No Vote to Labour!
Down with Starmer—no to austerity, genocide and war!
After 14 years Britain’s ruling class is turning away from the Tories and looking to Labour leader “Sir” Keir Starmer to rescue British capitalism from relentlessly declining profit rates. As the Financial Times recently noted: “UK growth has failed to recover from the financial crisis [of 2008] and from the Covid pandemic.” Marxist economist Michael Roberts observed that:
“…the UK economy is just falling behind. Compared to the rest of the G7 economies, the UK has the highest inflation rate and the second lowest GDP growth (just in front of Germany which went into recession this year). … And there is the staggering fact that without London in the equation for real output per person, the UK average would be below that of the poorest state in the US – Mississippi!”
– thenextrecession.wordpress.com, 11 August 2023
The multiple attacks on the working class pushed through in the wake of the Brexit fiasco (see: “The Devil or the Deep Blue Sea? Neither the EU nor Nationalist Poison – Spoil Your Ballot!”) have been accompanied by Tory attempts to scapegoat immigrants for the dramatic rise in poverty levels that are the inevitable consequence of anti-social government austerity policies. Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s vicious “obsession” with deporting undocumented migrants to Rwanda, recently enshrined in law, was never much more than a publicity stunt to misdirect the gullible.
When the COVID pandemic erupted in early 2020, Tory prime minister Boris Johnson’s response was to “let the bodies pile high”, which they did, leaving Britain with one of the highest rates of excess deaths in Europe. The Tories’ response to COVID centred on handing out lucrative government contracts to their inner circle while Boris Johnson infamously partied in 10 Downing Street during the supposed lockdown. The NHS (National Health Service), already massively underfunded prior to the pandemic, now appears to have reached breaking point:
“As of January 2024, one in 20 people in England wait at least four weeks to see a general practitioner, according to data from the NHS. If you need to go to the hospital, the situation is even scarier. Earlier this month, the British Medical Association (BMA) reported that the number of patients waiting more than 12 hours to be admitted in an emergency was about 95 times higher in April 2024 than in April 2019.”
– edition.cnn.com, 23 May 2024
Both Tories and Labour would like to finish privatising health care, but are hesitant to do so because of overwhelming popular opposition, particularly from working-class voters. The earlier sell-off of public water to corporate pirates has been a disaster:
“Macquarie [the Australian bank that owns Thames Water] took billions of pounds out of the company in loans and dividends – which is a share of a business’s profits that is paid to shareholders. Along with many UK water firms, Thames Water has been in the spotlight for pumping sewage into rivers. Between 2020 and the end of last year, it discharged at least 72 billion litres of sewage into the Thames.”
– bbc.co.uk, 14 March 2024
The Tories’ eagerness to participate in NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine derives, at least in part, from the desperate anxiety of British capital to sign a free-trade deal with the US to compensate for the disastrous aftermath of Brexit. Britain is currently the third-highest provider of weapons to Ukraine, including Storm Shadow missiles operated by British military personnel on the ground. During a visit to Kiev on 3 May, Foreign Minister David Cameron opined that “Ukraine has that right [to use Storm Shadows to strike deep into Russia]”. The Kremlin promptly responded that if British weapons, operated by British soldiers, struck targets in Russia, the UK would immediately become a direct party to the conflict and potentially subject to Russian strikes on its military assets anywhere on the globe. Britain’s participation in the conflict, widely seen as posing a real risk of spilling over into thermonuclear war, is not a major issue in the election because Labour and the Tories have virtually identical positions. Starmer calls for upgrading Britain’s nuclear arsenal and proclaims “national security will always come first in the changed Labour Party I lead”.
In February 2022, when eleven Labour MPs who signed a letter by the Stop the War Coalition (StWC) blaming both NATO and Russia for the Ukraine conflict were threatened with immediate suspension by Starmer, they all capitulated:
“A Labour source told the Mirror: ‘You can be a mouthpiece for the Kremlin or a Labour MP. But not both.’ It is understood all 11 later asked for their signatures to be removed as a result… The letter was signed by former frontbenchers Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Richard Burgon and Ian Lavery, as well as Beth Winter, Zarah Sultana, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Apsana Begum, Mick Whitley, Tahir Ali, and Ian Mearns.”
– mirror.co.uk, 24 February 2022
Labour politicians regularly try to outdo the Tories in Russophobia. Labour “left” John McDonnell, along with Sharon Graham, leader of Unite, the largest union in Britain, both signed on with the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign (McDonnell is in fact one of its founding members) to demand more weapons for Ukraine, even though the combination of lavish funding of Ukraine and anti-Russian sanctions have pushed down working-class living standards. The BBC observed:
“Steep price rises, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, meant hundreds of thousands more people fell into absolute poverty. The figure jumped to 12 million in 2022-2023, a rise of 600,000. This means the rate of absolute poverty in the UK now stands at 18% – a rise of 0.78 percentage points.”
Revolutionary Marxists favour a Russian military victory over NATO’s Ukrainian proxy, oppose all anti-Russian sanctions and support workers’ actions to block weapons deliveries to Ukraine, like those carried out in Italy and Greece in the early days of the conflict (see: “Russia reacts to imperialist encroachment”).
Class struggle from below
In October 2023 the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that 12 million households in Britain are living below the absolute poverty line—a direct result of an obscene upward redistribution of wealth under successive Tory governments:
“The Labour MP Liam Byrne’s new book, The Inequality of Wealth, details how the average wealth of an individual in the top 1% of Britain’s richest increased 31 times more than that of those in the bottom 99% between 2010 and 2021..”
– theguardian.com, 24 January 2024
A study by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) data, reported that “the average public sector worker was earning £200 a month less in real terms in spring 2023 than in 2010.” There have been several instances of significant resistance, including the refusal of primary school teachers organised by the National Education Union (NEU) to comply with the government’s demand to fully reopen schools after the 2020 Christmas break as COVID infections peaked. During 2022 the frustration of public sector workers at declining real wages and rising workloads exploded in a massive strike wave:
“The Office of National Statistics recently reported that days lost to industrial action in 2022 surpassed all totals recorded in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. More than 2.4 million working days were recorded as lost to strikes in 2022. This was the highest total since 1989, when the number of British trade unionists was significantly larger….”
– jacobin.com, 18 February 2023
Postal workers, railway and bus drivers, teachers, junior doctors and civil servants were among those who walked out. For the first time in its 108-year-old history the Royal College of Nursing struck over pay because the wages of full-time nurses were so meagre that many of them were forced to rely on food banks to survive. The tone-deaf Tories responded to this spontaneous revolt by absurdly appealing for national unity against Vladimir Putin:
“This is a time to come together and to send a very clear message to Mr Putin that we’re not going to be divided in this way … our message to the unions is to say this is not a time to strike, this is a time to try to negotiate.”
– theguardian.com, 4 December 2022
More than 500,000 workers went on strike on 1 February 2023, with pollsters reporting strong public support. The Tories responded by pushing through the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels [MSLs]) Act 2023 which stipulates that education, firefighting, rail, health and other public services must continue during strikes, for example at 40 percent capacity on the railways, and higher in other sectors, with disobedience punishable by firings and massive fines.
The Minimum Service legislation is so outrageous that Starmer has promised to repeal it. When Labour was in power between 1997 and 2010 it did not repeal a single one of the reactionary anti-trade union laws imposed by Margaret Thatcher and John Major during the preceding 18 years. Starmer has made it clear enough that he has no intention of doing so either if elected.
The right to strike, like the right to form trade unions and most other democratic rights, was only won through defying the laws of the time. Workers’ rights can only be defended today by actions led by those prepared to transgress capitalist legality if necessary. The train drivers union of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) set a good example when it successfully got around the new law in conducting a one-day strike against the publicly-owned London North Eastern Railway (LNER) in February. ASLEF president Mick Whelan explained:
“When one operator said it intended to issue work notices to our members, for the one day we were due to go on strike, we immediately put on another five days of strikes—more industrial action, as we had promised, to get the same effect—and LNER saw sense and promptly backed down.”
– morningstaronline.co.uk, 20 May 2024
The TUC’s September 2023 national conference resolved “we have no choice but to build mass opposition to the MSLs laws, up to and including a strategy of non-compliance and non-cooperation to make them unworkable, including industrial action” and pledged “100 per cent solidarity with any trade unions attacked under these MSL laws.” In 1971 the willingness of trade unionists to engage in “illegal” mass actions turned the Tories’ Industrial Relations Act, into a dead letter. Class-struggle resistance today can shred the Minimum Service Levels Act and all the rest of the anti-worker legislation enacted over the past half century.
Starmer’s course for Labour: reverting to a Liberal Party
In 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Labour had 564,000 members and was the biggest party in Europe. By June 2023 it had shrunk by almost 170,000 according to Labour List. The first thing Sir Keir did after taking over in the aftermath of Corbyn’s December 2019 electoral defeat, was to begin purging the party of leftist opposition. First for the chop were a variety of pseudo-Trotskyist deep entrists, including the notoriously pro-imperialist Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL) and Socialist Appeal, which carried on the Militant Tendency’s record as a leftist ginger group in Labour for over half a century. After finally being chucked out in 2021, Socialist Appeal opted to make a virtue of necessity and rebranded itself the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP).
Starmer did not merely aim to rid his party of self-proclaimed Marxists. He also went after prominent Labour front bencher Sam Tarry when he dared defy the leadership’s prohibition on appearances on picket lines to address striking train personnel of the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA) union in July 2022. TSSA head at the time, Manuel Cortes, a long-time Labourite bureaucrat, complained:
“If they think [they] can win the next general election while pushing away seven million trade union members, they are deluded.
“We expect attacks from the Tories, we don’t expect attacks from our own party. As a Labour-affiliated union, our union is ashamed of the actions of the Labour Party leadership and the anti-worker anti-union message it is sending out.
“If Keir Starmer doesn’t understand the basic concept of solidarity on which our movement has been built then he is not worthy of leading our party.”
– bbc.co.uk, 27 July 2022
As the strike movement gathered momentum in late summer 2022, leaders of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), Communication Workers Union (CWU), University and College Union and the Fire Brigades Union, along with food bank organisers and Labour lefts like Zarah Sultana and Andy Burnham launched the “Enough is Enough” (EIE) campaign promising to soon be:
“…holding rallies across Britain, forming community groups, organising picket line solidarity and taking action against the companies and individuals profiting from this crisis. We can’t rely on the establishment to solve our problems. It’s up to us in every workplace and every community. So, if you’re struggling to get by and your wages don’t cover the bills, if you’re fed up working harder for less and you’re worried about the future, or if you just can’t stand to see what’s happening to our country – join us. Enough is enough. It’s time to turn anger into action.”
– wesayenough.co.uk, accessed on 9 June 2024
The EIE campaign was greeted with enthusiasm, as Vice reported:
“If EIE’s membership – reportedly over 700,000 – can be mobilised, the turnout could be significant. ‘It doesn’t just feel like a left-wing rally. The sheer numbers of people there would indicate to me that it goes beyond that usual demographic,’ says Laura Dickinson, a voluntary organiser for the campaign based in the north of England. ‘The government and the opposition don’t seem to have the answers to this crisis, so people are turning elsewhere.’”
– vice.com, 30 September 2022
But the excitement soon fizzled as leaders of the various trade union affiliates accepted disappointing settlements and reverted to empty talk about the importance of electing a Labour government. It became clear that the tough talk about turning anger into action by left bureaucrats like Mick Lynch of the RMT and Dave Ward of the CWU was never seriously intended to mobilise a class-struggle workers’ challenge to Labour, but merely an attempt to pressure Starmer to the left. It should now be clear to everyone that is not going to happen; Starmer has openly demonstrated his affinity for big business and his commitment to continue degrading Labour’s already attenuated connection with the workers’ movement. He seems to want to return Labour to its origins as the left wing of the Liberal Party from which it emerged 124 years ago. In this Starmer is continuing down the path blazed by Tony Blair whose “New Labour” Margaret Thatcher estimated to be her greatest achievement.
British capitalists have expressed their enthusiasm for Starmer financially: according to inews, “during 2022 Starmer pulled in £7.2m of donations compared to £4.9m for the Conservatives”. And Open Democracy reported:
“Of the £21.5m in cash received by the [Labour] party in 2023, just £5.9m came from the trade union movement, compared with £14.5m from companies and individuals – a huge increase on the previous year, and indeed more than in the three previous years of Keir Starmer’s leadership combined. As trade union contributions have dipped slightly, from around £6.9m in 2020 and 2021 to £5.3m in 2022, donations from businesses and individuals have soared: they totalled £2.3m in 2020 and rose to £3m in 2021 and £7.6m in 2022 before nearly doubling last year.
“Around £10m of this total comes from just four sources: Gary Lubner (£4.6m), David Sainsbury (£3.1m), Fran Perrin (£1m) and Ecotricity (£1m), the green energy firm owned by prominent eco-activist Dale Vince. This means that just two individuals gave the Labour Party more money last year than all the trade unions combined.”
– opendemocracy.net, 13 March 2024
Starmer earned the confidence of British capital by positioning himself only slightly to the left of the Tories on all substantial questions. Much of his appeal is that he is not associated with the Tories, who are reviled by the vast majority of the population and seem headed to a catastrophic electoral defeat. Starmer has clearly distinguished himself from Corbyn, a Labour “left” whose naive and half-hearted reformism promoted popular illusions but whose unwillingness to fight for any of the things he claimed to support helped catapult Starmer into power. Today few workers expect anything much from Labour. Its promise to hire an additional 6,500 teachers is not likely to be fulfilled, and its declared intent to “cut NHS waiting times” just means opening the door wider for private healthcare companies. A particularly sinister plank in Labour’s programme is its promise to crack down on anti-social behaviour, stiffen border control and significantly bolster the state repressive apparatus. Labour’s promise to “deliver economic stability” (a key concern of the ruling class) is complemented by assurances it has no intention of “turning on the spending tab” (for the benefit of workers and the poor) once in power:
“Growing the economy on secure foundations will be the number one mission of the next Labour government. That is the route to making working people better off.
“Labour will deliver stability with iron discipline, guided by strong fiscal rules, robust economic institutions, and a new ‘fiscal lock’ to ensure we never repeat the mini budget that sent mortgage rates soaring.”
– labour.org.uk, accessed on 8 June 2024
Unite leader Sharon Graham aptly described Starmer’s “New Deal for Working People” as having “more holes than Swiss cheese. The number of caveats and get-outs means it is in danger of becoming a bad bosses’ charter”. Graham outlined a few key elements of Starmer’s anti-working class programme:
“…there were rowbacks on individual rights, including zero-hours contracts, where Labour has ultimately changed its policy from an outright ban to workers now having a theoretical right to a contract with regular hours. But it was the tightening of the noose around the neck of new, straightforward rights to organise for trade unions that presented the clearest indication of change to me, a bureaucratic web impeding the right for a union to access a workplace in order to organise it. The corporate lobbyists were unsurprisingly gaining a foothold.”
– theguardian.com, 4 June 2024
Yet despite her criticisms, Graham concludes that “the country desperately needs a Labour government,” absurdly adding that the party “tightening the noose” around the neck of the trade unions should “show it will stick to its guns on improving workers’ rights”. Graham, like the “left” bureaucrats who cobbled together the EIE movement only to dissipate the energy of militants who wanted to fight back, ultimately offers nothing beyond the perverse lie that a Starmer government will benefit working people.
Zionist genocide & more state repression
The Tory government has sought to smear the massive national protests against the horrendous genocidal assault on Gaza as anti-semitic “hate marches”. It has charged supporters of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) and the Revolutionary Communist Group under hate speech and anti-terrorism laws for simply siding with Palestinian resistance to mass murder by the Israeli military. Under Starmer Labour has taken the same reactionary position, as defenders of the Palestinians are slandered and purged. Bogus accusations of “anti-semitism” were key to the Labour right wing’s attack on Jeremy Corbyn whose wholesale capitulation to the loathsome smear campaign fatally undermined his leadership. The Labour Party willingly adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-semitism which includes condemning any mention of the simple fact that the Israeli state was a “racist endeavor” from its origins. Jewish supremacy is racist as we explained in a recent article:
“The current genocidal assault on Gaza is also a continuation of the historic Zionist project of eliminating the indigenous Palestinian population from all territory between ‘the river and the sea,’ (i.e., Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon). The state of Israel was born in 1948 through a campaign of ethnic cleansing by murderous Zionist thugs who succeeded in driving hundreds of thousands of terrorised Palestinians from the lands their ancestors had inhabited for thousands of years.… While Zionism inflicted enormous pain on the Palestinian population it displaced in 1948, it has also been a tragedy for the majority of Jews by diverting them from participation in the socialist struggle to transcend capitalist irrationality into dead-end nationalism. The Zionist project promised a harmonious nation-state where company owners and their employees would cooperate for their mutual benefit, but, from its origins, Israel has been an oppressive Jewish-supremacist state in which capitalists are privileged over workers, European Ashkenazi Jews over the Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews of Spanish, Middle Eastern and North African origin, and all Jews over Palestinians and other goyim.”
– Bolshevik No. 6, “For a bi-national workers’ state in Palestine-Israel”, 2024
In an 11 October 2023 interview with LBC (at 1.14 minutes) Starmer asserted that in his view Israel’s right to self-defence includes the “right” to cut off water and power to the entire civilian population of Gaza.
The Labour leadership’s ban on members of parliament and councillors attending anti-genocide protests produced considerable opposition which found expression in November 2023, when 56 Labour MPs defiantly supported a Scottish National Party amendment calling for an immediate ceasefire. The surprise landslide victory of former Labour MP George Galloway in February’s Rochdale by-election was widely interpreted as a repudiation of Starmer’s pro-Zionist stance on Gaza. Galloway’s victory came in the context of a wave of resignations and protests at moves to replace several popular Labour MPs with servile hacks. By April more than a 120 local Labour councillors had resigned from the party. Starmer has thus far been able to avoid paying much of a price for his reactionary Gaza policy and grossly anti-democratic behaviour because of the extreme unpopularity of the Tories, whose problems are further compounded by the apparent threat of a big chunk of their traditional base defecting to Nigel Farage’s new right-wing “Reform UK” party.
The number of former Labour MPs and other leftist candidates running against the main parties is unprecedented in recent decades. Galloway’s pithy observation that “the Tories and Labour represent two cheeks of the same backside” helps explain why. Most of those running are candidates for Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain (WP). A few WP backers are well known, including former Labour MP Chris Williamson, former diplomat Peter Ford and ASLEF executive Andy Hudd, but most of its candidates are political newbies. The WP’s programme combines traditional Labourite reformism with backward attitudes towards abortion and the rights of sexual minorities as well as a pronounced anti-immigration, pro-cop bias. WP positions on international questions have a left-pacifist, little England, tilt but the new party supports the Palestinians and does not shrink from branding NATO as the root of the problems in Ukraine:
“We make absolutely no apologies for our support for Palestine and the people of Gaza during the brutal onslaught carried out by Israel with full support from the US and Britain, politically backed by Labour and Tories alike. Our position on Ukraine centres on a condemnation of the expansionary provocation of NATO in alliance with another ethno-nationalist government that throws its own people into a perpetual meat grinder. We will withdraw all military support from war zones and work for a negotiated and peaceful settlement whenever and wherever war breaks out.”
On issues related to domestic class struggle the WP awkwardly attempts to project support for trade union struggles while suggesting that it is important not to transgress bourgeois legality. The WP election manifesto talks only about “backing legal strike action”, although earlier this year it was assuming a somewhat more militant posture:
“The Workers Party will show solidarity in a practical way, collaborate in union demonstrations in the fight back against the new government regulations and support pickets. Collective action is essential against this clear suppression of the workers’ rights. Condemnation; taking action short of a strike; and refusing to work overtime or take on additional duties are essential means of resistance. The Workers Party also encourages any non-compliance with the act undertaken by trade unions, who have the means to support members in resisting these laws of suppression.”
– workerspartybritain.org, 24 January 2024
The WP is not in fact a party, but rather a hastily assembled electoral alliance whose candidates are a somewhat eclectic lot. In calling for votes to WP candidates we exclude any like Billy Howarth (who ran on their ticket in the local May elections), with a history of rightist affinities. The WP is running over 150 candidates but is avoiding standing where former Labour leftists are running as independents, including Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn’s “Islington Manifesto” which is mostly a rehash of traditional Labourite reformism, does at least call for stopping arms sales to Israel, banning nuclear weapons and, unlike Galloway, defending abortion rights. Corbyn has appeared on the platform at various protests over the genocide in Gaza and has also denounced the Tory Minimum Service Levels Act.
Corbyn and Galloway are by far the most prominent former Labour supporters running against Starmer in the current election, but they are not the only ones. Peter Taaffe’s ostensibly Trotskyist Socialist Party (SP), whose antecedents in the Militant tendency spent decades buried in a deep entry in Labour before being expelled in the 1980s and early 1990s, is running a slate of candidates under the banner of the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC). TUSC was originally intended to be a multi-tendency left electoral alliance but today is pretty much an SP operation. It has a left-Labourite programme based on the long-held Militant/SP utopian fantasy of being able to launch the socialist reconstruction of Britain via a parliamentary enabling act.
In February the born-again anti-sectarians of the Spartacist League (SL) participated in a TUSC conference called to launch preparations for the imminent election. The SL proposed to delete the call to “reinstate full trade union rights to prison officers” from TUSC’s programme on the grounds that screws are not part of the working class. When their motion failed, instead of walking out, the SL continued to nourish hopes that they might still be given a place on the TUSC slate. Alas, their illusions were dashed when the candidate selection was announced:
“On 3 June, as the Spartacist League was getting ready to run an electoral candidate as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, the TUSC steering committee informed us that our application had been rejected. The reason? A probation officer who sits on the steering committee (and who is a Socialist Party member!) objected to our running on the TUSC list because of our opposition to prison guards being part of the trade union movement.”
– icl-fi.org, 8 June 2024
The SL should not have been too surprised by this as the SP’s cravenly reformist attitude to the state and willingness to characterise cops, screws and professional military cadres as “workers in uniform” is hardly a secret. We do, however, agree with the SL that in this election socialists should advocate voting for TUSC and WP candidates as well as:
“those independents who run in open opposition to Starmer’s Labour on a pro-working-class platform. In Islington North, we will support Jeremy Corbyn, who runs independently after being purged from Labour.”
– iclfi.org/, 8 June 2024
A central feature of this election is Starmer’s drive to further transform the Labour Party into a pliant tool for British capital. This impulse underlies the current leadership’s support for genocide in Gaza, reactionary anti-trade union legislation and NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine—policies which socialists adamantly reject. Marxists oppose voting for all Labour Party candidates and advocate votes for any candidates who are part of the left and workers’ movement and stand in clear opposition to Starmer’s Labour on these three points. Besides Corbyn, the WP and TUSC slates this would also include those running for the Revolutionary Communist Party, Socialist Equality Party and Socialist Workers Party. We call for voting for these candidates despite their various political deficiencies, which in many cases include a clear preference for a Labour victory over the Tories. Genuine socialists will never, under any circumstances, vote for bourgeois candidates—a category that includes the Liberal-Democrats as well as the Scottish Nationalist Party and the Greens—even if their positions on various issues are to the left of Labour’s.
Break with Labour! Vote TUSC, WP & other leftist candidates!
The defections and purges that have seen over a hundred councillors and tens of thousands of Labour leftists exit the party will probably shrink Starmer’s margin of victory over Rishi Sunak and his demoralised band of Tories. Voters are likely to deal the thoroughly corrupted Labour Party a few painful defeats, although it is clear that Sir Keir will be the next occupant of No. 10 Downing Street. But turbulent times lie ahead—the strikes of 2022-23 may quite possibly turn out to be the precursor of a vastly larger wave of class struggle in the near future.
A Starmer-led government has made it clear it will do the bidding of British imperialist capital. It will increase arms spending, continue privatising the NHS and attacking the organised workers’ movement while pushing ever greater numbers of working people into abject poverty. A sizeable vote for leftist candidates running in opposition to the pro-imperialist Starmer clique on election day could help promote a fertile environment for a resurgence of class-struggle politics that might well trigger a deep split between Labour’s traditional working-class base and the capitalist lackeys who lead it. Such a development could facilitate the emergence of a new, left-wing mass workers’ party.
Many of Starmer’s leftist opponents still dream of a Labour Party led by someone like Corbyn; others, including Galloway, advocate the creation of a new working-class party. Yet despite differences over organisational form, there is a widely shared commitment to Labourism–the notion that parliamentary reforms are the primary motor-force of social change, with extra-parliamentary class struggle playing only a supporting role. Revolutionaries stand with all those who engage in militant resistance to the attacks of the capitalists and their political lackeys; but we do not regard the creation of a new left-reformist Labour Party 2.0 as a necessary step.
The only answer to the endless irrationality of capitalist rule and imperialist predation lies through the construction of a mass revolutionary workers’ party anchored in the trade unions and committed to the hard road of class struggle: defying anti-trade union legislation, purging cops and screws from the unions, organising workers’ defence of demonstrations and picket lines against attacks by police and scabs. Such a party would seek to infuse the working class with revolutionary consciousness by championing full citizenship rights for all immigrants, defending abortion rights and the interests of LGBTQ+ people while organising mass working-class opposition to the rapacious criminality of British imperialism and its allies abroad. The ultimate objective of such a party would be to open the road to a socialist future by smashing the existing capitalist state, expropriating the ruling class and establishing a new state committed to promoting the interests of working people and the oppressed internationally.