got nothing to do, on the mentally unstable, on anyone in fact who engages in any act which could be deemed "alarming" or "offensive" - while the real crooks in the mean square mile engage in massive fraud, tax avoidance, embezzlement, and rarely a damned thing is done about it. The pensioners who are dying because of poverty, and the children who are eating shitty nutrition-free meals at school. The New Labour ministers who slimed the firefighters as fascists and the enemy within. The obscenely wealthy, protected by the City Police, sucked up to by new Labour; the working class, robbed of decent housing, welfare and public services, met only with strident Blairite moralism and police repression. And to all this, Oona King MP says "Amen".

Well, I don't know how many times applause erupted, and I can't tell you for how long the standing ovation lasted. I'd hazard a guess it was longer than anything Blair is likely to receive at the Labour conference after this election. Money was collected in buckets, people signed up to help with local campaigns at the stalls around the room, and I, munching on a bag of jellies and fizzy things, went off with Bat, Meaders, a few stalkers and others to the pub. What happened? Well, I don't remember, but I woke up with footprints on my knees and red underwear over my head. Last time I let anyone persuade me that Rohypnol is a new hallucinogen...