It is with immense pleasure and honour that the LCFI communicates to the vanguard of the working class and the revolutionary left that the Socialist Fight organization of Great Britain returns to the framework of our national sections, after some years of distance from some international political differences and Zionism. For an undefined time, there will be two chapters of the LCFI in Great Britain with independent websites and publications. In unity with other organisations, the SF now further strengthens the struggle of our international against NATO in the UK and the world, it also strengthens the defense of Russia and other oppressed countries against imperialism as we continue the struggle for a socialist world and for building a new communist international.

LCFI International Secretariat

Charles Windsor’s coronation is a huge provocation against the working class, and an incredibly arrogant psyop. The timing is not fundamental to the point: but today working-class people are being hammered by huge price rises in basic foodstuffs and a considerable number are threatened with being driven into malnutrition, and even homelessness. Yet on coronation day, May 6th, there is a demand from the monarch and his ruling class cohorts for the population to “swear allegiance” to him and his family, as he partakes of his enormously expensive ceremony, estimated at around £100 million.

This arrogant demand on the people from those above is likely to fall flat. It is a sign of fragility. Charles Windsor is not popular or respected. Many sections of the population have a distinctly low opinion of him. Part of the ideology of monarchism is that the royals are somehow supposed to be a superior breed to the rest of us, but Charles Windsor is seen as callous, arrogant and a crank by many. The prince who talks to his plants.

Even among monarchists, many consider him tainted by the issue of his late wife, Diana Spencer, who died in a car crash 26 years ago after being hounded by the prurient royalist tabloid media and its paparazzi for speaking out about his adultery with the woman who is now his wife (soon to be ‘Queen Camilla’) while their sons were still infants.

The various official explanations for her death, mainly that she was the victim of a drunken chauffeur, are full of holes and contradicted by video evidence. At best, she died after being hounded and chased through the streets of Paris by the voracious British royalist press-pack and their hirelings; at worst, some suspect foul play and some sort of covert state action to get rid of her and an embarrassing problem that threatened to mortally wound public support for the monarchy.

Her death, in August 1997 caused a huge public outpouring of grief from a population that was obviously then, as it is now, saturated with monarchist sentiment, or at least sentimental softness on the various eagerly promoted myths of royalty. But it had a two-edged aspect to it; there was also great suspicion and latent anger among those masses that was partially directed even then at then-monarch Elizabeth Windsor for what was seen as public callousness about the death, tinged with suspicion. It was a peculiar episode that allowed the newly elected Tony Blair to co-opt this sentiment, however briefly, for his government by baptising her as the “people’s princess”.

The problem with the treatment of the comings and goings of the royals as soap opera, as has become the practice of the media in the neoliberal era, is that the monarchy derives its legitimacy from the principle of dynastic succession. Soap operas can turn nasty. And real life, when there are dynastic conflicts at stake, as well as questions involving racism and similar issues, can be even nastier when they are fought out in public.

The death of Diana was a major trauma, and the central figures at the heart of this are Charles and his two sons, William and Harry, and his former mistress and soon-to-be “Queen Camilla”, the former Mrs Parker-Bowles. They became the central figures of the British monarchy the moment the aged Elizabeth passed away. Elements of this group are at daggers drawn with each other, in public view. And there is no alternative for the UK monarchy than them.

Harry’s recent series of Netflix interviews, with his mixed-race American wife Meghan Merkle, and his book Spare, was an explosion waiting to happen. A continuation, and a deepening, of the trauma of the death of Diana. If Diana was an explosive outsider to the British royal camarilla, Harry and Meghan are even more explosive. The royal family, desperate to show that it was in tune with ‘modern Britain’ with its immigrant-derived communities and ethnically mixed major cities, completely failed to deal with a non-white woman marrying into it through Charles and Diana’s younger son.

Accusations of racist treatment of Meghan Merkle, together with actual physical brawling between brothers William and Harry over matters related to this, have caused further, major trauma to the reputation of the royals. The whole saga of whether Harry and his wife will attend the coronation just epitomises this. When the spectacle is over, monarchists everywhere will have to come to terms with the fact that the new monarch, and the ‘new’ monarchy, is very different to the staid, dependable image his mother went to great lengths to project throughout her record-long reign, trying to preserve the monarchy from scandal.

Charles/Camilla Pseudo-Liberal Cult: “Please Tolerate Us!”

Instead of this, we will have King Charles and Queen Camilla, who everyone knows were in an adulterous relationship for the whole period when Charles was married to Diana Spencer, who bore the current heir to the throne, William Windsor, and the ‘Spare’, Harry. Charles will be the head of the Church of England: which as least nominally stands on the biblical 10 Commandments, among them being: “Thou shalt not commit adultery”.

The Church of England was founded by Henry VIII in the sixteenth century when he wanted to divorce his wife and broke with Rome to allow him to do so (he later executed two of his six wives). But the question of divorce, let alone adultery, was so sensitive for the monarchy and the Church of England in the 20th Century that in 1936 Edward VIII had to abdicate the throne because he wanted to marry a divorcee.

But now the King – the head of the Church – and his Queen will be the two best-known ‘adulterers’ in the country, and their actions are not seen as mere innocent dalliance, but having played a major role in circumstances that caused the death of the mother of the new heir to the throne, a charismatic woman with a following like that of a film star. This leading to major conflict including physical brawling and estrangement between the succeeding generation of the royal family. Charles is himself old, and unlikely to be around much longer than a decade or two. It is tailor-made for more blowouts and internecine warfare that could easily bring the fragile British royal dynasty to complete collapse.

That is where this latest wheeze of asking the population at large to ‘swear allegiance’ to the new King comes in. It has the whiff of desperation about it, and the flavour of even trying to create a cult. And then there is the odd fact that, among the bunting and Union Flags that bedeck the streets ready for the coronation, you frequently see the rainbow flag of LGBT rights. Is this a sign that the British monarchy have suddenly become progressive campaigners for gay rights? That is unlikely. Though Diana was known for her work as a champion of the victims of AIDS, the rest of them had no particular liberal reputation.

It appears more likely that Charles and Camilla are so conscious of their position as adulterers at the head of the Established Church, that they are looking for support and sympathy among others who are also deemed by conservative elements in and around the church to be ‘deviants’. It’s a cynical exercise in in trying to gain sympathy for the new monarch among unconventional layers, that will likely strengthen the arguments of those who dismiss support for gay rights as cynical, hypocritical ‘wokery’.

Manipulation and attacks on Democratic Rights

This manipulation goes hand in hands with threats of repression from the government and the bourgeois state against anti-monarchy protesters. The ruling class is quite worried that the institution of the monarchy is particularly fragile right now, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. So, they are particularly intolerant of criticism, and hostile to those who would campaign for its abolition. The implementation of the new grossly undemocratic anti-protest laws has been brought forward, threats have been made by the police and the Home Office against protesters and opponents of the monarchy, and facial recognition will be used on coronation day against those objecting, an outrage against democratic rights. This was echoed within the Labour Party of Starmer, as at the 2022 LP Conference the delegates were pressganged into singing “God Save the King”, and Starmer made clear that criticising the monarchy was as much a no-no as opposing the imperialist proxy-war in Ukraine, or criticising Zionism.

Liberal republicans and the soft-left say that the monarchy is “out of touch”. They say similar things about the current Tory government, implying that the ruling layers are somehow unaware of the suffering and anger that their attacks on our living standards, on social welfare and the social wage, the engineered, rigged housing market and the huge housing crisis, sky high prices, extortionate rents, unfit housing and homelessness that is the result of it, cause to working class people. But this is wilful naiveite.

These are not lapses. They are brutal means to keep working-class people in line. They WANT working class people to fear being reduced to penury if they fight back. They WANT to destroy every social gain we have, from the NHS and basic protection against ill-health, to pensions. They want to hamstring and render useless the trade unions, to effectively ban working class struggle against our impoverishment. They want to make effective social and political protest against their attacks on us, against the destruction of the environment, and now against the coronation, difficult if not impossible.

The monarchy is an anti-democratic institution par excellence. Its very existence is a complete negation of democracy and the very idea of equality. It asserts that the common man or woman belongs to an inferior species, in effect, that privilege, not only wealth but power, is dependent upon birth, and that that is true by right. The ideology of monarchy wraps up subservience in the mantle of supposed virtue, the ‘virtue’ of being ‘loyal’ to the project of world robbery, of benefiting from the plunder of centuries, and of being ‘a cut above’ the victims of British imperialism in the past centuries, by such a show of loyalty to the robbers.

The monarchy plays an important role in maintaining the bourgeois order: it is the formal basis for the power of the executive branch of government, the power of the prime minister, who acts in the name of the Crown, not the popular will. Citizens of the UK are deemed as ‘subjects’, another negation of democracy and equality. The monarch still also has reserve powers that can be used by the ruling class to restrict or abolish democratic rights and procedures in an ‘emergency’ as the ruling class sees it. So far these have been used by the monarch’s representative overseas, as in 1975 when the Australian Labor government of Gough Whitlam was sacked by the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, whose power derived from the British monarchy (though in fact he acted for the CIA). Something similar happened in 1983 when another Governor General was instrumental in giving legal cover to the US invasion of the tiny Caribbean Island of Grenada, to overthrow the fractured remnants of the leftist New Jewel Movement and reassert US power.

The fact that the monarch mostly no longer exercises direct political power does not change its political-ideological role. It renders the widespread veneration of it among the middle classes and backward parts of the working class, more craven, more ideologically retrograde. The naked exercise of power at least commands a form of respect through knowledge of the consequences of non-obedience. This is self-willed subservience, the only thing that really drives it is the belief that the subservient benefit from a share of the ruling-class plunder that the monarchy symbolises.

Abolish the Monarchy – Abolish Capitalist Power!

The monarchy symbolises subservience to wealth in general, which is why the tabloid press is ferocious in denouncing all dissent from this ideology, even when it seeps into the family of the monarch, and the liberal media as often as not follows suit. The negation of class consciousness and democracy. Subservience to the monarchy thus runs deep in the imperialist-dominated British labour movement and the Labour Party. The hegemony of British capitalism in the 19th Century, and then Britain’s imperialist hegemony from approximately the 1880s until it was fractured by WWI, and then only finally displaced by US imperialist hegemony since WWII, created the material base for the dominance of the monarchy over British politics even in the period when the working class movement managed to extract real concessions from the bourgeoisie, with ‘welfare capitalism’ in the three decades or so after WWII, which came under concerted attack from neoliberalism from the 1970s onwards to the this day. All these events failed to shake the domination of the monarchy spiritually over the British Labour movement.

The biggest give-away that Brexit, contrary to the illusions of some on the left, was not a left-wing opposition to neoliberalism, was the nationalism and the continued, even enhanced, reverence and deference to the monarchy and the Union Jack, the flag-shagging etc. Even though part of the drive behind it was anger at the decline of working-class living standards under neoliberalism, and the abandonment of working class politics by the Labour Party for the last few decades (with the partial exception of the period under Corbyn’s leadership). The thrust of this movement was a demand for the restoration of the privileges British workers felt that they were owed as members of a formerly ‘great’ Empire, and a hostility to immigrant workers, not any solidarity with the victims of British imperialism and its allies. Thus overall, Brexit was a reactionary, sentimental-imperialist movement despite being driven by working class discontent.

To politically express its own class interests, and not be the self-willed wage-slaves of the bourgeoisie, British workers have to break decisively from monarchism. This has not happened so far in the 20th and 21st Centuries, though there were some fleeting signs of it in the 19th. But the most revolutionary act in British history was of course carried out by the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary phase under the leadership of Cromwell. Even though he was a bourgeois scoundrel and a key progenitor of British colonialism’s crimes in Ireland, the act of his movement in executing Charles I was a highpoint that the British working-class movement has never come close to emulating – yet! But British imperialism is in terminal decline, and the US behemoth they today act as vassal to is also facing the loss of hegemony in the current ‘new’ Cold War with Russia and China. These ruling classes will take ‘their’ working classes with them into deeper and deeper penury, if not nuclear annihilation, as they struggle to retain their world power and profit margins.

It is thus a matter of simple self-preservation and class interest for the working-class movement in Britain to reject this absurd loyalism and inscribe the democratic demand for the abolition of the (very bourgeois) monarchy and aristocracy on its banner as an integral part of a transitional programme for working class rule and international revolution.

Today the imperialist powers and their allies are escalating the siege against the Russian-Chinese bloc. Everything points to the confrontation advancing towards a third world war if the current escalation does not ebb. In this sense, the puppet neo-Nazi regime of Kyiv has already turned the Ukraine into a platform for the war. It has been de facto annexed to NATO. Ukraine has not been a sovereign country since 2014 and is now merely a sacrificial tool of imperialism.

The integration of Finland and Sweden into NATO, the creation of AUKUS (the Asia-Pacific NATO arm created by the United States, Britain and Australia) and the continuous provocations against China over the Taiwan question are all part of the siege by the imperialist powers of the Russian-Chinese pole and its allies. Redoubling the oppression of these countries, with the active participation of the European imperialism, is necessary for US imperialism to ensure that the 21st century is also the “American century”.

This need for oppressed countries, surrounded by imperialism, to resist has built, in practice, a world anti-imperialist front including both oppressed capitalist states and the remaining workers states. Marxists must know how to position themselves within this world anti-imperialist front. There is ongoing debate amongst anti-imperialist Communists in regards to the class character of Cuba, North Korea and China, on whether they are Communist or deformed workers states or indeed whether China remains a workers state. Notwithstanding such disagreements it is obligatory to defend all these states against attempts by pro-imperialist forces to overthrow them either directly from without, or by ‘colour revolutions’ from within. That is why we reject any attempt at “revolutionary” defeatism in both camps, since imperialism and its allies are in one camp and in the other a bloc of countries oppressed by imperialism, and the workers’ states.

Every movement of US imperialism worsens its own crisis. A few weeks ago, several banks in the US and Europe had to be bailed out. This is part of a boomerang effect on the imperialist economies of the failure of their sanctions against Russia. We must make use of every self-inflicted blow by the US imperialists and every division that occurs between the capitalist powers. BRICS and the developing countries are making their own movements of de-dollarization of trade relations, sharing of technologies (for example in semiconductors), and mutual protection against sanctions, speculative attacks, etc. Likewise, the other imperialist powers are unsure about how much to cut their own throats in (they hope!) exchange for future profits. We must recognize at the same time that each blow to them brings the US ruling class closer to a point in which open war seems to be the only “solution” to their problems. The tendency is clear, but the outcome is unpredictable.

We do not want war. The workers are the main victims of the scourge of war, both directly and indirectly, as shown by the destruction of life in Donbass and in Ukraine, dragged by the puppet Zelensky into a nation of rubble, and by the rapid deterioration in the living conditions of workers in Europe. It is always the imperialist nations that take the initiative to unleash war. Russia, led by Putin, oppressed and surrounded on all sides by NATO, belatedly decided to react and defend the people of Donbass with the Special Military Operation. Now, imperialism is making every effort to not return to peace, to profit from a lucrative arms race, and to escalate to war. 

We do not want war, but nor are we pacifists.  We must break with the politics of pacifism and Russophobia. The organizers and leaders of the March 18th protests in the USA for example tried to isolate and censure the organizations that support a Russian victory over imperialism in the war and instead aimed to pressure the imperialist Democratic Party that is waging the war. Such politics only cowers in the face of public opinion and serves imperialist governance. No progress will be made appealing to either of the vicious imperialist Republican or Democrat wings of the US ruling class. 

History demonstrates that wars open fissures in the capitalist world system, breaches through which proletarian revolutionary movements can break though. The great wars of the 19th and 20th Centuries resulted in great revolutions. The Franco-Prussian war resulted in the Paris Commune. The Russo-Japanese War gave birth to the first Russian Revolution of 1905. The First World War gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution and a huge revolutionary wave in its aftermath. The Second World War produced the Korean, Chinese, Yugoslavian, Vietnamese, Cuban revolutions, involving the expropriation of non-European capitalism. An ongoing war in a more globalized world could unleash a phenomenon even more extensive than after the Second World War. One third of the world’s population lives in countries where capitalism’s means of production have previously been expropriated from private ownership. As the imperialist escalation moves towards the third World War, the communists need to be internationally more aware and organized as the vanguard of the working class.

The tactic of participating in the world anti-imperialist front must be accompanied by the strategy of a consistent fight against imperialism, a fight against the capitalist system as a whole.

Therefore, we defend the right of China and Russia to defend themselves from the imperialist encirclement. As well as all the people oppressed by imperialism – like the population of Donbass itself – just as we are for the victory of all belligerent forces that confront imperialism – like Hamas in Palestine, while we aim to unite the fight against imperialism with the struggle for the proletarian and socialist revolution.

The very character of this war, defensive for Russia and offensive for imperialism, proves once again that the bourgeoisies of oppressed countries are incapable of carrying out the complete liberation of their peoples from imperialism, as they wish to continue exploiting their part of the world working class. Only new socialist revolutions can fully defeat imperialism, complete these tasks and thus emancipate humanity. But, leaving things to spontaneity, it is easier for humanity to continue on the course of increasing barbarism than to socialism. As the war in Ukraine has also shown this barbarism will increasingly take a fascist form. To halt this we need a new international organization of communists that will unify all who agree with the above program to give a conscious, proletarian, socialist and revolutionary alternative to the stalemate and the current war.

LIST OF ENDORSING GROUPS AND INDIVIDUALS (As of 25th April)

Endorsing Groups

볼셰비키그룹/Bolshevik Group (South Korea)
Classconscious.org (US and Australia)
κομμουνιστικη επαναστατικη δραση / Communist Revolutionary Action (Greece)

Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, and its sections:
Consistent Democrats (Great Britain)
Liga Communista / Communist League (LCFI – Brasil)
Socialist Workers League (United States)
Tendencia Militante Bolchevique/ Militant Bolshevik Tendency (LCFI – Argentina)

Socialist Fight (Great Britain) 
Socialist Unity Party (US)
US Friends of the Soviet People

Endorsing Individuals

Marie Lynam (Posadists Today – London)

José Carlos Marçal – PCPB (Brasil)

Joana Marisa Boaventura (Brasil)

Rainer Shea (USA)

The suspension of Diane Abbott from the Labour whip in the House of Commons by Starmer is another grotesque instance of Labour’s purge of opponents of racism, and of socialists and left-wing people generally. In Abbott’s case she has been the MP who has been subjected more racial abuse than any other politician in Britain. Comrade Abbott has been purged for expressing her views in a letter to the Observer (23 April) about the different types and impacts of racism and prejudice affecting different minority populations in the UK.

We consider that while some of the views expressed by Abbott in her letter are mistaken, for instance about Travellers and Irish people, her views about racism against Jews are simply correct in today’s conditions. In any case, these topics are a legitimate subject for debate within the labour movement and Starmer’s suspension of Abbott represents utter hostility to the norms of free labour movement debate – which is not really news. No doubt it is also intended to get another ‘troublesome’ left-wing MP of long-standing out of the party, after Jeremy Corbyn. It is unlikely that Abbott will have any more success than Corbyn has in getting the whip back – Corbyn has now been officially barred from standing in the Islington North seat he has won over and over again since 1983. Abbott, who has done the same in Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987, is most likely to face a similar attack. If they were to both decide to stand as independent candidates in their own long-held seats in the coming General Election they would likely win, and give a big impetus to the need, felt by millions, for a leftist alternative to the Tories and hard neoliberal New Labour under Starmer. Whether they will seems highly doubtful, though it is not entirely clear whether they might do so under pressure from below.

Misogynoir and Racism

As has been pointed out previously, Abbott has been abused both racially and in a sexist manner, and the combination of the two produces the phenomenon of misogynoir, a special hatred of black women. An investigation by Amnesty International, cited in the Guardian from the period surrounding the 2019 General Election, into abuse on Twitter, noted that:

“Of the 140,000 tweets mentioning the shadow home secretary’s Twitter handle, @HackneyAbbott, one in 20 were classified as abusive. During the six months the tweets were monitored, Abbott received more abuse than all female MPs from the Conservative and Scottish National parties combined.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/sep/05/diane-abbott-more-abused-than-any-other-mps-during-election

Abbott herself recounted:

“Abbott told the study her experience as an MP had gone from receiving one racist letter a week to hundreds every day, including letters covered in swastikas and pictures of monkeys and chimpanzees. “It’s the volume of it which makes it so debilitating, so corrosive, and so upsetting. It’s the sheer volume. And the sheer level of hatred that people are showing,” she told researchers.”

ibid

Furthermore, this racial abuse found repeated expression within the Labour Party. Two major reports, one commissioned under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, the other conducted by Martin Forde QC after the leaking of the earlier report, found that attitudes to Diane Abbott and other BAME MPs in WhatsApp messages between Labour apparatchiks hostile to the Corbyn leadership (using official Labour Party phones and discussion groups), revealed “over and underlying racism and sexism” and “ expressions of visceral disgust, drawing (consciously or otherwise) on racist tropes, and they bear little resemblance to the criticisms of white male MPs elsewhere in the messages”.

So, the most prominent and long-standing black MP, a victim of much racial and bigoted abuse, including from within the Labour Party, has been suspended and threatened with expulsion, for expressing her opinion about racism. But none of her abusers have been so purged! What a scandal! Her letter is short enough to reproduce in full:

“Tomiwa Owolade claims that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people all suffer from “racism” … They undoubtedly experience prejudice. This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.

“It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.”

Though she did issue an apology for it being published, saying it was an early draft of a letter that had been sent to the paper by mistake. She had no need to apologize, though the letter could have been better written and some nuances better expressed. But these are political questions and debating the nature of racism or prejudice against various groups is completely legitimate in a labour movement where Zionism has played a major role in muddying the waters and poisoning debate.

She is wrong about Travellers and the Irish (in Britain at least), who have been subjected to sustained racism under British imperialism and colonialism, and in the case of Travellers, all over Europe. Racist oppression against the Irish in particular has been closely linked to Ireland’s position as Britain’s oldest colony: the Irish have been treated as less-than-human by the British ruling class for centuries and this has only weakened as British imperialism has itself weakened so much that it has had to relinquish part of its historic power in Ireland. Reluctantly to a nation that has gained from its membership of the European Union, which part of the British ruling class regards as a separate imperialist bloc that they reluctantly must work with (but many would keep as at much distance as possible – hence Brexit, and the travails of the ‘Northern Ireland Protocol’).

The degree of discrimination against Travellers including in Britain today, rivals and may even exceed that against black people. For decades after open discrimination on racial grounds became illegal in Britain, “no travellers” signs were a commonplace in pubs etc., particularly in the countryside. They are not unheard of even today, as a 2021 report by London Gypsies and Travellers highlighted:

“This has been an important “Me Too” moment for the Traveller community. The exposure of Pontins’ blacklisting of Irish Travellers has resonated hugely with many people’s experiences of discrimination. It has made plain the racism that Gypsies and Travellers routinely face, but which has become so normalised that it is barely remarked on.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/17/irish-travellers-say-uk-blacklist-a-campaign-of-discrimination

And of course, gypsies and travellers were subjected to persecution and then extermination, along with the millions of Jews who were murdered by Hitler, in the Nazi genocide and extermination campaigns during and in the lead up to World War II. However, unlike Jews, who have pretty comprehensively overcome the oppressed position they were forced into before 1945, GRT people are still being persecuted, including by this government.

What comrade Abbott is perhaps guilty of is seeing racism through an excessively black lens. For someone from a very oppressed black community who has been personally subjected to torrents of racial abuse, however, that is perfectly comprehensible. The point she was clumsily making is that they’re not oppressed on the basis of colour. In recent times the BNP had some Jewish members and even councillors, there are prominent Jewish members in Le Pen’s party (and other far right parties) in France, and part of the Irish population is gravitating towards the far right over refugees in Ireland. These groups have not historically been oppressed solely on the basis of colour, whereas black people always have. Attempting to recognise the (several) genocides of the people of African origin is not permitted by the racist Labour Party, if it is given the legitimacy of being up there with the Nazi holocaust.

Abbot’s Purge – A Racist Outrage!

That she should face being purged for such a thing is an outrage! The Starmerites do not care two hoots about anti-Irish racism nor about Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (GRT) – as shown by their toleration of John Mann – a major force in the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign – who even issued pamphlets targeting Gypsies and Travellers alongside other supposedly ‘anti-social’ layers for ‘trespass’.

When she comes to talk about prejudice against Jews in today’s conditions, she is basically correct. Unlike Gypsies and Travellers, for instance, today, Jews are rarely identifiable, unless they choose to be so, and through upward mobility, have pretty comprehensively escaped from ghettoisation and oppression. The change in Britain has been so marked that before World War 2, Jews were a key social base not only of the Labour Party, but also of the Communist Party. Today, Jews are far more likely to support the Conservative Party than Labour.

This is the political expression of a layer of the population that has escaped from a subordinate, oppressed position and rightly considers itself to be privileged. Political Zionism was a key means by which this was effected. Its conservative, bourgeois politics was crucial in overcoming the hostility of the propertied classes to class-assimilation of Jews (whose origin was largely in a medieval community that were mainly involved in trade in commodities), into the middle and upper classes of Western capitalist societies, and therefore joining the dominant class layers of Western imperialism. Albeit with a distinctive, Zionist form of bourgeois politics that particularly sees Israel as ‘their’ transplanted imperialist state. Today, phoney allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’ are a means to fend off criticism of the virulent Zionist racism against Palestinian Arabs and their defenders that plays a major role in Jewish communities in the West, and its considerable influence on imperialist policy in the Middle East.

This is what Starmer is upset about: criticism of this particular type of racism is not tolerated in his racist, Zionist ‘Labour’ Party. He himself stated his support for Zionism “without qualification”. Phoney fulminations against so-called ‘anti-Semitism’, i.e., criticism of this type of racism, played a major role in bringing down Corbyn’s leadership. The Big Lie was propagated widely that Corbyn was brought down by a supposed ‘scandal’ of his leadership’s supposed ‘discrimination’ against Jews. A complete pack of lies from start to finish, a total scam, but reinforced by the state’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, now run for the benefit of neoliberalism, not oppressed groups.

But this clearly racist purge makes the real, racist nature of Starmer’s party much clearer. And he will not be able to escape this. The most abused, black female member of Labour’s Parliamentary Party is being purged for commenting on her own oppression and that of others, while those in Labour who abused her, and others, get off scot-free. This makes clear – Starmer’s leadership is an enemy of Britain’s oppressed black and Asian minority populations, and this enmity stems in considerable part from the Zionist politics of Labour’s leading cliques.

Down with the Starmer/Zionist racist purge of Diane Abbott!

Reinstate her now!

No vote to Starmer’s Zionist New Labour!

At the end of March, Keir Starmer did what he obviously had been planning to do for a long time, and rammed a motion through the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee definitively ruling that Jeremy Corbyn will not be allowed to stand as a Labour candidate in the next General Election. This is due in Britain before December 2024, but will probably take place in May 2024. Unless the somewhat fragile Tory regime splits and collapses before then.

It was always obvious that Starmer would do this, as his entire project always was to sabotage the left-reformist, social democratic leadership of Corbyn in the period from 2015-2020, covering two General Elections (2017 and 2019). He was the prime cadre in the background who the neoliberal political cliques that dominate Labour’s sizeable apparatus and officialdom, came to regard as their standard-bearer after Corbyn was unexpectedly elected leader in a political mass upsurge after the neoliberal Labourites’ substantial election defeat in 2015. Put on the defensive by two damaging election defeats, the prior one in 2010 after the miserable end of 13 years of privatising, warmongering ‘Labour’ rule, the working class, or at least social-democratic, pole of this bourgeois labour party found the political space to reassert itself and win the leadership for a brief period.

The entire project of the British ruling class since the 1970s has been to defeat the trade unions, and to find a way to deprive the working class of political representation and the chance to even preserve and defend previously achieved social gains, such as the National Health Service and a half-decent social welfare system. These have been massively mangled by 40 years of a bosses’ offensive under the banner of neoliberalism, under both Tory and Labour governments. But however briefly, the mass movement behind Corbyn struck blows against that, conquered the Labour leadership, and even came close to winning political office on such a social democratic programme. In the 2017 General Election Corbyn’s Labour deprived then Tory Prime Minister Theresa May of the overall parliamentary majority the Tories had won in 2015 and forced them into two years of fragile minority government, where they depended on the votes of the Protestant-sectarian Democratic Unionist Party in the Northern Ireland statelet to get their measures through parliament.

This was a substantial shock to the British ruling class, who thought it had succeeded over the years of Thatcher and Blair in marginalising any kind of working-class politics. So, their response was that the Tories and the Labour neoliberals worked together to destroy Corbyn’s leadership. After some false starts, they settled on the tactic of using of fake allegations of anti-Semitism against the Labour left as personified by Corbyn, who had been a long-time defender of Palestinian rights. The Tory/billionaire media, including ostensibly liberal outfits like the Guardian and Independent, worked together with the Labour right-wing internally to vilify the left in Labour as supposedly suffused with hatred of Jews.

In addition to this, the issue of Brexit (British exit from the European Union), and nationalism, was used as a weapon to defeat Labour by the right-wing, again exploiting the issue – which also massively divided the Conservatives – to divide and discredit Labour under Corbyn’s leadership. A UK referendum in 2016 saw Britain vote narrowly to leave the European Union on a basis that was as least partly driven by populist anti-immigration sentiment in part of the working class, and resentment at the loss of living standards under neoliberalism, which right-populists such as the UK Independence Party, as well as a key part of the Tories led by Boris Johnson, exploited to try to win power on the basis of the same populist nationalist demagogy.

Right-wing conspire to destroy Corbyn’s leadership.

In 2017, Corbyn stood on a platform of, among other things, accepting the result of the Brexit referendum and attempting to use it to escape some of the EU’s own neoliberal rules in pursuit of his social-democratic programme. This brought him close to victory in 2017. But after this, the Labour right under Starmer fought tooth and nail to commit Labour to another Brexit referendum, and the immediate reversal of the Brexit mandate. At the same time the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign was raging in the media and Corbyn retreated before the ferocity of it, Zionists complaining that disrespect for their racist programme equalled some kind of racist, anti-Semitic campaign against them.

Mendacious accusations of anti-Jewish racism were formulated against several leading figures on the Labour left, including well known figures like Ken Livingstone and Chris Williamson, a host of less well known but fairly mainstream leftists such as Marc Wadsworth, Pete Willsman and Jackie Walker, as well as Stan Keable, Tony Greenstein and Socialist Fight’s Gerry Downing, who obviously were part of a Corbyn-supporting far left. Several of these were actually Jewish, but the ferocious mendacity in the media did not care about that. It was a pseudonymous campaign against socialism, nothing to do with any ‘racism’. Ideological confusion about Zionism ran deep in the Labour left, and both Corbyn, and a considerable layer of the official ‘left’ around him, such as Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and the Corbyn-supporting Momentum movement, capitulated, refused to stand up for those so vilified, and threw them under the bus.

The result was that Corbyn looked chronically weak, and his authority over Labour was somewhat weakened by the time of the 2019 General Election. As well as that, the stumbling Tory Prime Minister Theresa May had been replaced by the Trump-like populist Boris Johnson, and Starmer’s policy of demanding the immediate reversal of the Brexit vote through a second referendum, played right into his hands. As it was probably intended to do, particularly as since becoming leader Starmer has wrapped himself in the Union Jack and become an outspoken defender of Brexit. It was quite correct to oppose Brexit and defend those rights of migrants within Britain and Europe that existed before Brexit, but the tactical question of how to handle the right populists’ victory in the referendum required some finesse.

The result of the ‘anti-Semitism’ lie campaign and the cynical, right-wing manoeuvring over Brexit was a major defeat for Labour in the 2019 General Election, at the hands of Johnson whose demands to ‘Get Brexit Done’ were something of a trump card. Though there are some grounds to suspect that even this was exaggerated and more sinister machinations from the bourgeoisie, possibly even involving corruption of the electoral system, were in play to magnify Johnson’s electoral victory. Some elements of the bourgeoisie, including both former Prime Minister May, and Trump’s US Secretary of State Pompeo had made it clear that the ruling class was determined to defeat Corbyn at virtually any cost.

After Labour’s 2019 defeat, Corbyn resigned, and Starmer took over, mendaciously promising ‘unity’ and the continuation of Corbyn’s social democratic policies. But entirely predictably, this was the prelude to the biggest purge of the left in the Labour Party’s history. Not just targeting alleged ‘far left’ infiltrators, but the mainstream Labour left. Left-wing parliamentarians have been forbidden, on pain of exclusion from the party, to sign anti-war statements over Ukraine, or to criticise Israeli racism, or to stand on workers picket lines. And of course, Corbyn had the Labour whip withdrawn, for refusing to collude fully with the Tory-dominated state body, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, in its fatuous attempt to brand the Labour Party under his leadership as having ‘discriminated’ against Jews.

The purges have involved the proscription of pro-Corbyn left-wing groupings, and, on a massive scale, the expulsion of members of the party who supported those groupings even in many cases before they were proscribed. The claims about ‘anti-Semitism’ are exposed by the large scale purge of left-wing Jews, massively and disproportionately targeted as effectively ‘race-traitors’ by the racist Zionist thugs around Starmer who defend the dispossession and oppression of Palestinians and strong-arm those who dissent in classic far-right fashion.

Corbyn’s exclusion from standing in the overwhelmingly Labour-voting constituency, Islington North in North London, that he has represented since 1983, is the culmination of this purge. Its purpose is to ensure that nothing like Corbynism can even happen again, from within the Labour Party at least. It is entirely possible that this will finally resolve the class contradiction that Labour embodies, between its mass working-class base and the pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist bureaucracy that rules its apparatus. In the period where British imperialism still had some strength in the world, this bureaucracy demanded ‘socialism’ through greater state ownership to benefit workers. Now that British capitalism is in deep decline and desperate for each morsel of profit, particularly the political labour bureaucracy is inclined to follow the ruling class in financial scams, including even the privatisation of healthcare.

For a genuine workers party!

The logical conclusion of this is to break the working class from the bourgeois labour party and create a genuine working-class party. Many of those excluded from Labour have already drawn this conclusion – Chris Williamson founded the Resist Movement in 2020 after being driven out of Labour, which recently merged with the Socialist Labour Party, founded by the veteran miners’ union leader Arthur Scargill in 1996. The SLP, with Chris Williamson playing the leading role, is now involved in a joint campaign against NATO and its proxy war in Ukraine with George Galloway and his Workers Party of Britain. Comrade Galloway was thrown out of the Labour Party in 2003 for his militant defiance of Blair and imperialism over the war in Iraq. All these activities are the beginnings of the coming together of forces to create such a working-class party.

What will Jeremy Corbyn do now he is being driven out of the Labour Party by the vengeful supporters of Zionism, imperialism and neoliberalism? Will he break from Labour and play a constructive role in the break of the British working class movement from pro-imperialist Labourism? He has been very reticent about this – it is virtually a certainty that if he were to defy Starmer and defend his seat as an independent leftist, he would defeat the stooge that dared to stand against him. But that would itself require him to break from the chronic political softness and conciliationism that crippled his ability to fight against the ‘anti-Semitism’ witchhunt and the right-wing campaign of political assassination of not only himself, but the movement behind him. It is not clear at this point if he will capitulate or not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A personal reflection on the Scottish Gender Recognition Bill

By

Mark Andresen

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

Sue Pascoe of Chamber UK confirms:

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

Pascoe, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen McilKenny, The Scotsman, 17/02/23

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

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

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

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

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

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

R Hunt, Stonewall Chief Executive

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

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

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

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

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

Strike Against Government Censorship

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

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

The Strike Wave and the Union Bureaucracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Potential for a New Working-Class Party

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

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