This is going to be a long posting but I make no apologies for that. There will also be an Appendix Posting following this which will cover the wider range of left-wing challengers to the system as they existed a year ago. In general, the last year showed us that these were to be largely irrelevant to electoral politics in the following months. Once this is done, the series will end and Position Reserved will go back into abeyance to be replaced by a new Substack which is available at https://timpendry.substack.com
It is over a year since I promised the final analytical piece in the series on 'alternatives to the current political order' within the United Kingdom. A great deal has happened since then, including a General Election and riots in deprived working class areas. Perhaps three people will read this but it stands on the record as an account of the period from one perspective. The essence of what follows is that I reviewed the political situation in the Autumn of 2023 and made a personal existential leap from analysing the world from outside to acting in the world (which I do periodically). Instead of simply suggesting to others a solution to the problems set in the initial posting in the series back in May 2023 and then waiting for comment before doing anything useful, I leapt into the political fray ... of which more in a moment.
But let us step back a year and see where we were then, what happened and where we are now. The big question then was whether the Labour Party was moving towards a split (which I had doubted) because of discontent (on multiple fronts) with Starmer's right-wing leadership or whether the bulk of the 'Corbynista' Left, having found at least a temporary cause for unification over the issue of Palestine, would simply do what we would expect it to do and find an excuse to roll in with the Party regardless at the next General Election. We were half right in the latter respect but not because there was any will to change amongst the Corbynistas but because the Labour Right was confident enough to stamp it and its pretensions firmly into the ground. The Left was already fragmenting by the Autumn and it effectively collapsed (with one exception) in the run-up to and during the General Election.
The state of the Left (excluding the Workers Party of Britain) will be briefly covered further in the Appendix Posting but the General Election saw this fragmentation expressed as an emotional and panicked division into a number of factions and independents of the dominant liberal-left opposition to neo-liberalism and so to 'Starmerism' in the Labour Party . Those with a stake in Labour hung on in the vain hope of post-election influence. Others already exuded by the Labour Right re-emerged as 'independents' (or in abortive new pseudo-parties such as the now-forgotten The Collective), mostly over-relying on left-wing outrage at events in Gaza. We have to be honest here and say that the bulk of the British working class were not going to put emotion and moral compass ahead of the cost of living and frustration with the inept and bankrupt Tories. Others fled to the Greens which had cynically adopted quasi-socialist policies to buttress what was, in fact, an anti-working class middle class environmentalist project.
Socialists and anti-imperialists were in disarray as the labour movement, even its most radical elements in the transport and public sectors, stuck with Starmer because he promised to deliver non-socialist but workerist benefits ... and, to be fair, Starmer appears to be delivering on those promises with significant pay rises. These seem to be paid for in part by anti-socialist cuts to benefits for the struggling non-unionised population and by more general austerity. The unions can also reasonably expect delivery of improved regulatory workers rights. The unpalatable conclusion for the Left is that organised labour has been incorporated into the progressive movement (along American lines) in return for moderating its demands away from socialism and foreign policy and in the direction of member rights and benefits. The working class is thus being split into its organised and non-organised elements with the very vulnerable and those on the margins of society being thrown to the wolves.
The collapse of the original Labour Representation Committee understanding between organised labour and socialist activism was always probable once the Labour Party had been captured by the political Right. The story of this is fascinating but for another time. Suffice it to say that the fault lay not with trades unions who, after all, exist to protect the interests of their members but with socialist activists who theorised socialism and detached themselves from the working population both organised and unorganised. The narcissism of the bulk of the post-68 British Left with its graduate white collar base is at the root of the gifting of the labour movement to a centrism that cannot even be called social democratic, far now to the right of politicians like David Owen.
On the other hand, having chosen the route of rainbow urban 'socialism', Corbyn and his unstable 'faction' (for that is what it had become) lacked the courage to break with what was now a middle class progressive party with more in common with the US Democrats and European 'socialists' (which are, of course, nothing of the kind). The bulk of the Left went into the elections as a shattered group of activists fighting over the same territory, putting up competing candidates and drawing Labour votes away from London where it did not matter. Both the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats (with the connivance of Labour) brilliantly gamed the First Past the Post system to gain a massive majority for a Starmer Government on a fifth of the possible vote and a third of the actual vote. In short, the Labour Government was constitutionally legitimate with full access to the State's monopoly of force (subsequently deployed ruthlessly and sometimes unjustly against the street working class Right) and democratically illegitimate ... indeed, the logic of the situation with at least two thirds of the nation resentful of the result is that the United Kingdom can barely be called a democracy except rhetorically but then Ralph Miliband had described this state of affairs in his brilliant 'Capitalist Democracy in Britain' as far back as 1982.
Thanks in large part to what might be objectively seen as the narcissism and ineptitude of what passes for the bulk of the Left in Britain with its peculiar obsessions with cultural matters and single issue campaigns, the strongest constitutional opposition to the new Government could come from only similar liberal-left creatures of the system (the Liberal Democrats and Greens) or the populist lower middle class Right which was successfully reaching out to resentful working class voters through Reform. A clinical view of the situation would probably say that a majority of the nation was still 'liberal' in some form or another with a third of the nation (probably much more in England) drawn to national populism.
The Left thus barely existed as a viable political force (with one notable exception which we will come to) because what passed for the Left was far less concerned with the condition of the working (and lower middle) class and far more concerned with the plight of faraway peoples and cultural issues - in other words, the British Left had become little more than what nineteenth century observers would have called 'radical'. Even the WPB (which as we shall see, does have a strategic rather than tactical orientation) was drawn into the morasse of Middle East politics out of moral fervour and failed fully to connect with the working class.
The word 'socialism' might be used frequently in our culture but it has become diffuse. There were small groups of activists, of course, and the odd intellectual but most Left position-taking was radical-liberal or progressive along American lines with 'socialism' being adopted not with any sense of ideological coherence but as either an almost traditionalist attempt to appropriate dying old Labour rituals and rhetoric or to challenge the Labour Right with a naughty word. Instead of a systematic critique of power and control along the lines of Tony Benn or even Karl Marx, what we were seeing was a mish-mash of single issue positions and identity politics without coherence, utopian and based on feelings like outrage and slogans. Yes, this approach might mobilise movements like transcendentalism, spiritualism and Corbynism but such movements tend to rise and fall to the excitement of journalists, changing the culture but not the structures of power.
The problem for such a Left was not merely that it was 'persecuted' (which it was) by the right wing Labour machinery within the Party that it had dominated only a few years before but that it was weakened by its own 'internal contradictions' of which one of the most important were differences of opinion over whether (as most Trotskyist-inspired activists but also romantics and utopians believed) socialism could be effected through 'one more heave' at some indeterminate period in the future within the existing structure or whether the attempt to do so would be futile and efforts should start immediately to build an alternative Left Party.
But what would Left mean? No one was seriously discussing whether there was any common ground between the working and lower middle class on the one hand and cultural progressives and rainbow theoreticians on the other? The loyalists tended to triumph even if many of their followers quickly drifted into voting Green (given that the Greens were mouthing left wing platitudes and policies) or into an indiscriminate backing for independents who mostly seemed to be more energised by events in the Middle East than in their own country. This was very rational for inner city Muslim activists but a poor strategy for engaging 'white' working class voters elsewhere.
The General Election proved the utter absurdity of the ideal of capturing the Labour Party for the Left. Although Jeremy Corbyn was returned as a rather weak and tired independent, the four other 'Left' independents were actually representatives of the South Asian Muslim interest - nothing wrong with that but it should not be considered wholly relevant to the creation of a national Left inclusive of all communities. The only serious (in ideological terms) socialist challenger to the system was the Workers Party of Britain (of which more later) but even it found itself over-relying on the mobilisation of the Muslim vote, found its strongest Leadership candidate (George Galloway) systematically attacked in order to ensure that he lost his seat and, in effect, failing to reach (due to lack of resources) the broader working class community which was very obviously either sticking with Labour as an alternative to the bankrupt Tories or shifting into Reform territory and national populism.
Another internal contradiction lies in the 'forgetting' of the whole period in which socialism and the labour movement had placed liberals and radicals as secondary to a mass movement that could claim at least half of the population as active supporters. This was the Labour Party that grew from the beginning of the twentieth century into Attlee's successful socialist experiment in the late 1940s based on war economics and, although it went into slow decline after that, was destroyed by the arrival of progressive liberalism under Kinnock, then Blair and now finalised in its most authoritarian and 'progresssive' form under Starmer. The response of the bulk of the Left seems to have been to accept its defeat on socio-economic issues to all intents and purposes, abandon redistributionist strategies and shift into a concern with revisionist Marxist cultural politics along radicalised American progressive lines.
Livingstone had introduced the political strategy of the rainbow coalition in London in the 1980s. What was a successful strategy in one of the world's most prosperous and multicultural global cities had subsequently transmuted into a national dysfunctional identity politics that became alienating to many working people and which had developed its own authoritarian tendencies. These tendencies eventually started to threaten traditional 'English liberties' (which had always had their place in British socialism). By the time we reach the current situation, the bulk of the Left had represented little more than a performative radicalism which it was easy for centrists (including many Tories) to appropriate in a weak form in order to deflect the population from more serious issues surrounding distributional economics, loss of freedoms and both the creation of the security State and of a more refined version of the 'imperial West' with its huge and costly military-industrial complex.
In this context, although small in the Autumn of 2023, the Workers Party of Britain [WPB] was different. It dealt with many of these issues even if at times imperfectly. First of all, it defied the progressive prioritisation of cultural politics and attacked identity politics in favour of an inclusive revival of class politics. Second, its policy platform which was developed throughout the Autumn in anticipation of a General Election, restored the primacy of redistributional economics and state planning (explicitly as socialism) and put forward a cogent anti-imperialist critique that was linked to the existential survival of the British people in the hands of an increasingly unstable ruling regime that seemed not to know what it was doing.
Having reviewed the situation in the light of my original concerns and studied all the alternative potential left-wing offers (and given that I recognised that, in some respects, the populist Right were not always wrong in their critique of the total system), I found myself joining the WPB through my critique of what NATO had become and the risks it posed to the lives and livelihoods of the British people. Since then, I have seen that the post-Cold War imperial structures emanating from Washington (in which London is often 'more royalist than the King') also threaten our fundamental freedoms to expression and to access to information. It is as someone essentially libertarian that I find myself in support of this particular collectivist Party. And, ironically, it is as a libertarian that I find myself supporting a Party that makes a safe home for social conservatives which I shall argue out on another occasion.
I had had some past dealings with George Galloway on political matters but most of my interaction was with the General Secretary and his group of largely Birmingham-based authentically working class Party Officers who soon impressed me with their coherence and intelligence. They welcomed my involvement. At the 2023 Party Congress I was elected by the members with their support to the ruling body of the Party, the National Members Council. Soon after, the NMC asked me to provide an independent draft of the Party Manifesto which was inclusive of Congress and NMC decisions, was in line with the Party's Ten Point Programme and which could be used as the basis for future campaigning. It was an exercise in political education designed to create greater coherence within the Party under conditions where the bulk of the Left seemed to be reliant on ad hoc statements and sentiments. It was also designed not to be a traditional 'package of measures' where possible but rather a general statement of principles which led inexorably to certain policies that were socialist and anti-imperialist and, above all, directed at the interests of the working classes. It was irrelevant if, on occasions, I might have personally demurred at this or that position because it was not an exercise in intellectual egoism but a genuine attempt to create a twenty-first century variant of socialism for British conditions.
The document was collectively amended in places and approved and later followed up with a Manifesto specific to Education co-developed with a colleague NMC Member. Once this was done, strategic policy discussion ended at least until the next Congress in 2025. However, once the General Election was called, we found an issue emerging that, while the WPB emphasised socio-economic issues, the bulk of the Left was still caught up in cultural priorities and so we set up an election unit based on Telegram (which is why we are disturbed at the real motivation for the arrest of Durov in Paris) that developed positions on these issues as they arose in real time in the political market place. These were then endorsed or sometimes amended at NMC level after the fact which gave us considerable flexibility in supporting our candidates. The speed of operation and the abandonment of committee decision-making followed the successful methodology of the Grassroots Alliance inside the Labour Party in the mid-1990s.
George Galloway was, of course, briefly MP for Rochdale prior to the General Election (although he lost the seat after a good fight in considerable part because of aggressive black propaganda from other ostensibly left wing organisations) so the success not of the policy but of the effective campaigning and organisation is not in doubt. We have to remind the reader that the WPB in September 2023 was very small with its Congress filling half a large room in Birmingham at its Congress. Partly due to Gaza but not only Gaza, membership rose rapidly. There was a new influx of highly professional political campaigners based in London so that, if the General Election had been called as expected this Autumn, the WPB would have had a cadre of candidates who had been fully vetted, improved organisational structures and raised funds for effective campaigning.
The unexpectedly sudden General Election caught the WPB not so much unawares but prematurely in mid-organisation. It needs understanding that it has no serious source of funding other than member contributions - no corporate sponsors, no union funds, no public money and certainly no foreign funds (which would be refused). It relies entirely on volunteer forces. It would also be untrue to say that campaigning went smoothly - there were errors that affected effectiveness although treated now as 'learning by doing' without a culture of blame. Nevertheless, in less than six months, the WPB acquired over 210,000 national votes (well ahead of target), developed sufficient presence in around ten seats (reaching 29.3% of the vote in Birmigham Yardley) where it can be regarded as a serious challenger to the incumbent and became regarded as the sixth largest party in England by the BBC. All this happened with an effective 'freeze out' by the national media. No left-wing rival (unless you count the Greens as a spurious alternative) achieved so much.
Looking at the situation in the early autumn of 2024, we can say that, while it is possible for liberal-left and progressive forces to coalesce in haphazard ways between the Greens, the Labour Left and the 'Corbynistas' and perhaps elements in the petty nationalist parties, much to the frustration of some Leftist intellectuals, the WPB has become the first and only serious socialist and anti-imperialist challenger to the prevailing order, extremely careful to oppose all forms of revolutionary or street violence and willing to work with anyone who can deliver what it is promising to the working class. It defines this class (much to the frustration of some socialist theoreticians stuck in old nineteenth century categories) in extremely broad terms to include the aspirational small business owner often neglected by theoreticians. It does, nevertheless, have issues to resolve. It is best to be honest about these. One of the remarkable things about this Party is its openness to frank debate.
The first is the illusion that it is just George Galloway's Party as Reform is seen as the creature of Nigel Farage. This is incorrect. George is Leader by election and is Leader because he has the full confidence of the membership, His experience of the actuality of politics in and outside Parliament is invaluable. In NMC Meetings his advice is wise but also open to question and he adjusts his views in response to debate as the NMC adjusts its views to his experience of organisation and campaigning. Every Party is best served by having a degree of charismatic leadership and committee men and women and intellectuals generally cannot deliver that. He is a remarkable politician.
The second is that although the core of the Party is totally committed to the socialist and anti-imperialist vision that is centred on actual working class interests, as it grows new members arrive still imbued with more middle class cultural and single issue concerns. The next stage is one of mutual respect and an engagement with political education strategies to ensure that the ideological underpinnings of the Party may present a coherent framework for political action but also will permit a decent compromise on some of those progressive concerns which are humane and well within the ability of the Party to accommodate. The political reality is that any socialist or anti-imperialist project must willingly and even joyfully accept that British working and lower middle class cultures tend always to traditional liberalism in terms of community and personal interaction. This process of disciplined accommodation has started already with the extensive pages of working policy positions derived from exchanges with the Left and others during the General Election. These notes created a range of humane and compassionate positions on gender and lifestyle issues that will be shared (subject to further review) in future campaigning.
The third is lack of resources and the need to build organisation in anticipation of not only by-elections and the next general election but also council elections. Although I have had some experience of organisation (I ran the South East region for three weeks during the election to fill a gap and ran the afore-mentioned Grassroots Alliance in a similar collegial way back in the 1990s) this is not my territory. It is widely agreed that refining policy and worrying about presentation is less important now than attracting members, activists, good quality candidates, organisation, building war chests for specific campaigns and political education.
The fourth is that the WPB is a radical Party with policies completely antithetical to the position of the current regime. This should not be a concern in a truly free country especially as the WPB is specific in its opposition to extra-parliamentary, revolutionary or violent methods. It is, however, committed to free expression. It is now becoming ever more clear that a State that feels under existential threat and is only dubiously democratically legitimate is prepared to undertake increasingly authoritarian and unjust measures in order to deter dissent and is doing so in clear co-ordination with other States in the context of the threat of war. The arrest in Paris of Durov but also house searches in the US, extraditions, arrests of journalists at the border, draconian sentencing, sustained lawfare and attempts to censor or close social platforms are all signs of a panicking system attempting to frighten its own populations into compliance. The British State has accrued to itself alarming emergency powers. The WPB has to ensure that the State's efforts do not frighten off supporters and activists and can be lawfully resisted.
Another issue arises from a Leftist criticism that fails to understand the actual structure of the Party. There is no doubt that the WPB saw an influx of Muslim members because of widespread outrage at the British Government's support for the violent and disproportionate reaction of a neo-nationalist right-wing regime in Tel Aviv leading to some 40,000 deaths of Palestinians at the time of writing. The story is that we have become RESPECT 2.0 (RESPECT being a defunct quasi-Trotskyist Party in alliance with Muslim interests) when nothing could be further from the truth. The WPB welcomes every Muslim (or indeed any other ethnic community member including members of the Jewish community) on the basis that they are workers and not part of a particular identity. The claim that this means petit-bourgeois small business elements in a workers party is meaningless because social conditions under neo-liberal globalisation mean that such elements have become working class. The WPB would like more small business supporters from all communities. The non-Muslim support for the people of Palestine was as strongly held as that of many Muslims and Jews with the same view are also welcome.
Nor does Muslim membership mean excessive social conservatism. There has been another profound misunderstanding here. The WPB's position supports private choices that harm no other and this means respect for all religions and none. The general rule is that there is no party line on such views. I am free to express my libertarian views as much as George Galloway is free to express his more socially conservative views. The WPB's members include Marxists, Catholics, Muslims, Social Libertarians and many other culturally very different people. Its concerns are primarily not with cultural struggle but with socio-economic struggle which is why it is so unnerving to the current regime. It unifies because it is centred on respect for private and family life and opposes the totalitarian attempt to impose the values of progressives on populations in a way that only breeds division and resentment. LGBTQ+ activists appear not to like the Party because of their interpretation of some of Galloway's socially conservative views but this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the Party and the first line of the Party's LGBTQ+ policy states clearly that "The Workers Party stands firmly on the principle that all workers are equal, regardless of their identity."
The mistake people are making is to assume that when a WPB Member expresses a personal opinion on a cultural issue, they are expressing a political opinion or the opinion of the Party. They are not. They are so used to voting for individuals on their personality and not on their policies that politics under progressivism has become degraded into a celebrity show like 'Love Island'. Just as some people cannot understand the difference between fantasy and reality, we have been entrained to fail to see the difference between a person and a policy. It will take time for a culture on the Left based on everyone trooping into line on identity issues to return to a consideration of socio-economic oppressions and inequities and to understand that politics does not require forcing everyone to adopt a particular world view beyond the one outlined in the WPB's Ten Point Programme. The WPB simply wants the public sphere to retreat from the promotion of cultural politics in favour of effecting more material change.
None of these issues are truly problematic for the WPB because they are all recognised as issues. There is ample time to resolve them though external communications and internal political education. In my case, much of my job is done. It is a workers party for workers and run by workers and, while 'intellectuals' have a role to play, that role should be secondary to learning through doing as organisers and campaigners. What the WPB needs now (apart from more financial resources) is members, activists and good quality candidates and, allowing for the usual down time you have after an election, I feel reasonably confident that these will appear.
NOTES
1. The Flaws in Historic Corbynista Strategy - The reasoning of the Corbynista Left had appeared to centre on its ability to pressure Starmer in Government from the Left through revolts and threats of revolt in association with some trades unions. In fact, the most likely outcome would have been 'plus ca change' with thousands of party activists gritting their teeth and becoming neutered as grunt support for a positively anti-socialist liberal-left regime. The probable failure to create a new Left Unity Party (or equivalent) is thus down to theory and practicalities. The Trotskyite-trained leadership of the Left have always been obsessed with allying with the 'social force' of official trades unionism but this is never going to break with its Party so long as organised labour gets the easy wins on employment rights and, more recently, pay - at least not until socialists can persuade union members to engage in more effective pressure on union bureaucracies. Starmer has simply taken the bull by the horns and integrated organised labour into his project in a way that Blair refused to do.The bankruptcy of the Corbynista strategy should be clear to even the most loyal Labour Leftist given the sheer scale of Starmer's majority and the fact that it could be in place for the next half decade.
2. The Seduction of Labour and the Absurdity of Centrism -The Labour Party may be a decaying asset (insofar as it can get only a third of the vote and its membership is completely hollowed out) but it is still an asset and a brand. The costs and risks of setting up an entirely new Party with the risk of being blamed for the cardinal sin of letting the real Tories in - or even the Populist Right into office - were always far too great for the Labour Left to accept. For the Labour Left even the soft right-wing faux-Labourism of Starmer, almost indistinguishable from the 'wet' wing of the Conservative Party or the Liberal Democrats, is always going to be preferable to anything further to the Right. Starmer, in other words, has the Labour Left over a barrel - back me, he says, or get worse. The question now is, honestly, is it worse?! All the Labour Left can hope for on these terms is influence rather than power and certainly no independent prospect of getting more than the bone tossed to a dog of minor ministerial positions and a bit of liberal-left flummery added to Government legislation ... at least so long as it does not frighten the horses of Atlanticism or the markets.
The WPB mission, of course, is to break this state of affairs (which means no less than the continuation of a sclerotic dysfunctional political system in hock to a decaying imperium far across the Atlantic Ocean) and find an alternative to the current political order. Labour's problem is not a unique one within this collapsing structure. The Tory Party has its own issue with its Right potentially being merged into a populist conservative revolt from outside the Party just as Labour has this issue with its 'Corbynista' (essentially urban activist Left) wing. In both cases, this could 'go either way or neither way', that is, the dissidents would simply fold into their centrist leadership's demands because they have neither the courage nor the vision to consider a dynamic alternative (which we think likely on the Left but less so on the Right) or they could separate out to create new entities that attract those outside their parties in order to look for a radical alternative.
But (indulge the fantasy of revolt) just how radical would these options be? While Reform had radical potential, it might have become merely John the Baptist for a future resurgence of the Johnsonite Tory Right. This would represent no serious change to the current political order at all. In fact, the General Election might imply the opposite, a flood of Tory right wingers entering Reform in order to turn it into Tory Party 2.0 just as the WPB might theoretically be threatened by a flood of progressives and left-liberals eager on turning it into what they wanted out of the Labour Party. Either way, the reality would be that all the pre-Brexit radicalism of right wing populism would have collapsed into the worst sort of Tory troglodytism and all that potential for socialism would have collapsed into another wet set of progressive compromises trying to manage national decline with no fundamental change to a country collapsing under its own historical weight.
