Alternatives to the Current Political Order Part 6 - The British 'Left' and the Workers Party of Britain

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.

3. Delusional Utopianism - Of course, for a certain type of intellectual Leftist of the 'Red Pepper' School, the talk is of operating simultaneous within the Labour Party and outside it, mobilising the community while awaiting that eschatological moment when Labour can be socialist again. This is, of course, utopian and absurd. The actual outcome is that the 'Labour Left' will suck genuine radical protest and alternatives to the current political order dry while its Trotskyist leadership turns its social base into little more than a machine for voting in yet another centrist administration that backs NATO and Israel and continues to run the country into the ground. Worse, if this motley crew did manage to break free of the Labour brand (which is psychologically and ideologically difficult), all it would manage to do is neuter genuine working class and popular revolt into an unelectable exercise in liberal left intellectual self-pleasuring. The bulk of the British Left is, in fact, in utter disarray despite the surge of energy we have seen in the streets over Gaza. Almost entirely utopian and delusional, it is a set of wish lists that have failed to analyse 21st century capitalism adequately, has no understanding of the dynamics of technological transformation and treats the problem of imperialism as a set of wish lists for better behaviour by an essentially psychopathic system.

 

This leads us to the 'Catholic problem' - can you effect change more effectively by remaining within the Church or doing a Luther and challenging it from outside? We noted that Tory populists have a similar problem within their own Party structures. A Party that can basically (metaphorically) 'shoot' its previous rather weak but decent Leader because of his left-wing views is scarcely going to let anyone of the Left have more than a rhetorical engagement with policy and power. Those hungry for power in the context of the current political order are going to have to compromise so much that the word 'Left' can honestly no longer apply to them in any meaningful sense. Once someone 'truly' Left gets to the point of power capable of serious change, the entire weight of the ruling establishment will turn on them as they turned on Corbyn with spurious claims of anti-semitism. The bitter discovery of the Palestinian cause by the Labour Left in recent weeks is just displacement. None of it really understands that what happens in the Middle East is secondary to what happens within these islands but this aspect of the struggle is still necessary to break the moral corruption at the heart of the leading centre-left party. Palestine becomes an absolutely necessary issue to focus utopian, moral and emotional energy but it should be a first stage rocket that launches us into a decisive transformation of Britain into a country where the power structure is moral enough to stop sending arms to Israel and to support the aspirations of all subjugated peoples. The Labour Left and its weak analogues are doomed never to run the State (which is what matters) unless the total system collapses completely in which case we are in a very different ball game and one the Left rarely wins.

 

4. The Declinism Implicit in the Labour Offer - Despite it being about as inspiring as a blancmange, the Labour Party looks as if it will almost certainly be the basis for Government for perhaps a decade, assuming it survives its first term. The Tories (the centre-right faction of the ruling order) have so abysmally failed to rule effectively that the ruling order seems fairly united that Tweedledum had to be replaced with Tweedledee. The general voting public did not have much choice in the matter other than to endorse the decision. In other words, from the perspective of the 'influencers', the existing trajectory of decline on multiple fronts might be 'managed better' by Labour to preserve the interests of those with a stake in the system. No one at the centre truly believes that the decline can be halted. Starmer's recent miserabilist speech might tend to confirm that assessment. This is Venice in the eighteenth century, a polity that someone will be put out of its misery eventually (probably by implosion) if a new political force does not get a grip.

 

For those who are either 'of the faith' or are depressed enough to think there is no alternative but to catch the crumbs from the bourgeois table or who think that cultural politics (derived from the critical theory of the universities) really are more important than class and redistribution, then the strategy is simple. Stick with the Labour Party, compromise as little as possible (which means compromise a great deal) and try to steer the system towards traditional left values by stealth and persuasion - and political opportunism. This would be a dogged 'optimism of the will' strategy that is really riddled with 'pessimism of the intellect'. It may be exemplified by Momentum which seemed to have thrown poor old Jeremy under the bus in its attempt to survive as a voice within Starmer's Party and is now a mere cypher.

 

5. What is the Left and is there a Possible Alternative Party that is not the WPB? - The Left has transvalued its values to such an extent that we can no longer be sure what Left means. The centre-left faction (especially its 'Left' component) has been entirely captured by the graduate white collar middle classes and has largely abandoned the working class vote with only some exceptions in the public services. As we have noted above, the latter have even had to abandon their socialist aspirations in order to sell their syndicalist demands to the population at large and their memberships. This is why large tracts of the working class turned to populism and are now floating in disarray with no one to represent them with a healthy combination of permanent redistributive economic needs (energy subsidies were just short term bribes) and easy-going and tolerant cultural conservatism. This is potentially explosive in the longer term. It may eventually make Britain under Labour virtually ungovernable.

 

There is still a possibility, of course, that the treatment of Corbyn might result in the 'Trot' element in the Party deciding to say 'what the hell' and trying to set up an alternative Party. This presents an interesting problem for the WPB because the relationship to such an entity could be highly problematic for its own identity. Having worked closely with these guys in the 1990s, I think it safe to say that, to paraphrase Macbeth, they have waded so deep into the river of compromise that they may as well carry on and rely on the wheel of fortune to deliver some semblance of power and influence. Perhaps the vehicle to watch is Corbyn's (and colleagues') Peace and Justice Project and the association of independents uniting to try and get Short Money (which they are unlikely to get for technical reasons) but this exemplifies the problem of the Labour Left. It has descended into a liberal left aspirational package of measures that binds redistributionism with cultural politics, is urban white collar and still has no true understanding of what makes the ordinary working or lower middle class voter tick. 

 

In fact, it could be argued that it might be a disaster for the country if the Peace and Justice project did leave the confines of Labour (our centre-left faction of the ruling order) and ended up dominating the few seeds of redistributionist, working class and anti-imperialist revolt in the country. The result could be little more than a fluffy British version of American left-liberalism or progressivism run by excitable intellectuals and activists rather than a disciplined mass popular movement. This would then be the final death of the British Left except as a posturing community of bien-pensants awaiting some doomsday for the ruling order that never comes. 

 

8. The System and the WPB - Looking at the (admittedly somewhat weak) potential challenges to the system from the fragmented 'Far Left', we can see if any other than the WPB have the potential credibly to challenge the centre-left faction (Labour) in the long run without collapsing back into the dodgy American-style soft left-liberalism that keeps men like Joe Biden, Keir Starmer and Olaf Scholz in power and posturing as the world burns. That the establishment was more than a little frightened of the WPB's potential is indicated by the campaign of harassment employed against its attempts to hold a No2NATO Conference at two venues before finally getting a smaller venue. It managed the situation creatively by having three 'sittings' and only advising of the venue to attendees some 12 hours or so before. Naturally the fact that it was then packed out would not be reported by the establishment media. The conduct of the system towards the WPB indicates that this is where the system senses the threat. At this point in history, I see no alternative.

 

Narrating The Current Crisis - What Trump May Mean

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States is a fact on the ground. Even if Jill Stein somehow succeeded in overturning the result through recounts, it is to be doubted that the populist movement would accept the revision. A Hillary Clinton Presidency would be a wounded beast, facing an angry Republican Congress and probable civil strife and under vicious and continuous internet attack. The world beyond the United States, having congratulated Trump once, will be embarrassed to have to become partisan by subsequently congratulating Clinton. The deeper truth is that Trump has won even if he loses a recount. He has destabilised liberal America and mobilised populist America. That clock cannot be turned back. Nor is Trump's victory is an isolated event. A number of similar political events across the West suggest that a radical change affecting international relations is under way and that the process has not yet concluded. Let us provide a new narrative of contemporary history and see where it leads us.

We can start by saying that the neo-liberal model and its ameliorative liberal internationalist and post-Cold War international socialist variants have improved conditions for many millions outside the West but they have arguably also enriched up to half of domestic Western populations at the expense of the condition, security and identity of the other half as well as created oligarchical minorities elsewhere. Neo-liberalism and its variants have also not brought peace. On the contrary, a forward expansion of liberal values by force has destabilised many countries, leading to mass movement of peoples (which brings free movement of peoples into disrepute amongst those who have not benefited from globalisation), has created new security threats, has forced non-Western sovereign states into defensive militaristic postures and has even recreated the conditions for superpower competition and confrontation only a quarter of a century after the ending of the Cold War.

There have been benefits from quasi-socialist and liberal ameliorative strategies operating at a global level, especially in terms of the mobilisation of progressive forces outside the West and the engagement of young activists in progressive politics within it but regulatory regimes have tended to pay only lip service to democracy and to have preferred corporatist structures in which activist minorities collaborate with corporate CSR departments and government agencies to impose legal and regulatory solutions to global problems without consultation with or the political education of those in the West left behind. They also tend to treat emerging country populations as ‘subjects’ of action rather than as independent actors engaged in their own liberatory struggle.

The role of the United States has been ambiguous. The promotion of a progressive liberal agenda has often operated alongside a militaristic and expansionist agenda. This has created a class of international NGO activists ‘who mean well’ but it has also created alliances with faith-based obscurantists who feign democracy and, in turn, also created its own obscurantist and reactionary oppositionism prepared to engage in armed struggle to defend identity against what they see as cultural imperialism. National liberation has moved from the progressive Left to the reactionary Right, the United Nations has been diminished and, at its worst, the reaction to Western ideological expansionism has created cause for new threats of asymmetric warfare operated by terrorists allied with organised crime.

Globalisation, in collapsing borders, has also permitted massive capital accumulation by organised crime, free riding the increase in international trade, in facilitating illegal economic migration (often willing but sometimes enslaved), piracy, online fraud and the trade in narcotics and banned substances as well as in armaments and illicit untaxed funds. The liberal internationalist regulatory strategy has scarcely made a dent in this expansion of non-state activity which may be classed as criminal by state moralists but, in some areas, represents the developing world’s own rational exploitation of globalisation.

The negative response to this situation was originally restricted to two distinct movements. The first was the rise of a domestic Western anti-war movement which split progressive forces into those who supported liberal values expansion and those who saw it as imperialistic. The second saw the co-emergence of neo-nationalist resistance to the claims of the West. Both appeared in the wake of Western intervention in Central Asia and the Middle East. During this period, the Liberal Establishment of the West was in a strong enough position to ignore the anti-war movements and to place continued pressure on non-Western nations, not excluding attempts at regime change by stealth, often indirect through 'Foundations'. The prospect of a global hegemony for the West, based on market economics, oligarchical democracy and rights ideology, was considered real by the liberal’ hawks’. At this time, right wing national populist forces in the West were largely marginal.

In 2008, a major economic crisis transformed the situation. The capitalist system teetered briefly on the edge but proved resilient. However, its resilience was purchased at the price of a strategy of domestic austerity which continues to this day. This coincided with growing acceptance that liberal interventionism using force had been a disaster that had not achieved its ends although the full fruits of that disaster would still not be seen for some time (exemplified by the Syrian tragedy). Confidence in the elite was shaken but the solution of the voters was, at this stage, to grumble but change the captains of the fleet, not the direction of the navy.

The Coalition Government of 2010 in the UK and the Obama Administration which came to office as the recession of 2008’s effects were unfolding continued governance much as before but a series of developments shook confidence in the elite: above all, the economic crisis itself and the associated fact that, though economies were stabilised, growth did not return. The self-identifying middle classes (actually the middling and lower middle classes and upper working class) were disproportionately hit by the consequences. The rich appeared to get richer. Austerity measures were increasingly judged to be applied unfairly to keep elected officials in power by appealing to the half of the population fearful of taxation. Elected officials were increasingly seen as self-interested and even corrupt or certainly beholden to the economic interests who had caused the crash. In foreign affairs, incapable of winning wars, democratic states proved perfectly capable of war crimes and out of touch with public distaste for foreign adventurism. Since progressive governments had either presided over the conditions that led to the crash or were presiding over the failure to deal with the consequence of the crash, public discontent tended to move to the right rather than the left (although populist movements appeared of both types). This was compounded by a new factor - the pressure of mass migration as 'free movement of peoples' turned from a dream into a nightmare that liberal ideologues failed to recognise as such.

The failure of the Arab Spring and other democracy movements saw a hardening of state power across the emerging world and in the communist and former communist states. These latter states also took a more neo-nationalist stance, fully aware of the role of Western elites in attempted regime destabilisation. Noting Russia’s successful incursion into Georgia, they began the process of resisting liberal Western incursion and then turning back the tide of Western expansion, a process in which Russia took the lead with its acquisition of Crimea and its own intervention in defence of the existing order in Syria. If the liberal internationalists continued to pursue their strategy either directly or indirectly through ‘philanthropic’ foundations, these not only made little headway but created further instabilities which neo-nationalists could exploit. A huge class, an 'industry', of otherwise unemployable graduates created a special interest bloc in the West of 'activists' and 'campaigners', appealing to that part of the electorate with a deontological view of international affairs where the exclamation of a 'should' would be sufficient to demand an action that would then become an 'is' - life is rarely so simple! This was faith-based and not evidence-based politics. While the Left began to split into its liberal left and socialist components with increasingly bitter recriminations between the two over austerity, identity politics, liberal economics and foreign policy, the real beneficiary of this break down in the liberal Western paradigm was the neo-nationalist and populist Right which now began to grow rapidly within the West.

The negative populist reaction to liberal elite failure was both a Left and a Right phenomenon but it was the Right that was enabled to remain united in its opposition. Most of the establishment Left were implicated in the failures and errors of the current regime. This has been symbolised well in the last week by the unprecedented decision of an incumbent French Socialist President of France not to put himself forward as the candidate of his Party in next year's Presidential Election. Liberal elements on the Left had refused to compromise with public anger because of liberal ideology and so saw their side split into factions and their acceptability diminish except among special interest groups who had nowhere else to go (such as public sector white collar employees and NGO workers). Meanwhile the populist Right, taking overt inspiration from the effective opposition to liberal hegemony of Putin (Russia), created an alliance of the lower middle class with national trading and financial interests and discontented working class people whose economic interests had been ignored and whose culture had been disrespected by urban liberals. These latter created a network of interconnected national populist movements that claimed democracy and freedom (not without reason in some cases), seizing power quite quickly in Hungary and Poland but increasingly setting the terms of debate elsewhere and posing material threats to the established order in countries as different as the UK, France and Italy.

The first major breakthrough for populism against the elite was not on the Right but on the Left with the surprise election of a marginal figure (Jeremy Corbyn) to the Leadership of the Labour Party, Instead of accepting the result, the liberal wing of the party undertook a war of attrition against their new Leader. This halted any chance of Labour becoming the voice for British populism instead of UKIP. By the time he was established firmly as Leader (even then clearly being undermined despite that), the initiative had long since passed to UKIP and thence to the Leave Campaign for Brexit. This same opportunity was lost more recently in the US when the DNC conspired to halt the rise to power of the avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, confident that their preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton would have the confidence of the American people. This split on the Left and widespread economic discontent presents us with weak versions of Lenin’s famous three pre-conditions for revolution. All that were missing were the cadres to seize power. These were provided by ruthless well-funded populist machines, wholly dedicated to achieving power, in successively the Brexit Vote and the 2016 Presidential Election and strong enough to push aside even the mainstream media which had been arbiter of politics for the bulk of post-industrial history.

The victory of these forces is truly revolutionary for the following reasons:-

1. They have forced conservative forces to accommodate the key populist demands of the neo-nationalists – we see this in the strategic commitment of the May Government to Brexit and the degree to which previously negative conservative Republicans have offered their full support to the incoming President
2. They have given encouragement strategically and tactically to national populists elsewhere, most notably in Europe where there are real fears amongst liberals that their last major stronghold (the European Union) may fall to neo-nationalism or implode under pressure from neo-nationalism
3. They have not merely out-manoeuvred the progressive Left but have forced it into a crisis with the two factions (the socialists and the liberal) now engaged in a bitter existential struggle for dominance as the primary opposition force – a process that may take many months or even years to result in victory for one side. It is just as likely that these forces will split into separate ‘parties’, dividing the Left for a generation.
4. Moreover, they have managed to ‘detourne’ the liberal left so that it appears to be increasingly anti-democratic and irrational as well as arrogant and narcissistic, the historical attributes of the Right. This latter may be the populists’ greatest achievement in the long run.
5. They have introduced other apparently left-wing strategic policies – including variants of Keynesianism and anti-imperialism/peace – into populist discourse leaving the liberal (rather than the democratic socialist) Left as justificatory spokespeople for austerity, corporatism and even war (which in itself fuels the civil war within the Left).
6. They have adopted a paradoxical inter-nationalism in which strong nation states collaborate as they compete, concentrating on trade relations and deal-making rather than war – again, this is a ’detournement’ of traditional Left positions which have abandoned inter-nationalism and national liberation for supra-nationalism and trans-nationalism.
7. Above all, they have appealed over the heads of the Left beyond their traditional lower middle class base to the non-public sector working class (at least in the Anglo-Saxon countries), adopting their values, respecting their culture and (at least superficially) supporting their economic interests. This has split the working class from the Left in a decisive historical shift that saw a third of working class votes go for Brexit despite Labour backing for Remain and the Democrat’s white working class support dramatically hollowing out on November 8th.

The importance of the Trump phenomenon is that whoever commands the United States of America commands the general thrust of international relations policy. It is now clear that a national populist agenda is in charge of that thrust, directly or indirectly (in the event of a disputed result) for at least four and probably eight years and maybe twelve years That is sufficient time (as Reagan showed) to transform the condition of the world for good or ill. It is likely that a more moderate but allied Conservative Government will be in office in the UK for at least four years and possibly nearly a decade and that the European Union will see a major transfer of power to the national populist right in several major nations and possibly the implosion of the liberal model for the Union as a whole.

This is as strategically important as the arrival of communism and fascism in the 1920s. Even if states were not communist or fascist by the 1930s, they often adapted their politics not merely to challenge these forces but to appropriate aspects of them in order better to challenge them. National populism in a number of variants, including liberal and Left variants, are likely to become the hegemonic form of international relations discourse for at least the next decade and probably much longer This does not mean the Left does not represent a challenge to the new Right. Neither of national populism’s great victories (the US Election and Brexit) were overwhelming – the Democrats still (barely) won a majority of the popular vote and we have noted the theoretical possibility of the result being overturned by recounts. Similarly, Brexit is accepted by both major parties but the debate over whether the UK is to have a 'soft' or 'hard' Brexit permits Remainers to believe they can overturn the mandate through stealth or attrition. But the Left now has a major problem of credibility – it is associated with arrogance, incompetence, corruption and hypocrisy and, increasingly, with a rather dubious attitude to democracy.

Another problem the Left has is one of division – there are now two major competing visions for defeating neo-nationalism, the liberal and the socialist, which are fundamentally incompatible. The former will not adapt, compromise and let go of power while the latter sees the former as equally if not more problematic than the populists (who inconveniently will not go all the way to being fascists or official racists or xenophobes despite intense attempts by liberal propagandists to make these connections). Moreover, many socialists have more in common with Trump on key aspects of foreign and economic policy than they do with their own liberal ‘allies’ while many liberals are clearly highly emotional about single and identity issues that socialists see as part of the problem and not part of the solution. Given that Jill Stein only got 1% of the vote and 40% of women voted for Trump, the environmentalist and feminist commitments that lead Left thinking are also probable barriers to recapturing working class support.

To all intents and purposes, November 8th was a devastating blow to the liberal internationalist project. Funding will continue from European (at least until 2018) and from Liberal Foundation sources but US and UK Government sources are likely to dry up quite rapidly in the coming months. More to the point, the US and UK Governments are no longer going to be available to promote many liberal causes with emerging world Governments even if the British Government appears to remain committed to some important international rights-related treaties. UK Government action will be redirected at trade deals forcing European countries to follow suit. Major international agencies will have their role questioned with expectations that policy be in accordance with national populist values. The Business & Human Rights Treaty is unlikely to make progress until the current cycle is over - unless it is made more business-friendly.  The balance of power has shifted.

Corporate reactions fall into various special interest categories with many welcoming the new populism, others (with large urban liberal customer bases) nervous of boycotts and politicisation and others concerned about the collapse of the existing liberal internationalist order. One likely result is that all but the bravest corporation will start to withdraw funding from social liberal projects that might be classed as political where once they were simply classed as CSR (corporate social responsibility). Public affairs departments are reeling under the shock because they tend to be staffed by ‘urban liberals and liberal conservatives’, people who have had a stake in the preceding order and a career path that might include political office. Now, they have to consider their options as business splits into camps according to their relationship to various factions in the culture wars. However we look at it, independent funding is likely to decrease or shift into obviously charitable projects where those charities are not engaged in political lobbying. Radical capitalists like Soros and Branson are swimming against the tide. They are also not getting any younger.

Culturally, the liberal internationalists are faced with the problem that they are no longer ‘hegemonic’ within the West. Half the population rejects their hegemony. A significant part of the leadership of the 'hegemonic half' is questioning the strategy of arrogance towards the working and lower middle classes. Globalisation is in question intellectually. Liberal internationalists no longer hold all the commanding heights of power (and may not recover ground until 2020 or even 2024 or 2028) and, if they do recapture them, it will be a much weakened position - Weimar or Leon Blum's Popular Front to all intents and purposes. Their funding is about to fall except from highly politicised Foundations who are now in a confrontational relationship with the sources of power that can deliver what liberal NGOs want. Soros, for example, has openly declared war on the Trump Administration which places the Trump Administration alongside every 'regime' that Soros wants to overturn - their enemies' enemy is Trump. Every attempt to assert radical liberal values now has a countervailing, often cogent and aggressively positioned, alt-right argument. As liberal social media platforms try to cut out the alt-right, new platforms appear to serve it.

Two cultural opponents within the West are now evenly matched for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union and this has happened in under a year. As in all such struggles in the past, it will be hard for anyone to stay out of the fight and stay in public life. The old Right/Left conflict is changing into a conflict between democratic nationalism and inter-nationalism on the one side and supra-nationalism and liberal internationalism on the other. A third of the Left, mostly working class, will find itself moving into what will be positioned as the New Right and a third of the Right, mostly managerial business and white collar professionals, will find themselves moving into the Liberal Left. The former have the old media, the universities, the 'intellectuals' and the scribblers. The latter may have the most innovative parts of the new media, the public meetings, the bulk of social media sharers and the people who discuss public affairs in the pubs rather tham the wine bars. And we are only at the beginning ...

Position Reversed ... The Labour Party Is Worth Backing ...

I do not have a tribal approach to politics. Parties like all other human institutions are tools and nothing more. Is a political Party more or less likely to express my core values and implement policies that accord with those values? If so, I can give my allegiance. If not, I must look elsewhere. Solidarity in a shared common cause is not the same thing as blind loyalty or faith. 

This leads me to the unconventional position that I might prefer the solid soft 'one nation' nationalism of Theresa May to the neo-liberal internationalism of the Blairite Right or of the pre-Brexit Tory Party and Liam Fox - and the inter-nationalism and socialism of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell to either. Few would follow me on that but it is my position and that is my right.

The Radical Centre was never what it claimed - that is, the squaring of differences in the common interest. Rather, it was a coup by a professional political, bureaucratic, media-based and quasi-academic elite. The recent reaction on both Right and Left and across the West to rule by provenly incompetent 'experts', technocrats and political professionals is nothing but good if you are a true democrat (which I am) and are prepared to work for your values once functional democracy has been restored.

Back in May, I said I would quit the Party though, of course, I had paid my dues to September and was not going to give up on my vote for its Leader, albeit somewhat pessimistic that the sheer dead weight of the professional elite's war on Jeremy Corbyn would eventually break him. I was wrong on that expectation - to my surprise.

The Alienating Old Labour Party

The reasons I gave then for walking away were real enough: a lack of respect for dissent within the Labour tradition (on the European issue); a lack of respect for evidence-based debate; and the infiltration of the party by identity-based politics, especially those with a gender angle. These were all real concerns and things appeared to get worse rapidly - there was the dirty campaigning against Party Brexiters (a campaign which was humiliated in the event as an estimated third of Labour voters voted for Brexit), the filthy campaigning to denigrate and humiliate Jeremy Corbyn by the Labour Right and in the mainstream media; and the increasingly ridiculous 'war on antisemitism' which showed just how degenerate the Party had become in its snowflake identity wars.

What became clear by the beginning of this month was that the Party was riven by two competing  'matrices' (to adopt a term from a popular Hollywood sci-fi film), that is, two ways of interpreting reality neither of which was entirely true to the life experience of most people. Both represented different sets of core values and class interests but those differing core values were material and important in their difference.

On the 'old' side was a professional party apparat and political class backed by a complex claque of special interest and metropolitan media networks who laughingly asumed that their path was 'electable' when there had been nothing but slow decline since the regime of Tony Blair. They appealed to the triumph of the Labour Right politician Sadiq Khan not understanding that the numbers who actually voted for him were actually less than the numbers who voted for Brexit in London. The Tories had had a weak campaigner in Goldsmith and Khan could role out the inner city identity vote and not frighten the horses. London is not simply a mini-version of England, let alone Britain.

Yes, much valuable reform was undertaken in the Blair-Brown years in a programme of amelioration to correct the worst excesses (or rather the sclerosis) of the Thatcher-Major years but this was offset by the embedding of our local elite into a much broader international elite, wholly detached from the population at large, engaging in war-mongering for which that elite should never be forgiven and committed to a failed economics of 'enrichissez-vous' and cheap labour that had failed to deal with the infrastructual consequences of mass migration and regional decline.

The New Labour Movement

On the 'new' side was a surging movement from below, still naive about international relations (which runs itself on the principles of the jungle) but actively questioning elite power and austerity-based neo-liberal economics and, in that process, beginning to question the international economic arrangements that had led to trading agreements and those institutions like the European Union that were increasingly placing capital ahead of the people. The very viciousness of the attacks on that new movement from the Right and the attempt to use 'spin' rather than political education to counter its admitted naivetes indicated just how decadent and even cruel the Labour Right had become.

Basically, those who wished to destroy Corbynism descended to black propaganda of the worst nature and yet their leading candidate - not necessarily himself implicated in the excesses of his side - ended up by adopting much of the Corbyn-McDonnell economic programme because, well, it was popular. Cynical Blairites stood aside during the attempt at counter-revolution confident they could reverse that platform later if the anti-Corbyn candidate won. Even now, they continue to plot regardless of two clear democratic mandates within what is now the largest membership party in Europe.

The Labour Right and Soft Left existed on fear and anxiety while the new movement lived on hope - neither was entirely right or wrong in some black and white way but one had failed and was unimaginative in its solutions to the real problems of the people eight years after the crash of 2008, while the other was opening doors to new ideas and the political education of the masses. One distrusted the people - the road that led to the referendum revolution of June 23rd - and the other trusted the people. One was led by middle class people who feared the mob as they have done since time immemorial and the other was the mob transforming itself into a movement.

In mid-July after the Referendum vote we saw Remainers become Remoaners, threatening to reverse the vote of the people by all means possible in a surge of underhand anti-democratic thinking that was clearly closely associated with the organisation of the Labour Right assault on Jeremy Corbyn in method and intent. I analysed what a Left Leaver could do next in July with not a little despair. I found no one to argue against me in my harsh analysis. I laid out a trajectory for Left Leavers in four stages over some six months:

• that Corbyn might win and reaffirm national democracy so that the Labour Party could remain a vehicle for Left Leavers (which has happened); 
• that Corbyn might lose and a new Party be created that was sensible and which reaffirmed national democracy so that this might be the vehicle of Left Leavers (which was always going to be difficult and proved not to be necessary); 
• that UKIP would became sensible in its protection of national democracy so that, with no alternative, Left Leavers could cross the water to the populist right (which would be the triumph of hope over reason); or, last of all, 
• that nothing sensible was left out there to protect the workers from international neo-liberalism and the wise Left Leaver would go into private life or support Mrs May, assuming she stayed firm on national sovereignty, as, at the least, a national neo-liberal. 

Resolving The Issues

This final phase was brutally presented to Left Leavers by me as a final existential choice between being Left or being a leaver. I (though I suspect not so many others) would have put national economic sovereignty and national democracy first only because these were preconditions for effective socialism and an informed and engaged population. Socialism could not be imposed through the barrel of a Commission Directive and the Varoufakis belief that the European Union could be democratised in any reasonable political time scale was frankly ridiculous.

Nothing could be done over the summer - until the political wheel had turned another quarter. Corbyn might be defeated. He might, if he won, adopt the hard-line Remainer position (outlined pre-emptively by Tim Farron of the Liberal Democrats) simply to ensure a peace deal with the Labour Right and preserve his anti-austerity economics. Most unlikely of all, UKIP might sudddenly become humane in its attitude to foreign nationals and adopt its own version of anti-austerity but geared to Labour voters.

And, of course, Theresa May might shift her position to a Brexit position so 'lite' that we may as well have not voted on June 23rd. As I write, we are in the midst of a PR war between the City and business Remainers (no doubt backed by the civil service) on the one side and sceptic Brexit Ministers (no doubt backed by the voters who voted for Brexit) for influence on the content of May's speech at her Party Conference. Nothing is certain in this soap opera until the thin lady sings. 

Meanwhile, Momentum is not a Party within the Party as the Labour Right claim but a parallel operation challenging and potentially renewing an undemocratic Party apparat against which I and others had fought and which we had failed to reform in the mid-1990s. It is not, despite claims, like Militant because it is not sectarian or restricted to one major locality for its effect. Momentum is nationwide and is drawing in many new people to politics. I am not a member and do not intend to become a member of Momentum but I respect its role as mobiliser of political engagement for people otherwise excluded by the system. It now needs sensible 'realist' challengers rather than the sinister and pig-headedly opportunistic Progress or the atavistic Labour First. Whatever it is, it needs to be respected as better organised, more directly connected to the population and more intelligent in its methodology than any of its rivals.

Half Way Between Old and New

Perhaps what the old guard cannot forgive is that Momentum helped massively increase party membership, despite the best efforts of party officials. A mass membership is not what the Right has ever wanted. Before 1996, Blair used to talk of the million member party but it was the last thing his lot wanted. The professional political class survived very well on moribund local parties, nerd-like rulebook activists, trades union fixing and deals, parachuted-in metropolitan dogsbodies as candidates in safe seats and little or no questioning of policies (except where the unions asked for their pound of flesh on employment rights which was often conceded with great reluctance).

The question then became whether, having now been fought twice and won against people desperate to keep their gravy train going and having been traduced repeatedly, Corbyn would be so exhausted and troubled that he would compromise on key policy areas. He had already done so on Trident. Why not on national sovereignty? The Right had already undermined the Labour Party by talking it down just as the Remainers had undermined the British economy in the run-up to June 23rd.

These counter-revolutionaries may have lost and now be surplus to historical requirements but they appeared not to understand their predicament. They had played to win with utter ruthlessness, uncaring of the damage they did to the institution they claimed to support. Existentially and professionally they had serious skin in the game of controlling the Party and in the pork barrel of the European Union. It is interesting that, to satisfy the soft left of this alleged centre ground, the first post-mandate announcement was, indeed, pure pork barrel - that the EU regional funding would continue after 2020 with a new Labour Government.

No analysis, no discussion. Just a political bid to win over the professionals at the centre of a patronage network involved in disbursing large amounts of funds in the depressed regions. The Party was making blanket commitments to the regions without asking questions or offering policies that would be geared to the efficacy of the spending, instead just offering what had simply been EU-directed money without new and clear socialist strings attached. This was how the SNP and European Socialists operated not a responsible British Socialist Party. This had been money that had been largely directed to EU ends or the ends of special interests linked to EU strategy. The expenditures need some analysis before depriving the poorest classes in the richest areas to feed the middle classes in the poorest areas.

To Renew or Not To Renew - That Is The Question?

In the meantime, a request for renewal of membership to the Labour Party arrived. A year ago, it would have been renewed automatically. In May, it would have been binned. When it arrived, it was put aside to see how things fared between its arrival and the Leader's speech at Conference. September 24th had offered hope - not just an increased mandate for Corbyn but signals being sent beyond the pork barrel message. The new Movement would persist in its radical democratisation of the Party. I have some confidence in this if it can be pushed through over the heads of a sclerotic and less than competent and defensive apparat. It will be a struggle.

To some extent, such policies will be the continuation of the work that my old crew started in the mid-1990s when we created Labour Reform and then co-ordinated the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance. It would mean a rolling back of the democratic centralist Partnership in Power model and create the opportunity for ordinary members to get control of their hired hands - the elected politicians - and (I hope) policy under sound technical advice in which the trades unions should have a role. In the process, a naive movement would turn into a politically educated movement based on core socialist values able to face a renewed and revived Tory Party which, in the meantime under Prime Minister May, also has returned to some its core values and ceased to be the creature solely of the City and business (much to the latter's clear frustration). The country cannot but benefit but through an existential struggle over values conducted within the democratic process and rule of law. The Left will make mistakes and sometimes behave ridiculously but it will learn by doing and create a better world in doing so.

Similarly Momentum has started to explain itself and to challenge the 'matrix of lies' against it from special interests. I draw attention to only one item - the fight-back over accusations of antisemitism, a vicious slur as dangerous as the cruel and cynical manipulation of the death of Jo Cox by Remainers. The Jewish Chair of Momentum pointed out that the Vice Chair was Jewish as well and that Jews were active at every level in the organisation. Ironically, this might simply create new conspiracy theory on the Far Right but I think the Left can live with that and counter it on first principles. The issue remains sensitive and Momentum seems to be trying to draw back a little. It is under constant pressure to concede to the totalitarian culture of the Right Zionist lobby but, from where I sit, Jackie Walker's head-on assault on the Right is spot-on and needed to be said. Questioning the conduct of Netanyahu's Israel is not antisemitism.

So, the Labour Right is in the same position as the Remoaners - engaged in noise and fury, with access to friends in the mainstream media, with the advantage of easy access to wine bars and dinner parties in the metropolis - but they lack any power now except to be destructive. If they have not shot all their bolts, they seem determined to unload them as quickly as possible, leaving themselves unarmed before too long. Instead of engaging in rational evidence-based questioning of some of the more naive positions of their opponents, they make hysterical claims that quickly prove to be unfounded, discrediting themselves in the process. They use propaganda techniques worthy of Goebbels and they come to look aggressive in ways that fuel engagement by people like myself who were otherwise happy to leave things to others. The Labour Party apparat has proved itself problematic as well - appearing untrustworthy probably more from lack of imagination than from outright malice, stuck in the old matrix. It too needs radical reform.

The McDonnell Speech and Its Virtues

Then came John McDonnell's avowedly neo-socialist speech on Monday. First the Referendum result was accepted (no hitching the Party to the wagon of a second referendum alongside the Liberal Democrats). Second, if the European Union is to be a neo-liberal project, Labour clearly won't play ball - the preconditions for re-engagement are that neo-liberal trade deals will not be signed and sovereign nations can implement interventionist socialist economics (in other words, the Tories and UKIP have opened the door to socialism in one country until collaborating socialists can create a socialist Europe). Third, Labour now wants to work with and not against the financial services sector but on its terms - meaning no more casino economy and the finance sector's participation in the neo-socialist investment programme: if it supports that programme, Labour will support it in Europe and elsewhere (subject elsewhere to the war on tax avoidance). 

Fourth, Labour will not be inactive on the Brexit negotiations - it is going to try and drive them further to the Left, not in order to scupper them but to scupper the Tories and their austerity economics. Fifth, Labour is not going to get sucked into the migration debate (though Corbyn two days later appeared to reverse that) but it will seek protection for workers whilst fighting xenophobia (the pitch to the Polish vote was all-too-obvious here) - in other words, Labour should speak for mildly conditional free movement of labour as a sovereign British decision (an international socialist decision). Herre, we saw a definite difference of emphasis from Corbyn two days later. In other words, taken all in all, Europe is positioned as 'second order' to the struggle over economics (in good Marxist fashion). 

Overall, this was a measured pro-European but not pro-EU speech (the difference is significant). It was far more pro-people internationalist socialist position than we have ever heard before from a Labour politician, one that accepted Brexit as a necessary possibly temporary pause before a Socialist Europe of internationally co-operating nation states is to hand. I can live with that ... I just needed to hear what Jeremy Corbyn had to say before renewing my membership ...and I let Emily Thornberry's somewhat waffley contribution to BBC World at One on Monday and her unsophisticated speech at Conference pass since it merely told me that she had not yet got all her marching orders and had yet to get her feet under her table. 

The game now was clearly one of being pro-European by being challenging to the neo-liberal European Union and that is all many of us Leavers wanted in the first place. The Yanis Varoufakis strategy of change from within was never going to work without a shock to the EU's system and Brexit was part of that shock treatment. A Socialist Europe is best achieved through ensuring that a major G7 country outside the European Union can prosper as a Neo-Socialist Economy in its own right - demonstrating neo-socialism by example. The alternative was simply accepting ameliorative but ineffective restraints on neo-liberalism through a flailing European Social Democracy run by less than effective men and women in grey suits, always looking over their shoulder at Goldman Sachs, J P Morgan and the IMF.

The Corbyn Speech and Its Faults

This brings me to the excellent (from a traditional socialist point of view) speech by Jeremy Corbyn on Wednesday. He captured the very soul of a movement when that soul desperately needed to be recovered. Of course, from the point of view of a cynical realist like myself, there was a bit of magical thinking here and there and an idealism that might have a bucket of cold water thrown over it by harsh economic and political reality further down the line but the speech was a starting point, the establishment of some core principles from which Labour Party socialists could draw heart and against which they could test their inevitable compromises. 

Perhaps I felt that both John McDonnell and Andy Burnham, much more to the Right, had a greater grasp of reality and that some of the relatively new Shadow Cabinet were lost and waffling in an idealistic day dream but Corbyn's aspirations were ultimately my aspirations and that of many Britons. One and only one set of policies made me pause before committing to renew - the excessively naive and counter-productive position on migration. 

In this area, as on Trident (where I agree with him) Corbyn was essentially being a faith-based politician, much like Tony Benn at his most narcissistic.  There are aspects of socialism that regrettably mimic religion - its Methodist aspect. I don't hold to it. I have no time for religion but I recognise that a 'broad church' (an interesting cliche in this context) has to hold many people who are predisposed to believe in magic to the Party because half of our species actually do 'need to believe' in ways that Fox Mulder would understand and they are voters too.

Corbyn's statement "But we will also be pressing our own Brexit agenda including the freedom to intervene in our own industries without the obligation to liberalise or privatise our public services and building a new relationship with Europe based on cooperation and internationalism." is precisely why Brexit is important. In effect, this is the quintessential Left Brexit position since the entire European Project is built on a neo-liberal commitment not to permit this degree of economic freedom, one that is not going to change because a couple of socialist governments in London and Athens ask it to change. This restoration of national sovereignty must, of course, be implemented responsibly and it is legitimate to ask whether the huge number of interventionist and spending promises actually do stack up but this was a first motivational speech after a gruelling period of division. There are four years now to refine the policies into workability.

Where Corbyn Gets It Wrong on Migration

On the other hand, Corbyn's strategic errors on migration must be exposed. First he does not get that cultural identity is as important to English workers as it is to Palestinians. Nor is it necessarily 'fascist. As others have pointed out to me "[an] emphasis on cultural identity is founded on a solid [Left] intellectual tradition: from Raymand Williams to Gramsci, from the work of Genovese to that of Charles von Onselen, and so on". From a practical perspective, being concerned about cultural identity should not be spun as being essentially 'rightist' - after all, Labour lost Scotland for a lot of reasons but one was a failure to understand cultural identity and respond to it instead of trying to accomodate it positively as an expression of discontent and then 'detourne' it into inter-national socialism. It is ironic that the Left accepts non-locality based identities like gender, race and sexual orientation so readily and yet turns its nose up at national and historical identities.

Second, the political economics of increasing taxes on the indigenous upper working and lower middle class to fund improved services for migrant areas is political suicide. It is these people who vote in Governments. We may not find that comfortable but it is a fact on the ground. Certainly the soft liberals and NGO snowflakes won't find this comfortable but failing to understand the economic pressures on the middling sort (which includes Labour's upper working class voters) is a serious block to power unless Corbyn has some damn fine arguments for more taxation that go beyond moral exhortation. With limited funds available (no matter the borrowing claims of the Shadow Chancellor) and with lots of perfectly reasonable promises being made to a variety of special interest groups (regions, NHS, public service workers, the low paid, students, the 'hardworking families' of political discourse and so on), taxing the anxious and struggling middling sort more highly in order (it would seem) to improve the infrastructure of migrant areas becomes a gift to the populist right wing media. You may as well send them membership cards to UKIP in the post.

Third, the sheer scale of incoming migration to Europe and thence to the UK is being treated as an inconvenience rather than a truth. It may well overwhelm the kindness to strangers offered by Corbyn - and we have a precedent in the chaos folowing Merkel's humanitarian gesture in Germany. To the economic migrant, even the slums of the West offer levels of wealth that to them are worth taking immense personal risks. To go on to promising a ready-made welfare infrastructure that will exceed the highest expectations of the middle classes of Addis Ababa and Khartoum is irresponsible to say the least. And be assured, we have scarcely understood the scale of economic migration to come - the next wave is from the Horn of Africa through Egypt. The international institutions that have just offered half a billion Euros for job creation in Ethiopia understand this only too well.

Although sentimental liberals may have no problem with any of this, many natural Labour voters will. Migration has become to many people who are natural Labour voters and who are neither cruel nor stupid an issue about respect for their own needs as citizens. It is not about the other, it is about themselves. Idealists may bemoan such selfishness but it is not for them to dictate terms to the electorate. We are a democracy and the people should dictate terms to politicians. It is certainly not about hating the foreigner - which is the malign myth peddled by Remain propagandists - but about voters being under severe social and economic pressure in their own right and wanting Government to relieve that pressure directly and even personally.

Treating Voters With Contempt?

The implicit characterisation in Corbyn's speech of Left Brexiters as stupid people who voted on peddled myths and did not have minds of their own is a little insulting and clumsy. The inclusion of the phrase "the referendum campaign a campaign that peddled myths and whipped up division" was foolish. It oversimplified matters and was deeply insulting to the third of Labour voters who voted Brexit in order to pander to Labour Remainers. We noticed. It dampened our enthusiasm. The campaign was being characterised by Corbyn in terms dictated by the mainstream media (an irony here) on the basis of campaigning by just one element in the campaign - UKIP. 

Left Brexiters in no way endorsed that position and were deeply active in campaigning for Brexit on socialist grounds. This unfortunate turn of phrase will be resented especially since the mainstream Remain campaign peddled fear through exaggerating economic threats, something (to his credit) Jeremy Corbyn did not do. Fanatics engaged in lies and half truths but most sensible people on both sides fought on issues of principle in good faith and that should be recognised.

The one third of Labour voters who voted Brexit should not be treated as deluded fools unable to make up their own minds without the help of North London intellectuals ... they voted rationally and in their own interest and they should be respected. All Emily's advisers on foreign policy (according to her speech) are from Inner London North of the Thames and East of Uxbridge which is not a healthy state of affairs.. If you do not respect people, all the people, you cannot expect to win their votes and those votes will be needed in 2020. Remain had depended on middle class votes in the South interested in their pockets and those voters are unlikely to be voting for John McDonnell's socialism come the day - so Labour needs that 30%.

The need to improve infrastructures (central to Corbyn's migration policy) is certainly vital but it should be person-blind and be geared to any community who needs it, not be presented as favouring incomers or special interests or being a cause to encourage more incomers before the infrastructure has been put in place. His policy is topsy-turvy. We should be assessing what this country needs and can take (not, by the way, unilaterally 'stealing' talent from countries that need nurses and teachers even more than we do), pre-building the necessary infrastructure and then welcoming migrants to join a safe and secure welfare economy where they either have a role to play in the greater good or because space has been made for people suffering exceptional risk to life and limb. We should not be sending a signal that this small island is a land of opportunity, like America in the nineteenth century. It is not and such an attitude could place our welfare economy under intolerable strain.

The Blunder on Migration & The Decision to Renew

Although a decent speech that touched every socialist button, Corbyn also failed to recognise the logic of May's position - that positive humanitarian intervention overseas might stop migration at source by improving conditions for the poorest in their own country (which should mean not gutting their health and social services to ensure the security of our own). 

Corbyn's position on migration represented a sentimental flaw in an otherwise good speech and one that UKIP and the right-wing media will seize on and exploit at every opportunity with a corresponding silence from Leftists like me that will become deafening. Nor will we allow ourselves to be characterised as callous or un-socialist - it is we who have the interests of the poor of the emerging world and the indigenous working class (and those from overseas already in our country) at heart. It is we who have an analysis that encompasses social and political sustainability. 

On this one, he is on his own. Was this blunder on migration, almost as daft as his blunder before Brexit in kow-towing opportunistically to the Remain machine on the Labour Right and Soft Left, sufficient to disengage me from the Labour Party and start moving through that trajectory outlined by me on July 16th? No, it was not, and I can give three reasons.

Let us get one out of the way quickly. Migration is potentially existential but it is not primarily existential like the Brexit vote. The voters still have the chance to teach the naive idealists inside and outside the Party. In the end, there will be a lesson taught Labour on the ground to which Corbyn and the idealists must adjust if they want to achieve the rest of the programme outlined in the McDonnell and Corbyn speches of September 26th and 28th. Anti-austerity outside London is one helluva a lot more important than pleasing the luvvy NGOs in London if the new team wants to prove that neo-socialism can work in one country and then export the model elsewhere by example.

Pragmatism is No Vice

Secondly, no political programme is ever going to be perfect. The core values underpinning Corbyn's programme are consistent. There is a means of openly arguing for alternatives where there are disagreements. By offering to smash Blairite democratic centralism, Corbyn permits me and others to challenge him on this and other policies without seeking to overturn the general commitment to democracy or necessarily being disloyal to the total programme or to him. The policy may be wrong-headed but it can be placed before the Party before it is placed before the electorate and people like me may have the chance to argue our case in a way not possible under the dictatorial rule of Blair, Brown and Milliband. Voices are already speaking out about the foolishness of the migration position without making this a leadership issue.

Thirdly, perhaps most important of all, critics can recognise that Corbyn's position arises from a sincere moral, perhaps faith-based, position that is in perfect accord with the values of socialism and which represents an ultimate position (the borderless world) that even his critics would like to reach. Just as Left-Brexiters did not object to a truly democratic socialist united Europe but only to the feasibility of one under neo-liberalism (and so can find themselves in agreement with John McDonnell's subtle economics) so critics of Corbyn's migration politics can critique the practical naivete of his approach on pragmatic grounds without in any way impugning his integrity, decency and, frankly, moral superiority all things being equal in a perfect world. But then you do not need socialist parties in a perfect world, do you?

And so the conclusion is simple - my negative position on renewal must be reversed. The Labour Party and Labour Movement are now in decent and moral hands. Corbyn is wrong on migration and may be naive in other areas but 'his heart is in the right place' as is that of the new movement. He stands for values that desperately need reviving and are being expressed in a political movement that challenges the reactionary essentialism of UKIP and its opportunistic and cynical equivalent in Scotland (SNP), the gross and equally cynical opportunism of the Radical Centre and Liberal Democracy and the special interests of the undeniably effective but class-based Tory Party. 

Therefore, with only a little hesitation, I shall renew my membership of the Labour Party.