After a decade of highs and lows, the British left has entered into a period of realignment. We have for some time been confident of the potency of our ideas: a socialism broadly underpinned by working-class economic power, social liberation, anti-imperialism, and environmental justice. But we’ve long faced a challenge in expressing this politics organizationally. More recently, socialists have come close to a consensus that we need a mass party to provide the unity, direction, and endurance we have desperately lacked.
This is obvious from the focus of debate among comrades from a range of traditions at events like The World Transformed or in left publications. The convergence on the need for a party of our own is a far cry from both the horizontalism that predominated before 2015 and the subsequent participation in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. However, this has not yet translated into agreement on the correct vehicle. Socialists remain divided between three main party-political projects — the Labour left, the Greens, and Your Party — if they have been inspired by any at all.
The socialists remaining in the Labour Party follow what critics call a “wait and hope” strategy. Even the Socialist Campaign Group (SCG), which gathers a couple dozen relatively left-wing MPs, has split, with its less radical members gravitating towards the Labour soft-left’s new formation, “Mainstream.” After years in which leader Keir Starmer has purged socialists, they put their faith in Andy Burnham — mayor of Greater Manchester, previously minister in the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments, and twice-failed Labour leadership candidate — gloriously returning to Westminster and challenging the prime minister from the left.
Burnham-mania only underlines the exhaustion of the Labour Party as a vehicle for socialist politics. He recently put himself forward to stand in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, in a bid to return to…
Auteur: Chris Saltmarsh
