On 7 June the People’s Assembly Against Austerity held a lively protest march through central London. There were dozens of trade union banners and placards. The march reflected the national concern over the impending cuts in welfare and public service spending and was nationally reported, which is rare for left-wing events.
Gaza aside, where have the left gone?
It was joined by marchers from the Stop the War pro-Palestine movement, with their slogan Welfare not Warfare, and followed a route regularly taken by the monthly Palestine marches. In all there were some five to six thousand people.
But those Palestine demos, though heavily condemned as “hate marches” by government and opposition leaders, can attract 20 times those numbers. They display few union banners because union leaders discourage or even forbid participation for fear of upsetting the government, of whom they are still harbouring vain hopes, and for fear of being slated as antisemitic. These six-figure Gaza marches are never reported now, since national media were only ever interested in marchers being arrested on bogus ‘terrorism’ charges, which few if any are: they are invariably peaceful events.
The point of this imbalance is not so much that hundreds of thousands are prepared to defy mainstream attitudes and publicly oppose Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza – millions stand for that cause – as that so few will turn out for the left. It is a shock to the political system that progressive or socialist opposition to Britain’s centre-right parties has practically disappeared.
Culling the left wing to make a government for bankers
Up to the 1980s governments worked in line with Keynesian economic principles, with public investment directing economic growth and social policy, in a system known as social democracy. Those politics have gone. All the main parties now follow classical liberal economics with the market in command.
When Keir Starmer won the Labour leadership in 2020 he was determined to achieve one task above all others – even on his own admission above winning the next election – and that was to rid the party of its left-wingers. The imperative was to assure city financiers, big business and national media that Labour could be “trusted to govern”.
His campaign has been a terrific success. The banks are rolling in cash, and even Labour bosses won’t be too worried that, after the cull, Labour membership is reported to have fallen below 300,000, only just over half of its 550,000 peak under Jeremy Corbyn – though the figures are kept secret and not divulged even to the party national executive. The party doesn’t need the members’ £5.88 a month when it can now rake in millions from business.
What has also ended is the resurgence of socialist ideas and collective spirit in Corbyn’s Labour Party that might well be seen as the UK’s last chance to save social democracy. It was always doomed because the party machine was able to keep the resurgent left well clear of national influence, often by repugnant means such as the widespread false charges of antisemitism.
People rejected by the party are now questioning how to vote in future. So are millions more who voted Labour in 2024 in the hope of improving their lives and instead got a government largely indistinguishable from its Conservative predecessors. Who do they vote for now?
A new party for Labour’s disillusioned supporters?
The obvious choice is the Greens, who have a progressive social programme as well as policies aimed at reversing climate change; many of the leftists who joined Labour under Corbyn voted Green anyway. The Greens have a leadership election due in August and one candidate, Zack Polanski, considered the most left-wing, is running a vigorous campaign to recruit disgruntled ex-Labourites. But many socialists are suspicious of what they see as the party’s jumbled policies and incoherent organisation.
Conservatives and LibDems are no different from Labour; the emptiness of their contrived antagonism in what in truth is a consensual political structure is what frustrates and infuriates large numbers of people. And though we are told that Labour is set to lose sackfuls of votes to Reform UK Ltd (serve them right) they won’t be from voters on the left.
Many are talking about a new left-wing party – as if there aren’t enough already: the proliferation of rival Communist and Trotskyite groups is an embarrassment, if not a national joke, even among themselves.
There is already a new party called Transform, and another called Aspire, adding to the Workers Party of Britain launched by the narcissist George Galloway with expelled Labour MP Chris Williamson, plus the Socialist Labour Party headed by former miners’ leader Arthur Scargill.
With traditional left parties, the problem is that they are ends in themselves. Their function is to lead the working class to revolution; their supporters’ duty is therefore to build the party to that end. They are not geared for electoral politics and a new party with the same approach would be ridiculous in a national election where a mass movement is required. Everyone on the left is aware of this, by the way.
There is actually a Reinstate Corbyn campaign – a lost cause if ever there was one. Since he was booted out of Labour in 2021 the former leader has been promoting a non-party Peace and Justice Project. In May he spoke at a Conference of Resistance in Huddersfield organised by another new grouping called the People’s Alliance for Change and Equality, and after years of dithering he is now on the verge of endorsing a new party.
This was forced on him by suspended MP Zara Sultana and quitting Labour in early July and calling his bluff. The organising core is the same group of Communists and left Labour trade union bureaucrats that ran his office as party leader.
To be fair, there are several more of groupings working hard but separately to bring everyone together, like the Socialist Labour Network, Network of Independent Socialists, and the Campaign for a Mass Workers’ Party, but at some point decisions will be needed and choices made.
The non-party alternative
There might however be a better way. In March another new grouping called We Demand Change staged an open event at a rave venue in the east London docklands. It centred around the influential Counterfire group – a breakaway from the trotskyist Socialist Worker Party that along with pro-Palestinian groups and CND forms the core of the large anti-war movement. Two thousand people turned up.
Corbyn and other left notables were speakers and but the gathering also included the Green Party and direct action groups like Youth Demand, Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Palestine Action (PA).
These are people who are getting on with it, confronting the state over the big issues of climate change and war, the ones who stage spectacular stunts, block motorways and invade factories manufacturing weaponry for the genocide in Gaza; the fact that the non-violent PA has now absurdly been banned as a “terrorist” group is seen as just more evidence of how right-wing and authoritarian Labour has become.
The event concluded with an open mic discussion on the very question: a new party for the left, or what? Contributors included non-party activists in run-down areas who are challenging corrupt and complacent Labour councils and MPs that are enforcing the leadership’s crackdown on community activism. In some places independent groups have taken over Labour councils and there were dozens of community candidates at last year’s election, of whom five won their seats. One was Jeremy Corbyn. Their five-strong bloc in the Commons is now bigger than Reform’s.
These Labour reverses were put down to sizeable Muslim populations mobilised by opposition to the Gaza conflict; but it takes a lot of people to win a parliamentary seat, and almost nowhere can Muslims win a majority on their own.
Early in the new parliament, Labour suspended seven MPs who stood firm in a ritualised ‘loyalty test’ set up by the leadership over the two-child benefit cap. Labour candidates in 2024 had been heavily vetted for compliability and the persistence of internal opposition in June was traumatic for the government.
There was no vote taken after the We Demand Change debate but a predominant feeling emerged in favour of a network rather than a party: an arrangement that in every constituency a single left or progressive candidate shall be given a free run, whether a leftist, a trade unionist, a community activist or a Green, with others standing aside to support them. Perhaps it doesn’t actually need a party as such to co-operate at election time.
In France last year all the parties of the left and the Greens formed a Popular Front to defeat the far right, and succeeded. The French constitution enabled a dictatorial President to appoint a government without them, but they won the vote, and that’s what the UK left will need – though the term ‘popular front’ is alien to British political culture.
Community candidates have a real chance – just ask Wes Streeting
There was a specific rationale in support of this view. One of the community independents who nearly won last year was Leanne Mohamad, in Ilford North, East London. She came within just 528 votes of Labour’s Wes Streeting, the government figure most hated on the left – after Starmer himself. Streeting is not just the Health Secretary driving through Labour’s policy of increasing private sector involvement in the NHS; he is Starmer’s presumed and groomed successor.
In the Ilford poll the Greens also had a candidate, who won 1,794 votes. Had Rachel Collinson agreed to stand down, Leanne Mohamad would now be in parliament. Even more to the point for the left, Wes Streeting would not.
A version of this article was first published in Media North: Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (North). For more from Media North, and to subscribe to their newsletter, visit their website.
