The British 'Left' and the Workers Party of Britain

One Alternative to the Current Political Order

This last week has seen news that Jeremy Corbyn attended talks about the formation of a new political party The Collective. In fact, Corbyn has not said anything about endorsing an initiative that was, in fact, announced before the election. What is really going on here is a lot of kite-flying from the liberal-left wing of the anti-Starmerite Left designed to build momentum for something that a relatively few Left activists and intellectuals want but which runs counter to the standard Trotskyite strategy of working within and not outside the Labour Party and the trades unions. It is an initiative designed to tap into the frustration of thousands of confused and desperate activists who feel defeated and who have found themselves supporting isolated independents, minor marginalised parties and the Greens.

This article is, however, not about The Collective, Corbynism or constitutionalist Trotskyism or the shattering and fragmentation of the Left activist movement (matters that we may return to later although this Substack would hope not to be drawn into the minutiae of just one part of a total political system). It is about an actually existing party of the Left that fought seats in the last General Election and garnered significant votes from a standing start - the Workers Party of Britain. There is an intense debate within that Party as we write on what its attitude should be to this latest attempt at rebuilding what, frankly, has been a failed approach to dealing with serious national problems. Should it be collaboration or resistance? There is no current statement on this from the WPB (after all, Corbyn has not, it seems, endorsed the ‘new’ initiative) and there will probably not be one until after this weekend’s ruling National Members Council if then. However, it might be useful to strip away the ‘spin’ around The Collective and look at a pre-existing alternative model for Left organisation and how it is progressing before anyone gets too excited about something that may never happen and, if it happens, may not deliver much worthwhile.

A great deal has happened on the British Left over the last year, including a General Election and riots in deprived working class areas. Back in the Autumn of 2023, I reviewed the political situation in a series of Blog pieces elsewhere that looked at all the alternatives to the existing dominant parties. The intention was (having studied the populist Right and various other independent challenges) to close with an analysis of the Left at that time but I never did this as I had promised. My researches led to a personal existential leap from analysing the world to acting in the world (which I do periodically). Instead of simply suggesting to others a solution to the problems set out in my 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 later.

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. It effectively collapsed (with one exception) in the run-up to and during the General Election.

The state of the Left as a whole (excluding the Workers Party of Britain) is too extensive a subject for this particular article but it is in disarray. The General Election expressed an already existing fragmentation as an emotional and panicked division into a number of factions and independents from within 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. The abstentions over the cutting of winter fuel allowance by 53 troubled Labour MPs are about the best we can expect - performative stuff that achieves nothing. Others already exuded by the Labour Right re-emerged as 'independents' or in abortive new pseudo-parties such as The Collective which incidentally had no material impact whatsoever on the General Election. Mostly the Left over-relied on events in Gaza with outraged activists merely speaking (outside the Muslim community) to other outraged activists. 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 has cynically adopted quasi-socialist policies to buttress what was, in fact, an anti-working class middle class environmentalist project.

Socialists and anti-imperialists were thus 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 have delivered 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 with 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 the 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) hade lacked the courage when it might have meant something to break with what was now a middle class progressive party (Labour) with more in common with the US Democrats and European 'socialists' (which are, of course, nothing of the kind) than its own history. 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) but 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 had become 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 in favour of the British working class) was drawn into the morasse of Middle East politics out of moral fervour and failed fully to connect with the working class. A lot of its natural vote ‘crossed the floor’ and backed Reform.

The word 'socialism' might be used frequently in our culture but it has become diffuse. There are small groups of truly socialist activists, of course, and the odd intellectual but most Left position-taking has since become 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 in the twenty-first century was a mish-mash of single issue positions and identity politics without coherence, utopian and based on feelings like outrage and on slogans. Even demonstrations became ritualistic affairs with minimal impact on real power - a lesson that should have been learned from the failure of the massive anti-Iraq War demonstration of 2003.

The problem for such a Left aligned with Labour 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 the 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. Again, we refer the reader to Miliband’s ‘Capitalist Democracy in Britain’ which has not been bettered for its clinical analysis of British liberal democracy which is only contingently liberal and only superficially democratic.

But what would Left mean under these conditions? No one was now seriously discussing whether there was any common ground left between the working and lower middle class on the one hand and cultural progressives and rainbow theoreticians on the other? The loyalists (to Labour) had always tended to triumph even if many of their followers quickly drifted into voting Green (given that the Greens were mouthing their new set of 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 fruit of all this is a Left divided between impotent Parliamentarians, impotent Corbynista activists, exiles in the Green Movement or the minor nationalist parties and impotent independents.

The General Election eventually 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 by some rather dark forces 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. This latter was very obviously either sticking with Labour as an alternative to the bankrupt Tories or shifting into Reform territory and national populism. But at least the WPB proved itself not to be impotent as we shall see.

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, a decline 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 then 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 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. Events in the last few weeks indicate just how out of control the regimes of the West have become with material threats to our safety in the advocacy for long range missile attacks on Russian territory and the conspiracy of silence over the terroristic use of technology in civilian areas by an ally.

Having reviewed the situation in the light of my original concerns and studied all the alternative potential left-wing offers (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 last Autumn as a result of my critique, in particular, 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 working class social conservatives which I shall argue through 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. 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 can 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.

The late Bernard Crick was realistic in drawing attention to the importance on the British Left of a tradition exemplified, rather eclectically, by a fusion of Robert Owen’s co-operativism, the cultural vision of William Morris, Methodist ‘conscience’, Chartist democracy and a more humanist Marxism - to which I would add the curious literary Leftism that ran from Shelley to the late Michael Foot and which was libertarian, ‘fraternal’, egalitarian and fundamentally ‘ethical’. It is this ‘ethic’ that helped drive so much of the outrage at the extreme behaviours of the Israeli Right in Gaza. It was simply just ‘wrong’. 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. This is one area where its concerns match those of the legitimate democratic populist Right.

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 deaths of Palestinians well in excess of 37,000 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. 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. 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. People 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. 

For the avoidance of doubt, this is a personal commentary on the current political situation as will be all future Substack articles. It should not be construed as an official communication from the Workers Party of Britain.