Despite everything, Your Party conference a success


I took part in the “Your Party” conference online last weekend and my impressions were quite different from most of the reports in the media and on social media. 

First of all, the conference was not chaotic. Every session began and ended on time (unheard of in leftwing circles!), while speakers on the many amendments to the draft political and organizational statements were kept to two minutes and kept on topic by the chair. Attempts to attack the conference organization or standing orders were not allowed – including, apparently, a group of participants standing up and demanding to speak. The live feed was interrupted while this was going on, so I cannot say exactly what happened, but this is what I read.

Despite all this, debate on each amendment gave equal time to speakers both for and against the motions. The online voting system worked well, anonymizing the vote when adding it to the total. 

Political disagreements were expressed in the debates on each amendment. For example, a motion to stand YP candidates in every possible constituency was voted down in favour of standing candidates in areas where they were more likely to succeed. The first option was pushed strongly by speakers who identified themselves with the Socialist Party (formerly the Militant) and embodied a view that YP should be organised much like the Labour Party. 

But look at what the conference achieved. In the first place, it was held in November, as promised in September when many doubted that it could have been organised in such a short time. The very public factionalism between Corbyn’s group and Zarah Sultana led many to write it off as hopeless. That the conference happened at all was due to the tireless work of many volunteers as well as the founding of party branches throughout the regions.  In the second place, it resulted in substantial unity on the amended pollical statement and founding documents. In the third place — the party was actually set up and has a name!

Your Party, it was agreed (by 80% of the vote) should be explicitly socialist and rooted in the broadest possible social alliance. Dual membership would be possible with aligned allied parties (although which parties are in alignment would be decided by the elected Central Executive Committee).

The major division in the conference was over the leadership model. A narrow majority voted for a collective leadership rather than a single leader (51.6% versus 48.4%) Voting at party conferences should be open to all members through online voting systems (77% in favour) rather than being reserved for physical attendees at conference. The debates appeared to show a generational differentiation between younger speakers who favoured a more ideological outlook and older speakers who took more pragmatic positions.

There was a strong sentiment in the conference for democracy from below and antagonism to non-transparent decisions taken by an unelected organizing committee. Zarah Sultana in an uncompromising speech slammed the expulsions and exclusions of Socialist Workers Party members at the start of the conference, aligning herself squarely with the calls for maximum member democracy. She had boycotted the first day’s session in solidarity with those excluded.

Many amendments that had been put forward by branches did not make it to the agenda, including one that party legislators should only receive a skilled worker’s wage – it was referred to numerous times by speakers, but it doesn’t seem to me to be the hill to die for.

What happens now is the election of CEC members from the branches and taking over the organisation of the party from the steering committee. Collective leadership could end up being a total disaster – or a pioneering model of a new type of party organisation.

Like many participants interviewed at the end of the conference, I was energized and hopeful. The determination of grassroots members to make it work means, I hope, that problems will be overcome and Your Party will become a significant force in left politics both in the UK and throughout Europe. Jeremy Corbyn began the conference with an impassioned call for the return of hope, which I think has been fulfilled to a large extent by the conference itself.

I have to agree, then, with the sentiment expressed  by Ethan Shone in Open Democracy. “Fractious though it may have been, this was a political conference truer to the pure ideals of democracy than most. There were no corporate exhibitors, and no private events where party elites shared their unvarnished plans with lobbyists. Ordinary people from all walks of life and from all corners of the country took to the stage in that huge exhibition hall and made thoughtful, impassioned contributions. Members of this new political movement were empowered to vote, either in person or through a unique online system, on how the party should function, how it should be organised and how it should be built from here. … Or as a young tenants’ rights organiser from Yorkshire, who stopped momentarily to chat on the way out of the conference hall on Sunday, said: ‘This isn’t normal, but people are sick of normal politics’.”

For a more considered analysis of the conference, see Gregoris Ionanou’s post on Facebook.

The People Won’t Be Dissed: “Your Party” Energizes Social Democracy in Britain


Along with more than 800,000 other people, I am energized by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement of a new left party. What I most appreciate is the fact that the party’s policies and leadership structure will be decided by the membership, not dictated in advance. As Corbyn put it: “Politics should be about empowerment. Instead, people are shut out of the decisions that affect their daily lives. For too long, top-down political parties have patronised their members and disempowered the communities they claim to represent.”

Many commentators are confused because it doesn’t fit their ideas of what a party should look like, and have offered much unsolicited advice on what Corbyn and Sultana should do. I think this is a mistake on their part. Discussions about the nature of “Your Party” should be unencumbered by the disputes and trauma of having been excluded from Labour.

When I visited the UK in 2016, to research my book The Socialist Ideal in the Labour Party: from Attlee to Corbyn, my first port of call was a conference of “Labour against Austerity” in London. We broke out into sessions, including one on housing. What I found was that members were at first hesitant, then surprised and excited by the opportunity to devise solutions to social problems based on their own lived experience, not handed down from the Labour hierarchy. And they developed some very concrete and realistic ideas. That sense of liberation was felt by many other members who I interviewed for my book. So the plan for members to develop and decide policy is totally viable, and would revitalize the creativity of the rank and file in solving burning problems in their communities. 

In my book, I argue that the significance of Corbyn’s leadership role was primarily as a symbolic focus to challenge bureaucratic control of the party apparatus and to diminish the influence of the parliamentary party. The Corbyn leadership had opened up a new discourse of combining elective power with local community organising in such a way as to curb the flow of wealth to international capital. This movement reflected the persistence of what I term the “socialist ideal”: the belief that the government should fund state institutions needed to cover the foundational needs of a democratic citizenry: health, housing, and education. The overwhelming response to Corbyn and Sultana’s announcement shows that the desire for a fairer and more equal society is alive and well, despite Starmer’s Labour reimposing austerity and suppressing democratic discussion within its ranks.

As I argue in my book, the new politics developed within Labour under Corbyn was premised on the expectation that a party with a socialist leadership could win a working parliamentary majority, or at least another hung parliament. The 2019 defeat came as a bitter blow to activists and contradicted their assumption that the 2017 electoral result could be replicated.

However, the Labour left was consumed with defending the party against accusations of institutional antisemitism, which diverted it from extra-parliamentary campaigning in working-class communities, and it never cohered around a clear political perspective that would have distinguished a transformative agenda from a rudimentary ethical socialism.

Those who focus on the failure of “Corbynism” to effectively counter these accusations of antisemitism are misguided. After Labour’s surprise electoral success in 2017, Labour’s right wing was energized with a view to bring the membership under control, and more than that – it joined with millionaire funders who wished to curb socialist policies, together with the media guardians of acceptable political discourse.

It’s now public knowledge that the hard-right activist Morgan McSweeney’s organization, Labour Together, obtained substantial funding from millionaire Labour donors Trevor Chinn and Martin Taylor, through its connection with right-wing Labour MPs. With the funding, McSweeney carried out extensive research into the party membership, and determined that while Corbyn’s core support could be characterized as “true believers”, opposed by die-hard rightwingers, it was joined by a larger group of “idealist” supporters who formed a soft left.

McSweeney decided that a direct leadership challenge to Corbyn could not succeed, and instead coopted journalists to repeat and amplify accusations of antisemitism against the leadership in order to weaken its support. His aim was to reach the soft left by influencing their news sources, above all the Guardian, and attempting to shut down the alternative left website the Canary. The daily onslaught of articles attacking Corbyn in the Guardian was the result of his relentless campaigning.

The narrative that Corbyn’s office was responsible for failing to rein in antisemitism within the party evolved after direct accusations of antisemitism against Corbyn himself didn’t stick. After the electoral near-victory in 2017, the accusations took on a different emphasis. Instead of a direct smear of Corbyn himself, the story changed to that his office “tolerated” antisemitism in the membership. It was a narrative carefully aimed at establishing reasonable doubt among the soft left and liberal journalists – who continue to repeat it to this day, despite it being comprehensively debunked in the Forde Report. 

Corbyn’s leadership was up against a powerful network of right-wing Labour MPs and party bureaucrats, liberal journalists, the BBC, and anti-Corbyn activists bankrolled by millionaire Labour donors. This is the face of state intervention to prevent Corbyn ever being elected UK Prime Minister, a network of political power intersecting with other financial and media power networks. If there are lessons to be learned from the defeat of Corbynism it is that the project did not collapse out of its own contradictions, or because its response to the antisemitism smears was not more definitively anti-Zionist. It was made to collapse by the concerted intervention of all arms of the state, including the liberal media and the BBC – but the demoralization of Labour’s soft left also bears responsibility for its failure.

“Your Party” is not about Corbyn or Sultana, but about the lives and concerns of ordinary people finding political expression and turning into meaningful social change. The people are the stakeholders together with the leadership, not boardroom CEOs or politicians. 

Many thousands are soon to engage in the process of redefining the socialist ideal to one where the main focus is not on electoral success, but building communal action for the well-being and prosperity of the many, not just the few. Corbyn explained the project like this: “One of the biggest mistakes we can make is thinking we must choose between parliament and our communities as battlegrounds for change. We want to build power everywhere. That is how you transform a moment into a movement that grows for generations to come. That is how we can take on the establishment, inside and outside parliament, to win a better society for us all.”

Revitalizing the Grassroots When Tyranny Threatens 


“What is happening right now is different,” emailed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to supporters after speaking at a 23,600-strong rally in Tucson, Arizona. “Something special is happening.” 

She and Bernie Sanders had spoken to 86,847 people across Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado in a whirlwind tour of Republican-voting states. Many of those who RSVP’d for the “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies had no previous connection with the campaign or the Democratic party. “At our first stop alone,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote, “half the crowd were brand new people not previously on any list of contacts. Many were first timers.”

In Denver, Colorado, the pair held their biggest rally of 34,000 people. According to the Denver Post, “People watched from the rooftops of nearby buildings, the stairs of the Denver City and County building, and outside of the gated perimeter of the official event. … At various times, the crowd chanted Sanders’ and Ocasio-Cortez’s names and phrases such as ‘tax the rich’.” The anger of the crowd was not just directed towards Republicans, but also against the Democratic party’s leadership. “The crowd erupted in cheers when Jimmy Williams, general president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, said he had a message for the Democratic Party: ‘Get off your ass’.”

What is going on? Is this a watershed moment, something different? Or is it simply a case of party politics as usual? Some on the left characterize the rallies as being a way to mobilise the Democratic party’s “mainstream liberal base”, as Eric Blanc does in Jacobin, and criticising them for neglecting the question of how to turn this energy into a movement capable of actually defeating Trump. 

At a rally held by Democratic representative Ro Khanna in California, the Washington Post reported the fears of a Democratic supporter that the country would not make it to 2028 or even 2026 with a normal democracy. Mike Arnold, a 74-year-old Air Force veteran, likewise said he isn’t sure the country will make it to Democratic elections in 2026. “The courts might not hold and if the courts don’t hold, the only next thing is the military itself,” he said. Democratic party leaders “are playing by the old rules, and they don’t abide by those,” he said of Trump and his allies. 

This sentiment is in sharp contradiction with the Democratic party leadership’s strategy of relying on the judiciary and the Supreme Court to curb Trump’s attack on democratic institutions and waiting for elections in 2026 to defeat the Republicans. Blanc writes “General calls to get involved aren’t enough. People need specifics and next steps. To be fair, the fact that ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ rallies haven’t yet made such organizing asks isn’t really the fault of their hosts. It reflects the weakness of a too-timid US labor movement and a too-small, too-fragmented Left.”

He argues that “we desperately need America’s two main progressive tribunes to leverage their popularity and platforms to supercharge today’s incipient grassroots efforts and help create a cohesive mass movement that doesn’t yet exist.”

It seems to me that there is a mass movement already in formation, independently of AOC and Sanders, which they have tapped into with their rallies. It encompasses a wide range of US society, not just those already aligned to the Democratic party. Prem Thakker for Zeteo asks where AOC and Sanders are going to channel this movement they have energized? “Wherever Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez go from here will be seen as a long-awaited inflection point in American democracy. Or a foreseeable retraction back to what got us here in the first place.” So Thakker makes the course of the movement depend on what the two tribunes decide to do, rather than looking more closely at what their audiences are thinking and doing.

The anger and indeed fury of the crowds at the rallies has been created by the Trump/Musk administration because it is tearing up the social contract that has underpinned American society since the end of the Second World War. Roosevelt’s New Deal gave Americans social security, Medicare and Medicaid, a social safety net that, even if today somewhat fraying at the edges, is an important underpinning of most people’s lives, whatever their politics. When every day workers confront corporations out to extract more rent from them, jacking up the prices of food and adding surcharges to vital utilities, they have no recourse except that of looking to their political representatives. When the Democrats cave to Trump’s plans, they are suddenly left without cover.

Many Trump voters are now having buyers’ remorse when the true impact of the administration’s cuts kick in. The more liberal readers of the New York Times contacted its deputy Opinion editor, Patrick Healy, with “some of the angriest and most despairing emails and phone calls of my career, from people saying President Trump is systematically degrading and destroying the United States. They wonder if there will be fair elections in 2026 or 2028. They’re furious this week about the Signal group chat on national security and war planning. But they’re also angry because they feel there’s no effective opposition to Trump, be it from Democratic elected officials or the party, the legal system, universities or other institutions. Many Americans feel in real peril. They don’t want to wait out Trump or keep their heads down. They want to fight for their country.”

The audiences at the town hall meetings and rallies want their legislators to go much further than they are prepared to do. For example, at a packed town hall meeting called by progressive Democratic rep. Jim McGovern in Franklin County, MA, a mostly rural area, small farmers were at their wits’ end about their funding for subsidies and programs being immediately frozen. Calls for a general strike got loud applause, and there was palpable hostility to the role of Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer in giving the administration enough votes to continue funding the government, which was the most important political leverage the Democrats had since they were in the minority in both Congress and Senate. Audience members in general were much more radical than their representatives.

Sanders himself recognizes the importance of grass-roots leadership in taking the movement forward. He told the New York Times: “One of the aspects of this tour is to try to rally people to get engaged in the political process and run as independents outside of the Democratic Party.” He added: “There’s a lot of great leadership all over this country at the grass-roots level. We’ve got to bring that forward. And if we do that, we can defeat Trumpism and we can transform the political situation in America.”

Undoubtedly this revitalization of the grass-roots is a positive peoples power surge. The movement of resistance won’t stop or be retracted back to conventional Democratic party politics because Trump and Musk will not stop and won’t be stopped by politics as usual.  This is what makes what is happening different, since the Trump administration is unprecedented and requires new categories of analysis.

Trump unchained: Democrats supine


I went to a jazz concert last night to avoid Donald Trump’s speech to congress, but when I switched on the TV at 10pm – expecting to hear the end of his speech – he was still in full flow and only about half way through. I was shocked by his use of human props in the audience to manipulate his base; a 13-year-old boy who always wanted to be a policeman who came in a police uniform who then got given a secret service credential. Parents of girls killed allegedly by undocumented immigrants. All was designed to divide the country, not just against immigrants, but also the feeble opposition of the Democratic party.

HIs rhetoric was extremely effective. He knows how to push the right-wing buttons. And that was what was scary about it: Republican delegates rose to their feet every few minutes to clap and cheer, while Democrats just waved little cards saying “False”. 

It was like a Nuremberg rally in the 1930s. Donald Trump is not Hitler, he’s Donald Trump. But he was able to stir up nationalistic passions and demonize his political opponents, especially the Biden administration, like the Nazis did. He even repeated his racist nickname of Pocahontas for Elizabeth Warren.

Congressman Al Green from Texas stood up at the beginning of his speech and shouted that he did not have a mandate to cut Medicaid – undoubtedly true. The Republican chair then had him thrown out by security, while Democrats sat on their hands and did nothing. The Pelosi leadership of the party was seen conferring and no doubt discouraging any other challenge to congressional decorum.

After being thrown out, Green told a press conference: “The president said he had a mandate, and I was making it clear to the president that he has no mandate to cut Medicaid. I have people who are very fearful. These are poor people, and they have only Medicaid in their lives when it comes to their healthcare. And I want him to know that his budget calls for deep cuts in Medicaid. He needs to save Medicaid, protect it. We need to raise the cap on Social Security. There’s a possibility that it’s going to be hurt. And we’ve got to protect Medicare. These are the safety net programs that people in my congressional district depend on. And this president seems to care less about them and more about the number of people that he can remove from the various programs that have been so helpful to so many people.”

There is no point in fact checking Trump’s many lies and exaggerations. He is manufacturing a narrative out of whole cloth that justifies his dictatorial executive orders and tariffs that will fall on US consumers. The Republican party are completely in thrall to this ideological fantasy, while the Democrats have no idea how to respond to it. What was true in his speech was when he boasted about how much his administration had achieved in 43 days compared to previous administrations in four years. In the run-up to the election Biden and Harris talked of how Trump was a fascist and had to be defeated at all costs. Now he is president, the Democrats sit meekly like lambs being led to the slaughter. Only Al Green stood up to oppose Trump at the event and only a few boycotted it like AOC. Bernie Sanders rightly described Trump as living in a parallel universe of his own creation, where the issues important to working people have no place. At least Bernie is going around the country to rally people against the government’s attacks. Where are Biden and Harris now?

Gerry Healy and his downfall


Review of The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism, by Aidan Beatty, Pluto Press 2024.

It’s refreshing to read a fairly dispassionate account of the rise and fall of the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) and its leader, Gerry Healy. It’s not exactly an untold story, as the book’s subtitle states, but it has been told exclusively by party partisans, while Beatty is an historian without a factional allegiance. Another good reason to read this book is the author’s final chapter, unmasking US Trotskyist leader David North as both a charlatan and a pale imitation of Healy.

At one time Healy, a pugnacious and authoritarian Irishman, was the most prominent leader of the Trotskyist movement in Britain. Beatty charts his ascent through the small Trotskyist groups of the 1930s and 1940s, his book alternating between a chronological account of Healy’s life and thematic chapters exploring his politics. After Labour’s election victory in 1945, Healy pushed for a strategy of secretive entry into the Labour party rather than building a separate socialist organisation, forming “The Club” which was successful until Gaitskell became party leader. Beatty discerns the characteristic features of “Healyism” in the Club’s “rigid dogmatism, an emphasis on the study of Marxist texts, and top-down party structures.” 

In 1959 the Club became the Socialist Labour League (SLL), but Healy continued to keep a tight control over its resources. It published a weekly newspaper called the Newsletter which had creditable reporting of industrial news, and began raising funds for a daily paper, the Workers Press, which launched in 1969. The SLL benefited from the revolutionary sentiment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which encouraged Healy to rename the organisation the Workers Revolutionary Party in 1973, and launch a new daily in 1976, the News Line, using new technology at a printing site in Runcorn. In 1985 the party split and disintegrated into numerous small groups after revelations about Healy’s sexual predation on young female members. 

Beatty’s account of this split unfortunately focuses on tensions within the party leadership, and doesn’t do enough justice to the agency of  the rank and file membership. His method of working from published accounts and interviews with former WRP members presents a confusing mosaic of this contradictory period. One of his interviewees, Clare Cowen, sums it up more succinctly as a revolt of the members against the leadership.

It is generally agreed that Healy was an effective speaker. His rhetoric was more convincing between the mid-1960s and 1970s, when the class struggle was in the ascendant. The first time this reviewer heard him give a speech was just before the 1964 election which returned a Labour government after thirteen years of Tory rule: he denounced Labour for the fact that the Economist was giving them support, calling their editorial board “animals”. His vehement hatred of capitalism, or so it seemed, was both frightening and exhilarating. I was anticipating a Labour betrayal after Harold Wilson abandoned the promise of nuclear disarmament, so a party which held fast to socialist policies seemed attractive.

I joined the Willesden branch of the SLL, which met at the flat of a married couple in the area, and was introduced to the world of early morning factory sales. At the time the SLL had a majority in the Labour party’s youth movement, the Young Socialists, which was in the process of separating from Labour and organizing independently. Its orientation to working-class youth was attractive to me.

It’s true, as Beatty comments, that the SLL’s and WRP’s branches were dominated by Healy’s personality. It’s also true that the organisation was sustained by the sacrifices of its members, sometimes extreme sacrifices. So two connected questions are suggested: what motivated its members to make these sacrifices? And why did they stop doing this in 1985?

The WRP’s ideology was based to an extent on Lenin’s formulation in What is to be Done? – that to remain members it was compulsory for them to be active in building the movement, not simply supporters. It was also the source for the argument that a newspaper was essential to organizing a revolutionary party. As Beatty points out, selling a daily newspaper was conflated with “building the party” and became the main activity of the branches, displacing political work that might have strengthened the WRP’s influence in the labour movement. The idea that soon a mass revolutionary movement would come into being, which would require a revolutionary party to be built beforehand, was key to disciplining members to sell the daily paper. The fate of the revolution was made the responsibility of the efforts of individual members. 

Branch secretaries would pressure members to sell more papers and recruit more members. Then the secretaries would attend a meeting of an Area Committee, where they would be castigated for their branch not selling enough papers or raising enough money. Then the Area Committee would send delegates to the party Central Committee where the delegates would again be castigated for not achieving more sales or recruiting more members. On top of that, select Central Committee members would be on a Political Committee, where Healy would berate them for not building the party fast enough.

How did he berate them? He would take reports of events happening in the world, or in the economy, and fit them into a Trotskyist schema of imminent revolution – or alternatively, an imminent fascist coup. PC and CC members would be held personally responsible for preparing members in their area for revolution or resisting fascism. This created a hierarchy of enforcers of Healy’s demands, the basis of an authoritarian culture within the party.

What made this ideology so potent was that it was a shared ideology, based on a myth of the Russian Revolution as led by a Bolshevik party built by one man, Lenin. Trotsky’s writings built up this myth, and a foundational document of the International he founded reduced the crisis of humanity to “the crisis of revolutionary leadership.” The cult of one leader as the source of all political wisdom was intensified and heightened within the British Trotskyist movement in periods of isolation and factional fighting in and around the Labour party. Full-time WRP employee Dave Bruce noted how Healy had enablers who contributed to the party’s internal regime: “Healy was almost as much a product of his colleagues as they were of him.” (page 27)

Healy’s politics were formed in the dishonest manoeuvrings, political fantasy, splits and violence that were part of the history of the Trotskyist movement in Britain. It gave Healy a sense of his own importance. Long-time member Norman Harding was Healy’s driver for some years and in Staying Red recounts that he was “living in some kind of parallel universe of his own creation.” He was a fantasist who appropriated the stories and propaganda techniques of others, like the US Socialist Workers Party leader Bill Cannon and former mentor Jock Haston in the UK, and was able to impose his fantasies onto others because at heart it was what they wanted to believe. 

The party’s printing equipment in Runcorn had been built up in preparation for an imaginary general strike, even storing large quantities of newsprint in anticipation. In the event, the newsprint dried out and became unusable, although soaking up a lot of party capital. The printers were loyal members and worked long hours to produce the News Line; even so on their days off they were assigned to branches in the Liverpool area and were subject to the same discipline as other members, that is, their branches had quotas of papers to sell and pay for even if not sold. 

Healy’s long-time personal secretary, Aileen Jennings, also a target of his abuse, wrote a letter to the party’s PC in July 1985 that revealed for years he had been using his position to coerce young women into having sex with him. The letter was kept under wraps by the party leadership for several months, although rumours spread among a few members, until it was disseminated more widely and blew the lid off the cover-up. The revelations broke the ideological framework that sustained members’ activism. After the letter reached printworkers in Runcorn, they voted by a majority to stop work on the News Line. The outvoted minority produced a scab edition, but Liverpool party members arrived in time to stop the distribution van from leaving and went on to occupy the printshop.

Beatty gives the impression that the news about Healy percolated gradually through the membership until a mass aggregate meeting in London condemned him. In actuality, the absence of the News Line had dealt a blow to the authority of the party committees, and compelled heated and soul-searching discussion among the membership. Although the plotting of the small group who had engineered the revelations, as described by Clare Cowen in her book My Search for Revolution, was central and important in dividing the leadership, it was the actions of the printers that forced the issue within the membership and the eventual split. 

The print workers had been sustained by their sense they could use their skills to work directly for socialist revolution. They were also acutely aware of the disconnect of the party’s policies from the class struggle, through their branch work. So the majority did not make their decision because of support for a particular faction within the leadership. Like Andy Blunden, quoted in Beatty’s book, they instinctively knew the revelations in Aileen Jennings’ letter to be true.  

For years I had made up the News Line’s pages ready for printing – my part in bringing down Healy was to refuse to do this at a crucial moment, along with my fellow printworkers. We were repelled by Healy’s actions and knew that it meant much agonizing inner struggle about what kind of politics we had supported. We were no longer prepared to work for a politically corrupt organisation; and neither were most of the membership, who repudiated Healy’s supporters.

Healy was expelled from the WRP before it finally fell apart, but political fantasy dies hard. To this day, there is a small organisation calling itself the Workers Revolutionary Party, still producing a paper with the same title whose typography and layout is made as close as possible to the News Line of the 1980s.

Lessons for US Democrats from the UK Election


            What lessons should Democratic strategists learn from the election in Great Britain? As is now becoming obvious, Biden is not competent to defeat Donald Trump in November. His catastrophic debate performances and his policy of unconditional support for Israel while it pummels what is left of Gaza and annexes more of the West Bank has alienated a good part of the Democratic base among the young, African Americans, Latin Americans, and Arab Americans. That could make or break the presidential vote.

            Although Labour won an overwhelming majority in Great Britain’s general election, its victory is more hollow than it appears. The party’s vote share was barely increased over 2019, and the Tories ignominiously collapsed, losing votes to the fascist Reform party. A number of leading Labour parliamentarians lost their seats or had their majorities severely reduced because of one fundamental question: the party’s position on Gaza. 

            Far from being an obscure foreign policy topic, Palestine was a major factor in a number of constituencies. Voters did not forget Keir Starmer’s knee-jerk support for Israel’s right to “defend itself” by cutting off water, food and electricity to the Gazan people. Four new independent pro-Palestinian MPs were elected, and moreover, the Green party gained four MPs – a fourfold increase over its previous parliamentary presence. Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected as an independent with a large majority, defying a targeted Labour campaign that threw large resources into unseating him.

            More dangerous is the rise of the Reform party. It now has five MPs, including Nigel Farage, with the opportunity to make racist anti-immigration statements from within the protection of Parliament. The fragmentation of the Tory right-centrist government encouraged disaffected voters to switch to the hard right. The same pattern is playing out in neighboring France: Macron’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and autocratic rule facilitated the rise of the National Front to the point that it is close to forming the next government.

            The Biden administration’s centrist policies, which ended the emergency safety net mobilized during the pandemic, have also allowed disaffection to build up over the increased cost of living, medical care, and housing. This palpable discontent poses the real and present danger of a second Trump presidency, with the backing of the Supreme Court to take any actions he wants to without fear of accountability – even the jailing of political rivals and a clampdown on free speech, a sacrosanct American constitutional right.

            Clearly, Biden should step aside for the good of the country. But aside from his replacement, the Democrats need to push for the cutting off of arms supplies to Israel. If Netenyahu decides to declare war on Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel must be left to fend for itself without fresh supplies of American bombs and missiles. The US must not be dragged into a conflagration in the Middle East that would have untold consequences for the world. Israel’s uncontrollable expansionism must be reined in.

            The next Democratic presidential candidate will need to take bold steps to address pressing domestic issues. Yet the party’s foreign policy must also take a high priority, as the elections from Great Britain and France teach us.

Britain Says “I’m with Gary”: Cruel Politics No Match for Moral Clarity


The climbdown by BBC management over Gary Lineker’s now-famous tweet laid bare the political weakness of Rishi Sunak’s government – how far it is removed from popular opinion. It hopes to whip up a xenophobic backlash against asylum seekers in order to rescue its electoral chances. But the affair has also exposed the no less appalling and morally atrophied response from Starmer’s Labour. 

The Tory party has discovered that creating a moral panic over immigration has not gained as much traction within mainstream public opinion as it would like. Lineker criticized directly the rhetoric of the Tory right wing: “There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?” The language Lineker had in mind was that of Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who claimed in parliament that “illegal and uncontrolled migration” of asylum seekers coming across the Channel in small boats was an “invasion”. 

Sunak was at great pains to dissociate himself from the BBC’s decision to suspend Lineker from presenting Match of the Day. Sunak said he hoped “that the current situation between Gary Lineker and the BBC can be resolved in a timely manner, but it is rightly a matter for them, not the government”. While the government does not directly dictate the BBC’s actions, it is the case that the BBC’s board is packed with Tory sympathisers who are particularly responsive to the demands of hardcore rightwing MPs and the tabloid press. 

The solid support for Lineker from his fellow sports presenters and commentators – many of them former professional athletes who value team solidarity – has fragmented the response of the political class. Co-presenter Ian Wright immediately announced he would not appear on the programme without Lineker, closely followed by Alan Shearer and all other potential presenters on the BBC’s list. 

Football fans – who in the past have been targeted by the extreme right – have sided with Lineker over the political elite. About a dozen people held up a banner outside the BBC’s Salford office saying “Reinstate Gary Lineker” and other signs saying “Refugees welcome here”. At Saturday’s match between Leicester and Chelsea, which Lineker attended as a spectator, fans could be seen holding up signs supportive of the presenter, with one reading: “I’m with Gary. Migrants welcome.” At one point in the game, both sets of supporters chanted Lineker’s name. 

The Guardian reported: “Gary Lineker is our guy,” said Leicester City fan Shafiq Khalifa. “He is  standing up for people who don’t have a voice to speak.” The council worker and photographer feared Lineker’s punishment for speaking against government policies was a worrying sign for society. “We’re coming to that point in the world where we’re not allowed to say the truth,” he said. “The BBC know what they’re doing.” Lifelong Leicester City fan James Sankar, 75, who was attending the game with his Chelsea-supporting wife, Prem, 66, said the BBC’s reaction to Lineker’s tweets made him worried that people’s freedom was being reduced. “He has a right to do that, it’s a free country. That’s one of the things that we’re proud of, being able to say what we want.”

According to the Independent: “A Manchester City fan held up a sign saying “Gary Lineker for Prime Minister” at a match at Selhurst Park, London. Meanwhile, Swansea City fans were also pictured waving a banner which said “Gary, Gary, Gary Lineker” and “stand up to racism” at the Swansea.com Stadium.”

Braverman’s racist rhetoric has emboldened extreme rightists to whip up local residents to attack asylum seekers who the government has deliberately placed in hotels in largely white small towns where they stand out and become victims of harassment, rather than London where they would blend in. However, Lineker’s moral clarity about the government’s plans has succeeded in changing the narrative. 

The Observer commented: “Amid signs that the row may be changing public perception of the government’s asylum policy, the furore has also exposed deep Tory splits and unease over its hardline nature, under which refugees arriving on small boats in the UK will be detained and deported ‘within weeks’ – either to their own country if it is safe or a third nation if it is not. … Tobias Ellwood, Tory chair of the Commons defence select committee, said he needed reassurance that there would be workable routes by which genuine asylum seekers could reach the UK ‘so this is seen as a genuine attempt to save lives … not just the bombastic rhetoric that riled people like Gary Lineker.”

Although attacking his tweets was expected to divert attention away from the policy itself, it has instead only focused political discourse on the cruelty of the legislation, also exposing the moral atrophy of the Labour right. Veteran journalist Will Hutton commented: “The furore has transformed the terms of the debate. Labour had confined itself to criticising the policy only in terms of its workability. Now it cannot allow only Gary Lineker to speak out about the rotten values that have driven it, as the numbers declaring their support for him grow. This is transmuting into a popular progressive moment as the integrity of public service broadcasting is defended alongside Lineker’s stance on asylum seeking. Britain is not the rightwing country the right imagines. It is a fairer, much more decent place. Congratulations to the Match of the Day presentation team who showed us who we are – the best game any of them have played.”

Lineker was closer to the public mood than the Labour leadership, which carried out an embarrassing u-turn after first disavowing Lineker’s language to then supporting him against the BBC management. Skwawkbox commented: “What drove the u-turn? Well, in the interim, fellow presenters had shown exemplary solidarity with Lineker, informing the BBC that they would not be participating in the show.” By contrast, Jeremy Corbyn had no hesitation in congratulating Gary Lineker and Ian Wright, calling for a mobilization “to defeat this inhumane, illegal and immoral legislation.”

Starmer’s Labour has carefully avoided the central issue of the treatment of asylum seekers, focusing instead on the technical workability of the government’s plans. Phil Burton-Cartledge took Starmer to task over his refusal to make any moral criticism of the legislation. “Taking on the arguments politically instead of as a manager and a bureaucrat means telling people with unfounded prejudices and racist attitudes that they’re wrong. Which is something the Labour right are never willing to do, unless the public are opposed to a war or, as per more recently, want the nationalisation of water and energy. Offering political leadership is hard. It’s much easier to surf the wave of reactionary public opinion than challenge it, because the press are on side.”

After thanking his colleagues for their support, Lineker tweeted: “A final thought: however difficult the last few days have been, it simply doesn’t compare to having to flee your home from persecution or war to seek refuge in a land far away. It’s heartwarming to have seen the empathy towards their plight from so many of you. We remain a country of predominantly tolerant, welcoming and generous people. Thank you.”

This would seem to present an opportunity for Labour members to raise the lack of any principled opposition from the parliamentary party to the legislation, but their voices have been muzzled by rightwing control of the apparatus. How long can this continue?

“We will fight in the fields and in the streets”: Ordinary people lead the struggle against the Tory neoliberals


Nurses are preparing an unparalleled escalation of strike action for the beginning of March. For the first time, members working in emergency departments, intensive care units and cancer care services will be joining the strike. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has announced the first continuous 48-hour strikes running through two days and two nights, rather than limiting walkouts to the 12 hours from 8am to 8pm, as they have done up until now. It is also considering increasing strike pay, to make clear it is serious.

“It is with a heavy heart that I have today asked even more nursing staff to join this dispute,” said RCN general secretary Pat Cullen. “By refusing to negotiate with nurses, the prime minister is pushing even more people into the strike. He must listen to NHS leaders and not let this go ahead.” A union insider said: “NHS leaders … were expecting an escalation but had not prepared for the removal of the committees and derogation process that too many had manipulated at local level. We saw a minority of hospital management bullying nurses to break the last strike.”

The nurses are being joined by ambulance workers organised by Unison, after a re-ballot of 12,000 members, which the union describes as a “significant escalation” of industrial action. The action aims to force government ministers to meet union officials and negotiate seriously about pay. The outrage at Energy Secretary Grant Shapps’ claim that ambulance staff had refused to provide information about where they were striking, “a blatant lie” according to GMB official Rachel Harrison, has only hardened strikers’ determination.

The government’s intransigence on their wage claims has only solidified the militancy of the strikers. But the significance of the strikes is that, like those of the railway workers, postal workers, and teachers, they are fueled by the need to preserve social institutions which are currently being allowed to fail. These ideals and goals are common to all the strikers: nurses are fighting for the future existence of the NHS, university lecturers for the future of higher education as institutions for learning, postal workers to keep the Royal Mail as a means of community cohesion, the railway workers for passenger safety as well as the very right to strike.

Postal workers voted by an overwhelming 95.9 per cent to continue their strike action. Communication Workers union general secretary Dave Ward said the vote is “proof that postal workers will not accept their livelihoods being destroyed so that a few at the top can generate serious profits at their expense.” He said: “It is proof that workers loyal to a historic institution like Royal Mail will not accept it being turned into an Uber-style, bog-standard gig economy employer.

Deborah Eggleston, a members of the teachers’ union NASUWT, was interviewed in a Guardian video titled, “Strikes are all we have.” She explained that by closing the local Community College in Shildon, where she lives, “they’re taking away the collegiate spirit of the town.” Schools are important community hubs, she pointed out. Talking about her volunteer work for the Shildon Alive community food centre, she said that she felt her role in society “is more than just teaching children: it’s about helping the community I live in.”  She has found that “for the first time, ordinary people cannot go on like this.”

The need to rebuild society after the impact of the pandemic is being shouldered by the unions, while the Tory government is abstaining from any kind of effective intervention. The Sunak government is paralysed because concessions on wage claims to match inflation would break apart the Tory coalition. It includes hardliners aiming to destroy unions and to allow the NHS to collapse, together with those fearing a social catastrophe and pleading with the Treasury to release funds to support the lowest-paid.

It is possible that the government will be brought down by the strike wave. In that case, it would likely be replaced by a Starmer-led Labour government. But rather than addressing the pressing problems of poverty, healthcare, education, refugees and rapidly rising energy costs, Starmer is so out of tune with the unions and their members he has relaunched the internal culture war against Jeremy Corbyn so as to isolate and neutralize the left in the party. 

If the government falls as a result of strike action, a Labour government would be facing an energized and militant working class. It would have a pressing need to head off grassroots militancy and restore faith in the system. They can’t do this without increasing low-paid workers’ wages.  Paying for a substantial increase for public employees means taxing the rich. Is Starmer up to it?  I don’t think so either.

A government of any complexion couldn’t even begin to tackle the problems facing society without dealing with the issue of the accumulation of enormous wealth at the top of the social structure while at the bottom people’s living standards have been destroyed. As Deborah Eggleston put it: “ordinary people cannot go on like this.”

Fighting the Anti-Worker Stance of Neoliberal Tories and Right-wing Labour


Image: Unite Community

February has begun with the largest mass strikes in Britain since the 1970s, bringing half a million workers out on strike. Marches and rallies in all major cities and provincial towns were spearheaded by thousands of teachers, joined by civil servants, university staff, rail and bus workers. The marches were notable for their enthusiasm and popularity with the general public. 

Sections of the working class are uniting and pushing back together against the government’s refusal to negotiate pay settlements that would compensate for inflation. This movement is regenerating the basic class consciousness that was dormant for much of the recent past. As railway union leader Mick Lynch told a rallyfor the National Education Union in Westminster on Wednesday, “we are the working class, and we are back.”

The one-day strike coincides with the TUC’s national “protect the right to strike” day, called in response to new government legislation that will tighten the current restrictive laws by imposing minimum service levels on trade unions. The Guardian reported that the leaders of the National Education Union (NEU), Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney, describe the strike as “a huge statement from a determined membership who smashed through the government’s thresholds that were only ever designed to prevent strike action happening at all”. Civil servants’ union leader Mark Serwotka commented that striking members were “very young, very vibrant, very diverse. Lots of first-time strikers, and a real sense from many of them that they felt quite empowered.”

The union campaign of resistance to below-inflation pay offers reflects a movement of popular democracy coming into collision with an authoritarian government. Public support for the strikers shows that it is generally understood that they are not just fighting for sectional wage claims but are also standing up to the government on issues that affect everybody. Moreover, it has become clear that it is the government which is directly responsible for the stalemate on wages. It is significant that both teachers’ and nurses’ unions have announced they will not take part in next year’s pay review bodies, created only in order to insulate the government from political pressures and involvement in collective bargaining. The outsourcing of responsibility for public sector wages to these pay review bodies is a strategy of the neoliberal state – similar to the creation of “independent” bodies to regulate energy, water, and transport costs – that has been broken apart by the overwhelming resistance of unions to below-inflation pay deals.

Many members of the Labour party see this upsurge of resistance as a harbinger of a future Labour government. Even though reluctantly supporting a Starmer-led Labour at the ballot box, they consider that a Labour government must be better than the current corrupt and incompetent Tories. In fact, writing for LabourHub, Mark Perryman says it is “ill-informed ultraleftism” to suggest anything else. But although a more professional and less corrupt government would certainly appear to be better for everybody, what would it offer the strikers?

Keir Starmer has argued that the pay rise being demanded by nurses is “probably more than can be afforded,” and according to a briefing from shadow health minister Wes Streeting’s office, Labour would support using the army to break NHS strikes. Stephen Kinnock, the shadow minister for immigration, claimed that England had been “left with no choice” but to draft in army personnel to cover for striking ambulance drivers, border staff and civil servants.

A further confirmation of this anti-worker attitude is given by the London Labour conference, where a resolution affirming support for the strikers and condemning the government’s move to outlaw strikes was narrowly voted down by the Labour right with the support of Unison representatives, even though Unison members in the ambulance service will be joining the strikes next week. This is evidence of how a Labour government may act when in office.

Starmer also defended greater use of the private sector to drive down NHS waiting lists. A Momentum spokesperson said it “beggars belief that the Labour leadership is choosing to embrace the role of the private sector in the NHS” and to undermine the principle of universal healthcare. The spokesperson added: “For Keir Starmer to go back on his leadership pledge to end NHS outsourcing is morally wrong and politically self-defeating.”

How can Momentum remain relevant when it can only offer moral criticism of the Labour leadership in the midst of the growing strike wave? Momentum has been most successful when it doesn’t depend on its position in the Labour party – such as The World Transformed festival. Delegates and other attendees at the Liverpool party conference appeared shell-shocked when they wandered into TWT – perhaps recovering from singing the national anthem. By way of contrast, Tribune magazine’s Enough is Enough campaign has mobilized many hundreds of people independent of official Labour, simply by bringing together union activists with campaigners on rents, food banks, and other social issues.

The economic historian Adam Tooze has adopted the term “polycrisis” to characterize the instability of the world economy. He uses it to indicate the way simultaneous crises are interacting with and amplifying each other, and that there is no unitary cause of the crisis. It has to be recognized, he argues, that this is a novel situation in which the interrelation of the crises is not clear, and that making comparisons with past inflationary crises is misleading. 

British society might well be a prime example of a polycrisis. The shock of the Brexit vote in 2016 cannot by itself explain the “astonishing stagnation in productivity and real incomes” that has eclipsed anything in the last 250 years. For a significant part of the population real incomes actually fell, making the descriptors of decline and stagnation a literal reality. Coupled with that is a social breakdown at many levels: economic contraction, parliamentary governance, national constitution, state healthcare provision, energy, water and travel regulation, as well as unaffordable housing.

The official Labour line is that a change of government can fix all these problems: their current slogan is “only Labour can save the NHS.” But the Labour leaders’ statements on nurses’ strike actions and their absence of support for Wednesday’s strike show that a Labour government would continue with authoritarian neoliberal governance and inevitably come into conflict with public sector workers.

The continuing wave of strikes is forcing a renewal of open class lines in social life and fragmenting neoliberal state institutions. This development offers the possibility of creating new political forms that will dislodge the grip of the Labour right and enable left activists to participate in social struggles that can build new relationships between different sectors and with international movements.

My book, The Socialist Ideal in the Labour Party: from Attlee to Corbyn, is available from Merlin Press at merlinpress.co.uk

Book Review: “Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow,” by Mike Phipps


Mike Phipps has been around for a while. A founding member of the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) from 2004, a long-standing member of the editorial board of Labour Briefing, he was founder and editor of Iraq Occupation Focus for several years. Now he is a member of the Executive Committee of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD), and writes for the website Labour Hub.

Phipps assesses the current state of the Labour party in his new book: Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022). And his verdict is not pretty. As well as losing members, expelling activists, ignoring its own constitution and conference-decided policies, Labour is “headed by a leader with so little personal following in the broader Party that he is to a large extent the prisoner of its most factional right wing elements.”

It only gets worse. In the middle of the pandemic and climate crises, the party’s 2021 conference turned inwards to conflicts over rule changes. Phipps attributes the right-wing’s push for changes to the leadership election rules to the prospect of an alternative leader without the baggage of Starmer’s pledges to the membership: “It looked like Starmer’s ultimate problem was that he had lost the support of the left, and the right of the Party didn’t really want him.”

Phipps rightly identifies the December 2019 election result as a “life-changing” calamity for many activists who had spent hours door-knocking in the dark. But was the party really up to a “new politics” in any case? Transforming Labour into a movement that could sustain a radical Corbyn government in power “was always going to be a daunting task for an essentially electoralist Party notorious for its routinism and institutional conservatism.”

Phipps warned presciently (in his essay collection For the Many) in 2017 that the party needed “root and branch reform,” wholesale democratization of its structures so that the influx of new members could play an effective part in deciding policy and selecting candidates. That didn’t happen, and after initially electing left branch leaderships, control reverted to the hands of the right. Starmer’s election to the party leadership was a consequence of the overwhelming disappointment of many members after the 2019 election – and also the dashing of the left’s hopes of the possibility of electing a radical government to Westminster despite the ferocious Tory and deep state assault on Labour. 

However, Phipps is still convinced of the possibilities of socialist activism within Labour. The left “needs to move beyond a fixation with the leadership,” he argues, “and focus on what was achievable: intellectually, in terms of organisation, among the membership and the affiliated organisations, in policy terms and among voters.”

Local government is an arena where citizen involvement offers a chance for consciousness-raising around economic and political issues, he points out. Locally-based politicians such as Andy Burnham demonstrate alternative regional visions, and the effective responses of regional and local authorities to Covid demonstrated their commitment to public health compared to the abysmal record of central government. Where councils have been active at grassroots community organizing (such as in Worthing), they won electoral support against the national trend.

The prospects opened up at local level, contends Phipps, militate against activists leaving the party in protest. He says: “the input that radical Labour ideas can have within the Party’s empire of local government depends hugely on the extent to which activists of the Corbyn era stay in the Party and make their ideas felt.” He considers the outlook for the left “is not as unremittingly negative as might at first appear.” Despite organizational exclusion and internal division, the left is far more powerful now than in 2015. 

He contrasts Momentum’s ability to consolidate the left within the party with the fragmentation of a decade earlier, when there was little coordination between the LRC and the CLPD. Taking the long term view, he cites writers who argue for rebuilding the party on the ground in working-class communities, offering practical solidarity and real solutions, in Christine Berry’s words. He privileges community organizing coming from people taking ownership of the party themselves, but “organizing should be the central priority of the left in the party.” 

Because of his long-term approach, Phipps discusses the role of the unions mainly in terms of their effects on the structural workings of the party, although he allows for the rapid growth of mass movements having a direct impact on Labour and its representatives. This is evident from the current upsurge of militant strike struggles that has placed the unions at the centre of mass opposition to the government, despite the lukewarm response of the Labour front bench to the escalating cost of living and energy rates. 

While criticizing Starmer’s authoritarian clampdown on party discussion, Phipps is also critical of the left, which he charges with responsibility for the party’s grassroots organisation and policy development. “If many of the leadership’s woes since 2019 have been self-inflicted, this might equally be said of the left: demoralization, infighting and a failure to look outwards all undermined its effectiveness at a time when it was needed more than ever.” Demoralization and infighting signal the weakness rather than the strength of the left. However, potential divisions within the PLP could be deepened by the grassroots response to Momentum’s demands that MPs attend picket lines in their constituencies and that Starmer drop his ban on MPs joining the pickets. 

The creation of a special category of members who have been suspended or expelled from the Labour party and do not have voting rights within Momentum has only exacerbated the contradictions between Momentum’s efforts to move Labour to the left and the unprecedented ruthlessness of the right in expelling and suspending activists. Although Momentum members have joined picket lines and are enthused by the upsurge of strike struggles, this hasn’t gone much further than activism with a distinct lack of strategy. Local branches have adopted measures such as working with trades councils and Tribune supporters clubs to get around the membership restrictions. 

Perhaps the left should not be held solely responsible for the state of Labour’s grassroots organisation: its role might better be one of unlocking the practical imagination of the broader labour movement on how to build a movement of counter-power and fulfil earlier promises of a movement-based party. Phipps is right, however, to point to the upsurge of creative socialist thinking in the party under Corbyn’s leadership, and the need to defend and continue this legacy embodied in new conceptions of socialism and the policies in the 2017 and 2019 party manifestos. 

Mike Phipps, Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn, OR Books 2022

My own book, The Socialist Ideal in the Labour Party: from Attlee to Corbyn, is available from Merlin Press at merlinpress.co.uk