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Al Williams's avatar

Interesting analysis, but sad to see Scotland and Wales overlooked. What's the Workers Party GB position on Welsh and Scottish independence?

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SB's avatar

The WPB hadn’t really registered for me during the election and it’s good to broaden my knowledge and dispel a few misconceptions about the party and its platform. It’s good to see some genuinely alternative policy proposals around wealth redistribution and foreign policy.

The focus on ‘workers’ seems completely outdated and unattractive, stuck in some past as an inherently contradictory term by which people defined themselves by their role in a capitalist industrial model that they purported to disagree with. While organised labour had (and has) a role to play in addressing injustices, people no longer see themselves as workers (and it’s not clear why should they have ever accepted this grossly reductionist mischaracterisation of their individuality and agency).

Indeed one WPB policy rightly supports worker owned businesses: but the workers at such a business are no longer merely workers, they are also partners or owners.

So the name is incongruous and will need changing.

On the environment, and how we produce and consume energy and resources, the manifesto is a complete let down that is out of step with public opinion and reality, incongruous with the party’s focus on workers and with its redistributive principles (leaving very little to distinguish policy from Reform).

I always find it such a shame to see those on the intellectual left rubbishing the impact the fossil fuel-driven energy binge of the past century and more - driven as it has been by the interests of wealthy land and business owners - has had on people (and, indeed, on workers) and again, in incongruous and contradictory fashion, harks back to the apparent good old days when workers were real workers slaving away in dirty factories producing stuff for affluent people to buy that they didn’t really need and broke quickly, littering and polluting the environment they and their kids have to live in; resource-driven wars; apparently all a good thing because it earned you a steady wage!

The oil age itself is a product of capitalist exploitation (of people and resources and life on this planet in general) foisted undemocratically on an unaware public primarily to enrich the resources owners.

It’s contradictory to want a better lot for ‘workers’ but deny economic and ecological overshoot and the impact it’s having on their and their descendants’ health and well-being (whether through impacts on food production, food and energy price inflation, loss of biodiversity and migration) and it’s out of step with public opinion that sees this as a problem.

But being out of step with reality is the bigger problem.

“Climate change is constantly taking place. It has done so for thousands of years. We follow the science when it is clear but we understand just how much science can be socially constructed in a society dominated by the interests of Profit and not People”. Many people would describe this as crank populist right conspiracy theory, about an imaginary world where politicians are corrupted by climate scientists who are corrupted by research grants, but magically never by fossil fuel lobbies whose interests have dominated for too long.

Anyhow the science is clear that the pace of climate change and biodiversity loss is unprecedented in the history of human civilisation. Referencing the end of the ice age or when an asteroid ended the dinosaurs is irrelevant.

There is nothing wrong with “rational debate centred on democratically aligned outcomes” so let’s have it :-

There is nothing favourable for people (workers or otherwise) in polluting their environment, or destroying the biological heritage of their descendants.

So ensuring that the transition of our energy systems does not allow profiteering by business at the expense of the public is right.

And taking into consideration the “affordability” of measures on vulnerable groups is necessary, but the policy should be to ensure they are supported where necessary.

Eg. Rather than outright opposing ULEZ schemes “because of the costs they impose on working households and small businesses” - thereby imposing air pollution-driven health costs on much the same groups (including many ‘workers’ who don’t drive cars) - instead invest in clean public transport, or stand by your redistribution principles and assist people with the costs, rather than so dispiritingly tell them they should be proud to accept their diesel-driving neighbours (esp. those who can’t afford to tune their engines) spewing CO and particulates into the air they breath.

A truly redistributive or socialist party should address these policy shortfalls, not pit one vulnerable group (people who can’t afford a new car) against another (people who can’t afford to breath polluted air).

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