–No Vote for parties that support imperialist wars
– No Vote for parties that are complicit in Israeli genocide
– No Vote for parties that deport immigrants and refugees
– No Vote for parties that are tied to capitalist profiteers
Victory to the Palestinian Struggle – End All UK Support for Israel
Recognise an Independent Palestinian State on Gaza & the West Bank
Stop & Reverse the Privatisation of Public Services
Strike to Win – Build Rank & File Action Committees to Stop the Sell-Outs
Defend LGBT+ Rights & the Right to Determine one’s own Gender Identity
Fight for Equality for Women, Including Abortion Rights
Build Mass Action to Shut Down Detention Centres & Stop Deportations
Amnesty for All Refugees and Undocumented Immigrants
End Prevent and all forms of Islamophobia
Fight anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry
Open the Borders – Reverse Brexit
The most important aspect of this week’s General Election is that it signifies the end of the Labour Party as a possible arena of struggle for the working class & oppressed against imperialist wars, exploitation, racism and the rise of fascism. At a time of crisis for the poor and oppressed of the world, Keir Starmer has established a totalitarian regime in the Labour Party that is complicit with Israeli genocide, expels Jewish critics of Israel for ‘anti-semitism,’ and promises to be much tougher on refugees & immigrants than the divided and incompetent Tories.
The mass movement in support of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party was the final attempt to reverse Tony Blair’s ‘neo-liberal’ policies and turn the party into a mass movement of the Left. The ruling class is relying on Starmer to ensure that nothing like that ever happens again, and he – a former high official of the British state as Director of the Crown Prosecution Service – is ready to do obey.
Starmer and his allies have opposed the strike movement, banned Labour MPs from joining workers’ picket lines, banned constituency Labour Parties from accepting or discussing motions relating to Palestine and opposed the mass movement in support of the Palestinian struggle. The Labour Party bureaucrats operate a round-the-clock ‘Big Brother’ surveillance of the social media of their MPs, candidates and many party officers and members, at least on those who are not 100% ‘on-line.’ On that basis Starmer and his future Chancellor of the Exchequer, former Bank of England economist Rachel Reeves, have established an alliance with a large section of the British capitalists and former Tory donors who have publicly supported and funded his election campaign. He has now been endorsed by the Sunday Times, a right-wing Murdoch paper.
The most urgent task now is to build a new party of a different kind, one based on mass struggle against racism, capitalist exploitation and imperialist wars.
The potential for the new party already exists
This election has been preceded by a nearly three years of radical mass action in Britain: the biggest wave of strikes for 40 years that is still developing; the frequent mass actions to prevent the arrest and deportation of refugees and immigrants; the huge anti-war demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. These movements are represented in this election by a record number of ‘independent’ candidates and new groupings standing in opposition to both main parties, such as (in London) Leanne Mohamad in Ilford North and Noor Jahan Begum in Ilford South.
Among them are a number of left-wingers expelled from the Labour Party, including Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North and Claudia Webbe in Leicester East, and Faiza Shaheen, who is standing as an independent in Chingford & Woodford Green after being dropped at the last minute as Labour candidate because of her continuing support for the Palestinian struggle.
The Revolutionary Internationalist League (RIL) and the Movement for Justice (MFJ) are calling for a vote for those expelled Labour MPs and candidates, for Labour candidates who have shown public support for Palestine or opposition to Starmer’s anti-immigrant rhetoric during the election campaign, notably Bell Ribeiro-Addy in Clapham & Brixton Hill, Diane Abbott in Hackney North & Stoke Newington, and Apsana Begum in Poplar & Limehouse – and for independent candidates who support the Palestinian struggle and oppose the Labour leadership’s support for Israel, especially for those have supported the strike movement.
We support a vote for the Green Party because of its opposition to Labour’s support for Israel, its support for immigrant & refugee rights and Palestinian rights, and its demand for the repeal of Tory legislation that has drastically restricted the right to protest and freedom of speech, and its call for ending the anti-Muslim Prevent scheme.
We support these candidates and groups, not because they agree with all our policies or we agree with all theirs, but because we recognise them as part of the mass movements that have grown in direct opposition to a Labour Party that is dead for any progressive struggles, in Britain or internationally. We are calling on them to come together to build the new, democratic party of struggle.
We are not advocating some new alliance of established Left groups (though not excluding them either) we are arguing for a party that is based on action, that fights to win, unites the various arenas of mass action in a common struggle, and that does not bow before the archaic stupidities of the parliamentary system or the treachery of full-time trade union bureaucrats.
For those reasons we are opposed to any support for George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain. We are calling on its candidates to disassociate themselves from Galloway and his allies and stand as independents. Galloway is an unsavoury opportunist and a political exhibitionist, who makes totally different ‘pitches’ to different audiences, and whose election manifesto bristles with reactionary positions on women and the family, on gender issues & green politics – and on immigrants and refugees. In a recent interview he was demanding that the Royal Navy should be used to push back cross-Channel refugees. That was the position of Priti Patel and Suella Braverman. The Navy refused their demands.
Getting from ‘Potential’ to the New Party We Must Build
The most important problem facing the candidates listed above is that, however sincere they are and however closely they feel responsible to their immediate communities, they are not accountable to the movements we have built, that are the bases for their electoral success if they win, or for their future role in those movements.
This deficit means that their victories may give them the votes in Parliament needed to get some concessions from a Labour Party government, but we cannot expect them to fight to win. They will rely on Parliamentary manoeuvres that will not succeed in rebuilding the NHS, protect refugees and immigrant communities from racism and discrimination, or end fees for university & college student and reinstate grants for education at every level so that working class and poor youth can stay in school and succeed.
We can take Jeremy Corbyn as an example. He is well known for his pro-working class politics, but he has not called on rank-and-file trade union activists to dump their current union leaderships. It is just ‘not done;’ neither Corbyn or any other MPs see that as part of their political role. Yet it is obvious that the current trade union bureaucrats squandered the strength of the strike movement and sold out their members. To win the forthcoming rounds of strikes and/or negotiations, the existing sell-out leaders who are tied to the Labour Party must be replaced by independent committees of elected rank-and-file militants, directly accountable to their members. Neither Corbyn nor any of the other candidates we are supporting have raised this perspective or called for unified, all-out strikes of the unions to win.
The strike movement has been inspiring and historic, but if it does not win real improvements in wages and working conditions this year, protected by cost-of-living allowances and minimum staffing levels, both of which are needed to prevent inflation and more job losses, we will not only suffer defeats in trade-union terms, we will face a backlash from the small business people, middle- class professionals, and some of our community supporters. Nigel Farage and the fascists will swoop in and promote the lie that only an authoritarian fascist leader can solve the economic decline Britain is experiencing. A new round of anti-immigrant, racist, and bigoted attacks will occur in the streets and in the airwaves. Former Brexit supporters who may be testing out the viability of progressive political solutions, will turn back to the more familiar politics of bigotry, cynicism and hopelessness they held onto for so long.
Only a movement can win those gains. Politicians divorced from popular collective struggles can only posture while they fail to achieve anything more than the individual social work they do in constituency surgeries. That is why we must continue to build our movements, raise the level of our struggle, and consolidate new leaders. If we don’t move forward, we regress. We have to provide the spine for even the best and most sincere politicians we send to Parliament.
Reverse Brexit and Open the Borders
The outgoing Tory party and its leadership were the principal promoters and executors of Brexit – a policy of whipping up racism, xenophobia and immigrant-bashing in order to establish an authoritarian government that would attack workers’ rights & human rights. They secured an election pledge from former prime minister David Cameron to hold a referendum on leaving the European Union and went on to dominate the ‘Leave’ campaign, scoring a narrow victory in the 2016 referendum. That campaign and the aftermath of its victory were a prolonged ‘carnival of reaction’ – a huge rise in racist and fascist attacks (and some murders) along with homophobia and Islamophobia. Even primary school children and their parents were not exempt from their threats.
Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Rishi Sunak and their political cousin Nigel Farage rank high among the people responsible for those crimes.
Before & after the referendum, the RIL & MFJ argued that Brexit was a racist, anti-immigrant project. Britain’s black, Asian, and Muslim communities knew that perfectly well and mostly voted against it. Every survey at the time and every study since then has demonstrated that anti-immigrant prejudice was by far the principal motivation behind voting for Brexit.
Brexit was a major factor in undermining Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. While his economic and social policies won tremendous support, and while we oppose his frame-up expulsion by Starmer and support his stand in the current election, we have to be clear that his refusal (along with nearly every Labour MP) to call out Brexit as a racist project was a fatal error. It meant that Labour endorsed Brexit as a ‘democratic’ decision.
It was not as though he had not heard the argument. His close ally on the Left, Diane Abbott, spent nearly 6 months campaigning on the racist character of Brexit and arguing for keeping free movement (which was perfectly possible) before she was silenced.
The consequence was that the Corbyn leadership ended up making decisions that lost him the support of several Labour Left MPs and alienated a large proportion of his young supporters.
However, as MFJ argued at the time, that was not the only damaging consequence of Labour’s failure to call out Brexit as a racist project. It left the hard Brexit faction around Boris Johnson unchallenged in its campaign to undermine the Tory prime minister Theresa May. As a result she resigned and Johnson became the Tory leader and prime minister in July 2019 and went on win a large majority in the December.
Once in power they implemented the most extreme version of Brexit, and introduced legislation that massively increased the powers of the state, giving state bodies (police, army, intelligence services etc) the power to authorise or commit crimes in the service of the government. They undermined effective voting rights, especially for the poor and the young, and gave the government rather than independent bodies control over the conduct of elections. A torrent of new laws created ever tighter restrictions on the right to protest and freedom of speech. They tore up the rights of refugees, immigrants and workers.
And they accomplished all that with minimal opposition from the Labour leadership, now in the hands of Keir Starmer.
Brexit is now the non-issue of the election. A majority of people in Britain see Brexit as a disaster that has made them poorer and their lives more difficult, and they would like to reverse the decision. The Tories don’t want to talk about Brexit because it is an embarrassment; Starmer’s Labour Party does not want to talk about it because it would complicate their appeal to anti-immigrant racism.
This issue won’t go away. The RIL and MFJ call for the reversal of Brexit, not because we love the European Union, but because it is essential to defend the basic human right of free movement and the right of workers to go where they need to in order to find employment – the most important right for the class that has to sell its labour power in order to live.
We demand Opening the Borders because that is what millions of people are forced to do by the material, social, political, military and environmental problems they face – problems that the ruling elites of the imperialist countries are responsible for. We are already seeing the alternative to Open Borders; it is a world of despotism and barbarism. We will not tell refugees and migrants to stay where they are until the rich and powerful imperialists learn a modicum of humanity – or agree to establish ‘safe routes.’
Fascism and resistance
The outgoing Tory government was a regime clearly moving towards fascism, with many ministers having direct links with fascism and with far-right, pro-Trump ‘think-tanks’ in Britain and the USA. The repeated exposure of corruption certainly made that course more difficult, but the principal cause of the divisions and weakness in the Brexit/Tory ranks has been the growth of mass resistance – from the widespread Covid ‘lockdown’ by hundreds of thousands of individuals and families in March 2020 that temporarily forced an unwilling government to fall into line, to the 2-year long strike wave in the public services that had mass public support and created the political climate for the mass anti-war movement in support of the Palestinian struggle. Those developments were ignored, or more often opposed by the Labour leadership.
The threat of fascism has not gone away. The rise of fascism is an international development because everywhere there are ruling classes, or sections of the ruling elites, which are turning to fascism to crush opposition, increase exploitation, and prepare for war with rival states. Fascists are in the governments in the Netherlands and Austria, they are the government in Israel and Italy, Marine Le Pen’s ‘Far Right’ party has come top in the French elections and Trump may be elected President in November. And everywhere the ‘moderate,’ ‘centrist’ or social democratic parties are normalising these developments because they are many times more afraid of the power of the poor and oppressed than they are of the fascists.
Fascist activity and racist & homophobic attacks have already grown already under the Tories, though much less than in other European countries. A Labour government that is tied to a crisis-ridden capitalist class, a Labour government that refuses to meet the real needs of the poor, the workers, the sick and homeless, and the struggling lower middle class could provide ideal conditions for the rapid growth of a fascist movement.
Fighting fascism is not a battle of ideas, it is a matter of self-defence, of defending our mass movement, our unions, and our integrated communities. That will only be effective with political leadership – again, that will only be possible if we build a new party based on the struggles of the mass movements and working class.
The next phase of our struggle, under a Starmer-led Labour government will be more demanding, but we have a sound base to build on. Despite 14 years of Tory dominance, there is less racism now than there was during the last Labour government. Thanks to the continued struggles of the anti-racist, labour, immigrant rights, and anti-war movements, Britain is less divided by race, nationalism and gender identity. Support for Brexit has plummeted. The strike movement to stop the free fall of the British economy and our living standards, and to save the NHS and public services, is readying for a new offensive this autumn. The majority of people in Britain oppose the Israeli government’s genocidal war to end any possibility of a Palestinian state. Britain has had the most consistent and largest anti-war, pro-Palestinian demonstrations and mass actions of any nation outside of the Palestinian struggle in Gaza and the West Bank.
Build & Unite the Mass Movements – Build a New Party of the Workers & Oppressed
03.07.2024