No-one can say that the signs weren’t there for all to see. In his first act as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn directed council Labour groups not to set needs-based budgets (and, by implication, to impose Tory cuts). He conceded to Trident. The long-fought for left demand to democratise the union block vote was quietly dropped. Corbyn also abandoned mandatory reselection of MPs on the eve of conference, when it looked certain to be agreed. He gave in to the PLP zealots demanding a second referendum. He handed over Momentum to the Zionist Jon Lansman and presided over the witch-hunt.
Corbyn never mobilised the membership in struggles outside the party, yet consistently undermined democracy and accountability within it, reducing members to door-knocking election fodder. Under Corbyn the party remained a safe haven for the war criminals who’d led us into the Iraq war. From the outset, Corbyn’s priority was to manage the expectations of his victory, defending the broad church at all costs and preferring to leverage Unite leader Len McCluskey’s left bureaucracy rather than the half a million members who’d voted him in. Every capitulation further undermined any confidence the working class might have had in his leadership. No wonder that so many voters didn’t trust him to deliver on the 2019 manifesto.
It should have been no surprise that the same playbook unfolded in Your Party (YP). Neither Corbyn nor Zarah Sultana had the track record nor showed any inclination to build a mass left workers’ party. 800,000 registered an interest in YP, without doubt reflecting the sustained and unprecedented anti-genocide mobilisation. If Corbyn and Sultana’s priority had been to turn that astonishing response into a fighting force, it would have been easy to resolve factional differences through transparency and democracy, publicly available minutes and genuine accountability to members. Instead, they both bypassed our movement’s democratic tradition of decision-making branch meetings and delegate-based conferences in favour of XR-style talking shops and sortition – clearly a manoeuvre to avoid accountability to the membership.
The real question is not “should we stay or should we go?” but rather, how did the left fail so miserably to challenge this treachery? Why didn’t we intervene forcefully around simple and clear democratic demands – for branches, for access to our data and our funds and for a delegate-based body to draft the constitution and the political strategy?
Whilst the socialist left talked about the need for democratic branches, we collectively missed the opportunities presented by regional assemblies and conference to call time on the whole stage-managed fiasco, blocking and disrupting where necessary. By the time we got to conference, Corbyn and Sultana had somehow waylaid some 700,000 potential members.
Only one intervention in conference would make sense – a forceful expression of ‘no confidence’ in the entire leadership team that got us there. Instead, we lent the process credibility through our participation and got bogged down in a poisonous and febrile war over supposed ‘transphobia’. Meanwhile, the significance of former general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union Mark Serwotka’s decision to join YP was entirely ignored, along with his articulation of how to build a fighting workers’ party.
A left without a compass
Bizarrely, the intervention of the organised left in YP started and ended with their anointment of Sultana as their champion against Corbyn and their decision to act as her bag carriers at conference. This was despite zero evidence of any class consciousness on Sultana’s part beyond her social media sound bites, let alone of any ability to organise and fight. Her only strategy at conference was to stage a publicity stunt for the mainstream media, leaving Corbyn with a blank cheque in the months that followed. This was a clueless left that reached out to the weaponisation of transphobia as a substitute for class consciousness. In the process, they tossed aside the glimmer of hope posed by Serwotka, someone who patently knows how to speak to, motivate and organise working class people – and who has led and won national strikes.
We have a problem on the British left and YP is but its latest manifestation. On the one hand, we have the Labourists with their exclusive fetish for parliamentary democracy, served by bureaucrats who spend their entire political careers controlling and dissipating class struggle. On the other hand, we have the left sectarians who have little or no relationship to the organised working class and who talk left but build nothing. Neither camp seem to understand that the levers of power do not reside in Downing Street – they need only ask Liz Truss about that!
In the gulf between them sit the working class, mis-led, abandoned and increasingly turning to the far right. We need a strategy to build a left workers’ party, starting with an understanding of how imperialism sits at the very core of our ruling class and of how their failure to continue the extraction of past profits from the global south has closed down the space for social democracy in Britain whilst driving ever more catastrophic wars abroad. The strategy has to build combative forces in the trade unions, electoral campaigns talking directly to the working class and mobilisations on the streets against austerity and war, linking them all through a democratic political party. The Workers’ Party of Belgium is no bad place to look for inspiration. At no point was YP positioned to fill this need.
“Should we stay or should we go?” or rather, what’s to be done on the British left and how can we build a left workers’ party? The class struggle will continue, but the real question is whether we’re able to give it political expression and representation and avoid wasting any future Serwotka-like opportunities. This has to be addressed collectively, whether we’re in or out of Your Party. What matters is that we’re all working towards the same vision.
