This issue focuses on the struggle against imperialism’s proxy war in Ukraine, which is now a world-shaking, world-historic conflict between imperialism as epitomised by NATO and centrally the US, and a loose alliance of ex-workers states and semi-colonial countries aiming to escape worldwide imperialist domination and projecting the aim of a ‘multipolar world’ where imperialism, and particularly the world imperialist hegemon of the USA, ceases to hold sway. We as revolutionaries consider this to be a just and supportable struggle in which the working class has a side – against NATO. Though we also consider that that the only way to lastingly and permanently defeat imperialist capitalism is through international workers revolution.

Our strategic aim is the creation of a new World Party of Socialist Revolution to lead this struggle. This is a necessarily many-sided struggle. These different sides are faithfully reflected in this issue, both on the domestic and international terrain. Both the front page and back page article are devoted to the struggle against imperialism.

The front-page lead article is about the very welcome creation of No to NATO, No to War (No2NATO) as an anti-war bloc and a point of unity of genuine anti-imperialist, anti-war activists. We acclaim its initiation by Chris Williamson of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), and George Galloway of the Workers Party of Britain (WPB) and note its potential not merely to unite anti-war activists but also to provide the basis for the crystallisation of a new anti-imperialist, genuinely working-class party, since both initiating components share key elements of our strategic aim in this regard.

This is not of course the first time that comrade Galloway has attempted such a thing – for all its problems, RESPECT in the 2000s was an attempt to be proud of – we hope he and his collaborators will be inclined to repeat that on a more solid basis this time around. The article contains a balanced and fraternal analysis of the history and politics of all this, both regarding the political histories of the SLP and WPB which we hope will be taken in the spirit it is intended and will indeed be a source of clarification and solidification of a promising political project.

The back-page article reflects the other side of our work: seeking to build an internationalist and principled anti-imperialist left, working with other revolutionary-minded left-wing tendencies from a variety of positions, not just of Trotskyist origin. The declaration reproduced on the back page calls for the victory of Russia against imperialism on the anniversary of the Special Military Operation. We are the British section of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (LCFI), and as an international tendency the LCFI takes the lead in seeking to overcome historic animosities and build something akin to the Zimmerwald left, which was the predecessor of the Communist International in WWI. We have also sought to endorse the Paris Declaration initiated by a number of left-Stalinist groupings including the CPGB-ML, where we have met with reluctance and caution about accepting endorsements from Trotskyists, but to underline our seriousness about this we reproduce their sharp, class-based declaration, with our own brief commentary.

Also on the Ukraine conflict, there is coverage of the protest at Downing Street against Nazi terror in Ukraine organised by International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS) on 28^th January, a similar protest in Dublin, an anti-war protest in Seoul, South Korea, and a speech by the Bolshevik Group of Korea at that latter event. Another protest is being held at Downing Street on 25^th March, supported by No2NATO and the IUAFS, which our comrades again strongly support. Also in this regard, there is the text of a leaflet the IUAFS issued to the Stop the War conference on 21 Jan when building for our own 28 Jan event – we do not neglect the struggle against inconsistent, pseudo – ‘opposition’ to imperialism’s proxy war.

Other material in this issue includes an analysis of the rocky state of Sunak’s Tory regime, and the contradictions facing it, the complete lack of an alternative from the Labour Party, the state of working class resistance and the problems of the strike wave, and not least the recent unusual but exemplary political strike at the BBC in defence of Gary Lineker’s right to free speech. There is the text of a leaflet distributed by the Consistent Democrats at trade union events, such as Enough Is Enough’s protest events at Downing Street against the Tories’ new attacks on unions. There is coverage of the rise to power of Lula, of the reformist Brazilian Workers Party, and the attempt of far- right Bolsonaro supporters to stop his taking office. And there is a personal view of the issue of the Gender Recognition Bill issue in Scotland, and the question of trans rights, by our comrade Mark Andresen.

The other major article featured in this issue is our review, of the major work by Tony Greenstein: Zionism during the Holocaust – the Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State and Nation. This is a supportive review, as the book itself has an encyclopaedic character on this crucial subject – it contains such a wealth of information of research and information that it will be referred to for decades to come. But the review is far from uncritical and deals with some crucial gaps in the author’s analysis and conclusions that genuine Marxists are duty-bound to address.

All-in-all this issue contains a considerable selection of material of importance to the left and the struggle for socialism.  

A personal reflection on the Scottish Gender Recognition Bill

By

Mark Andresen

As a heterosexual male, and no authority on LGBTQ+ issues, I’d not anticipated writing on the subject of Scotland’s Gender Recognition Bill. What swiftly changed my uncommitted position was the fallout, the triggered bigoted responses by the liberal left to its initial passing. Their consensus being that their former long held ‘safe spaces’ were now under imminent threat. Not only does this triggered assumption not relate to the Bill’s purpose, neither does it reflect it in outcome. In truth, it is simply the latest stage in a procedure that commenced back in 1998.

Sue Pascoe of Chamber UK confirms:

‘The Bill has nothing to do with access to single sex spaces, prison placement or sports activities; it is only about the process that leads to a new birth certificate…’ She goes on: ‘The benefit for a trans person of a new birth certificate is being able to marry in church in their acquired gender, die recorded in that gender and bring their birth certificate into alignment with their already changed passport and driving licence, so that they are not ‘outed’ getting a job, or similar situations where all documents might be required.’ .

Pascoe, 2023

This represents a key corrective to the response triggered from some on the Left, as well as – inevitably – many more on the Right. It somewhat mirrored the fallout from the Section 28 debates between 1988 – 91, exposing the shallowness of much of the liberal left commitment to gender rights. Misperception of the Gender Recognition Bill and its intended outcomes left a void filled by a united prejudicial assumption.

 There is an additional problem in this line of demarcation thinking; that we accept the parallel framing of a separatist liberal agenda that continues to endanger – rather than support – the very communities that seek to be included and emboldened in society, rather than permanently excluded by it. Mike MacNair in The Weekly Worker clarifies this position.

 “’…The political nature of (a) positive approach has to be one which stresses the commonality of the oppression of trans people with other experiences of oppression and exploitation, rather than stressing the difference.” (MacNair, Clearing the Ground, 2023). He adds how treating it as a single issue, rather than as a part of “our common humanity”, remains “true of any other moral and political claim”. That the fear for the safe spaces – and knee-jerk reactions of anger – feeds into the divide-and-rule separatism of establishment framing and are “useless for emancipation” going forward. (ibid).

Outside the other ‘safe space’ – social media itself – the consequent demarcations appeared less surprising.  I.e., the national vigils in response to the horrific double knife murder of Brianna Ghey on the one hand – and Sunak’s blocking of the Gender Recognition Bill and subsequent High Court review on the other.

 “Under Section 35 the UK Government can legally intervene to block royal assent for a bill that a Secretary of State ‘has reasonable grounds to believe would be incompatible with any international obligations or the interests of defence or national security’. The Government can also legally take action if it sees a bill as making modifications to the law as ‘it applies to reserved matters’. Under such a scenario, ministers in London must have ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe that any proposed legislation would have an ‘adverse effect on the operation of the law as it applies to reserved matters’. This means that a bill can be blocked if the Government thinks it would clash or conflict with the prevailing UK Government policy as it applies to reserved matters, even if the proposed legislation falls within the powers granted to Holyrood.” .

Stephen McilKenny, The Scotsman, 17/02/23

 This has often been quoted by the Right as justification for blocking. Yet, there is no discernible reason given as to why such a Bill might conspire to conflict with existing legislation if what Sue Pascoe claims is correct.

The sudden resignation announcement of Nicola Sturgeon has added uncertainty to its future path. While it’s unlikely the response to the Bill had any bearing on her decision – despite the implication made by the mainstream media (it having had broad support from both sides of The Commons) – each of the candidates standing so far, for succession as First Minister, appear less committed to fighting for its success across the border; a sure sign of their continuity neoliberal credentials. A UK Government-friendly SNP – suddenly softer on independence – is the last thing either nation needs right now; whatever their politics. A stronger working-class requires a Westminster Government so cornered it will have to capitulate to people’s needs faster than the excellent nationwide strike wave can currently achieve on its own. As we know, this requires a post-strike policy platform of demands for what follows, which no union appears, as yet to have considered; but, the mooted alternatives are for another article.

So, what of the response by the LGBTQ+ communities themselves?

Integration network SEIN define what is meant by a ‘safe space’ as “a place or environment in which a person or category of people can feel confident that they will not be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment, or any other emotional or physical harm.” (Sein Glasgow, 2017). Stonewall – after polling its members and supporters, prior to the passing of the Bill through the Scottish Parliament – found a mixed picture in their results; one which highlighted obstacles to acceptance as much within some communities, as outside of them.

“Society is changing,” states Stonewall’s Chief Executive:

“The vast majority of LGBT people are open to at least some of their friends, and nearly half of us are open to everyone in their family… but, the picture is mixed. Bi people in particular feel unable to be open about their identities with friends and family: they’re four times more likely not to be open with anyone in their family than gay men and lesbians. That’s a particularly depressing figure given how marginalised bi people can often feel; the sense of isolation, of invisibility, behind these figures is hard to truly comprehend. And what of our intimate relationships? Again, the picture is far from encouraging. This report shows that more than one in ten LGBT people have been abused by a partner in the last year. These rates rise further for trans people, as well as disabled and black, Asian and minority ethnic LGBT people…The report found that half of black, Asian and minority ethnic LGBT people experienced discrimination in their local LGBT community because of their ethnicity. One in eight LGBT people of faith and one in four LGBT disabled people whose activities are ‘limited a lot’ because of a health problem or disability have also encountered prejudice based on their identities. Which means some LGBT spaces are inaccessible to the very people who may need them most.” .

R Hunt, Stonewall Chief Executive

The gay communities of the past were no strangers to their own, internal, conflicts as how best to proceed. e.g., the Assimilation v. Revolt debate. In the mainstream press of the day, during the Section 28 controversy, battle lines were drawn between actor Ian McKellan, very much in the former camp, and director Derek Jarman, proudly in the latter. “I’ve no wish to join an Establishment that’s spent several hundred years excluding us”, Jarman memorably retorted. This position mirrored his view that ‘legal rights’ here – advocated by some – should have nothing to do with private sexual choices made between consenting adults; something deemed reasonable at the time that today’s liberal leftists – irrespective of who’d draft such rights – might blanch at. Yet, this also feeds in to MacNair’s point that such issues should not be treated as separate entities, apart from the needs of the working-class majority, but included as part of the revolutionary, inclusive and transformative agenda of a Trotskyist platform. A view I gladly share.

Labour Offers More of the Same! We Need a Genuine Working-Class Party!

Sunak’s Tory government flounders from one crisis to another, even though it really has no opposition within mainstream politics. In the middle of a huge international crisis of Western imperialist hegemony, this crisis is also the product of British capitalism’s more specific decline.  The Tory Party is a huge liability for the boss class of Britain, but for the moment, they are stuck with it. It desperately clings on knowing full well that a large majority of the population consider it a venal gang of asset strippers and are desperate to see the back of it. This Tory Party abandoned its long-time ethos (many would say ‘façade’) of sober respectability in the middle of the last decade and plunged into populist demagogy to try to exploit a major crisis of the British capitalist system much of which was of its making, to give itself a paradoxical short-term revival. The problem is that this was only a short-term buzz, and that is all it could be. The hangover from the debauchery and rampant corruption-in-plain-sight of Boris Johnson’s premiership, and then the Kamikwazi rampage of Truss’s brief but destructive far-right reign, is proving terrifying. It has lost its moorings and does not have any clue how to recover the political capital as a supposed organ of bourgeois stability that it once possessed.

Sunak likes to put across an ‘image’ of the Tory Party returning to some vaunted “integrity, professionalism and accountability” but his government has so many obvious sociopaths in it that this is a bad joke. He has no choice in this as the populists are too strong in the party to be decisively defeated. And he owes his rise to them in any case – he is one of them, who is now trying to dissemble. So, it staggers through contradictions – the Windsor Agreement he signed with the EU to resolve the impasse over the ‘Northern Ireland Protocol’ of Johnson’s original 2019 Withdrawal Agreement aims to preserve the Good Friday Agreement, which is the basis of power-sharing in the North of Ireland. But that depends on formal adherence to the European Convention of Human Rights and similar international agreements, including the 1951 Refugee Convention.

The tactic of the far right of the Tories is to use non-white stooges to promote a racist agenda – which was learned from the former apartheid South African regime’s Bantustan tactic. Sunak himself is a prime example, as were Sajid Javid, Nadhim Zahawi and Kwasi Kwarteng earlier. Their rise is fuelled by big money, neoliberalism and corruption, and there are always stooges among every population that can be bought and bribed. Suella Braverman’s reprise of Priti Patel’s plan to criminalise asylum seeking, if implemented would blow Sunak’s agreement with the EU out of the water. His visit to Macron, bunging him a half-billion pound bribe to set up a detention camp, is designed to find a way round this contradiction.

Strike Against Government Censorship

But the attempt to suppress criticism of Braverman’s racist agitation against refugees by Gary Lineker has led to a confrontation of the government and its BBC stooges with football stars and BBC staff, driven by support from working class football fans, who are often stereotyped as racist and reactionary. Not in this case. Lineker is hardly radical – he was hostile to Corbyn from the right – but on this his statements and refusal to apologise are principled and worthy of support.

Both Labour and Tories denounced Lineker’s Tweeted comparison of Braverman’s vitriol with 1930s Germany– though Labour was forced to about-face. He was removed as chief presenter of Match of the Day. Braverman claimed his criticism was ‘offensive’ because her husband is Jewish – weaponising him to defend racism. But when other star presenters, like Ian Wright and Alan Shearer, refused to appear without Lineker, followed by other presenters and commentators, and then football clubs and players, under pressure from fans, refused to appear, or to be interviewed about matches by the BBC. In effect this has led to a spontaneous and amorphous strike and confrontation with the government and the corruptly taken-over BBC, with its leading personnel like Richard Sharp widely known to be involved in financial corruption with Tory politicians like Johnson. A strike by football stars, clubs and fans, which shut down BBC’s football coverage in less than a day. A strike provoked by the government, this time about political censorship, right-wing ‘cancel culture’ and flagrant attacks on free speech.

The Strike Wave and the Union Bureaucracy

This interacts with the broader strike wave, which has recently shown signs of sputtering, as strikes have been called off for ‘negotiations’ with the government by nurses, firefighters and railway workers, even though the votes in favour of strike action by sections of workers being balloted recently have exceeded the most optimistic expectations of trade union militants. In the Royal Mail, several weeks ago, you had 96%, on a 77% turn out, voting to strike. This was then exceeded by junior doctors who managed a 97% vote in favour of strike action. But in this strike wave the problems of the nature of the trade union bureaucracy, and the lack of leadership of the movement by a political party of the working class, are now central questions.

The bureaucracy, even its most militant-talking figures such as Mick Lynch of the RMT, have scrupulously abided by the previous anti-union laws and merely sought to manoeuvre within them, not only in terms of ballots and fighting for a huge turnout, but also by giving two weeks’ notice of strikes, refusing to engage in solidarity actions, and not openly organising more generalised strike actions. This has been done apologetically and occasionally and has not been central to the strategy of the unions. What should be done is to mobilise that mass militancy that gives rise to 90%+ majorities into confrontation with the bosses and the government where the union membership, not the bosses state, set the terms. In the absence of that, the government has felt emboldened to carry out a further attack on trade union rights with its outrageous ‘minimum service level’ bill, eroding the right to strike itself. The unions should absolutely not be settling with the government not least because of this.

The problem is that the unions have no unifying leadership and perspective, and many of them are organically soft on Starmer’s Labour Party even as it shafts trade unionists and bans its elected representatives from even standing on picket lines. This strike-wave is driven by public sector workers’ discontent at being nakedly robbed of billions that should be spent paying them decent wages, while the same billions are sent to Ukrainian Nazis for the proxy war against Russia. Yet the TUC passes resolutions calling for increased arms expenditure, and misleaders like the fake-left Mick Whelan of ASLEF, along with John McDonnell, signed the dreadful Ukraine Solidarity Campaign statement calling on British imperialism to sent warplanes to the Nazi regime in Ukraine.

Such people are incapable of leading a real struggle against this regime, and its accomplices and stooges like the Zionist racist and Nazi apologist Starmer. To strike as a unifying fist against the bosses, we need a genuine workers party able to offer a principled alternative to such wretches, and to the ethos of the labour bureaucracy as a whole. Such a party needs to fight consistently to defend oppressed peoples abroad, such as the Donbass population and the Palestinians, and thereby also to consistently oppose imperialist activities in support of such oppression, which in present conditions literally involves taking money from the poor at home and giving it to violent racists abroad. It must give voice to working-class discontent against that bureaucracy, a caste of professional negotiators over the price of labour power within the capitalist system who themselves fear the emergence of movements aimed at abolishing that system, which would render their role redundant.

Sunak’s regime is as strident as any involved in waging the criminal imperialist anti-Russian proxy war in Ukraine. He rivals both Ursula van der Leyden and Boris Johnson in that regard. The overarching situation in West Europe is that the war risks destabilising the whole continent, not just Britain. Anti-war protests as well as strikes over economic questions are becoming a regular event in Western countries. Britain has lagged behind, but the groundswell of discontent that led to the formation of No to NATO, No to War means that is unlikely to last. The protests are fuelled by economic suffering of the masses as many are crucified by inflation and rocketing energy prices, but in Britain it is worse, largely because of Brexit. The considerable strike wave resulting from the inflation has revived both the strength, purpose and moral authority of trade unions among the mass of the working-class population.

Starmer: Purging the Labour Movement from the ‘Labour’ Party

 The ruling class, knowing full well that the lies and demonisation of Russia involved in this war are as outrageous as those used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, are desperate to stop a real anti-war movement taking off. Thus, the attempts to stop the No to NATO conference. As the Tories have atrophied, the bosses have been grooming Starmer and New Labour to take their place, and he is undertaking this mission with enthusiasm.

His attacks on the working class and left-wing base of the Labour Party go far deeper than those under Kinnock and Blair. The ruling class had a big scare when Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader, and Starmer is simply acting for the bosses in making sure that Corbyn and people like him will never be able to address a mass audience through the Labour Party again. We see not only the banning of Corbyn from standing as a Labour candidate in the Islington North seat he has held since 1983, but also such measures as banning CLP’s from affiliating to left-wing, anti-racist, environmental and socialist campaigns. These include, as Skwawkbox recently reported:

“Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Labour Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Stop the War Coalition, Republic, London Irish Abortion Rights Campaign, Jewish Voice for Labour, Somalis for Labour, Sikhs for Labour, All African Women’s Group, Health Campaigns Together, The Campaign against Climate Change Trades Union, Peace & Justice Project.”

The flipside of this attack is that CLP’s will not be allowed to vote against being affiliated to right-wing and racist bodies that are nationally affiliated to Labour. Such as the Jewish Labour Movement, which supports the racist state of Israel against the Palestinian people, and which openly refused to support Labour in the 2019 General Election, preferring Boris Johnson as prime minister to Jeremy Corbyn.

This is a full-frontal attack on the working-class component of the Labour Party more blatant than either Kinnock or Blair dared to do. Its clearly a purge of the mainstream Labour left and all who dissent from the politics of privatisation of healthcare, racist and chauvinist campaigns against oppressed ethnic groups, NATO nuclear warmongering, and support for Zionist crimes. There is no real pretence any more than they are attacking some kind of ‘far left’ fringe of supposed ‘infiltrators’ or ‘entryists’, implying that such people have revolutionary aims that are at odds with Labour’s supposed ‘democratic and constitutional’ politics.

Blair publicly regretted that Labour was ever created and wanted to ‘heal’ the split with the Liberal Party. Starmer is now putting that into practice by purging the Labour’s organic reformist left. The explicit statement by Starmer that Corbyn has been de-selected – by Starmer’s diktat — from Islington North is accompanied by the semi-proscription of the Peace and Justice initiative that Corbyn founded. Banning CLP’s from affiliating to this body logically points to banning members from supporting it – that is, proscribing it. And thus, the basis is being laid by Starmer to expel Corbyn from the Labour Party on a similar basis to many expulsions that have happened already – for supporting bodies such as Labour Against the Witchhunt, etc, which were proscribed retrospectively, so that people who supported them even before they were proscribed can be purged.

This little innovation is one very good reason why no one with any socialist or working-class consciousness, no-one with the slightest shred of democratic principle or even self-preservation should support Labour in any election where that would help Starmer become prime minister. Passing new rules (or laws) that are then used to ‘prosecute’ people for “prohibited acts” committed before such measures were adopted is a threat to all the democratic rights that the working class has won under bourgeois democracy. It indicates that today’s Labour Party leadership rejects the principle that working-class people are entitled to any democratic rights at all. It is rather like an infamous judgment regarding slavery that was one of the key flashpoints of the US Civil War in the mid-19^th Century.

Chief Judge Taney of the US Supreme Court forced slave Dredd Scott to be forcibly retained by his owner and declared that black people had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect”. Starmer has a similar attitude to working class socialists and those who fight against racism – for him they are lesser people whose democratic rights can be abolished retrospectively, at the behest of the employing class. If he can do this within the Labour Party, there is no reason why he could not do the same in wider society were he to become Prime Minister. It is worth noting that Braverman learned the technique of weaponising her husband’s Jewish origin to suppress criticism of racism, from the Labour right.

Working-class people have everything to fear and nothing to gain from putting Starmer into Downing Street to replace Sunak. It would be out of the frying pan and into the fire. The best outcome that the working class can hope for in the next election is a hung parliament, where neither Tories nor Starmer’s party are able to do much, with some presence of a new left-wing party perhaps crystallising out of such progressive, anti-imperialist developments as No to NATO, No to War, and/or the various initiatives that are taking place to try and put the beginnings of a new working class party in place before the general election. Though the Starmerites might respond to this by forming a grand coalition with the Tories.

Potential for a New Working-Class Party

The potential for a new working-class party is shown by a recent opinion poll conducted by Trust Barometer, which revealed that 61 per cent of potential voters agreed that Britain needs “needs a completely new type of political party to compete with the Conservatives and Labour for power”, and that three quarters said that they thought the UK was “heading in the wrong direction”. (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-tories-starmer-sunak-poll-b2290995.html?r=44995) This does not appear to reflect any kind of far-right sentiment – overwhelmingly it appears to reflect discontent with the right-wing Tory regime and the belief that Labour under Starmer is like the Tories.

The most advanced initiative towards such a development is the 2022 merger of Chris Williamson’s Resist Movement with the Socialist Labour Party, founded nearly three decades ago by miners’ leader Arthur Scargill after the Labour Party under Blair repudiated its bureaucratic-socialist Clause 4. As now a leading spokesperson for the SLP, comrade Williamson initiated No to NATO, No to War with George Galloway and his Workers Party. We hope these will come together in a principled party unification in due course and avoid/overcome the adaptation to right-populism that has marred the Workers Party in its founding period. Other initiatives that point in the same direction are the call for the convening of a conference to discuss and advance the formation of a new left-wing party, put forward by the Socialist Labour Network, which our comrades have also supported over the last period for its potential in this regard. The People’s Alliance of the Left (PAL), which includes Left Unity, TUSC (Trade Union and Socialist Coalition), the Northern Independence Party and the Breakthrough Party, is another strand that may have some role in the creation of such a party. If Corbyn were to bite the bullet and defy Starmer to stand as against Labour in Islington North that would undoubtedly galvanise much wider numbers, though it is far from clear that he has the political courage to do that. What is needed above all is a commitment to both free debate and working-class democracy, and a framework where political development in a genuinely working-class, revolutionary direction is possible.

The creation of No to Nato, No to War is potentially a major change in British politics. On 25^th November, responding to a call by Chris Williamson of the Socialist Labour Party, and George Galloway of the Workers Party, around 1000 Communists, Socialists and Anti-Imperialists met up at Bolivar Hall in Central London, the Venezuelan cultural centre. They met in three separate sittings due to the limited size of the hall (holding around 350 people at maximum) and voted, three times therefore, for a motion to constitute No2NATO as a new, anti-imperialist anti-war coalition, with an initial, interim leadership of Galloway, Williamson and ASLEF Vice-President Andy Judd, until a broader leadership can be elected. 

The ruling class evidently fears this new coalition and had mobilised its spooks and other agents – or at least their online contingent – the troll army of NATO that is titled NAFO (‘North Atlantic Fellas Organisation’) to try to prevent the conference from being held. Previously, two bigger venues had been booked, first St Pancras Church, and then Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, and each time the venue management had capitulated to a campaign of cyber terrorism – threats of disruption, sabotage and violence, and some sort of boycott emanating from the trolls and no doubt business interests of various kinds, to coerce them to cancel the event. The feeble cowards surrendered within hours to criminal activity.

This could potentially cause legal problems for these venues, as they both signed contracts with the organisers, who are centred around two legal left-wing political parties that are both registered with the Electoral Commission. Or the ruling class could openly dispense with ‘democracy’ and seek to ban the parties and the movement itself. But such a thing is unlikely at this juncture, as it would likely backfire. Popular sentiment has swung to acute scepticism about the Ukraine proxy war, and the dangers of a wider, nuclear conflict and the Nazi proclivities of NATO’s proxies are becoming more widely known. It’s a major scandal waiting to erupt.

An alternative to Stop the War. It ought to replace it!

The new anti-war coalition is based on opposition to NATO and not the pro-imperialist politics of the Stop the War Coalition, which professes to be neutral in the conflict and to condemn all sides, but which prominently raises the slogan ‘Russian Troops out of Ukraine’. The reason why there has been no anti-war movement here thus far is summed up in that slogan. Because that is NATO’s main war aim – to drive Russia out of Ukraine so that Maidan Ukraine can join NATO and become a threatening base for aggression, including nuclear aggression, against Russia. It does not matter that STW expresses pious words of criticism or even condemnation of NATO for expansion and its lies about a ‘peace dividend’ after the Cold War. That will simply be ignored. The demand for ‘Russian Troops Out’ is what is operative, and it simply makes Stop the War a left cover for NATO and its proxy war in Ukraine.

Though even that is not enough for the disgusting imperialist ‘Ukraine Solidarity Campaign’ which, when Stop the War called their own national demonstration on same day as the No2Nato event, actually waged a counter-demonstration and provocation against it, briefly trying to seize the front of the march. These imperialist types produced a statement demanding tanks and warplanes, and other arms to US imperialism’s Nazi puppet regime in Kiev, whose Head of State, Zelensky, posts images on his official Instagram account of his troops wearing SS emblems like the Death Head, the Lion badge of the SS Galician Division, and even the cracked skull symbol of Hitler’s personal bodyguard. This obviously has the blessing of the Labour Party leadership around Starmer, but it is an index of the grotesque capitulation to imperialism of much of the remaining Labour ‘left’ that it was signed by John McDonnell and Ian Lavery.

Thus, these people finally show their true nature. Even the social imperialists in both world wars refrained from embracing the perpetrators and advocates of genocide. In Germany, the SPD avoided even the appearance of complicity with Nazism by supporting the ‘Allied’ coalition against Hitler, led by imperialist US, Britain and France but also including the USSR (which did most of the actual fighting). Now we have decisive elements of West European social democracy, in Britain and Germany, under US guidance (of course), calling for arms for Nazi puppet forces that embrace a cult of Nazi criminals like Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with Hitler. This is a major political departure for social democracy, a further stage in its degeneration.

The Galloway/Williamson initiative has great potential, in that it represents a significant break to the left of the most previously ‘left’ reformism in the Labour tradition, where both main initiators have their roots. Chris Williamson is the only parliamentary representative in the Corbynite movement who came out of that situation with his political integrity intact, who defied the witchhunt with considerable consistency and refused to grovel to the witchhunters. He was rewarded with suspensions from the party on the basis of lies and quotation-chopping so laughable that it bears comparison with the frauds of Stalin’s secret police in the 1930s, in the worst period of the Soviet labour bureaucracy’s attempts to crush their left critics.

Chris Williamson and the SLP

The attacks on Williamson were so blatantly unlawful that he has won two legal victories against them. One in court against an unlawful 2019 suspension from the Labour Party (though they immediately contrived another one). Also, the government quango, the so-called Equality and Human Rights Commission, which produced a pseudo-report in 2020 mendaciously claiming the Labour Party under Corbyn had discriminated against Jews, was compelled to remove a smear against Chris from its screed for fear of legal action – a similar smear of ‘anti-semitism’ to the ones former London Mayor Ken Livingstone and former Labour councillor Pam Bromley are now litigating against.

After being deprived of the chance to stand as a Labour candidate for his own Derby North seat in the 2019 General Election by this fraud, Chris stood as an independent, though in the middle of the defeat of Labour engineered by the right-wing saboteurs, compounded by the smear campaign against him personally, he predictably did poorly. But after leaving Labour, he founded the Resistance Movement, also known as Resist, as a left-wing ‘grassroots movement’ which sought to involve itself in working class campaigning activity. It later voted to transform itself into a political party, initially registered under the name System Change due to the onerous requirements of the Electoral Commission. But in 2022 Chris proposed that Resist merge with Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, which has existed since 1996, and the proposal overwhelmingly carried. It was a bold move, as mistakes in the SLP’s way of organising in its early days – a rigid and bureaucratic way of dealing with political debate and the factionalism on the far left, blunted its potential and led it into a ghetto of stagnation, isolation and decline. This appears to have been vindicated as the influx of Resist supporters has somewhat revived the SLP and Chris has become perhaps their most prominent figure in terms of public activity.

Both over Zionism and Ukraine war, Chris Williamson has taken principled anti-imperialist positions, speaking out in defence of the people of the Donbass, and therefore, to defend them, being compelled very publicly to defend the Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in the Donbass, which is the only thing standing in the way of an imperialist Nazi-fuelled Zionist-type project of ethnic cleansing and oppression of the Donbass people, likely akin to what was done to the Palestinians. In that, he has much in common with the SLP historically, which was rooted in the militant National Union of Mineworkers when led by Arthur Scargill particularly during the heroic 1984-5 miners’ strike, who didn’t flinch from defying ruling class anti-Sovietism during the Cold War. But Chris’s embrace of labour movement democracy as a crucial issue in Labour – his ‘democracy roadshow’ and demands for accountability in the Corbyn-led Labour Party was one thing that put the wind up the Blairites (while Corbyn himself prevaricated and capitulated) – points to a much more democratic and outgoing party project than the flawed original SLP. Chris Williamson has deepened his critique of Labourism and its role in support of imperialism and colonialism, and denounced Attlee’s 1945-51 Labour government at the conference for its role in creating NATO in 1949. He has also taken to quoting Lenin on the nature of the Labour Party as a “thoroughly bourgeois party … composed of workers … [but] led by reactionaries”, something that points to potential evolution much further to the left.

George Galloway and the Workers Party

George Galloway also broke to the left from Labour in the context of the Iraq War, being expelled in 2004 for ‘incitement’, in other words, a principled opposition that went much further than the usual social-pacifist bleating of left social democracy, when he called on other Arab countries to come to Iraq’s defence against the US/UK 2003 invasion and occupation. His electoral victory in 2005 in Bethnal Green and Bow, under the banner of the left-wing coalition RESPECT, was one of the most powerful blows against imperialism and pro-imperialist Labourism in the history of the British left. RESPECT was initially a coalition with part of the far left, mainly the SWP under the leadership of John Rees and Lindsey German, and a layer of amorphous Muslim radicals based mainly in the Pakistani and Bengali immigrant communities in several major cities. Later, when the SWP retreated from what was in fact the most left-wing phase in its history, and tried to destroy RESPECT because its coalition partners refused to blindly obey it, RESPECT became a short-lived party in its own right. It hung around for a few years in the changing political environment of the early 2010s before being formally dissolved when Corbyn gained the leadership of the Labour Party, though one early sign of Corbyn’s cowardice in the face of the right-wing was his refusal to fight to reverse Galloway’s 2004 expulsion for a principled anti-imperialist position.

 Galloway is a contradictory figure, as his ‘anti-imperialism’ has often been very strident and principled, but at the same time mixed with conservative religious views on some questions. Notably, he has long been opposed to abortion on ‘conscientious’ religious grounds as originally a Catholic of Irish origin (though his religious beliefs today appear more eclectic). He has also evidenced various degrees of hostility and suspicion towards Trotskyism as a movement, though he has also worked closely with some on the left who claim elements of the Trotskyist tradition. Such conflicts are not unusual, as many of today’s groups that claim the tradition of ‘Trotskyism’ are downright treacherous and have repeatedly crossed class lines, betraying the entire tradition. He could be described as critically aligned with Stalinism. Galloway has been stiff-necked and principled in the face of Zionist hatred for his militant anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism, and has suffered personally for his view. For that he deserves admiration and solidarity.

However, one product of this personal suffering and isolation has been disorientation at times, and the taking of political positions that are problematic and erroneous, and that have somewhat damaged his reputation. Some of them are also no doubt the product of personal damage done by reactionary attacks, that acquired a political manifestation. The seminal example was the brutal beating of Galloway by the Zionist assailant Neil Masterson in August 2014, a violent attack on a 60-year-old by a vicious thug 20 years younger. It caused broken bones; it could even have been fatal. At the time Galloway was the member of parliament for Bradford West, yet virtually no one parliament, or even in the Labour Party had the political courage to condemn the assault and show basic solidarity with the victim. Not Corbyn, not McDonnell, not Abbott. Not any of them. The only MP in the British parliament who dared to condemn the attack was the sole Green MP Caroline Lucas. Most of the ‘far left’ also said nothing to condemn the assault.

Such a betrayal can easily produce disorientation and hatred of those who purport to be on the left, on the part of the victim.  There is evidence that some of these things happened to George Galloway. There was a political change in Galloway after that betrayal that was not present previously. This is shown over questions of Brexit, and immigration. The shift in politics was clear – in 2009 when RMT leader Bob Crow initiated the electoral intervention No 2 EU, Yes to Democracy which was a precursor of Lexit, Galloway refused to be involved, saying he did not like the anti-immigrant nationalism that was implicit in it. In fact, in the whole of his political career up to the watershed of 2014, Galloway often boasted of being “the most pro-immigrant politician in Britain”. Though his actual position was similar to the CP position of demanding ‘non-racist’ immigration controls, he was certainly not seen as in any way hostile to immigrants.

However, after the 2014 beating and the evidence disillusionment with the left that came flowed from it, Galloway adapted to the right-wing populism that came to be expressed over Brexit and the rise of Trump. He joined with Farage during the 2016 Brexit referendum in something called the Grassroots Alliance. Later, as the various clamours in favour of a second referendum were made from elements of the Labour Party, cynical mischief-making from the right (e.g. Starmer) and genuine disquiet at the anti-immigrant implications of Brexit from the left, Galloway volunteered to become a candidate for Farage’s short-lived Brexit Party in the 2019 General Election. Such was the disquiet at these positions that it appeared reasonable to us, even as the Corbyn movement was coming to an end, to be opposed to votes for Galloway’s new-born Workers Party organisation, originally born in a bloc with the Brar family’s Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), a hard-line Maoist-Stalinist group. They has also at times shown softness on ‘working-class’ right-wing populism, and hailed Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election as a “blow” against “the imperialist system” and for “progressive humanity”.

Right Populism and the Working Class

This adaptation by some of the most militant, anti-imperialist elements on the left to right-wing populism is paradoxical, but also has its roots in the contradictions and decline of neoliberalism, which have given rise to working class support for this kind of right-wing populism in the first place. The biggest problem that has militated in the 20^th Century against working class revolution and socialism in the advanced, imperialist countries, has been the subliminal understanding by a labour aristocracy – a well paid layer of the working class – that they benefited from the activities of imperialism in plundering and unequal exchange, sucking value out of the economies of poorer, underdeveloped capitalist countries and providing a material basis for social gains and benefits for militant workers in the advanced countries. This sizeable labour aristocracy, and the pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist labour bureaucracy that sits on top of it, is a major force in determining the pro-imperialist politics of the trade unions and what Lenin called ‘bourgeois labour parties’ in the imperialist countries (Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, 1916). But recently there has been a change, as the large-scale export of productive, industrial jobs from particularly the main Anglo-Saxon imperialist countries, the US and Britain, to the Far East (particularly China) has hollowed out that social reality and represents a massive attack on the living standards of workers who were very much influenced by that sense of benefitting from imperialism.

The result has been a growing “workless class” of formerly proud and militant workers, now degraded and impoverished, with their families prey to opiates and the like, who previously supported the bourgeois labour parties (or the left of the Democrats in the US, who sometimes used to pretend to be something similar). They adopted an imperial nostalgia, demanding their old living standards back again. Hence “Make America Great Again” as the slogan of the Trumpists in the US. The resentment of many US workers against China is fuelled by the fact that China has become a major industrial power, the “workshop of the world” as an unintended and unexpected by-product of this imperialist profiteering operation, which was originally intended to be at the expense of the Chinese workers also. But China’s hybrid character as a former workers state with considerable still state ownership and centralised economic management overlaying its own capitalism, allowed them to resist being screwed in this way. Hence the violent anti-Chinese resentment that fires up the Trumpists in the US. And working class support for Brexit here had a similar basis – the real thrust of working-class right-wing support for Farage was ‘Make Britain Great Again’, very similar to Trumpism.

The adaptation of Galloway (and the CPGB-ML) to Brexit, Trumpism and the like is based on a misunderstanding and one-sided interpretation of a complex development that has arisen in real life. Right-wing populism is a post-imperial delusion. But it can also be a short-lived phase of disillusionment and trauma for sections of the working class. Brexit in Britain has not benefitted the working class at all. It has further degraded working class people. The ultimate outcome of this in terms of working-class consciousness has to be a realisation that this demand that the neoliberal imperialist bourgeoisie give back to the working class their former privileged status, simply will not happen. It is materially impossible. Once that becomes obvious to the masses – and it will – then the inescapable conclusion can only be that working class people in Britain and the US have a common interest with the working class of countries that have been oppressed and plundered by imperialism. It must lead to those sections of the proletariat in advanced countries, who previously saw their interests as counterposed to those of workers in the oppressed countries, joining a real international proletarian movement.

A Genuine Workers Party is Needed, not a Bourgeois Workers’ Party

So why this apparent digression? The reason should be obvious. The two parties whose leading figures have founded No to Nato, No to War, both aspire to found real ‘Workers’ and ‘Socialist Labour’ Parties. This is crucial. We need to properly understand the roots of working-class illusions in right-wing populism in order to overcome both those illusions, and the confusions of some on the left who have at time been influenced by such illusions. As a Marxist tendency, we seek to replace the bourgeois Labour Party that the British working class has been saddled with for more than a century, with the genuine article, a real workers party. We can only welcome this development and regard it as a positive step.

It does appear that the outbreak of the imperialist proxy war in Ukraine has sharply pulled Galloway back to the left, to found a coalition along with the leading active representative of the SLP, that itself, like the movement against the Iraq War in the early 2000s, has the potential not merely to generate another anti-war protest movement, but to generate a new class party. This weakness towards populism and Trumpism, with its chauvinist element, needs to be overcome in further political struggles.

Galloway’s speech at the No 2 Nato conference on 25^th February, where he fervently welcomed, as a likely outcome of a defeat for US imperialist hegemony, the global defeat of imperialism, is very much at odds with the thrust of Brexitism and Trumpism. The outbreak of the war in Ukraine has led to Galloway being galvanised as an opponent of imperialism and his speech of 25^th Feb itself points to that next stage in the evolution of working class consciousness, if the implications are properly understood:

“the Pentagon issued a warning to China three days ago before president Xi’s peace proposals, when they didn’t know what was in the peace proposals: ‘There will be consequences for China should it choose to deepen its relations with Russia’. Think of the arrogance first of all of that – we’ll come to the stupidity. But think of the arrogance, of one superpower, threatening a second superpower, with ‘consequences’ were it to decide to have more friendly relations with a third party. The sense of exceptionalism you must feel to think you are entitled to do that. To think that you are entitled to warn other countries of who they can be friends with.

“But let’s turn to the stupidity of it. You know from Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger onwards it was the policy of the United States to keep Russia and China as far apart as it was possible to keep them, and, if possible, to keep them at each other’s throats. In the last few years the policy of the United States and NATO has made Russia and China virtually one country, certainly militarily and economically, one country, and now, they think China is going to obey orders from somebody called Anthony Blinken? The day when China could be ordered around by foreigners is OVER, OVER, OVER! Ditto South Africa. South Africa was warned ‘why are you having joint exercises with the Russian and Chinese navies?’ As the leadership in South Africa pointed out: ‘when you Western colonialist countries were supporting the apartheid dictatorship in South Africa, the only countries that stood with us were Russia and China, and you want us to consider them our enemies?’

“I’m so old, I was there. Every dinner that the African National Congress fighters ate in the bush came from Russia. Every uniform that they had, every gun that they carried, every international initiative, campaign, that they were able to mount to bring about the freedom of South Africa, came from the then Soviet Union and from China. And now you want South Africa to be an enemy of Russia and China? Are you crazy? And South Africa has said ‘No’! India has said ‘No’! Iran has said ‘No’! Latin America, from North to South, has said ‘No’! Asia has said ‘No’! The Arab world, even the Saudis, and the Kings and the Sheikhs in the desert, have said ‘No’! The world is not against Russia and China! Don’t imagine you speak for the world!

“‘The West’ – if you include in it countries that are very definitely not in the West. The last time I looked Australia is not in the West, New Zealand is not in the West. But even if you allow them to call themselves ‘The West’, is 13% of the people of the world, of the world’s population lives in what could loosely be described as ‘the West’.  And we are here to say, even in the West, there are millions and millions and millions of us who reject your domination, and your wars, and your clubs.”

We need to build No2Nato, No2War as a broad anti-war bloc to mobilise opposition to the NATO proxy war,  and we cannot be doctrinaire or purist about this. But we must also use the movement to propagate the highest level of revolutionary politics and programme, based on the elementary view that the main enemy is at home. Indeed, that was said clearly by the initiators of No2Nato on 25^th Feb. Out of such an anti-war movement a new working-class party can and must be born. Two important components of such a party are already in place in No2Nato, the SLP and Workers Party. We advocate a principled unification of them and the creation of a bigger, broader party able to appeal to more workers and with a democratic ethos, evoking Chris Williamson’s work in the Labour Party under Corbyn, that would be capable of political and programmatic development towards a genuinely communist, anti-capitalist mass party. Not another sect on the rigid model of the Third or Fourth internationals, but something that could go much further and lead masses of workers in the process, as happened in Russia once before. Nor is this going to be any parochial process, as the founding resolution of No2Nato said, it must be global. We see our work with (currently) smaller revolutionary groups around the globe in trying to cohere an international Zimmerwald type left as complementary to involvement in endeavours like this. All avenues must be explored, and the emergence of a new international movement to abolish capitalism globally is likely to be uneven. It still has to be embarked upon, and this is a start.