by Peter Gregson

Based on Pete Gregson’s talk of 30^th May 2026 at www.tiny.cc/hamastalk

In the years of Pro-Palestine demonstrations I’ve attended since Oct 7^th 2023, there is rarely a mention of the group at the core of the whole issue: Hamas. For people are fearful to talk about them. But whilst calling for support for Hamas may be illegal, seeking its de-proscription is not. The UK Government’s 2000 Terrorism act permits requesting the de-proscription of any “terrorist” group. You can’t be penalised for calling for de-proscription. Citizens have the right to appeal against proscription if you give a reason as to why its proscription affects you.

Following the events of 7^th October 2023, I did exactly that and launched a petition to the Home Secretary. Initially I tried to get the petition before Parliament using the UK Government portal but was told it was beyond Parliament’s remit! So, I launched it online on Go-Petition, promoted it using 20,000 flyers – which I took to all the demonstrations around London and Scotland – and started getting signatures.

By January, the online petition had 45,000 views and 1,410 signatures which, though fearing arrest, I took to Downing St. My two supporters and I had our photo taken outside No. 10 and were welcomed into the building by police carrying a big box with Hamas Petition written on it.

The mainstream media was completely absent, despite my mailing 270 journalists – not one of whom decided to cover it. Only Russia Today, Al Jazeera, the Canary and Middle East Monitor carried it.

I experienced no issue with the police despite threats of being arrested from two of the 650 MPs I had written to on the petition. Unhappily for these two public servants, I had broken no law.

To be clear, although I have previously been in touch with Hamas on a prior campaign to twin Edinburgh with Gaza, they did not request nor have any involvement with this one. Indeed, around this time, an organisation called Riverways Law were asked by Hamas to submit a de-proscription application.

Their submission was much more thorough than my 8-page submission to the Home Secretary. You can check it out in full on their website at https://hamascase.com. It had lots of witness statements, including from members of Hamas describing what they saw on 7th October as well as the impact de-proscription was having on people’s lives. It was a phenomenal amount of work. They asked for de-proscription on three grounds:

a.       They said the Home Secretary has a duty to prevent even a suspicion of genocide; the way that the rules are set out, it’s not that she needs to see someone committing genocide in order to stop them – if there is even a suspicion of genocide, it becomes incumbent upon her to act. But because she’s banned Hamas and Hamas is fighting genocide- proscription means she’s undermining that fight.

b.      The second issue of course was Freedom of Speech. The Qassam Brigades (the armed wing of Hamas) were banned in 2001 by Tony Blair, but the political part of Hamas was accepted by Britain as being legitimate – they were essentially the government of Gaza. It wasn’t until 2021 when Priti Patel went on holiday to Israel, met Netanyahu and banned Hamas on her return. No vote in Parliament was required. Yet as Hamas has never operated outside Palestine, there is no issue of protection within the UK. We in Britain should have a right to discuss Hamas and by banning it, the Home Secretary has taken away our freedom of speech, which is Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. So, it is the British Government who are breaking the law here.

c.       Finally, there is the lack of proportionality over banning. The Quartet (Russia, the US, UN and the EU) – set their preconditions after Hamas was democratically elected in 2006. Despite the fact that the UN has allowed the use of armed force against occupation since 1982, they said they would only engage with Hamas if they gave up arms, recognise Israel and accept all PLO/Israeli agreements that had been made in the Oslo Accords of 1993. Clearly, Hamas were never going to do that.

The Quartet later appointed Tony Blair because of his ability in Northern Ireland to get peace- which was an incredible achievement. But we got peace because we negotiated. We never asked Sinn Fein to recognise Britain’s authority over Ulster. We weren’t asking the same thing that he was then asking Hamas to do. Another example, Nelson Mandela, when he headed the armed wing of the ANC, wasn’t asked to renounce the ANC before discussing peace.

Also, Hamas is the Gaza administration- so proscription criminalises all public sector workers there. Gaza City Council has 5,000 employees, just looking after the million people who lived in Gaza City. Technically, if you send money to one of those employees- you could be supporting Hamas. So its banning is simply unjust because it criminalises a vast swathe of people. It’s also pointless because they don’t have any influence over Britain.

The 1987 charter was drafted when Hamas set itself up; there were some quite harsh things in there. It’s an Islamic resistance movement after all – but that wasn’t the full thoughts of Hamas, because it wasn’t written by all of them, it was written by one man. So, in 2017 they released a clarification – their Principles and Policies. In it, they even said they would settle for a “Hudna”, a truce, along the same lines as the UN and UK demands – a return to the 1967 borders, Israel giving up the land it had taken then, giving up that occupation. Hamas also wanted the Palestinian prisoners to be released and the Palestinians who were driven out in 1948 to be given the right of return, as the UN had called for in resolution 194. But the Hamas offer of a truce was completely ignored; this proposal wasn’t covered in the West at all.

Each year Hamas calls for elections; but Fatah each year denies them. It’s true that Hamas would prefer Sharia law, but it has said it will go with the majority in a democratic Palestine. It seeks the end of Israel but would live alongside Jews who gave up Zionism. But none of this was or is talked about.

We get a very twisted view of Hamas. A brief look at its history; it all began with the advent of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 in Egypt; which was then constituted in Palestine in 1946. The Brotherhood concentrated on philanthropic acts; setting up mosques, schools, universities and so on. Back then Russia and China supported the liberation movements all over the world and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) benefitted from this. As the Soviet Union fell, political Islam rose. In 1987 much of the Brotherhood realised it could not refuse to fight any longer and so with the first intifada in 1987, Hamas emerged. Initially, Israel discreetly supported them as a counter to the secular PLO. But in 1993 matters exploded after Israeli Baruch Goldstein killed 29 worshippers at a mosque in Hebron (Goldstein is a hero nowadays to people like Ben-Gvir), he committed mass murder and injured hundreds more. As a response, Hamas declared they would retaliate, using two suicide bombs in buses against civilians in 1994. This resulted in their proscription by the EU and US.

In 1993, Israel and the PLO had signed the Oslo accords without most Palestinians knowing about it.  The PLO was led by Fatah, Arafat’s party.

Hamas rejected these accords and wouldn’t get involved in the first elections but chose to give the new Palestine Authority (PA) a chance. The PA began then doing what Israel had said they should do in the agreement which was to jail people who were resisting Israel’s rule. The PA started jailing Hamas supporters, doing Israel’s dirty work. Also, it was becoming quite corrupt.

Then Arafat died in 2004 and Abbas stood for election. Hamas boycotted this, because any president of theirs would have had to negotiate with Israel, which they did not wish to do- so Fatah’s Abbas took power. But in 2006 Hamas decided they would stand for election because they fundamentally believe in democracy. They did stand, winning handsomely. But Israel and the US immediately set about undermining the Hamas Government, which Fatah had also rejected, because they didn’t want to give up power. Abbas had his own US-trained police force versus Hamas’ police force; this was just a recipe for disaster. There were many killings of Hamas, then revenge killings; eventually it became clear that Fatah was planning a coup, leading to Hamas seizing power in Gaza. Thereafter, Israel refused to negotiate over Palestinian statehood. They employed a catch 22; they said they wouldn’t negotiate with Hamas, because they were “terrorists”; and they wouldn’t negotiate with the PA because it didn’t reflect all Palestinians. There was no way to win because Israel had every excuse in the book for refusing the things that they had agreed to.

In the West Bank, as expected, the PA became responsible for arresting Hamas supporters, making them very unpopular. Note that Hamas made repeated attempts over the years at peaceful protest, culminating in the 2018 Great March of Return. It was just so shocking; people were getting murdered by snipers just because they wanted to go home, back through the fence. Many became aware of the true nature of the Israeli regime at this time.  Also note that over the 20 years from 2021, 44 Israelis were killed by rockets fired from Gaza; over the same period, Israel killed many, many thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.

But Israel continued to allow Qatar to fund Hamas; suitcases full of dollar bills went into Gaza because Israel wanted to keep Hamas going, as then they would then conflict with Fatah (the PA), who were being funded by the EU and the US. The more they became polarised, the more the Israelis benefitted.

This carried on until Donald Trump set up the 2020 Abraham Accords in an attempt to “normalise” relations between the Arab states and Israel, seeking the former’s recognition and trade with Israel. Bahrain, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates all signed and in 2023 it looked like Saudi Arabia was going to be next, even though up until then the Saudis had said they wouldn’t normalise unless Palestine attained  statehood. But the more the Israelis promised the Saudis- their own nuclear power stations for example- the more the Saudis were tempted, which gave the strong impression that Palestine was being negotiated away. Hamas felt it had to put Palestine back in the public eye. Also, there was a lot of anger about Israeli actions at Al Aqsa mosque in 2023, where IDF soldiers attacked people at worship during Ramadan.

Hamas launched their strike pre-emptively as they became aware that Israel was about to attack again and take the Hamas leaders. In this strike, their stated aim was to capture soldiers- as the going rate for one Israeli soldier was about one thousand Palestinians, as evidenced by the various previous prisoner exchanges that had taken place.

The plan therefore was to take captives. On 7^th Oct Hamas launched an attack with the IDF falling back quickly, which Hamas didn’t expect. They then moved to settlements seeking more captives. Israel now employed the Hannibal directive.  Clearly, the damage to cars at the scene could not have been done by guys on motorbikes with Kalashnikovs and were likely done by Hellfire missiles from IDF Apache helicopters. These cars were completely and utterly burned out. The cars had been taking Israelis back to Gaza as captives, but the IDF bombed them. Damage from IDF tank fire of kibbutz homes was also apparent. Whether there was a Palestinian in there and some Israelis, the IDF didn’t care, they just bombed the whole building because they knew that they could blame Hamas. It’s believed as many as 800 Israelis were killed by the IDF. As more and more evidence has come to light following the attack, the claims of mass rape have by now been largely dismissed, despite the media frenzy. There were 19 breaches of the border fence, through which lots of people flooded out of Gaza, not just Hamas. The psychological state of these Gazans can be guessed at, after being starved and bombed for twenty years. They attacked the Nova festival that Hamas says they didn’t know was taking place.

The US and UK accepted Israel’s narrative. And now Israel uses the terrorist label to justify a genocide. And most Israelis have gone along with this because, they think “Oh no, they’re going to kill us all”. It’s got to that level of terror amongst your average Israeli – that they think “we can’t do anything but kill Palestinians, because otherwise we’re dead”. Which is exactly what Netanyahu and the Zionists want.

Even in this country, they brew up terror amongst Jewish people, because they know that just keeps the whole ridiculous ball rolling – and nothing sells newspapers like antisemitism.

As long as Hamas represents the majority view in Palestine, any negotiations would need to include Hamas, for any resulting deal to have any legitimacy within Palestine. Various UK Lords- Lord Peter Hain, Lord Rickets, have declared that wiping out Hamas is impossible. Even Tony Blair said it was a mistake to ban Hamas. Yet, these issues are shoved under the carpet and what we have is a very silent acceptance of proscription. But 80% of countries in the world do not label Hamas as terrorists. The UN does not define Hamas as terrorists. It’s actually the UK, the EU and the US that do so, which gives Israel all the cover it needs to continue killing Palestinians.

Pro-Palestine demonstrations are all very good but are not really getting at the root of what’s going on; Palestinians are fighting for their lives and land, and we should not ignore the fact that Hamas are fighting for them.

We must keep calling for de-proscription. If you agree, please sign the petition at www.tiny.cc/hamas and then we can start getting people to write to their MPs and MSPs. If enough people bug their politicians, it may succeed, not tomorrow perhaps, but if we persist for as long as it takes, it may lead to the establishment of a new democratic state for the most persecuted and oppressed people on this planet.

The following is the notes/text of a presentation delivered by a Consistent Democrats speaker on 7th June on this chapter. The recording of the presentation and discussion is here.

This chapter is magnificent, in my estimation, and the core of this work by Lenin. The Chapter, and arguably the book itself (since this is its core) is a restatement of a crucial work by Marx, which was never published until after Marx’s death (the Critique of the Gotha Programme – published in 1891, whereas Marx died in 1883).

It is in four discreet sections, which stand together in explaining this subject matter in a fairly straightforward, but rich and subtle manner. It explains the stages of the emergence of socialist society out of capitalism via the dictatorship of the proletariat, and then the later emergence of Communism out of the socialism that it is possible to build today. There is no need to reinvent the wheel or go into a learned set of extended these on this. So, I don’t propose to go through this in great depth, but rather to give a sketch of the main points. What I would advise, however, is to study this chapter in particular several times. It contains the political ballast to not only understand the whole of Lenin’s small book, but there is also a linear progression from some of the material particularly in section 3 of this book, to understand Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, which we studied earlier.

The other point that is worth noting is that none of this is developed in terms of any particular national terrain. It is taken as given that that we are discussing the overcoming of capitalism as a whole, and not any nationally-isolated posing of the question. In this regard, this citation of Marx is significant:

“…the different states of the different civilized countries, in spite of their motley diversity of form, all have this in common, that they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed. They have, therefore, also certain essential characteristics in common. In this sense it is possible to speak of the ‘present-day state’, in contrast with the future, in which its present root, bourgeois society, will have died off.” (Critique of the Gotha Programme)

It is clear that this is about developed capitalism in its entirety, and none of this implies any national isolationism or perspective of socialism in one country.

The first part of this is on the Presentation of the Question by Marx. Lenin briefly looks at two letters, Marx’s letter to Wilhelm Bracke of May 5, 1875, and Engels’ letter to August Bebel of March 28, 1875, which address basically two facets of the same question in different ways – the nature of the state in the immediate aftermath of a working-class revolution. Engels argued against Bebel, who was fond of agitation in favour of such things as a ‘people’s state’ or a ‘free state’, that the state was not a weapon of liberation, but something that our aim is to abolish. Engels argued that socialists should stop using demands about the state in agitation, and instead talk about the ‘community’.

Whereas Marx had written at some length about the ‘future state in communist society’, which would seem to imply the opposite of Engels’s argument. Lenin pointed out that they were just emphasising particular aspects of their joint views to address different questions, and were united in their basic position. Lenin thus quotes Marx:

“The question then arises: what transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousandfold combination of the word people with the word state. (ibid)

So, you have the three-pointed scientific answer Marx produced, and which Lenin elaborates and popularises in this work. Lenin quotes Marx

“Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

and continues:

“Previously the question was put as follows: to achieve its emancipation, the proletariat must overthrow the bourgeoisie, win political power and establish its revolutionary dictatorship.

“Now the question is put somewhat differently: the transition from capitalist society–which is developing towards communism–to communist society is impossible without a ‘political transition period’, and the state in this period can only be the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

He notes such achievements as the SPD, in organising “…a larger proportion of the workers into a political party than anywhere else in the world.”.  One million in party itself, and 3 million in unions, out of 15 million.

 Yet notwithstanding this:

“If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty”–supposedly petty–details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for ‘paupers’!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,–we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.

“Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in analysing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!”

He notes that capitalist democracy has this character, and does not proceed, as the opportunists say, towards greater democracy. Instead:

“.. forward development, i.e., development towards communism, proceeds through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and cannot do otherwise, for the resistance of the capitalist exploiters cannot be broken by anyone else or in any other way.

“…Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence.”

He quotes Engels to Bebel: “the proletariat needs the state, not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist”. Thus:

“Furthermore, during the transition from capitalism to communism suppression is still necessary, but it is now the suppression of the exploiting minority by the exploited majority. A special apparatus, a special machine for suppression, the ‘state’, is still necessary, but this is now a transitional state. It is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word; for the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday is comparatively so easy, simple and natural a task that it will entail far less bloodshed than the suppression of the risings of slaves, serfs or wage-laborers, and it will cost mankind far less.”

But there is a fundamental difference between this, and the bourgeois state:

“…the exploiters are unable to suppress the people without a highly complex machine for performing this task, but the people can suppress the exploiters even with a very simple ‘machine’, almost without a ‘machine’, without a special apparatus, by the simple organization of the armed people.”

The ‘machine’ is the armed people – we are talking about a semi-state. So, then Lenin goes (with Marx) into the first phase of communist society. Again, he quotes Marx:

“What we have to deal with here [in analysing the programme of the workers’ party] is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it comes.”

In particular, he notes that the revolution expropriates capitalist property, and each worker receives the share of the product of society proportionate to that which they contributed. This is formal equality.

“The means of production are no longer the private property of individuals. The means of production belong to the whole of society. Every member of society, performing a certain part of the socially-necessary work, receives a certificate from society to the effect that he has done a certain amount of work. And with this certificate he receives from the public store of consumer goods a corresponding quantity of products. After a deduction is made of the amount of labour which goes to the public fund, every worker, therefore, receives from society as much as he has given to it.”

But it is not real equality, because the individuals receiving these equal shares, are themselves unequal. “But people are not alike: one is strong, another is weak; one is married, another is not; one has more children, another has less, and so on” Therefore this:

 “…is an application of an equal measure to different people who in fact are not alike, are not equal to one another. That is why the ‘equal right’ is violation of equality and an injustice. In fact, everyone, having performed as much social labour as another, receives an equal share of the social product “

What this leads to is a paradox; that under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and even under the lower stage of communism, such inequalities, which Lenin acknowledges are unjust, are still inescapable and cannot be simply wished away. This Marx, and then Lenin, calls “bourgeois right”. This is part of material reality. Lenin again quotes Marx as to why that is:

 “… these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged, after prolonged birth pangs, from capitalist society. Law can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”

Thus, the state, even the bourgeois state (or part of its social function), cannot be abolished by decree alone. It continues to exist, and must continue to exist in some form, until social development renders it superfluous in a more distant future:

“In its first phase, or first stage, communism cannot as yet be fully mature economically and entirely free from traditions or vestiges of capitalism. Hence the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains ‘the narrow horizon of bourgeois law’. Of course, bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law.

“It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!”

This became the crucial issue after the Russian revolution, when the proletariat conquered power in a huge, backward, overwhelmingly peasant country. Though in formal terms the state was the owner of the entire collectivised economy, the ‘bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie’ had its power enhanced by the difference of material productivity between Soviet Russia and its imperialist enemies. The only basis upon which the power of this necessary apparatus could diminish was by a harmonious development of the productive forces, which presupposed the joint efforts of the proletariats of all, or at least several, advanced countries. But with the first, materially backward, workers state plunged into political isolation, the ‘bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie’ that Marx spoke of and Lenin amplified/elaborated, became relatively more powerful against the masses, and were able to politically expropriate the working class, while maintaining the property relations of the proletarian revolution, for several decades. This is all explicable, and explained, by this chapter, in essence and in embryo.

The flip side of this is that given a sufficient development of the productive forces, the state, including the administration of distribution we are talking about, obviously ceases to be economically justified:

“Democracy means equality. The great significance of the proletariat’s struggle for equality and of equality as a slogan will be clear if we correctly interpret it as meaning the abolition of classes. But democracy means only formal equality. And as soon as equality is achieved for all members of society in relation to ownership of the means of production, that is, equality of labour and wages, humanity will inevitably be confronted with the question of advancing further from formal equality to actual equality, i.e., to the operation of the rule ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim we do not and cannot know…”

“When the majority of the people begin independently and everywhere to keep such accounts and exercise such control over the capitalists (now converted into employees) and over the intellectual gentry who preserve their capitalist habits, this control will really become universal, general, and popular; and there will be no getting away from it, there will be ‘nowhere to go’.

“The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labour and pay.

“But this “factory” discipline, which the proletariat, after defeating the capitalists, after overthrowing the exploiters, will extend to the whole of society, is by no means our ideal, or our ultimate goal. It is only a necessary step for thoroughly cleansing society of all the infamies and abominations of capitalist exploitation, and for further progress”.

And quoting to conclude this:

“From the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority, have learned to administer the state themselves, have taken this work into their own hands, have organized control over the insignificant capitalist minority, over the gentry who wish to preserve their capitalist habits and over the workers who have been thoroughly corrupted by capitalism–from this moment the need for government of any kind begins to disappear altogether. The more complete the democracy, the nearer the moment when it becomes unnecessary. The more democratic the “state” which consists of the armed workers, and which is “no longer a state in the proper sense of the word”, the more rapidly every form of state begins to wither away.

“Then the door will be thrown wide open for the transition from the first phase of communist society to its higher phase, and with it to the complete withering away of the state.”

Q1: Have the Socialist Federation/Members Charter and Your Party All-London Delegate Assembly Proscribed the Consistent Democrats and Liaison Committee for the Fourth International?

Q2. What Happened to Opposition to Anti-Communist Bans and Proscriptions?

We reproduce a statement in Portuguese, with English translation, from Humberto Rodrigues, leading spokesperson for Emancipação do Trabalho, Brazilian section of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, about the recent exclusions of our leading spokesperson by USFI and allied leftists from events relating to the left of Your Party:

“Neste momento, apresar das expulsões, golpes, calúnias e injustas difamações, os camaradas da LCFI britânica, mais do que nunca, devem estar orgulhosos do nome que se batizaram: Democratas Consistentes. São, na prática, os mais consequentes entre os comunistas e entre os liberais na defesa da democracia e da liberdade de expressão dos trabalhadores dentro de suas organizações políticas e na luta de partidos. De nossa parte, da LCFI do Brasil, estamos orgulhosos de sermos irmãos de DC, os melhores lutadores da esquerda da Grã Bretanha na luta contra o sionismo, que é a vanguarda mundial do nazismo de nosso tempo.”

Or in English translation:

“At this moment, despite expulsions, coups, betrayals, slanders and unjust defamations, the comrades of the British LCFI, more than ever, must be proud of the name they have baptised: Consistent Democrats. They are, in practice, the most consistent among communists and liberals in the defence of democracy and freedom of expression of workers within their political organisations and in the struggle of parties. For our part, from LCFI Brazil, we are proud to be brothers of DC, the best fighters of the left of Great Britain in the fight against Zionism, which is the world vanguard of Nazism of our time.”

Your Party Members’ Charter leaders make their choice

The Members’ Charter leaders have blown it. The initiative itself was positive enough, and we in the Consistent Democrats supported it from the beginning. In the aftermath of the scandals over the smears against Zarah Sultana from Corbyn and co. over the membership system, to establish a system Corbyn and his acolytes could control, which led to the crippling of party democracy, branches without any membership data, rigged CEC elections (where only the pro-Corbyn slate had access to the data) and many other horrors, the time was overdue for an initiative regarding party democracy. The Members Charter seemed to be it, it gathered over 600 signatures before the local elections, demanding a set of basic rights for members/activists, with an ultimatum of May 16 for the Corbyn-led leadership to concede or conferences would be called. The YP CEC’s Corbynite majority responded to that with proscriptions against organised Marxists being members of YP. So, the conferences were called, beginning with the pre-conference on 31^st May with the aim of a fully operative conference in September.

The vision supposedly was parallel to that of Zarah Sultana – a party of the whole left. No bans or proscriptions of socialist groups. Though comrade Sultana does not appear to have been involved in this initiative, for whatever reason. Maybe that is even fortuitous. Because when it came to the conference itself, the initiators messed it up. A motion was submitted to the conference by ourselves about party democracy, that based itself on the ethos of ‘freedom of criticism, unity in action’ – full freedom of debate among socialists of whatever description, subject only to refraining from public criticism of actual agreed actions while such actions are in progress. This was the guiding principle of Russian social democracy. The other element of the motion, that was just as crucial, was that there was one exception proposed to this ethos of debate – Zionist views were to be proscribed:

“…we must not allow political Zionists to operate within our party, given the strategy of that current to infiltrate all kinds of different parties for their own genocidal ends, which has led to the shameful support by Labour to the genocide in Gaza.”

It does appear that this proposal detonated a storm, and was felt to be acutely objectionable by the core of those involved, including some leading elements not only in the Members Charter initiative, but also of the All-London Delegate Assembly (ALDA). We in the Consistent Democrats were always aware that many of the opportunist elements on the British far left do not like our analysis and position on Zionism, which is in part built on an understanding that the ‘outsize’ (in the words of Norman Finkelstein) preponderance of Zionist Jews in the wealthiest parts of the imperialist ruling classes of the West, explains much of the power of Zionists to dictate what happens in the West politically. Right now, that is centre stage, as Zionist forces are the instigators of major attacks on the democratic rights of Palestinians across the imperialist West in the middle of what is becoming a many-sided genocide of Palestinians and other Arabs, intimately connected with the US/Israel war on Iran, where Israel has pulled the US into an unwinnable conflict.

Given their record of infiltration and witch hunting in all political parties, including those of the workers movement, any left-wing party today that stands for class independence must exclude Zionists. Some signatories of the Members’ Charter responded to this by picking a fight with one of our comrades initially about our defence of David Miller (a particular bugbear of the capitulatory centrist left). The subsequent discussion, in which our agreed position on Zionism was argued, then produced from supporters of the Anti-Capitalist Resistance typical hysteria about our alleged ‘anti-semitism’ for presenting a coherent Marxist explanation of the power of the Israel lobby. There is no need to go into details here, a full account of what transpired, and indeed screen rendering of the discussion itself, can be found here:

“A Party of the Whole Left” betrayed: USFI NATO Socialists Undermine Zarah Sultana’s vision!

The original mover of the motion, comrade Ian D, was excluded from the conference for the usual nonsensical allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ from the capitulatory third-camp sects and their camp-followers. The seconder of the motion, Paul C, was allowed to propose it in his place and made excellent, brave contributions arguing for our motion, along with some other sympathetic comrades. He also made a point of order against the smears of ‘anti-Semitism’ against our comrades. Our motion was defeated with 17 votes for, 29 votes against, and 36 declared abstentions. There were at least 20 more undeclared abstentions, as the attendance at the meeting was significantly over 100. This is hardly an overwhelming mandate for those who excluded our comrade for arguing our agreed position on Zionism – the logic of that is to proscribe the Consistent Democrats as a group. If they do that, particularly as they have just fought to not proscribe Zionism, it is obvious what their real position is both on Zionism, and on bans and proscriptions on leftists.

The way is thus open for the new Socialist Federation, assuming it makes any progress, to develop a ‘Friends of Israel’ trend within it, as have all major political parties, including most recently the Greens, and now Reform. For this Federation, possibly the forerunner of a party, such a ‘Friends of Israel’ forerunner is already present with the Alliance for Workers Liberty, or perhaps also Anti-Capitalist Resistance – they work together a lot. The latter are certainly vociferous in seeking to ban Marxist analysis of the Israel lobby, and have a record of supporting Israel’s favoured wars in Libya and Syria. More verbally radical elements will pretend to oppose Zionism and NATO, while proscribing the most consistent opponents of these things, which is a classic example of what Trotsky once said about centrism: “Revolutionary in words, opportunist in deeds”.

Our comrades will continue to work constructively in YP and with all those in the new Federation who are open to creating a genuinely democratic, working-class party that must be anti-NATO and anti-Zionist in words and deeds, to be a real alternative. What we have now is really not good enough.

Unite the struggles of the workers and peasants of Bolivia! All solidarity with the struggle of the Bolivian masses! – Declaration of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International -LCFI

The government of Rodrigo Paz Pereira (of the Christian Democratic Party) is at war with the workers of Bolivia.

Just weeks after taking power, the government issued a landmark decree ending the state subsidy for diesel and gasoline. This measure, which had kept prices frozen since 2006, led to significant cost increases, fueling inflation that is hitting workers hard. Diesel and premium gasoline saw a sharp increase (diesel went from 3.72 to 9.80 bolivianos per liter). This immediately raised freight and urban and interprovincial fares.

Furthermore, the Paz government promoted a so-called “medium-sized property law,” which aimed to reclassify Bolivian peasant landholdings from smallholdings (with guaranteed protection against confiscation for debt) to medium-sized properties, making them liable to confiscation for debt. This was done to serve the interests of large landowners who sought to dispossess peasants of their land.

The Bolivian Constitution expressly protects small agricultural properties as the basis of family subsistence, decreeing that they are inalienable, indivisible, and exempt from taxes. By changing their classification to “medium-sized property,” this protection disappears completely. This has generated alarm among the peasants, leading them to quickly mobilize against the law.

The measure was originally decreed by the Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB) in protest against inflation and the elimination of fuel subsidies. As the days passed, what began as a union mobilization turned into a near-total road blockade that surrounded the main cities of western Bolivia.

In this context, the struggles and demands of workers and peasants converge. Currently, there is an indefinite general strike in full swing in Bolivia, which began at the start of the month and has become increasingly radicalized with the massive participation of multiple sectors.

The government, which has declared war on the workers, is responding with repression that has already cost the lives of at least four popular activists.

The government of Rodrigo Paz seeks, above all, to transfer the burden of the crisis to the masses, to expropriate the peasants from their lands, favoring the large landowners, and to orchestrate the transfer of control of Bolivia’s strategic resources, such as lithium, to US imperialism, as part of a global maneuver to cut off supplies to the People’s Republic of China.

It is the duty of all popular fighters to stand in solidarity with the struggle of the Bolivian people.

This solidarity should be directed, above all, towards preventing neighboring far-right governments, such as Katz’s in Chile, Milei’s in Argentina, or the Bolsonaro opposition in Brazil, from collaborating with Rodrigo Paz (providing him with repressive material, even under the pretext of sending “humanitarian” aid) so that he can continue his war against the Bolivian masses.

For the unity of the workers’ and peasants’ struggles!

Down with the repressive government of Rodrigo Paz!

Active solidarity with the struggle of the Bolivian masses!

On initiative of USFI hack, ALDA and Members Charter effectively proscribe Consistent Democrats and Liaison Committee for the Fourth International

By Ian Donovan

On 25th May 2026, the Assembly Organising Committee (AOC) of the Your Party All-London Delegate Assembly (ALDA) took the decision to violate its own proclaimed purpose of building a ‘party of the whole left’, and its previously expressed opposition to bans and proscriptions on the left, by banning me, a thrice-elected delegate from the Croydon branch of Your Party, from the ALDA discussion group, and from all the ALDA WhatsApp groups. The representative of the AOC wrote:

“After discussion amongst the Assembly Organising Committee, we are removing you from the ALDA WhatsApp community.

We believe that whatever your intentions, opinions or feelings, your repeated claim that Jews are ‘overrepresented’ in the ruling class is by definition antisemitic. We cannot tolerate racism in our online community.

To clarify, the AOC does not have the remit to prevent Croydon from electing you as a delegate, but currently our remit does extend to monitoring and making decisions regarding the WhatsApp community.”

I initially responded thus:

“Your position is a disgrace. I have screenshots of the entire discussion, which clearly reveals that I was subjected to Stalinist-style abuse and cop-baiting. I also have the testimony of Alex Green in that regard. I have screenshotted it all.

My position is entirely fact- based and I was also Nazi-baited by Simon Hannah simply for correcting a factual error about the ethnic origin of a Zionist oligarch – Zuckerberg – who is deeply involved in persecution of Palestinian activists online.

Pointing out the ethnic politics of a class enemy is in no way racist and your position, that such a person should be immune from criticism of his ethnic politics and bigotry BECAUSE of his ethnic origin, it itself racist.

Far from removing racism from this discussion, you have, in fact, institutionalised Jewish chauvinism and thereby anti-Palestinian racism in ALDA.

I will be taking legal advice about this, as the association of my views with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which I am on record as condemning as a ‘warrant for genocide’, is defamatory.  I can provide chapter and verse in this going back many years. The Protocols is a document that posits the idea of a cross-class conspiracy of all Jews to enslave all of non-Jewish humanity. It is obvious to anyone with a basic familiarity with Marxism that what I am pointing out with my position on Zionism is a class-based form of ethnic-nationalist politics furthering the victimisation of an oppressed people – the Palestinians. If you cannot see the difference, this is prejudice coming from you.

The equation of the two is racist ON YOUR PART. The distinction is elementary for a Marxist. I have clearly been libelled in this discussion by Simon Hannah, and I will be exploring the possibility of legal action against him for defamation.

You should also know that I consider that Zarah Sultana was mistaken for withdrawing her threat to sue those who smeared her last September for defamation. She should have sued Corbyn and his cohorts for libel. We should not tolerate libel in our movement.”

A few days later, on 30^th May, I was banned from attending the Members Charter conference. I was one of the earliest signatories of this initiative, I was number 6 on the list, and one of the volunteers who pledged to help build it in the run up to the full conference in September. I was removed simply for my views, not for any misconduct, without any hearing of any type, as I pressed the obviously-embarrassed comrade S, one of the initiators of the Members Charter. When pushed he said there would have to be a full hearing and indeed debate on these questions after the conference. Which serious supporters of a democratic socialist party project should hold them to. Their ground for excluding me was supposedly my ‘anti-Semitism’ for noting facts that even those condemning these views had to accept were factually correct. But before going on to that, it is necessary to examine what Hannah represents politically vis-à-vis my own views and positions.

Examination of the WhatsApp discussion reproduced below shows clearly that the political positions being argued by me in this discussion are the politics of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, agreed internationally in a draft programme produced by comrades in Britain and South America in 2021. The LCFI is a strongly anti-imperialist, communist tendency that is militantly for the defence of Russia and China against the current imperialist Cold War. We still consider China to be a deformed workers state, albeit with significant differences from earlier manifestations of that phenomenon, more resembling the programme of Bukharin than Stalin since 1979. We consider Russia to be a relatively new phenomenon: a weak form of capitalism that would be dependent/semi colonial were it not for major deformations on it derived from 74 years of existence as a post-capitalist workers state, bureaucratically deformed for most of that period up to 1991, when the workers state collapsed.

We consider Russia to be a new variant of what Trotsky in an earlier context called combined and uneven development – the interpenetration of different modes of production to produce a distinctive social formation. Putin’s Russia is the dialectical opposite of Tsarist Russia, which combined feudal despotism with a stunted form of capitalism largely imported by the Tsarist state. A bourgeois state like Russia today with ‘socialist’ deformations is a manifestation of the fact that the counterrevolution that took place in the USSR in 1991 was not fully consummated. In the Yeltsin period of neo-liberal shock treatment in the 1990s, several million former Soviet workers died from malnutrition, suicidal despair and deprivation of healthcare (and life expectancy fell by 5 years).

At the end of the 1990s Yeltsin was forced out by a popular backlash that the apparatus of the former workers state was able to put itself at the head of. That apparatus had remained substantially intact, and as the remnants of a Stalinist labour bureaucracy, it still had sufficient links with the masses to allow them to force a partial retreat from capitalist restoration. That is the root of Putin’s administration and also of its unprecedented popularity among the Russian masses. Under Putin, the terrible attacks of neoliberalism have been substantially reversed and Russian life expectancy has been more than restored to its levels before the neoliberal shock. And this new kind of deformed non-imperialist semi-capitalism is a natural ally of China’s Bukharinised deformed workers state, and between them and their Iranian ally they are now in the process of delivering the greatest defeat to US imperialism (and its smaller ‘Siamese twin’ Zionist Israel) in its history.

My main antagonist in the dispute was Simon Hannah, who is a prominent supporter of ‘Anti-Capitalist Resistance’, now the British section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI).  The main reason for this digression about Russia and China is to underline the difference between our politics and those of Hannah, the USFI, and the ACR. This organisation has a many decades-long history of betrayals and is among those who have brought the worst discredit on the name of Trotskyism, associating it around the world with support for NATO and its imperialist proxy wars. Particularly its support for the proxy war in Ukraine, its support for US imperialist aggression (in part on Israel’s behalf) in the Middle East (directly in Libya, by proxy in Syria). Then there is its virulent Russophobia and Sinophobia, branding Russia and China as ‘imperialist powers’, and equivalent enemies of the world working class to US imperialism, NATO, and Israel. This people are effectively a pro-NATO fifth column in Your Party, and in the Grassroots Left in particular.

USFI: Pro-NATO Russophobes, Sinophobes and Crypto-Zionists

Hannah’s and the USFI’s arch Russophobic and Sinophobic views are summed in an article by him: “Revolutionary Defeatism: Today and Yesterday” from April 2025, where he characterises Russia and China as “imperialist powers” and says:

“The essential disagreement is over the degree to which Ukraine has a right to defend itself from an invasion by an imperialist power. Some on the “Left” are cheerleading Russia and believe this is a war waged by Russia to denazify Ukraine. I won’t deal with that argument because it is so obviously ridiculous.” (https://anticapitalistresistance.org/revolutionary-defeatism-yesterday-and-today/)

ACR support NATO’s losing Nazi-conducted proxy war in Ukraine, initially targeted against the Russian-speaking people of the South-East half of Ukraine, particularly the Donbass but really encompassing the region (roughly) South East of a line drawn between Odessa and Kharkov, which involves the persecution of those Russophone populations. This was engineered by the US and NATO with the NED-funded Maidan coup in 2014, that overthrew the elected president of Ukraine, abolished constitutional language equality and engaged in systematic repression against Russian speakers, with similar aspirations as Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Zelensky himself has said that he wants Ukraine to become a ‘Big Israel’; he made that clear with his ‘solidarity’ with the Zionists’ Gaza genocidal operation since October 2023. This repression of Russian speakers was always intended to provoke a NATO proxy war with Russia itself. Hannah clearly supports that repression, which has been carried out by Nazi militia such as the Azov, Aidan, Kraken Brigades etc which are a major part of Ukraine’s forces. His screed does not even mention the rights of this Russian-speaking population to exist, let alone to speak their language and self-determine, from which it is reasonable to conclude that he does not consider they have any such rights.

He goes on to attack those leftists who are neutral in NATO wars from Serbia in the 1990s to Syria today from a pro-NATO standpoint, saying

“Again, who provides weapons to a national liberation movement or a country resisting imperialist invasion is a secondary question to the fact of the legitimate struggle itself. It was right for the Kosovars to get weapons from the West in the 1990s. It was right for the Syrian resistance and the Kurds to get weapons during the Syrian revolution. Do these weapons come with strings attached? Sometimes, we cannot ignore the autonomy of people fighting a legitimate struggle for freedom because of imperialist machinations.” (ibid)

This is a manifesto of NATO ‘socialism’. Every one of these ‘struggles’ involved imperialist crimes against the peoples targeted: the large-scale NATO use of Depleted Uranium weapons against Serbia in 1999 was a crime similar to the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. For all the NATO propaganda about Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the main victims have been the Serb population there. As for Syria, ACR are supporters of the supposed ‘Syrian Revolution’ which after the first naïve flush of the Arab Spring in 2011 was co-opted by NATO and Zionism. In early 2025 this ‘revolution’ brought to power Ahmad Al Shara’a (aka “Julani”), who was one of the founders of ISIS in Syria. Then moving through an array of al Qaeda-related splinter groups to become the thinly disguised communal terrorist group HTS, which now holds power and foments pogroms against minorities all over Syria, with the approval of Trump, Starmer and Netanyahu. These reactionary jihadists were just mercenaries for the US, Israel and other stooges such as Saudi Arabia – there was no democratic content to their war for the West. Such a wonderful ‘revolutionary outcome’!

Then there is his brazen defence of the USFI’s support for the imperialist invasion of Libya in 2011:

“Sensing an opportunity to overthrow a regime that had often been a thorn in the side of the West, NATO intervened in support of the uprising, providing air support to prevent their total annihilation by Gaddafi’s forces. This wasn’t a celebration of popular revolt by Western imperialism, but a pragmatic calculation that overthrowing Gaddafi was in the interests of the Western imperialists. It was also in the interests of Libyans as well, of course.” (ibid)

This NATO supporter has no more respect for the rights of Libyans than he does for Donbass people or Syrians. Despite the many despotic flaws of Gaddafi, his regime used oil revenues to create the most developed social welfare system in Africa by far, including such things as free electricity, interest-free loans, housing for all, free education – which actually led to a massive rise in literacy rates in a formerly illiterate country during his rule. And much more. (See https://globhistory.org/en/article/liviya/socialnye_reformy_livii) These social gains were blown away by the imperialist invasion; after that Gaddafi’s Islamic left populism was replaced by a total collapse into warlordism, and even slave markets for black Africans. Far from being in the ‘interests of Libyans’, the imperialist invasion was a pestilence on Libya. One can only think that someone who cheers for such things, as well as Nazi terror in the Donbass, and the rise of the pogromist Al Shara’a to power in Syria, has a truly foul contempt for those peoples outside of the imperialist West who dare to stand up to NATO and their frequent partners in crime, the Zionist rulers of Israel.

So back to the Hannah-led witchhunt in ALDA’s discussion list.  The discussion was on the material base of Zionism in the imperialist countries, and the views of the LCFI, which I have been a supporter of since 2015, are laid out on in the draft programme that the LCFI’s international leadership agreed in 2021, including the following passage on Zionism:

“One other crucial post World War II development is the creation of Israel, a new transplanted imperialist formation in the Middle East, that expropriated the Palestinian Arab people of their homeland and through mass expulsion and sporadic massacres, turned around three quarters of them into stateless refugees. The reactionary role of Zionism today is completely at odds with the progressive, vanguard role that Jewish intellectuals and militants played in revolutionary and democratic movements against feudalism in Europe, and in the early socialist and communist movements, which was itself a product of the universal ethos of the Jews as a qualitatively more internationalised population than any of their contemporaries in the period of bourgeois revolutions and the early period of the workers movement. This progressive history was negated by the extermination of many of the progressive, anti-Zionist and revolutionary Jews by Nazi anti-Semitism in WWII, which allowed Zionism, as a reactionary, imperialist solution to the historical oppression of the Jews, to become dominant.  The Palestinian Arab question is one of the most explosive and crucial national questions on the planet. The slow-motion Zionist genocide of the Palestinians, which could easily escalate, is symbolised by the repeated butchery of the people of Gaza and the ongoing annexation of the West Bank. Paradoxically, this has much in common with the persecution of the Jews by anti-Semites in Europe that the Zionists exploited and made use of many desperate European Jews as cannon fodder for their racist colonial endeavour at the time of Israel’s foundation.  The demand for the full right to return of the Palestinian Arabs and the replacement of Israel with a multi-ethnic workers state of Palestine ruled by the Arab majority is a basic democratic demand and the concrete expression of the Permanent Revolution. It can only be achieved with the revolutionary aid of the Arab, Persian, Turkish and other working classes of the whole Middle Eastern region.

“Israel has a unique relationship with the traditional imperialist powers particularly in North America and Europe, by virtue of the Jewish-Zionist caste within the bourgeoisies of those countries. The overrepresentation of Jews among the bourgeoisie in the diaspora imperialist countries, a product of their long pre-capitalist role as a commodity- and money-trading people-class under the natural, non-commodity based economy of feudalism, gave birth through a convulsive and contradictory process in the 20th Century, to powerful Zionist factions of the imperialist bourgeoisie in those countries that regard Israel as their own imperialist state, just as much as the state of the countries in which they reside. This is a unique, though fragile and unwieldy, imperialist formation that gives Israel much more clout than its size and population relative to its imperialist allies, such as the US, would seem to indicate. This has produced an additional complexity in the politics of the Middle East, and because of its relationships with imperialism in general, to the struggle against imperialism itself. This has particularly become important since the collapse of Stalinism, though perhaps its importance was not fully appreciated prior to that.

“Zionism also has played a deeply reactionary role in attacking the workers movement in the old imperialist countries. A case in point is the Zionist-led campaign in Britain to bring down the left Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn between 2015 and 2019 with a massive McCarthy style media-based witchhunt based on phoney accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’, which the weak Corbyn leadership capitulated to. It is a matter of basic self-defence of the workers movement that Marxists should fight for the exclusion of supporters of political Zionism from all working-class organisations. The labour movement should be educated to regard political Zionists as fundamentally similar to Neo-Nazis.” (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/lcfi-draft-programme/)

It is clear that the views I am being banned from ALDA for upholding are the views of the LCFI. So, this decision is itself a violation of the proclaimed aims of ALDA to further Zarah Sultana’s aspiration for a ‘party of the whole left’. It is also a violation of the basic democratic right of freedom of criticism about matters of politics. The views argued in the discussion by me are clearly identical politically to the views of the LCFI, which is not surprising as I have been an active supporter of the LCFI since 2015, i.e., for 11 years.

“Representation” and racist oppression

Claiming that to discuss issues of the ratios and percentages of representation of different ethnic groups in capitalist ruling classes is ‘racism’ is unsustainable and basically an attack on any attempt to apply historical materialism to questions of privilege and underprivilege, i.e., to racist oppression. It is an anti-communist attack on historical materialism, not any sort of racism.

Before moving on to the issue of ‘overrepresentation’, it is worth looking at a symmetrically opposite case – the underrepresentation of US blacks in the ruling class of the United States. This is a classic sign of the fact that this population is oppressed, and excluded from the benefits of the society they inhabit. US blacks are approximately 14% of the US population. In 2025 there were 14 US black billionaires, out of 902, approximately 1.5%. That out of a black population that makes up 14% of the total US population. But among those billionaires, seven of them are entertainers or sports performers, and are certainly not among the commanders of the US economy therefore. Such entertainers are very minor among the bourgeoisie – they are not owners of substantial capital – their income derives from performance revenue, not surplus value. With half of them being in his category, it is fitting to say that the real representation of the US Black population in the ruling class is just under 0.8%.  They certainly do not intrude into the domain of the real, dominant forces in US capitalism. So black people are underrepresented by a factor of more than 15 in the US ruling class.  

Similar things are true elsewhere but the US case is simpler to investigate because there is no complicating question of immigration involved with US blacks, whose existence in the US is as long standing as the white population. This signifies that black Americans are an oppressed population that is at the bottom of a racial hierarchy that is characteristic of imperialist capitalism in the US at least. It is also clear that the question of representation in the ruling class is intimately linked to questions involving ethnic/racial inequality in such societies. Seeking to forbid discussion of this is seeking to forbid discussion of oppression vs. privilege, which is itself racist.

Zionist Jews are represented among the wealthiest layers of the ruling classes in the West far beyond the numbers of Jews in the general population. The classic example of this is that while Jewish people generally are approximately 2% of the US population, when it comes to the 10 wealthiest billionaires in the United States, 6 of them are Jewish, and since Zionism is the hegemonic ideology among bourgeois Jews, evidently Zionists.

Non-Zionist Jewish super-rich bourgeois today are rare. One well-known example, George Soros, has himself been subjected to genuinely anti-Semitic abuse from Zionists and their allies, notably including the pro-Zionist former Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, and also Yair Netanyahu, son of the genocidaire Israeli leader. Orban’s regime accommodated Binyamin Netanyahu in Budapest in April 2025 in defiance of the ICC’s arrest warrant for war crimes/crimes against humanity – i.e., for the genocide. Not that Soros is any kind of beacon of enlightenment – he acts as an agent of US imperialism as he showed in the Maidan colour revolution in Ukraine in 2014. But genuinely anti-Semitic abuse against him should be condemned on principle.

“Anti-Semitic Tropes” and Zionist Tropes

An indicative episode about the political errors that can result from misrepresentation of this critique of Zionism is that in my discussion with comrade S, from the Members Charter, he recounted the following. Another founder of the Members Charter, a Jewish comrade who I have known for many years, with a gap in relations when he gained the erroneous view that I held some kind of racist hostility to Jews, recently said that he now considered that I have no hostile attitude to Jews, but that I had a political problem with ‘tropes’. This echoes the remark made by Tony Greenstein earlier that my positions meant I was “politically, not personally, anti-Semitic”. This is a contradiction in terms – racism is as racism does – it is not possible to be both non-racist personally and yet have racist politics. Non-racist views defeat such racist conceptions.

The error in this conception on the part of our critics flows from a degree of political softness on Zionism on the left more generally, that exists in many cases below the conscious threshold, and flows from a degree of cross-class liberal sentiment, some of it liberal-Zionist in origin, which literally is living in the past, in a bygone era. It’s simply a Zionist-trained Pavlovian reaction, at odds with current social and economic realities, to associate a critique of the cross-frontier activities of Israel-supporting bourgeois with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The difference is pretty basic as explained earlier:

“The Protocols is a document that posits the idea of a cross-class conspiracy of all Jews to enslave all of non-Jewish humanity. It is obvious to anyone with a basic familiarity with Marxism that what I am pointing [to] … is a class-based form of ethnic-nationalist politics furthering the victimisation of an oppressed people – the Palestinians.”

The facile, shallow equation of the world of the Protocols, with that of the Israel lobby today, ignores the major change in the world since the creation of the Zionist state. It also ignores the real nature of Zionist strategy. Many leftists will say that Zionism’s strategy is ‘reactionary’, but don’t really draw out the full conclusions or elaborate on that. But Zionist strategy was always, in a world divided between imperialist oppressor states and the many oppressed nations and peoples who are their victims, to move Jews as a population from the ranks of the oppressed, into the ranks of the dominant, oppressor peoples. This was possible only because, unlike other oppressed peoples, the Jews’ oppression had a pre-capitalist source/origin, and was not organic to capitalism. That was achieved with the creation of Israel, and consolidated with the 1967 war. With that consolidation, Zionism became the dominant form of politics among bourgeois Jews, and as with most peoples, the dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie becomes hegemonic among the non-bourgeois population of the group concerned. Dissent from that becomes a revolutionary act.

Anti-Semitism, like every form of racism, involves hostility to the targeted population as a whole. It does not discriminate along class lines. Class politics is the opposite of that. But the notion of ‘tropes’ is an attempt to mystify that – and its source is Zionist. The Protocols is racist because it portrays all Jews of all classes as monsters out to enslave humanity. But the purpose of the ‘tropes’ mystification is not to criminalise that racism, but to criminalise criticism of the bourgeoisie of an oppressor people. The ultimate instance of such a sinister mystification is the 10^th “example” of antisemitic ‘tropes’ in the IHRA fake definition of anti-Semitism, which says that “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” is supposedly anti-Semitic. Of course, what the Nazis are known for above all is genocide. And so, we see the logic of this mystification when it is now openly being said that accusing Israel of genocide is “anti-Semitic”, based on this notion of ‘tropes’.

This lie, which demands that people deny the voluminous evidence of Israeli genocide in order to avoid this supposed anti-Semitic “trope”, can justly be called both a mystification and a Zionist trope. That same is true of Simon Hannah’s allegation that the LCFI’s understanding of the (factually proven) social power and organised international collaboration of super-rich Jewish-Zionist bourgeois, that they constitute a caste that organises the oppression of Palestinians in several imperialist states, is the same as the Protocols. That notion is likewise a Zionist trope, that attempts to exploit the oppression of Jews in the past to justify or at least cover up the oppression of Palestinians today by the Zionist mainstream of Jewish bourgeois politics. Unfortunately, much of the social democratic left unthinkingly parrot this thinking. But people like Simon Hannah who consciously use this Zionist trope to protect this bourgeois layer from Marxist criticism act as anti-communist witchhunters and agents of the bourgeoisie in the workers movement.

The main perpetrators of genuinely anti-Semitic abuse today are the pro-Zionist media, for instance the Daily Mail, Times, Daily Telegraph and Sun all ran outrageous racial caricatures of the Green Party leader Zack Polanski with an enlarged nose, a classic Nazi racist propaganda theme, during the recent local elections. A minority of the far right still clings to Hitler’s Jew-hatred but the majority embrace Israel as a more successful example of a racist ethnocracy than the Third Reich itself.  These racist caricatures are the residue of an earlier period in the history of capitalism where the tendency of Jews to become disproportionately successful in ‘business’, was regarded with suspicion by much of the non-Jewish imperialist ruling class. Because Jews, as an often-oppressed group at that time, were often involved with left-wing politics, democracy and even Communism. The Jewish bourgeoisie thus came under suspicion of being subversive and ‘Bolshevik’. This was the essence of the anti-Semitism of Hitler, derived from the ‘Protocols of Zion’. But the combined activities of Hitler and then the Zionists changed that – Hitler exterminated a huge number of left-wing Jews, and Zionists saw their extermination as a golden opportunity to lead ‘their’ people into the ranks of imperialism’s oppressor peoples.

Denying facts: Anti-Marxist Nonsense

This enormously powerful layer of the US population, the wealthiest capitalists in the United States, the most powerful imperialism, can accurately be described in 2025 as 60% Jewish and Zionist. This is simply a material and historical fact. As we noted earlier:

“Jews have an unusual, top-heavy social structure. On a world scale, in 2025 there were 3038 billionaires in the world according to the Fortune 500¹ whereas the number of Jewish billionaires in the world, according to Forbes Israel, in 2025 was 276². This means that, taking 2025 (last year) as the time of analysis, over 9% of billionaires in the world are Jewish, 9.055% to be more precise. Yet the number of Jews in the world is 15.8 million, which is 0.2% of the world’s population. This is approximately 45 times overrepresentation. The overwhelming majority of those Jewish billionaires live in the United States (163), Israel (39) and other imperialist countries of Western Europe, Canada and Australia (35) and a smattering elsewhere, including Russia, where a relatively lower number live (21). They are overwhelmingly concentrated in the imperialist West.

The overwhelmingly dominant ideology among bourgeois Jews is Political Zionism, an exilic ideology centred on Israel as a supposed refuge. Israel’s racist citizenship law, which gives those born Jewish anywhere in the world the right to citizenship, has the effect of creating a partially internationalised imperialist bourgeoisie loyal to Israel, who are massively and disproportionately represented in the US and West European ruling classes. The 2025 Forbes list puts the number of US billionaires in that year as 902³. As stated earlier, the number of US Jewish billionaires in 2025 was 163. Which means that 18% of billionaires in the US are Jewish, as compared to the proportion of Jewish people in the US population, which is 2%.  But that is not all – because as you go up the rankings of billionaires by wealth, the disproportionate representation of Jews increases dramatically. Of the top 10 billionaires by wealth in the US, 6 of them are Jewish – Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerburg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Ballmer and Michael Dell. The other four – non-Jewish – are Elon Musk (the wealthiest), Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Jensen Huang. This can be determined by comparison of Forbes Israel with mundane US sources on billionaire wealth that do not distinguish ethnicity.” (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/us-hegemony-drains-away-through-israeli-achilles-heel/. Follow this link to find footnotes.)

There you have the obvious explanation of the social basis of the extraordinary power of the Zionist lobby in the United States, which goes way beyond any considerations of foreign policy or any alliance. Such mundane matters do explain the fact that anyone who stands up for the Palestinian people in that country faces a never-ending witchhunt and abuses of power that never seem to cease. Similar things are happening in the UK, in Western Europe, in Australia and indeed in many places where this social layer has the upper hand politically.

The statement from the AOC that the “claim that Jews are ‘overrepresented’ in the ruling class is by definition antisemitic” implies than any attempt to measure the oppression or conversely, the privileged status of ethnic groups by looking at their respective social weights in the ruling class is “racist” and should be forbidden for socialists. Apparently, the ethnic makeup, social and political composition of the ruling class are the ruling class’s business only, and Marxists have no business looking at this. Even when, and apparently especially when, investigating questions like the racist nature of a given capitalist society. If black people are underrepresented in the ruling class, then black people have no business looking into the relationship of that to their second-class status in society. Likewise for Palestinians, or those who support them and oppose the current genocide. They have no business looking into the representation of Jewish-Zionists, the ethnic/political group that dispossessed them in Palestine, in the Western ruling classes.

Anyone who makes such an argument, either about black people, or about Palestinians and their defenders, is defending racial oppression. Where US blacks are concerned, their underrepresentation is simply a function of the overrepresentation of whites in high positions. As far as the relationship between Jewish-Zionists, and Palestinians and defenders of Palestine (even Jewish ones), the same is true. The fact that in previous, very different circumstances, when Jews were actually oppressed and facing genocide, the top-heavy social structure of the Jewish population was exploited for propaganda purposes by Nazi genociders does not make the persecution of Palestinians and their defenders by this disproportionately powerful layer of super-rich Zionist Jews one iota less intolerable. My views, and those of the LCFI regarding the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and classic anti-semitism generally were alluded to in 2014 in my 2014 Theses on Zionism and the Jewish Question:

“The history of genocide against the Jews in the first half of the 20^th century is ruthlessly used by propagandists for the Zionist project to justify today’s crimes against the Palestinians. Not only that, but in the earlier period anti-semites exploited the atypical social structure of the Jews – their overrepresentation in business and finance – as an important component of the paranoid, racist ideology that led to the Nazi genocide in Germany and Europe.” (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/draft-theses-on-the-jews-and-modern-imperialism-sept-2014/)

That was elaborated more explicitly in a subsequent 2016 article:

The “…combination, of successful Jewish capital, and Jewish participation in the working class movement, was the material base that gave birth to a peculiar, racist and deeply reactionary ideology, classical anti-semitism, when capitalism ceased to be an expanding, progressive system in the late 19^th century. This ideology was based on a counter-revolutionary racist demonology; it saw Jewish bourgeois as the financiers of a Jewish-led subversive movement against ‘Christian’ civilisation. This was initially the ideology of late-feudal reaction in 19^th Century Tsarist Russia, where the large Jewish population was subjected to vicious attacks and pogroms. But as many Jewish refugees fled Russia to the West, the ideology of ‘anti-semitism’ and the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion became a major force in European politics first in France with the Dreyfus case, then in Germany in the early-to-mid 20^th Century, culminating in the rise of the genocidal anti-Jewish National Socialists under Hitler’s leadership.” (https://socialistfight.com/2016/01/07/political-zionism-the-hegemonic-racism-of-the-early-21st-century-by-ian-donovan/)

The allegation that our analysis of the reasons for the social weight of Zionist in Western society has anything in common with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is simply a cynical, deliberate lie.  Propagated by someone who has no qualms about supporting a proxy war in Ukraine waged by devotees of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose forces participated not only in the Nazi Judeocide in Ukraine, but also in the wider massacres of Russians on the Eastern front that were equally genocidal as 20 million Russians (27 million USSR citizens in all) died at the hands of the invading Nazis which Bandera’s forces were part of.

Even though the numerical/proportional strength of Zionist Jews among the ruling class is less pronounced in Europe than in the US, major attacks on the democratic rights of Palestinian people and their supporters are happening in Europe.  This is true in every major imperialist country that engages with the Israel-Arab issue. Only perhaps Japan is an exception because of geographical distance and different origin.

There is no way any genuine Marxist can pretend that this is NOT the social basis of this phenomenon. Refusing to acknowledge this simply means denying reality, and those who do so are no defenders of the Palestinian people no matter how they try to present themselves, as ‘socialists’, ‘Marxists’, or promoters of motherhood and apple pie for that matter.

Smears that aim to suppress debate

The entire text of the discussion is shown below. It should be explained that there had been the beginnings of a discussion on the politics of David Miller, the sacked sociology professor who won a famous victory against Bristol University in 2024 when he was declared to have been unfairly dismissed for sharp criticisms of Zionism. The judgement said that he had been discriminated against for his ‘philosophical beliefs’ as an opponent of Zionism because of its racist and colonial character. David Miller’s victory at the Employment Tribunal means that anti-Zionist views should be regarded as a protected characteristic in British law, a major gain for defenders of the Palestinians. Which is why Zionists are desperately trying to overturn it on appeal, and why many on the British left are signalling their weakness in the face of the lobby by a renewed witchhunt against David Miller and anyone who dares to defend him. This is epitomised by the conduct of Simon Hannah in this debate, and his role in the suppression of this political debate.

He is the one who tried to brand our understanding of the pan-imperialist nature of the Jewish-Zionist ethnic faction in the ruling class as akin to the Protocols and hence ‘anti-Semitic” – a clear libel. He is the one who said that correcting a factual error made by someone in the discussion – misidentifying Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg as non-Jewish – amount to playing ‘spot the Jew’. A slur that sounds like something from the far right Spiked, racist, philosemitic anti-Arab rag, who in the context of the return to power of Donald Trump (whose own Vice-President Vance earlier compared him to Hitler), wrote a vile, racist hate-filled caricature of the mainly Moroccan community in Amsterdam who fought back when their community was attacked by a genocidal mob of Tel Aviv Maccabees’ supporters last November. The racist, pro-Zionist Spiked wrote the following:

“Last week, the left influencers of the West sank to a new, foul low. Their cant and bigotry was on full display. They started the week noisily gnashing their teeth over the election of the ‘fascist’ Donald Trump and ended it essentially shrugging their shoulders over fascist violence in Amsterdam. One day they were puffing themselves up to condemn the ‘fascist’ heading to the White House, the next they were ‘contextualising’ the hunting of Israelis by Jew-haters on mopeds. They weep virtuous tears over fake fascism while borderline excusing what feels like real fascism. Listen – when Europe’s middle classes start ‘contextualising’ anti-Jewish violence, it’s time to worry.” (https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/11/the-moral-ghettoisation-of-the-jews/)

This far right, Trumpian garbage, branding the oppressed Moroccan migrant population of Amsterdam as akin to Nazis for resisting a riot and attempted pogrom by genocidal Israeli football thugs, carries a similar message to Simon Hannah’s outrageous slur that correcting a misidentification of Mark Zuckerberg as non-Jewish amounts to playing “spot the Jew”. Similar bullshit runs through Spiked’s hate piece which itself reads like an extract from Mein Kampf or the Protocols in its hate-filled description of the Muslim people of Amsterdam. Spiked is now a fascist, Zionazi hate publication, and epitomises our view that mainstream Political Zionism today should be treated as akin to Neo-Nazism.

But Hannah’s slur about the ‘Spot the Jew’ involved in identifying Mark Zuckerberg as Jewish, and one of the 60% of the 10 wealthiest billionaires in the US who are Jewish-Zionists, is basically identical to Spiked’s slur about a ‘Jew hunt’. Who after all is Zuckerberg? He is probably the most powerful social media baron in the world, the head of Meta which owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and also WhatsApp, the most used mobile messenger app in the world. According to Drop Site News, in April 2025:

“A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel, according to internal Meta data obtained by Drop Site News. The data show that Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023. Israel is the biggest originator of takedown requests globally by far, and Meta has followed suit—widening the net of posts it automatically removes, and creating what can be called the largest mass censorship operation in modern history. (https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/leaked-data-israeli-censorship-meta)

That tells you all you need to know about Mark Zuckerberg. He is a primary member of the Jewish-Zionist bourgeois caste – Israel’s international dimension. Indeed, Drop Site News makes this clear when it writes:

“Government requests for takedowns generally focus on posts made by citizens inside that government’s borders, Meta insiders said. What makes Israel’s campaign unique is its success in censoring speech in many countries outside of Israel. What’s more, Israel’s censorship project will echo well into the future, insiders said, as the AI program Meta is currently training how to moderate content will base future decisions on the successful takedown of content critical of Israel’s genocide.” (ibid)

This is truly sinister. Under Zuckerberg, Meta has complied with 94% of requests for censorship from the state perpetrating the genocide – that is, trying to cover up for this genocide like a latter-day David Irving on acid. At least Irving wrote his awful apologias years after Hitler was dead and the Nazi holocaust was over. Whereas the genocide in Gaza is still going on, and is being extended to the West Bank, Lebanon, and to a degree even Iran – and every act of censorship and suppression of news about these events makes it easier for Israel to continue its mass-murdering.

Another example of Zuckerberg’s censorship of the internet has been the banning of Track AIPAC, an initiative on the fringe of the US Democrats that aimed to monitor and counter AIPAC interference in US elections. Their interference aims to force out anyone sympathetic to the Palestinians in any party. Zuckerberg is thus directly involved in trying to suppress opposition to genocide in US politics (see https://thedemlabs.org/2026/02/12/why-meta-banned-track-aipac-joel-kaplan/)

By any objective standard, all these make Mark Zuckerberg’s current activities far worse than Irving’s literary denial of the Nazi holocaust years after it was over. Irving’s work had no impact of the course of the actual Nazi holocaust either way, but Zuckerberg’s genocide-denying censorship means he is not merely a genocide denier, but a genocide accomplice and indirect perpetrator in the current, ongoing genocide. And that’s not even touching on any military role that Meta’s many software arms are likely to be playing in this genocide.

So, when Simon Hannah accuses me of playing ‘spot the Jew’ for correcting a factual error about Zuckerberg’s Jewish origin to note that he is part of the 60% of the 10 richest US billionaires who are part of the Jewish-Zionist caste, he is race-baiting me for not being Jewish, in order to defend a genocide denier/perpetrator who is demonstrably much worse than the Nazi genocide denier, David Irving. This is a pretty disgusting level for a self-proclaimed ‘socialist’ to sink to. This is simply pathetic racism on his part, not mine, and no one with one iota of integrity would engage in this kind of disgusting behaviour.

And in this context, it should be noted that throughout the WhatsApp discussion, there is a drip-drip of assertions that to talk about “Jewish supremacism” is somehow ‘anti-Semitic’. In conditions where a genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza has been going on for nearly three years (though now hidden by political manoeuvres) and such massacres have been extended way beyond Gaza. And a key, material agency of the promotion, and political pressure to aid that genocide (and to stop criticism of it particularly in the West) is the same Jewish-Zionist layer of capital. The notion that this analysis gives mystical powers to a ‘Jewish cabal’ voiced by A Green, one of only two defenders of workers democracy in that discussion (and pretty hesitant himself), is an anti-materialist, anti-Marxist liberal guilt-trip. Such things as Brexit and the rise of Trump show clearly that Western imperialist politics are highly factional and far from monolithic, and the Jewish-Zionist caste are effective in such bourgeois factional terms because disproportionate capitalist property means disproportionate political power in a capitalist society. This is elementary. And an additional factor is that the dominant attitude of the non-Jewish bourgeoisie has shifted, with the rise of Zionism and also of neoliberalism, and the major role that key Jewish-Zionist ideologues played in that, from Judeophobia to Judeophilia. In that context, the attempt to suppress the right of socialists in the working-class movement to criticise Jewish supremacism, as happened in that discussion, is simply evidence of Jewish chauvinism, if not outright supremacism, on the part of those demanding the suppression.

The implicit Nazi baiting primarily by Hannah in this is disgusting because if anyone is involved in support for Nazi terrorism it is those, such as ACR and the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign that they support, who are up to their necks in support for a proxy war that NATO is waging through Nazi auxiliaries such as Azov. Pseudo lefts like ACR and other NATO fans have tried to make out that having a Jewish president somehow means that Ukraine cannot really be a Nazi-dominated regime. But Zelensky now proudly associates himself with the Azov brigade and the like, who despite the best efforts of NATO spin doctors, glory in Nazi insignia like the Wolfsangel and ‘blood and soil’ Red and Black flags.

Just as the bulk of the far right supports Israel, the bulk of them support NATO’s Nazi war drive in Ukraine. There is a minority on the far right, Nazi fossils, who demur, upholding Hitler’s old style anti-Semitism and we in the Consistent Democrats have a principled history of public, outspoken opposition to any alliance of the anti-imperialist movement in defence of Russia and the Donbass with such people. Our tendency, and the broader International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS) united front we support, have been sharply and publicly critical of George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain and No2NATONo2War for putting the fascist chancer David Clews of the far right Unity News Network, a fellow traveller of Mark Collett’s old-style Nazi ‘Patriotic Alternative’, on their platforms. We have had two considerable public controversies with Galloway’s supporters over this grave error, such as here from 2023 (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/iuafs-statement-no-no2nato-platform-for-fascist-david-clews/) or a more recent 2026 dispute where the IUAFS logo was used without our consent by those promoting ‘unity’ with Clews (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/iuafs-statement-on-the-suspension-of-bill-obrien/).

The public record is clear – we in the Consistent Democrats, the LCFI, and IUAFS who we are involved with, have a clear record of publicly denouncing both the Ukrainian Nazis involved in NATO’s proxy war and the small minority of traditional, anti-Jewish Nazis who oppose that war for reasons of national isolationism. Unlike the ACR, who are supporters of NATO’s proxy war, and the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, which simply support the NATO/Nazi war and cheer for Zelensky and his Nazis with their persecution of Russians and Russian-speakers. This follows on from the betrayals of the Corbynites regarding phoney witchhunts against ‘anti-Semitism’. And it’s a complete betrayal of the call that Zarah Sultana put out for “a party of the whole left”. ALDA now seems to want a party of Zionist capitulators. Full on opponents of Zionism are not wanted.

This article is based loosely on a presentation given at a Consistent Democrats discussion forum on May 10th, along with another on Trump and Netanyahu’s failed war against Iran. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here.

by Ian Donovan

The results are very serious for Starmer’s Labour leadership, though not yet terminal for the Labour Party as a whole, in my view. Though such termination is on the agenda. Labour lost 1239 seats. Major gains were made by Reform – 1384 seats. Significant gains were made by the Greens (403 seats). Also, the Tories lost 426 seats

For Labour, this is similar to the kind of rout that the Tories suffered with the end of Johnson and Truss. They are heading for a much bigger crisis, but not there yet. The losses to Reform are very significant, of the order of the collapse of the so-called Red Wall, but a significant number of these losses were to the Greens, not Reform. A significant proportion of Reform’s gains were at the expense of the Tories, not Labour. Both of the major parties are therefore in retreat. If anything, Labour ought to have suffered more – some of its losses to Reform, which were considerable but not overwhelming, could have gone to a working-class alternative if one had been standing. Unfortunately, in most cases that was not true.  

The reason this did not happen is because the Greens are not a proper working-class alternative – they are a petty-bourgeois radical party. Even though they have picked up a large layer of socialist militants who are disappointed by the sabotage of YP, the core of the party is middle class. Though it is making a show of formulating a ‘workers charter’ etc, it is not the real thing. Zack Polanski is well spoken and articulate, and that has provoked a storm of ruling class libels and hysteria against him – they don’t like being contradicted. He should be defended – in fact I think his radicalisation over the Gaza genocide and his anti-Zionist position is genuine. But he still does not appear as a working class, socialist leader. The Greens therefore have very limited ability to appeal to the more angry and demoralised sections of the working class who are being driven to Reform.

The absence of the sabotaged Zarah Sultana party initiative is telling. It was wilfully and maliciously sabotaged by Corbyn and the group around him. Your Party’s interventions in the Local Elections were few and far between. 25 candidates in the whole country under the YP ticket – many of them got derisory votes. The best that I know of was Mel Mullings in Thornton Heath, Croydon – she got 327 votes when the winning Labour candidates got over 1000, and so did the losing Greens.That was hard fought by a genuinely activist, and socialist, branch, with SWP, SP, ACR and CD supporters involved, with some minor dissention. It was difficult to cut through a conflict between Labour and Greens. Elsewhere, YP’s refusal to run candidates many has meant independent campaigns have run outside of the YP banner, but supported by YP (in some cases). They have varied in their politics enormously:

From overtly socialist and left-wing groupings such as Southwark Independent Socialists, or Haringey Socialist Alliance, or the Independent Socialists in Coventry including Grace Lewis, backed by Zarah Sultana. And then there are the likes of the Redbridge Independents backed by Corbyn, whose demands are simply for ‘clean politics’; and don’t mention socialism hardly at all. Left populism. Though to be fair, Corbyn did visit the Haringey Socialist Alliance, while refusing to support YP candidates in his own borough, Islington, running under a similar ticket. It seems his trip to Haringey was an attempt to deflect criticism.

None of this is accidental. It is clear from the sequence of events that Corbyn had been dissembling against calls for a new party for several years since he was deprived of the Labour whip in late 2020. He had five years to get something on the road, and it was always clear that he would have had mass support if he had done so. But he never did. He left it until the very last minute before deciding to stand as an independent in the 2024 General Election. He won, and it was always obvious that he would. As an independent, he was part of a broader phenomenon of independents who stood and won over Gaza. There were five. But his tardiness was always because he hoped to get the Labour whip back. And having a new party would be a huge obstacle to that. It still is. This is why he still describes himself as an Independent in parliament.

When Zarah Sultana resigned from Labour with the express aim of founding a new left party, after much hesitation he agreed. For fear of being marginalised if he had refused and it had gone on without him. When it was mooted publicly, and people were given the chance to express support for the idea, 800,000 did so in August 2025. Corbyn and co were clearly frightened by the size of the response, and saw it as a threatening monster. He also named it Your Party, supposedly as a placeholder name. So much for that! They delayed and deflected from trying to recruit these masses.

There was a vote at a meeting of the founding groups in early Sept in favour of co-leadership, as opposed to Corbyn simply being leader, which Corbyn lost. So, he withdrew from the committee that was organising the founding, and went back to his independent group of MPs. Then Zarah Sultana launched the portal to implement what had been promised. It signed up over 20,000 members in two hours – a growth rate of over 10,000 members per hour. That was remarkable, and it is clear in hindsight that this was the historic opportunity to turn the 800,000 initial signups into a coherent mass party. If left to run, it would have signed up 100,000 in a day, likely half a million in a week.  But after two hours, it was sabotaged, by an email signed by Corbyn and his independents claiming the portal was fraudulent. It was not – their email was fraudulent and libellous. This was, in hindsight, a major bureaucratic crime against the working class in Britain and the deliberate squandering of the opportunity to build a new mass party, which Sultana, to her great credit, saw clearly and tried to run with.

Having this sabotaged the mass party, the Corbyn clique launched another membership portal at the end of Sept, under the control of Corbyn’s ‘Peace and Justice’ non-socialist pressure group. It was a power and data grab, to exclude Zarah Sultana from real influence over the process. But this massively stunted the growth of the membership, the original sabotage was a massive blow to the party itself. By the time of the initial conference at the end of November, the membership was only 55,000. It is entirely conceivable that without the sabotage of Zarah Sultana’s membership portal, it could have been half a million or more. At the time we wrote this:

“The email sent out to members to sign up as members on Thursday 18^th September was genuine – the second email that was sent out a couple of hours later intimating that it was a scam was false, as the money was being paid into the account for membership subscriptions that had previously been agreed by both of the broad groupings that make up the precursors of the new party. It does appear that agreements were broken, and an attempt was made by the group around Corbyn to exclude Zarah Sultana from bodies that were previously agreed as supposed to be inclusive and gender-balanced by both sides. The glacial nature of the group around Corbyn, that resisted for as long as possible the call for a new party, is evident, as Corbyn was pushed into belatedly agreeing to Sultana’s call for them to co-lead a new mass party at the beginning of July. Those around Corbyn appeared to have been resisting equally the creation of a mass membership party…” (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/cd-statement-whither-your-party/)

We also criticised some on the left for their response to this event thus:

“This is not a ‘shitshow’ as opportunists like the Weekly Worker and the Spartacist League are saying, but an important fight being waged in the process of this new party’s formation. It is crucial that anti-Zionism prevails. In that spirit, we are endorsing the ‘our party’ appeal, which calls for a handover team to organise a mass membership drive and an election among supporters for a Founding Stewards Committee (effectively a Conference Arrangements Committee), which will in turn organise a democratic conference to elect a new leadership. This demand was publicly supported by Zarah Sultana as well as several creditable comrades in the proto-party. We need basic democratic norms to be upheld, in the party that is being created, at all levels, not least to allow the debate necessary for the movement to develop programmatically beyond left reformism, to enable a genuinely socialist, revolutionary politics and programme to take root.” (ibid)

This was correct, but really if anything we were too slow to realise the historic import of the betrayal by Corbyn that took place over the portal. This deliberate puncturing of the evidently fragile but massive sentiment for a new party was a historic crime against the British working class in the context of the threatening rise of the far-right Reform. It may well turn out to have been every bit as consequential as Kinnock’s betrayal of the 1984-5 miners’ strike. But that is with the benefit of several months’ hindsight. We got it substantially right, but could have been sharper and more clear-sighted about the implications of what happened.

Zarah Sultana made clear she envisaged a party of the whole left, including Marxist groups. She criticised Corbyn’s capitulation to Zionism. She spoke up for opposition to NATO, to Zionism, to transphobia, to the monarchy, for a policy of class war, for widespread nationalisations, for workers control.

Corbyn’s bureaucracy did everything to rig the conference and the subsequent CEC election against these left-wing policies, in favour of tepid populism. But they lost crucial votes at the conference in spite of the bureaucratic framework, over a public commitment of the party to socialism and the working class, over dual membership of socialist groups, over collective leadership

The nominations process prior to the CEC election gave an indication of the sympathies of the active membership – these took place on a regional basis, and were in many places won by the Grassroots Left slate candidates. The Corbynites’ response was to use the monopoly of data they had seized to rig the actual CEC vote, using that monopoly over the 55,000 membership to bombard tens of thousands of members with Corbyniite email propaganda that the Grassroots Left (the left-wing slate headed by Zarah Sultana), and independent candidates for that matter, had no access to. A trade union leadership that did something similar with the membership data in its possession would be prosecuted by the Certification Officer for election-rigging. They won the CEC elections by these fraudulent means, 14 seats to 8.

In response to these cumulative events, activists created the Members Charter in March – with over 600 signatures, which- gave an ultimatum to the CEC to open up and democratise YP, or a conference will be called. The TM led CEC’s response was to ram through extensive bans on dual membership. The Members Charter called two Zoom meetings each attended by over 100 activists, where it was decided to call a preconference on 31^st May, leading to a conference of something (to be decided by a democratic process – possibility a socialist federation) – in September. Not a call for a split, but it is possible the bureaucracy may attempt to expel the supporters of whatever is formed. A body aiming to put things right, by whatever means. Not seeking a new party, but if forced to, that is what will happen.

There are over 100 “proto-branches” around the country, and they have all been treated appallingly, deprived of the data that the Corbynites seized by fraudulent means in September 2025. Many are very active, and many activists are very angry at Corbyn. There is a conference of YP connections on 6^th June, in Sheffield. Which is not the same thing – YP Connections is a practical network of horizontal communication between branches of YP which have no official status – because the bureaucracy doesn’t want active self-organised branches. But it may dovetail with that initiative, as the proto-branches, which the bureaucracy around Corbyn abhor, are the party on the ground. The point of all this being to draw in those numerous activists into something viable.

YP has become a laughing stock and the many dedicated activists on the ground who have built it despite the sabotage and bureaucratic abuse won’t just walk away without a determined attempt to salvage it.

This article is based loosely on a presentation given at a Consistent Democrats discussion forum on May 10th, along with another on the local election results. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here.

There is a strong possibility of a resumption of the war in the next week or so, simply because the US, and Trump himself, cannot admit defeat. But it won’t make any difference to the outcome. The Trump regime is struggling to come to terms with its defeat. Iran is too strong militarily – with its drones, its missiles, and the missile defence it has now imported from China and Russia – to be defeated in a conventional war.

And it appears that, however much latitude the US ruling class has given Trump in waging this war, it does not want the use of nuclear weapons against Iran. Because it would lead to retaliation against Israel with nukes. Russia and Pakistan, North Korea and implicitly China have said this. Trump talks big and makes big threats. But he was deprived of the nuclear option by his own generals, who in practice he was unable to sack. Because of the potent possibility of a coup, one can surmise. So, there is nothing he can do. Even more bombing will make no difference. Ground troops would be a farce.

Trump’s Operation Epic Fury (Epstein’s fury) is over. It failed. Killing Ali Khamenei simply unified the Iranian population behind the government and setup of the Islamic republic. It politically backfired, pretty much immediately. As did the bloodthirsty attack on the girls’ school. As for Project Freedom – breaking the blockade of Hormuz by force – that is a bigger joke. It was spiked by two things – the Iranian attack in the UAE’s oil refinery in the Sea of Oman. And the closure of Saudi Airspace to the US which was the direct result of that attack. From the standpoint of US imperialism, this is a strategic defeat. It has lost its bases in the Gulf. They are mincemeat, whether or not there is any residual presence.

From the point of view of the rational interest of US imperialism, it is an unnecessary defeat and a disaster – the biggest since the fall of Saigon in 1975. Yet unlike the fall of Saigon, which was the completion of an incomplete social revolution, Iran was not and is not necessarily an opponent of US imperialism. It would have been quite prepared to play along. The demolition of Iran is a Zionist project. Israel has had the project of demolishing every significant non-servile state in the region since its foundation. Hence Suez, drawing in Britain and France to do its dirty work. Then the US was opposed. But the Jewish-Zionist cult grew to prominence in the US in the 1970s. Israel had French hardware in 1967 but little else. But it 1973 it had nukes, and threatened to use them against Egypt to blackmail the US into rushing it the conventional military hardware it needed to win the Yom Kippur war. Hence Nixon’s own nuclear alert.

The Israel lobby became increasingly powerful in the 70s and 80s. But with the collapse of the USSR, it managed to fill a political vacuum in bourgeois politics.  With the supposed ‘death of communism’, what was there to fight? It became Muslims – the ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis – which conveniently dovetailed with the Zionist agenda. Of Greater Israel and a straight line from the 1991 Iraq war, the 2003 destruction of Iraq, then Libya, Syria, culminating in this war with Iran.

But the world situation has changed, with the rise of Russia and China as allied world powers, with Iran as their potent ally. So, Israel has overreached itself, and it its potent influence – Trump is their hireling – has led to the US overreaching itself. The US has been in relative decline for a long time. But the neocon, Israel wars have qualitatively accelerated that.  And Israel has failed also, its great protector has been defeated. In spite of its genocide in Gaza, and its genocidal war in Lebanon as well, its attack on Iran was a failure. Israel itself was twice very severely bombarded and defeated. It is being defeated in Lebanon, and it wants the US to keep fighting. In vain.

This is a strategic defeat for both the US and Israel. This is breaking the relationship between Israel and the US. On both sides of the political divide in the US, hostility to the Israel lobby is growing. Among MAGA – Trump’s base is deeply split over Israel and the ‘forever wars’ which Trump promised to put a stop to, but then has dragged the US into the biggest, most damaging and most obviously losing war of all, of this type. And the Dems, where it used to be the case that being opposed by AIPAC was the kiss of death, as they would engineer primary defeats almost as a matter of course for anyone who criticised Israel. But now a different situation has arisen, because of a huge change in popular opinion at the base of the Democratic Party, mirroring what has happened to MAGA, where an endorsement by AIPAC is being seen as a kiss of death.

All this opens up the space for working class politics in the US, and for a potential creation of a full anti-imperialist bloc internationally. WE need to regroup a socialist-communist component out of this.

This discussion forum took place on Zoom on 19th April. The presentation and discussion is available as a podcast here. Slides and notes from the presentation are below:

“Currently there are 4 Core International Core Crimes, Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes and Crimes of Aggression. Ecocide was first coined by Arthur Galston, scientist, in 1970, to describe the attack not just on humanity, but also the environment itself, during Imperialist wars against liberation. It was popularised by Olof Palme in 1972 at Helsinki.”

“Between 1948 and 1960 Trioxone was sprayed by British Military planes (with the help of Australian, New Zealand and others) in Malaya in the “Malayan Emergency” aka the Anti-British National Liberation War, in their efforts to put down the establishment of a communist state in Malaya. The British Empire relied on the extraction of rubber and tin, using excessive force to repay the Marshall Plan debts by killing left wing activists who retaliated with setting fire to plantations. It was not called a “war” to avoid insurance refusal, who do not pay out in “civil wars”.

Thanks to strict military secrecy and establishment control of the media the only newspaper to report on these crimes was the Daily Worker (later Morning Star). Unnamed Daily Worker reporter, “Blood Stains Malaya Profits: Demonstrators Raid Shareholders,” Daily Worker, June 10, 1952, page 1. Cited in “Headhunters in the Malayan Emergency: The Atrocity and Cover-Up” by Dan Poole, figure 18, page 140.

Photograph published in 10 June 1952 by the British communist newspaper the Daily Worker (later renamed the Morning Star) showing anti-war protestors targetting a Dunlop shareholder meeting. The success of the Empire’s methods in putting the MNLA revolt down led to JFK endorsing the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.

While the US may not have been the “first” to commit ecocide in their military operations, they certainly used this “proxy war” to deliberately and wantonly commit ecocide in pursuit of the support of ‘capitalism’ and the suppression of communism post WW2, facilitating the looting of resources of the “3rd World2 by fomenting and supporting/reimposing colonial Indochina to prevent the advance of communism at the expense of the wishes of the indigenous people for liberation and self-determination, justified by McCarthyism and religious and communal interests.

1 Exterior view of the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, scene of the world’s worst industrial disaster in 1985. Interior shot of the factory before it was stripped of some of its most valuable components and subsequently abandoned to the elements. The factory remains ruined and abandoned and approximately 350 metric tonnes of toxic waste are stored there above ground. Many thousands of tonnes of toxic waste were also buried, in an untreated state, on the site. Rainwater continues to run through this buried waste as well as the remains of the abandoned solar evaporation ponds. This leaches toxic chemicals into the local groundwater aquifer, which serves as the primary water supply for thousands of people.

2 The Discoverer Enterprise and the Q4000 work around the clock burning undesirable gases from the still uncapped Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico. 26 June 2010

3 St.Andrews Old Course, 4th Hole, Ginger Beer – the Green deserts… 38 000 around the world, majority in US and UK.

4 Nigeria – oil spill… since 1958 upwards of 100 million barrels of oil have been spilled in the Niger Delta, only 6% of it on land, so definitely not just the “local people” amounting to a deliberate sabotage of the local polity by Royal Shell and Exon amongst others. Poor maintenance, linkage of small wells, spills, bunkering and corruption leading to little or no regulation. Now, one of the most bio-diverse yet polluted areas of the planet.

Open for discussion using these and any suggestions of examples of ecocide and would it be dealt with by this proposed legislation…

This is an agreed response from International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity to the substantial comment placed by Patrick Downey beneath the ‘IUAFS statement on the suspension of Bill O’Brien’, which was published on this site as well as the IUAFS site.

Dear comrade Patrick,

We were very pleased to receive your 28^th April response to our earlier statement, posted in the comments below the posting of the “IUAFS statement on the suspension of Bill O’Brien” on the Consistent Democrats’ website (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/uncategorized/iuafs-statement-on-the-suspension-of-bill-obrien/#comments (see below).

It is certainly a lot more fraternal and political than the responses of Bill O’Brien, who has been attending IUAFS’ weekly Zoom meetings for several years, but has recently behaved in an outrageous manner as detailed in the statement, leading to his suspension from being invited to these meetings. His behaviour since has been a profusion of threats and profanity, in such a way that we resolved to treat him as having walked away from the united front that is IUAFS, in our view originally for reasons that have nothing to do with the purpose of IUAFS, which is indicated in our name – to mobilise anti-fascist solidarity with the people of the Donbass, the Russian-speaking South-East of Ukraine, against the Western-funded and -armed Nazi Ukrainian nationalists, and with the Russian army that intervened to stop these Nazis in 2022.

It is good that you have apologised for the inclusion of our logo on the publicity for this international commemoration alongside that of the fascist UNN. Evidence of their far right nature is to be found in May 2025 on the BBC website,, which noted that “David Clews, a conspiracy theorist and far-right influencer, and Mark Collett, a Nazi-sympathiser who set up the far-right Patriotic Alternative (PA), have called for supporters to ‘infiltrate’ Nigel Farage’s party to push their own ‘pro-white’ and anti-immigration agenda.”  (bbc.com/news/articles/clygr52dn1ro). We in IUAFS have expressed strong disagreement with those who have attempted to build a ‘solidarity movement’ with Clews and his UNN since 2023, when we broke from No2NATONo2War, the putative umbrella Ukraine anti-war movement initiated by the Workers Party and George Galloway, because of their insistence on putting UNN speakers, including Clews, on No2NATO platforms.

As principled anti-fascists, we are utterly opposed to sharing a platform with fascists and this was documented in a statement dated May 30^th, 2023 “No No2NATO Platform for Fascist David Clews!” (https://iuafs.blogspot.com/2023/05/no-no2nato-platform-for-fascist-david.html). This was further documented in the transcript of a long interview on the UNN website by Clews with two leaders of the openly Nazi Patriotic Alternative group, Mark Collett, and Laura Towler, which was published on the Consistent Democrats website as evidence of Clews’ fascist politics (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/clews-collett-towler-transcript/).  In that interview Clews argues with these upfront Nazis that it is necessary for Nazis to hide parts of their politics to fool “Joe Normie” (the common man) into putting Nazis in power, and that was done by “revolutionary organisations” in 1930s Germany (it is obvious he means Hitler’s NSDAP).

Given this record, we found the appearance of our logo alongside that of UNN in this publicity totally scandalous.  You now say “I, Patrick Downey, was the one who was asked to put the logos of those participating in the May 2 commemorative event poster on it, which has now become a global event, and to which Ben Stimson has been the person binding things together.” The question is “asked by whom?” It appears that the answer is Ben Stimson. And earlier this was confirmed by Paul Cannon, the General Secretary of the Workers Party, when he said:

“The Workers Party has not produced the advertisement nor organised the meeting although we will support it.

“The event is being organised by Ben Stimson, with No2Nato participating in the event. For more detail about how logos have been used and the arrangements made please follow it up with them”

So, the common denominator is Ben Stimson, as we said in our earlier statement. And as we noted in that statement, it became clear that Bill O’Brien was both discussing the contents of IUAFS meetings with Ben Stimson and collaborating with him against IUAFS. The fact that you appear to have included our logo on this material with the UNN logo without knowing its significance on the initiative of Stimson, when we were already aware that your chair, Bill, was collaborating with Stimson and sharing the contexts of our discussions, simply corroborates our suspicions about Bill O’Brien, who has for a long period been the point of contact between IUAFA and TANA. We of course accept that you did not know about the fascist nature of UNN, but Bill O’Brien did, or should have done, because has been a regular weekly attender at IUAFS meetings for several years, including the period when our break with No2NATO over their giving a platform to Clews and co was a central point of discussion in our meetings.

On the question of Sinn Fein. The IUAFS is a united front purely about the Ukraine war and solidarity with anti-fascist resistance. We do not have a position on Sinn Fein or the Good Friday Agreement. Nor do we have a position either in favour of, or opposing, votes for the British Labour Party in elections. We have people within IUAFS with different views on both these questions, which are outside the framework of the united front that is IUAFS. This is why Bill’s attack on Theo for his views on Sinn Fein, and his attempt to have him purged for them, were outrageous. Not because IUAFS supports SF or the GFA. We do not. But because he was trying to get rid of our effective and dedicated Secretary because he doesn’t like his views on a question that is outside of the purpose and framework of the united front. That was a kind of sabotage of the united front and put Bill’s views on Irish politics above the interests of the struggle against Ukrainian fascism.

We never wanted to face a confrontation such as this with Bill O’Brien, and we have avoided taking any action over his behaviour for two years. We would greatly welcome any opportunity to repair relations with TANA, and indeed with Bill provided these requirements are acknowledged. However, Bill’s latest threat to have our secretary “shot or shut (shoot?) you myself” clearly makes such a reconciliation an even more difficult prospect.

We would be quite happy to repair relations with yourselves and indeed Bill provided some things are acknowledged. 1). That it was wrong to include our logo on any publicity without our permission, and far more wrong still that our logo should be used alongside that of the fascist UNN. (2) that IUAFS is a united front, and the views of tendencies or individuals on other questions (such as the nature of Sinn Fein) are outside of the united front and irrelevant, so long as they don’t promote fascism or racism. (3) That Bill O’Brien acknowledges that his behaviour in IUAFS meetings, and his insults and threats to IUAFS officers, were unacceptable. And (4) all threats of violence, implicit or explicit, are wrong and should be repudiated.

Fraternally

Paul Collins (Chair)

for IUAFS

Patrick Downey’s earlier comment

As secretary and PRO of the Truth And Neutrality Alliance, I, Patrick Downey, was the one who was asked to put the logos of those participating in the May 2 commemorative event poster on it, which has now become a global event, and to which Ben Stimson has been the person binding things together.
in relation to the use of the logo on the international poster (not our own, ie TANA), that is on me. If an apology is owed for this then it’s me who is sorry for the use of it.
I’m not familiar with UNN, I took it on good faith that they were or are a like-minded group. I haven’t looked into them to know if they are some kind of far right fascist entity and if they are then I wholeheartedly apologise.

In regards to Sinn Fein, TANA cannot and will not make any apologies for not supporting or promoting this party, as they have not served the people of Ireland well since the pandemic and the post pandemic era and have sat on the fence on many issues, and they have lost so much of the grassroots support they had in Ireland because they’ve shunned the people here and their main concerns. They want to ride the gravy train the same way the duopoly has, here in this country for so long.

In relation to threats made, to which I don’t support, but I also can’t take seriously due to the distance between the people involved and especially when someone obviously has PTSD. I do believe Ben was blocked from participating in Zooms, and I am not sure I understand why.
Yes Ben served time in prison, but this is due to the fascist British establishment and judiciary picking a side in the Ukrainian civil war, and later the SMO, in which it is deeply involved, especially MI6.

I personally find the whole thing petty and unfortunate, as if we had been working in cooperation with each other this event, and others, would be so much bigger and more effective and meaningful.

I don’t see relations between TANA and IUAFS as irreparable and if I’m completely honest I think for TANA’s part there may have been a mistake by using a logo but I don’t think this should ever have escalated to this point.

TANA will never turn our backs on our Chair as Bill has set up something that has the potential to be massive, especially with the groups we are now working with, and the knowledge and experience that Bill brings to the table.

As for Ben, while I and TANA don’t condone threats we can tell what are off the cuff remarks made in frustration. Ben has to be commended for sacrificing himself to participate in the struggle to defeat fascists and ultranationalist Nazis in the Ukrainian civil war and subsequently the SMO. He has faced outrageous treatment at the hands of the British establishment and I believe he has to carry that around with him all the time, so I would ask you to bare that in mind.

As I’ve stated, and I will reiterate, the situation is not irreparable and maybe there are 2 parties at fault here, not one.

TANA will continue to build relationships with other organisations, as we are currently doing with groups that we share common grounds with and this is only going to serve to strengthen us and make our rallies, events, seminars etc, larger and more successful.

We endeavour to preserve Irish Neutrality, fight the move to hyper-militarise the EU, fight Russophobia and seek a peaceful end to the NATO proxy war in Ukraine and Novo-Russia.

If you wish to reach out and resolve things then I would ask that you keep dialogue open with our Chair Bill. If you wish to sever ties that that is also your prerogative. We will continue our work and wish you the very best of luck with yours.