Your Party is a positive initiative, there is no doubt about that, but it reflects the problems of the organisation it came out of: the Labour Party. Particularly in the Corbyn period. The announcement of a new party was evidently driven by Zarah Sultana, MP for Coventry South, when she resigned from Labour at the beginning of July after having been deprived of the Labour whip last year for voting against the two-child benefit cap, introduced by the Tories, which Starmer was determined to keep. Jeremy Corbyn, having defeated the Starmer Labour Party in his own seat of Islington North in the July 2024 General Election, joined up with four other independent MPs who won seats last July: left-wing Muslims who campaigned particularly over the Gaza genocide: Shockat Adam (Leicester South), Adnan Hussain (Blackburn), Ayoub Khan (Birmingham Perry Barr) and Iqbal Mohammad (Dewsbury and Batley). They formed the Independent Alliance after the election. When Zarah Sultana resigned from Labour, she joined the independent Alliance, more of less concurrently with announcing the creation of a new party.

Effectively, though not formally since it is not properly founded yet, and the name is to be voted on at a proper conference towards the end of 2025, the new party already has six MPs, and it is most fitting that it should be heavily Muslim, as reflecting particularly the oppression of, and the anger of, that section of the working class of Muslim immigrant origin, mostly in this country with their origins on the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan and Bangladesh, who have become targets both from nativist islamophobes and Zionists active in British politics. This leads to an implicit division and even factional situation in Your Party even as it is forming up, as Zarah Sultana has openly and prominently declared herself an anti-Zionist since she joined the Independent Alliance. Whereas Corbyn is much shakier, and his record as leader of Labour is in stark contradiction to that.  When leader he endorsed a terrible position that Zionists and anti-Zionists could, and should, coexist in the same party. Of course, neither Zionists nor anti-Zionists could possibly accept this and given the relationship of forces within the Labour political bureaucracy at the time, the Zionists were emboldened to ram through the IHRA fake definition of anti-Semitism. Corbyn vainly attempted to dilute it but then acquiesced.  The witchhunt simply intensified overseen by Corbyn’s nominated Labour General Secretary, Jenny Formby – the expulsions of anti-Zionists on her watch accelerated compared to that of her right-wing predecessor, Iain McNichol. Zarah Sultana has criticised the record of Corbynism on this, rightly saying that Corbynism ‘capitulated’ to Zionism. On this she clearly merits critical support, whatever problems with her wrong positions on Syria previously, or her hostility to the progressive Russian intervention in the Donbass.

When challenged recently (by a left-wing, anti-Zionist activist) about whether he agreed with Zarah Sultana’s anti-Zionism, he looked acutely embarrassed and refused to answer. Corbyn had been earlier better politically when he stood on the platforms of Deir Yassin Remembered with Paul Eisen over several years before 2015. Eisen is a British Jew who out of disgust with the exploitation by Zionists of the past suffering of Jews to justify genocidal treatment of Palestinians, mistakenly concluded that the Nazi genocide was a hoax (though he conceded he may have been mistaken about that). Even though Eisen was wrong about this, his mistaken motives were honourable, and he should have been defended despite this mistake, as a sincere defender of Palestine. Corbyn’s later position, that Zionists and anti-Zionists should work together, in the context of today’s Gaza holocaust, is a far worse mistake than standing on platforms with Paul Eisen. Given the current context, this mistake is worse than Eisen’s – confusion about a genocide that happened before Eisen was born because of Zionist exploitation of that terrible event, is not equivalent to refusing to declare oneself an anti-Zionist today, in the context of the Zionist holocaust in Gaza which is visible to the whole world!

So, there are major political tensions within the project and at least rumours of a degree of factional warfare behind the scenes. This is obviously the result of the above contradictions. Corbyn is still a two-statist over Palestine, but that position is completely unviable today. There needs to be thoroughgoing debate and post-mortem of the previous failures within Labour in the lead up to the founding conference of the party later in the year, so these questions can be fully and openly aired and a balance-sheet drawn. The IHRA should be branded as what it clearly is: a truly sinister document that prepared the Labour Party under Starmer to support Israel’s genocide. The last thing the new party needs is subterranean factional warfare – far better an open discussion, if necessary, with the creation of separate platforms on this question, with the different trends visible to all. This is the only way to neutralise the potential for destructive attacks from the Zionists and other enemies aimed at the shipwreck of the entire project.

On the other hand, Your Party have instigated a consultation on the name for the new party, which all who have signed up have been given the opportunity to both suggest a name and submit a substantial motivation for it. Also positive is that both Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn have come out firmly in support of the rights of transexuals. There are some questions where the more ‘labourite’ trends within this are right. It is not all a one-way street. We need militant anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism in defence of Russia, China, Cuba, the DPRK, Iran, Venezuela etc. against imperialism, defence of women’s rights, particularly abortion rights, and defence of oppressed minorities, LGBT etc, under the banner of a revived workers movement fighting for unity of the working class and the oppressed against capitalism. No capitulation to Zionism, imperialism or the social backwardness of some of imperialism’s opponents.

Communist Fight Issue 2:13 is out now. This is the first we have put out in around 3 months, due to some recent logistical difficulties, but the contents of this issue are certainly appropriate. The front- page lead is about the new party initiated by Zahra Sultana, and centrally involving Jeremy Corbyn, at the beginning of July. The massive outpouring of support and interest in this – it rapidly signed up hundreds of thousands on putative supporters in a matter of weeks via website signups – now up to a million – is a seminal event in British politics. Through the new party is still in the process of formation, it has mobilised the mass base that gathered together in support of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in 2015 and then expanded it further. The expectations this has aroused among millions are massive – as the article makes clear, this is the culmination of four decades of class polarisation around divisions that have ebbed and flowed over that time, but have always been centrally about the role of pro-NATO, pro-Zionist, neoliberal ideologues in the apparatus of the Labour Party, that has finally pushed it to this split.

The issue contains also a brief analysis of the divisions in ‘Your Party’ over Zionism and the legacy of the witchhunt and election defeat, both engineered by deeply embedded Zionists in Labour, and the neoliberal right generally.

There is a short article on the Starmer regime’s attacks on democratic rights and civil liberties, crucial questions to be dealt with today.

There is an extensive treatment of some of the scientific aspects of capitalist-induced climate change and the seriousness of it for the future of humanity –  an existential problem that the world working class must take power to deal with. This can only be resolved by rational socialist planning of the world’s resources for use, not for profit, under the democratic control of the victorious world proletariat.

And there is an article on the wave of fascist activity and violence against refugees, and oppressed minorities generally, that swept Britain this August, following on last years horrors. It puts this in the context of social decline, and the changes in the class composition of Britain occasioned by neoliberal and its jobs massacres in the past few decades, and the political demoralisation and lumpenisation of key parts of the working class. It puts this, again in the context of the creation of ‘Your Party’; which can offer solutions for this if it adopts a programme that really attacks the root cause – capitalism. The article overall makes the case for the new party to organise its own militia to guarantee the inviolability of workers’ organisations and the defence of oppressed sections of society.

We are living through the biggest split in the Labour Party’s history, though it is happening in a long-drawn-out and novel manner. This is the continuation of a struggle that has been going on for many years, a continuation of the conflicts in the Labour Party and the labour movement more broadly since Corbyn’s election as leader in 2015, the tumultuous years of Corbynism, the witchhunts, the near victory in the general election in 2017, the sabotaged election campaign of 2019, and then the forcing out of Corbyn. And turn, these have continuity with the conflict over the Cold War in the 1980s, the miners’ strike of 1984-5, and the defeats of the unions under Thatcher and since with support from traitorous neoliberal Labour leaders like Kinnock, Blair, Brown and now Starmer.  The artificial, engineered defeat of Corbyn meant that the mass base that it had generated never dissipated – rather it went into abeyance in a state of seething resentment at the Zionist-led wrecking operation.

When the Zionists and Blairites could not get their way by the ‘anti-semitism’ smear alone, they changed tactics and cynically exploited the Brexit issue to mobilise the most backward and demoralised, semi-lumpenised, nationalist elements of the working class against the left. Starmer’s strident demand for a second Brexit referendum exploited justifiable hostility to Farage’s anti-immigrant, imperial-nostalgic ‘Make Britain Great Again’ movement but the second referendum demand was a tactical error for those who sincerely backed it – it gave Farage and Johnson the weapon of a hypocritical concern for ‘democracy’ to use against Labour. For Starmer, it was just a means to an end – the defeat of Corbyn’s Labour. In 2017 Corbyn did not make this error – he accepted the Brexit referendum outcome but actively sought a soft Brexit. Once Starmer had helped Johnson to defeat Corbyn in 2019, he became one of the worst Brexiters and flag-shaggers – everything he does is wrapped with the Union Flag to this day. Today his regime tries to compete with Farage as to who is most brutal to migrants.

The defeat of Corbyn in 2019 led to the election of Starmer as leader of Labour in 2020. That too was engineered. A situation was created where everyone knew that any halfway credible leadership candidate who did not in some way swear loyalty to Zionism would be smeared as ‘anti-Semitic’ and suspended from the party to rig the election. It would have required a massive offensive of a confident and clarified anti-Zionist left to overcome that. Cravenly, all the leadership candidates who succeeded in getting nominated, either declared themselves to be Zionists themselves, or in the case of Starmer, declared that he supported Zionism “without qualification”.

With the election of Starmer, the split began. Many who had eagerly supported Corbyn, despite all his flaws and capitulations, refused to support Starmer, because they knew full well that he was a placeman whose election had been orchestrated by the same people who had conspired to defeat Corbyn. A sizeable layer knew full well that Starmer’s claim to stand for many of the same things that Corbyn stood for was simply cynical eyewash to get votes from the unwary and the naïve. Then came the huge purges of just about anyone who stood for anything connected with Corbyn in any serious sense. So, Labour’s membership is 309,000 currently, as compared to 532,000 in 2019 under Corbyn, a loss of around 220,000 or so. This loss of hundreds of thousands of members was the tip of an iceberg in terms of support more generally and what could have been potential members. It was clearly a powder keg waiting to go off. This huge layer had already been seriously radicalised against Zionism as a key agent of capitalist reaction by the experience of the witchhunt in the Labour Party, and then were part of the much broader radicalisation of British society by the genocide in Gaza, which exposed what the Corbyn witchhunt was obviously about – clearing the way for Labour to support a genocide.

Which Starmer clearly did right from the moment the genocide began. Interviewed by Nick Ferrari on LBC on 8^th October 2023, he clearly defended Yoav Gallant’s order for Gazans to be starved of fuel, food and water. Starmer’s regime has persecuted Palestine solidarity activists in ways that the previous Tory government never dared, getting the cops to effectively ban Palestine marches and having leading Palestine and anti-war activists like Chris Nineham and Ben Jamal arrested and prosecuted on trumped-up charges of breaking ‘public order’. They have instituted outrageous raids on the homes of Palestine activists and journalists like Asa Winstanley and Sarah Wilkinson, effectively using the state to wage a campaign in wider society that is an extension of the witchhunt Zionists waged in the Labour Party against the pro-Palestinian left. The IHRA pseudo-definition of anti-Semitism was always about trying to coerce the Labour Party membership to not oppose genocide, as its key tenet was that equating Israeli policy with that of the Nazis – i.e., genocide, was “anti-Semitic”. The clear logic of this was always that it would therefore be “anti-Semitic” to accuse the Israeli state of behaving like Nazis even when they began outright genocide, meaning that the IHRA pseudo-definition should itself be regarded as a Nazi-like document, playing a role in some ways similar to that of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the proto-Nazi movement – as an ideological cover and warrant for genocide.

This was tried out on the membership of the Labour Party in the Corbyn witchhunt period, and now it is being used in wider British society, as with the bans on Palestine marches, supposedly for disturbing synagogues simply by being nearby, and now, desperately in the proscription of Palestine Action for supposed “terrorism”, in cahoots with the Israeli government and the far right Israeli Ambassador, Tzipi Hotlevy. But this has triggered off huge popular discontent, as the Labour government has been seen to ban and arrest critics of the most documented and publicised genocide in history, while visibly hob-nobbing with the perpetrators. All these conditions led to explosive mass growth of the Corbyn-Sultana party project, once it was kicked off by Zarah Sultana when she announced her resignation from Labour in early July. In less than a month, after she announced that she and Jeremy Corbyn intended to found a new political party to challenge Starmer’s Labour, it attracted explosive mass support, first through the Team Zarah website, and later through http://yourparty.uk, it signed up around 700, 000 people by the end of July.  Which even allowing for the logistical problems of creating an organisation out of that, is a phenomenal response.

It would be formalistic in the extreme to characterise this as a new party arising from social contradictions to challenge the Labour Party from the left, as if this could be abstracted from the previous struggles within Labour not only over the last decade, but in previous decades also. In terms of mechanics, this is a slow-motion split of the mass Corbynite base that more than doubled Labour’s mass membership and support after Corbyn was elected leader in 2015. That layer haemorrhaged away when Corbyn was brought down by the neoliberals and Zionists. But it never disbanded, never disappeared, it just went into a state of external flux and sporadic mobilisation. Corbyn’s own exclusion from Labour by the deprivation of the whip, and the obvious intention of Starmer to steal Corbyn’s long-held Islington North constituency meant that the previous leader, the one with the genuine mass working-class base, was being hounded out of the party. He defeated Labour in the General Election and retained his seat, as did four Muslim left independents opposing Labour over Gaza. So there is already a group attacking Starmer from the left in parliament before the foundation of the new party.

Corbyn has been extremely slow in drawing the conclusions from this and has created various ‘halfway house’ formations to keep the base together without drawing the full conclusions of it, from Peace and Justice, to ‘Collective’, the latter being somewhat secretive. But the bold actions of the much younger, charismatic Labour leftist MP Zarah Sultana forced his hand, and detonated the outright split.

Decades of Preparation for Split

Which is a profoundly progressive development of a world-historic nature, the biggest split in the history of the mass bourgeois workers party in the oldest imperialist country. With regard to the class nature of the Labour Party itself, this split is the product of the basic contradiction within the party itself, between its nature as the creation of a mass labour movement seeking its own political expression, and the pro-capitalist nature of the politics involved, flowing from the bureaucratic caste within the trade unions which reproduced itself in the political bureaucracy that grew up to lead and administer the party itself, with reformist politics that are ultimately bourgeois. In 1982, the Spartacist League, which was then possibly the closest thing to genuine Trotskyism around at that time, wrote about the Benn-Healey contest for the Deputy Leadership of Labour:

“The deep schism in today’s Labour Party is not simply another, typical, case of the party in opposition striving to refurbish its ‘socialist’ credentials among working people alienated by years of betrayal from the Westminster benches. Thus it will not lightly be healed; thus the palpable sense on all sides that the Labour Party cannot go on in the same old way. There is normally a symbiotic relationship between left and right in the party. Together they make a fine team for attacking the working class: while one lulls the workers with airy talk of socialism the other does (or both do) the bosses’ dirty work. This was certainly true in the last Labour government, when Benn played a major role in giving a left cover to anti-working-class betrayal. Today, however, this symbiosis has lapsed.

A distorted and uneven class line is being cleaved in the Labour Party under the impact of renewed anti-Soviet Cold War; between Little England reformists and NATO/CIA-loving ‘internationalists’, lacking in sharp programmatic counterposition but necessarily reflected in and inseparable from domestic class questions…

Reduced in status from its hegemonic position to simply the most powerful of’ several imperialist powers (marked and in part exacerbated by its humiliating defeat in Vietnam), American imperialism prepared itself, with Carter’s anti-Soviet ‘human rights’ campaign, for a course of open military confrontation with the Soviet Union — aiming at a favourable redivision of world markets over the corpse of the Soviet workers state. The international economic crisis which fuels this anti-Soviet war drive intersects in Britain a deep, long-term structural decline. To retain their standing as any sort of imperialist power, the dominant sections of the British bourgeoisie see no course other than an emasculation of the trade unions at home coupled with slavish allegiance to the Atlantic alliance. In this context the contradictions of the Labour Party as a bourgeois workers party have been brought sharply to the fore. In its role as a defender of British capitalist interests, the central core of the postwar Labour bureaucracy has been a staunch advocate of the ‘American connection’, while policing the unions when in office with a combination of reformist carrot and repressive stick.

The politics of the Bennite left –primarily a repudiation of the dismal record of the last Labour government and a utopian unilateralist attempt to pull Britain out of the Cold War vortex –are a reformist dead end from the point of view of the immediate and historic interests of the working class. But they threaten to make Labour an aberrant party in today’s conditions, a party unfit, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, for ‘responsible’ government. Unable to control the rise of Bennism, much of the historical right wing leadership of the party.is actively rethinking its need for the trade union movement as a political base of operations, and has undertaken or is considering an open break with the labour movement. A correct understanding of’ and tactical stance towards the political realignments in and around the Labour Party … is crucial for Marxists striving to break the stranglehold of Labourite reformism over the working class and forge a revolutionary vanguard to lead the proletariat to power. (Spartacist Britain #41, April 1982, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/spartacist-uk/041_1982_04_Bristish-spart.pdf)

Notwithstanding the glib formulation at the end about “forging a revolutionary vanguard” (which is easier said than done and can only really be a product of serious programmatic development involving a sizeable movement of class-conscious workers), nevertheless this analysis is broadly correct and relevant to this day. That ‘distorted and uneven class line’ has been a common thread of the anti-working-class development of Labour’s political bureaucracy since the early days of Cold War 2 in the 1980s, i.e. the Reagan/Thatcher ‘revolutions.’ It is a key part of the political context for major developments since, along with the rise of Zionism to the position of the hegemonic form of racism in bourgeois politics largely flowing from the role of Jewish-Zionist ideologues as the chief ideologues and popularisers of neoliberalism

Under Kinnock, then Blair and Brown, Labour had become outright reactionary-neoliberal and openly anti-working class, as epitomised by its junking in 1995 of the formal aspiration of the aim of a society built on “common ownership” – the old Clause 4, part 4 of the Fabian reformists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who co-founded Labour as a mass membership party in 1918 on this basis (though the early foundational work as a federal trade-union-led party was led by Keir Hardie). The aspiration of “common ownership” was replaced by a new, basically Thatcherite Clause 4, which includes in part 2, a commitment to “the enterprise of the market and the rigour of competition” (http://www.labourcounts.com/Clause_four_comparisons.htm) This excrescence has dominated Labour since the strategic defeat of the trade unions under the rule of arch-Tory Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, above all with the defeat of the year-long miners’ strike in 1984-5, a defensive struggle that, because of the betrayals of the rest of the labour movement and the sheer brutality of the state, at times took almost insurrectionary forms. This outcome conditioned the rise of Blairism in the 1990s,

Under Blair and later Brown’s New Labour, which ruled Britain from 1997 to 2010, a widening chasm emerged between what was in effect a neoliberal political “class” dominating Labour, and much of the working-class movement. A major part of New Labour’s project was imperialist militarism, much of it linked to support for Zionism, as with the Iraq war carried out with Bush’s US administration. Domestically, Blair’s regime, though it did liberalise some elements of labour laws, also kept the overwhelming majority of the anti-union laws that the Tories had nailed in place since the miners’ defeat, and not only did not reverse any of the Thatcher/Major government’s privatisations, it engaged in privatisations of its own, from air-traffic control, partial privatisation of council housing administration, and partial privatisation of the London Underground. It continued the Tories ban on new council housing, while at the same time, as did the Tories, letting monetary policy rip in such a way as to create massive house-price bubbles that really rigged the housing market to enrich the wealthy and landlords, following in Thatcher’s footsteps. So much so, that new Labour was deemed by Thatcher in a later speech, as “my Greatest Achievement.”

 The capitalist financial crisis of 2007-9, the near collapse of the banking system under neoliberal deregulation, was so severe that it brought down incumbent neoliberal governments in the US and Europe, including New Labour in 2010. In the US it brought to power the seemingly liberal black Democrat Barack Obama on a wave of social-democratic rhetoric, which proved in office to be largely cynical. In Britain, a hung parliament brought to power a coalition of Tories and Liberals that blamed excessive indulgence of the working class, poor and disabled for the financial crisis, and severely cut social benefits. After the defeat of new Labour in 2010, the overt Blairites suffered a partial defeat when the soft-left Ed Miliband won the leadership, talking of a ‘crisis of working-class representation’, and traded on his claim to have opposed the Iraq war (which was not completely clear, as at that time nobody had heard of him!) He was ineffectual in the face of austerity, and his leadership coincided with a major strengthening of an anti-immigrant, reactionary movement, that sought a British exit from the European Union to get rid of East European immigrants, whose cheaper labour had played a large role in the boom under New Labour prior to the financial crisis, and then were made scapegoats. Miliband’s ineffectual leadership, and the collapse of the Lib Dems’ popular support because of their role in austerity attacks gave the Tories an unexpected majority at the 2015 General election, and allowed the anti-EU, anti-migrant right-wing UKIP to put enough pressure on the Tories to call a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.

Massive political insurgency – 2015: repeated in 2025

It was unprecedented for a leader of the outright ‘socialist’ left social-democratic left-wing of the party, sometimes known as the ‘hard left’, to be elected leader of the Labour Party, as Jeremy Corbyn was in 2015. This was actually a massive insurgency of the socialist-minded working-class base of Labour against the neo-liberal political bureaucracy, whose hatred of organised labour already had few boundaries. This was driven back in a brutal manner by the Zionists and neoliberals, as detailed above. But the Sultana/Corbyn Party has simply given an embryonic organisational expression to this political split, which is along the distorted and uneven class line referred to above. This has the potential to resolve the class contradiction of Labour as a bourgeois workers party, in favour of creating a genuine mass party of the proletariat in Britain. Which to realise its potential, must be communist and internationalist in its politics.

This split is along a distorted, perhaps deformed, and uneven class line – the split is not pure. This is because the leftist, pacifist politics of Jeremy Corbyn, the most left-wing leader of the Labour Party since George Lansbury in the 1930s, are not free of bourgeois prejudices themselves. They dream of the peaceful overcoming of capitalist contradictions, or barbarities, through electoral means, but with the re-creation of a ‘proper’ welfare system and rolling back privatisation – supportable demands of course, but not revolutionary. However, the ruling class will not entertain this for a moment. This itself is dangerous to the new party and its potential to lead. The ruling class has shown by its brutal support for genocide in Gaza, and its unsubtle support for outright Nazis in Ukraine, the depths of barbarism to which it will sink when its prerogatives are challenged by the oppressed.

Yet this is also a new start, and many tens or even hundreds of thousands of subjective socialists will join the new party eager to fight for political answers to these things. In this situation, all socialists and communists should join the new party and be prepared to fight for socialism in a non-reformist, class struggle sense. This includes the militants of large social-democratic sects with ‘revolutionary’ pretentions like the Socialist Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, many of whom have, mixed with their revolutionary aspirations, elements of capitulation to imperialism such as Russophobia and Sinophobia, some softness on Zionism, etc. On the other hand, such movements as George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, with better politics on such questions, but that have also adapted to backward sections of the working class over questions like immigration and the defence of oppressed groups like transsexuals and even gays, should likewise be drawn into the movement so these problems can also be more effectively overcome. We hear that the Workers Party wants to affiliate to the new party – we would support that.

We could see serious elements, or even sizeable currents, within the new party develop beyond reformism in an incomplete way, embracing incoherent forms of what Marxists have traditionally called ‘centrist’ politics. This has nothing to do with the fashionable usage today to describe Blairite type disguised right-wing politics. Rather it refers to forms of politics that vacillate between reformism and revolution. Currently mainly the preserve of small sects, there is a precedent in British labour history for such a development on a larger scale with the Independent Labour Party, which split from Labour in 1931, opposed social democracy from the left, but never developed a coherent alternative. The healthy development of a genuine working-class party could certainly encourage leftward development but hopefully avoid such flaws emerging.

Communists and Workers Parties

A genuine workers party, which the British left has no real experience of, would tend to dissolve sectarian cliques and draw everyone into programmatic development. This situation puts us back at the situation of flux and possibility that existed when the Labour Party was founded. We should look to what Marx and Engels wrote to introduce part two of the 1847 Manifesto of the Communist Party for inspiration in dealing with this development:

“II. Proletarians and Communists

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

 They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.  They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement. 

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole. 

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.  The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat. “ (www.marxists.org/admin/books/manifesto/Manifesto.pdf)

In this regard, we in the Consistent Democrats have been working with other like-minded socialists in the Socialist Labour Network since that body emerged from Labour, the product of the merger of two important groups of the Corbynite left – Labour Against the Witchhunt and the Labour in Exile Network, both of which were important enough to be proscribed by Starmer, as was the SLN immediately the merger took place. We are now working along with other groupings of independent socialists, such as the Network of Independent Socialists (NOIS) in seeking to join and engage in the formation of the new party, at the same time advocating that it functions according to party and working-class democracy. Though such groupings may have a limited life given the horizons of such a new party, their role at this point could be quite important.

To conclude, we reproduce a motion that was proposed by the Consistent Democrats, and passed, at a meeting of the Socialist Labour Network on 8^th August. It captures quite well the opportunities, and dangers, posed by the new party, and some of what socialists should be fighting for in working for it:

“The Socialist Labour Network welcomes Zahra Sultana MP’s resignation from the Labour Party and initiative to co-found a new left-wing party along with Jeremy Corbyn, to challenge Starmer’s brutal, anti-democratic, pro-genocide, warmongering, anti-working-class austerity regime. The New Party has already signed up 750,000 members- compared with the current Labour Party diminishing membership of around 300,000

“Since Thatcher’s strategic defeat of the miners in the mid-1980s, most Labour leaderships have been openly Thatcherite and neo-liberal, the exception being Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership from 2015-2020, which did promise to begin rolling back the decades of austerity. Labour under Corbyn, which the bourgeois media slated as being ‘unelectable’, gained over 12 million votes in 2017 – more than any Labour campaign this century.  Even in 2019 when it was defeated, Labour achieved more votes than in Starmer’s election victory in 2024. It was the internal collapse of the Tory party that gifted Starmer that election. 

“The real problem with Corbyn was that his left social democracy and ‘broad church’ Labour politics meant appeasing the neoliberal Right to keep them on board. In the face of ferocious attacks from Zionists and their supporters in the media, Corbyn ran up the white flag and actively expelled many good socialists on trumped-up ‘anti-Semitism’ charges. The adoption of the fake IHRA-definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ primed Labour under Starmer to support the current Zionist genocide. 

“Starmer, other Labour Zionists and treacherous neoliberals were put in pole position by the weakness of Corbyn and the left, to sabotage Labour and destroy Corbyn’s leadership. This was done with the avid cooperation of the BBC and the entire Zionist-supporting, neoliberal legacy media. The Starmer regime that came out of this is genocidal and anti-democratic. Its outrageous proscription of Palestine Action demonstrates that corporate Labour is now rolling out to the whole population its treatment of its own members. 

“Labour’s brutal attacks on the working class, migrants, pensioners, the disabled and sick, benefit claimants etc, flow really from the ruling class’s current aims. Starmer was put in place to deliver on the ongoing aims of the neoliberal regime- the concentration of power and resources in the hands of the few. Its current trajectory will place power in the hands of the openly far-right in the guise of the Reform Party.  

“The Zahra Sultana-Jeremy Corbyn party has great potential to squash the ruling class’s far right project. But we must learn the lessons of the previous Corbyn leadership. Left social democratic politics are fundamentally inadequate today, more than ever. We need a genuinely working-class party with a democratic internal structure and culture where strategic, programmatic questions can be fully debated and resolved. We need to move beyond reformism to allow for the development of revolutionary alternatives. We cannot allow the workers movement to be defeated by Zionists, fascists or the subversion of even bourgeois democracy by the bourgeois state, its armed forces and intelligence services. We need a party that has a consistently anti-imperialist policy, which opposes Western imperialism and all its proxy forces around the globe.

“There can be no ‘friends of Israel’ in such a party – Zionism is a ferocious class enemy of the workers. We must be on our guard against other forms of right-wing infiltration. But we must be aware that if the ruling class is denied the chance to wreck the new party by subversion internally, they will seek other means – including military rebellion, fascism and potential coups. It is not accidental that during Jeremy’s leadership senior military officers openly threatened rebellion were he to be elected, and soldiers used his image as target practice on shooting ranges. The new party needs to take this on board – the working class cannot be merely pacifist in the face of ruling class violence. The labour movement needs its own means of resistance. We need a party that points the way to working class rule, and a break with notions of class collaboration and co-existence with a capitalism that threatens humanity with world war and environmental collapse.

“The SLN stands with the new party, provisionally known as ‘Your Party’. It exhorts the party to be bold in its vision for progressive and revolutionary change, and develop beyond social democracy and its tradition of betrayal.“

(https://socialist-labour-network.org.uk/motions-from-amm-on-8th-august-your-party-and-palestine-action/)

Below is a presentation given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at a Zoom forum on 22nd June. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here

Let us make very clear the position of the Consistent Democrats and the Liaison Committee of the Fourth International generally on this war, started by Israel with clear support and assistance from the Trump administration in the US, including by diplomatic duplicity and a pretence of involving Iran in ‘negotiations., and then openly joined by the US last night with the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites.

We utterly condemn the attack on Iran, an oppressed semi-colonial country, by these two imperialist states acting in concert, with the tacit and indeed material support of other imperialist states from West Europe such as Britain, France and Germany. We are for the defeat of Israel and its US quartermasters and lackeys, and the victory of Iran. We defend Iran’s military actions against Israel, we defend the richly deserved devastation of those cities in what is now called Israel, cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa, which have now had their military and intelligence buildings, and infrastructure destroyed by Iranian ballistic missiles and drones. We are also for Iran’s right to retaliate against those who attacked it. ALL of those who attacked it – not just Israel, but also the United States. We note that Iran has sympathising, militant groups all over the Middle East and beyond.

For a start, Lebanon with Hezbollah, and in Iraq, with well equipped Shia militia groups such as Kataib Hezbollah and others, who have already been firing drones and missiles at the Zionist state during Iran’s justified counterattack against Israel over the past week or so. Then there is Yemen – which earlier fought the United States to a standstill over their blockade of Israel in the Red Sea, and their attacks on Western, including US, shipping that was giving either economic or military support to Israel. The US was so devastated by Amanullah’s attacks, with their ultra-fast modern missiles, of Iranian and ultimately Russia hypersonic type, that they were compelled to break Trump’s solidarity with Israel, and make a separate agreement with the Amanullah movement/government in Yemen, basically that if the US left the Houthi alone, the Houthi would leave alone non-Israel-related US shipping travelling through the Mandab straights and through the Red Sea. Now, with the US joining in the attack on Iran, Amanullah have threatened to resume attacking Western shipping, from a position of strength, since Trump was forced to abandon attacks on Yemen earlier because of the US weakness particularly against the threat that Yemen could use its missile capacity to destroy Saudi and other Gulf oil production, which is vital to the US economy.

Even more startling in that regard is the threat from Iran to close the Straights of Hormuz, through which the products of over 50%, some say 70%, of the world’s oil production flows. The whole area bristles with US bases, not just in the Gulf itself, such as in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but also US installations left over from the occupation of Iraq, an earlier war of conquest that the US waged on Israel’s behalf, and also in Syria, sent in by Obama and Trump earlier in their crusade against Assad, also for his refusal to accept Israeli domination, in reality. It is now well known that the US used Al Qaeda and ISIS as dogs of war against Assad in a similar way that they used the Mujahedin and Taliban against the pro-Soviet, left nationalist Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

It does appear that this attack on Iran in some ways follows the pattern of what Trump did with Yemen, in one important sense. Trump’s nickname is TACO – which stands for ‘Trump Always Cops Out’. It appears that Trump did this to try to please the Israel lobby that clearly put him in power but attempted at the same time to minimise the damage by informing the Iranian government through some kind of back-channel what was going to happen. Which gave them easily sufficient time to remove their nuclear facilities to other locations, so in effect the US action was a piece of theatre, performative, and has only caused relatively minor damage to some facilities that were already empty. It was a ‘nothing burger’ as Scott Ritter said.

It is very unlikely that these installations will be used again, as the main reason that the US knew about their precise location was because of spying by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) people, who gave detailed information to the US and Zionists. The IAEA, it has been clear since the Israeli intelligence treasure trove that Iran got hold of and published on the eve of the Israeli attack on 12 June, had also supplied Mossad with the identities and locations of prominent Iranian nuclear scientists, setting them up for assassination either by Mossad or by some of their pet terrorist proxies that operate in Iran. Such as the once-leftist Mujahedin-e-Khalq, which for decades has been a tool of Mossad, the CIA, and even Saddam’s Iraq when it was a Western ally, and which helped and still are helping the Israeli attack on Iran with smuggled lorryloads of short-range drones, and planting car bombs in the street to enhance the Israeli attack, and make it appear bigger than it actually was. So Iran’s counter-attack against all these forces is obviously legitimate, even under the concepts of ‘international law’ that the US under both Biden and Trump, have openly ditched.

Iran now has very good reason to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it adhered to for decades, while Israel developed an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons. The squealing about Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions by nuclear armed Israel was always a hoax, similar to the hoax about Iraq and ‘WMD’ that was used to justify invading Iraq in 2003. Iran has no nukes, mainly because of the pacific religious opposition to them from its Supreme Leader. Iran clearly needs nuclear weapons to render it invulnerable to such crimes, and it could ‘borrow’ some from several sources while under that umbrella it develops the means to make its own. Now it may do so.

The world has moved on. Iran is much stronger than Iraq was in 2003 – it is a far larger country, with 90 million population, a territory the size of Western Europe, and modern weaponry some of which is well in advance of that of Israel and the US. Iran is not alone or isolated – the clear statement from neighbouring nuclear-armed Pakistan that a nuclear attack on Iran by Israel would bring forth a Pakistan nuclear attack on Israel, was crucial in this war. Which is a good thing. At the beginning of the Israeli attack, Iran’s air-defences were hacked by a Zionist cyber-attack. But they were brought back online in a few hours with Russian, and maybe Pakistani assistance. It does appear that Iran is getting discreet economic and military assistance, in terms of supplies, from both Russia and China. Which is what you would expect considering Iran’s crucial role in BRICS.

So, Iran is winning the missile and drone war, increasingly using its more modern hypersonic missiles in the latest counter-attack attacks, which Israel cannot defeat. Its Iron Dome has effectively collapsed.  And the civilian population of Israel is also suffering from these Iranian attacks. Parts of Tel Aviv and Haifa now bear some superficial resemblance to what Israel has done to Gaza. Though it’s not remotely the same in terms of wanton death and any deliberate destruction of the population. Nevertheless, there should be no squeamishness about Iran’s right to strike back against Israel as a state. Any civilian deaths are simply collateral damage of Iran’s right to defend itself against an unprovoked attack on Iran by Israel.

Israel is not a normal state. Many of its towns and cities are built on the ruins of Arab towns and villages. 400 such Arab towns and villages were destroyed, obliterated, in the 1948 war. In many other places, Israeli citizens live in homes that were directly stolen from Palestinian Arabs, who sometimes even still have the keys to their former homes. Israeli civilians are not like ordinary citizens of any of the European imperialist countries, or even those countries such as the US, Canada and Australia who had their origins in colonial settler projects of centuries past. Israel is a settler state today. Its crimes are ongoing. And it is somewhat different to these previous settler states in that the population is a very narrow layer of Zionist Jews that have an ideology that they are supposedly re-founding an ancient state that existed thousands of years ago.

This whole ideology is a grotesque myth, but it has been deferred to for the whole period of Israel’s existence in the popular consciousness in the West, for two reasons. One is bourgeois class interest, the other is a guilt reaction over the genocide of the Jews in Europe under Hitler in the mid-20^th century. The second is a temporary phase that is being overcome to a certain extent because of the obscenity and brutality of this live-streamed genocide. The idea that Jews are somehow morally superior and eternal victims has become discredited to a real extent by the obvious Hitler-like racism of the Zionists, such as the speaking of their victims as ‘human animals’, by the former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant immediately after the Hamas led breakout from the Gaza death camp on 7 October 2023. We heard biblical talk by Netanyahu of Palestinians as ‘Amalek’ – a biblical enemy who the Jews are supposedly commanded by their God to exterminate men, women, children and even kill animals belonging to this declared biblical enemy people of the ‘chosen’ Jews.

This genocidal agitation is clearly similar to the Nazis, and this understanding has seeped into popular consciousness including in the Western countries, with the vivid exposure of the population to a livestreamed genocide. It is the political basis for the indictment of Netanyahu and Gallant by the ICC for crimes against Humanity. This happened because of pressure from below. And for the Genocide case against Israel in the ICJ, which still exists though has become a byword for sloth and complacency, and the failure to do anything or even confirm their own provisional conclusions from January 2024 that Israel was ‘plausibly’ committing a genocide. The ICJ’s call for Israel to take immediate measures to prevent a genocide was completely ignored, treated as a joke by Israel. The whole concept of international law, international justice, the Genocide Convention, all that, has been openly mocked and junked by all the major Western powers since the Hamas breakout on 7^th October 2023.

What we really have to examine is why. What is decisive is not, as yet, the complete popular discredit of Israel and Zionism in the popular consciousness, including in the West. Massively in contradiction to that is the cult of Zionism among the ruling classes of the imperialist countries of the West. There is a material basis for the strong influence of Zionism in the Western countries. This was exemplified recently by the revelation that 10% of billionaires worldwide are of Jewish origin, courtesy of the finance source Forbes. This compared to a world population where only 0.2% is of Jewish origin. That is 50 times overrepresentation and massively enhances the political influence of Jewish bourgeois within the ruling class. Who in turn are overwhelmingly Zionist, since this is currently the hegemonic ideology among bourgeois Jews.

This is not some kind of moral attack on Jews as a population for being disproportionately rich. There are historic reasons for that, which derive from the social role of Jews as a trading class under European feudalism, the repository of commercial capital, a primitive, pre-capitalist people-class of merchant traders. This was analysed in its essentials by Abram Leon, whose work The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation was seminal, building on earlier material by Karl Marx himself. It is simply a historical fact that when capitalism replaced feudalism, elements of this pre-capitalist trading class were particularly suited to fit into niche elements of the emerging bourgeois society, particularly those involving finance and some kinds of trade.

In an earlier period, the non-Jewish bourgeoisie was distrustful of this layer of their own class, in large measure because the oppression of Jews under late feudalism had also created a situation where radical Jews played a very prominent role in democratic movements at the time of the bourgeois revolutions, and then in the socialist and communist movements. The bulk of the bourgeoisie earlier mistrusted their Jewish brethren because of this radical association, and it provided the soil for genocidal anti-Jewish (antisemitic) agitation to achieve a temporary hegemony among the bourgeoise, culminating in the Nazi holocaust in the 1940s.

But the Jews Hitler murdered were mainly the leftist and socialist Jews, and this changed the balance of forces within the Jewish people – to the advantage of this outsized bourgeois layer. This was today’s Jewish-Zionist caste in embryo. The Zionist movement conquered hegemony among Jews partly because of the Nazi persecution, though it was always a genocidal project, aimed at taking land by force from the indigenous people of the Levant and Middle East to create an ethnic dystopia. Like the proto-Hitlerite anti-Semites, pioneer Zionists such as Herzl admired early imperialist monsters like Cecil Rhodes, the plunderer of Africa, and sought to emulate them.

After WWII, with the defeat, exposure and discredit of Nazi anti-Jewish racism, the Zionist state was born. And a complementary hegemony was established over time in bourgeois politics. In the 1970s, as capitalism faced a major political and economic crisis, neoliberalism was like manna from heaven for the imperialist bourgeoisie as a strategic way out of the crisis. Many of its most prominent ideologues, such as Friedman, Joseph, Sherman, even Kissinger were Jewish and supportive of Zionism. This is somewhat mythologised, as an earlier pioneer of neoliberalism, Hayek, was not Jewish, but he lived at the wrong time and was regarded as a crank. But the upshot of this was the growth of a kind of cult of Zionism and Jewishness among the bourgeoisie, as the saviours of their system. The inverse of the earlier cult of antisemitism that drove bourgeois support for Hitler.

And the growth of this newer cult gave a massive boost to the power of that already outsize Jewish section of the bourgeoisie, and created the situation we live under today, where Zionism has ironically become a threat to the lives and liberties of ordinary people across the globe, in a similar manner as Nazism once was. So today, the Jewish-Zionist caste can order Donald Trump to attack Iran, and it can instruct Kier Stamer, another of its devotees, to attempt to proscribe Palestine Action. This is the nature of the bourgeois politics we face today. To fight capitalism, not just abstractly, but concretely, we must expose and defeat this odd Zionist excrescence, to open a real way politically to the abolition of capitalism itself.

Below is a presentation given by a Consistent Democrats speaker at a Zoom forum on 8^th June. The whole discussion is available as a podcast here.

It has taken 21 months. But something important is changing in the world relationships that underpinned Zionism’s power in the advanced countries. We can see this in the weaselly shifts in attitudes of Western governments. Starmer’s, for one.  And those of Macron, and the new Canadian government – which we all know has considerable continuity with Trudeau’s government that has been in power for the whole of the genocide. Even though it claims to be ‘new’. But Canada is the least of the issue. The Starmer leadership of the Labour Party, in and out of government, have been among the most virulent supporters of the genocide.

Outside government, Starmer publicly supported Yoav Gallant’s announcement of the policy of starving the Palestinian people, that was announced on 8^th October 2023 – “There will be no food, no fuel, no water – everything will be closed, We are fighting human animals and we will react accordingly”.  This was where the policy of genocide was openly announced. This was one of the key incidents that led to the genocide charge against Israel at the International Court of Justice in January 2024, the court saying there was a ‘plausible’ case that this was genocide and giving Israel toothless instructions to stop that genocide. This also led straight to the indictment of Netanyahu and Gallant for crimes against humanity at the ICC last year. That was before Starmer won the July 2024 General Election.

Since then, his government’s attacks on the democratic rights of Palestinian solidarity activists have considerably exceeded those of the Tory government that preceded it. In particular, the policy of seeking bans against Palestine solidarity marches, and the raids by ‘anti-Terrorist’ police against political activists and journalists who obviously have nothing to do with any sort of ‘terrorism’ have mushroomed, far more than under the Tories. Suella Braverman was forced to resign when she overreached herself and tried to stop Palestiine Solidarity marches on the supposed ground that they were anti-Semitic “hate marches”. A totally outrageous lie.  But this policy has been much more effective – and brutal – under Starmer and Yvette Cooper than it was under Braverman and Sunak.

In France, then same Macron who signed up for the feeble, but significant criticisms of the Israeli death and starvation campaign in Gaza, carried out wholesale attempts at outright bans, and mass arrests, at pro-Palestine events in France. We are even seeing some signs of ostensible distancing from the Trump administration, even though everyone knows that even more that Genocide Joe, his predecessor, Trump was and is a creature of Likud and a president directly funded and put in power by the largesse of the Israel lobby.  Likud billionaire widow Miriam Adelson, of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, funded Trump’s election campaign to the sum of $100 million. This is a repeat of his funding by her late husband, the Likud /Las Vegas gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson, in 2016. It was well known that in 2016 he was put in power to tear up Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, which Israel/Likud vehemently objected to – they simply wanted a US attack on Iran in the manner of the Bushes’ attacks on Iraq in 1991 and 2003 – which in large measure were dictated by a pro-Israeli, neocon agenda.

Today also, you can see why they wanted Trump. No one would have believed that anyone could be worse than ‘Genocide Joe’, with his massive funding of Israel throughout its starvation and mass bombing campaigns against Gaza, where several times over more bombs were dropped than on Hiroshima at the end of WWII. But Trump is visibly even worse, with his open advocacy that the US and/or Israel should ‘own’ Gaza, while its entire population are to be shipped elsewhere, while Gaza itself becomes a new Riviera – a playground for the wealthy.

Trump’s threats against Iran likewise took off far beyond what Biden had planned, which is what has forced the Iranian regime to start talking to the Trump administration about some kind of new deal, that would have them stopping all enrichment of uranium for nuclear energy purposes. It is not well known, but ought to be, that far from seeking nuclear weapons, as the Zionists and their camp followers in the imperialist bourgeoisie continually trumpet, in fact the Shia theocratic regime of Ali Khamenei has a religious pacifist, somewhat utopian, objection to Iran having nuclear weapons. In our view, the world would be a lot safer if Iran had nuclear weapons. And if it were not for Khamenei’s religious principles, and his being the Supreme Leader according to the Shia doctrine of Guardianship, no doubt Iran would by now have obtained these weapons and been much safer than it is today.

And yet … in the confrontation with Yemen over navigation in the Red Sea, Trump was forced to conclude a truce with the Amanullah movement – the Houthi – without Israel being included in the truce. The solidarity of Yemen with the Palestinians actually trumped (pun intentional) Trump’s solidarity with Israel – and Trump was forced to sue for peace. For Amanullah had made it clear that a US escalation against them, would lead to them destroying the oil production facilities of the Gulf States, obviously most notably, but not confined to, Saudi Arabia. It will be recalled that the genocidal war of the Gulf States against Yemen died down around 2020 partly as a result of the Covid pandemic, but also as a result of the increasing armed capacity of Yemen to blow up Saudi and Emirati oil production. This is also evident today, and it is why the US backed off.

But this also puts a huge question mark over US capacity to defeat Iran in a war, since it is to a very large extent Iran’s technological advances in missile technology, with a considerable degree of collaboration with Russia, that has so strengthened Yemen. If the US cannot defeat Yemen, and by concluding this truce, Trump has more or less admitted he cannot, how is he going to defeat Iran? There is talk of Israeli use of nukes, but that could be simply suicidal. Including to the world economy, as Iran has the evident capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz, where much of the World’s oil passes, from Saudi Arabia, in the main.

That is one of the key conundrums of today about the Zionist’s genocidal campaign to wipe out the population of Gaza. This is not a done deal or a sure thing, because in the military situation on the ground in Gaza, vis-à-vis the Hamas fighters. Israel has proven incapable of winning. There is a problem in carrying out a genocide in full view of the world where there is an undefeated enemy still operating in the territory that is the theatre of the attempted genocide. The problem is that every military blow to Israel reminds the world both that Israel is not victorious and brings additional attention to their genocide of civilians. The great fanfare of a few weeks ago about how Israel was going to clear out the Gaza Strip in short order has already become contradicted and tarnished. We have had the spectacle of ‘aid’ delivered in barbed-wire cages, which have become a symbol of this genocide in a manner similar to the way gas chambers became symbolic of Hitler’s genocide. What is the difference, as has legitimately been asked, between demanding that starving people enter a wire cage, and then shooting them, and demanding that an incarcerated population enter communal ‘showers’, and then gassing them? And this genocidal ‘aid’ operation is a joint operation of the Zionist regime, and the United States. Which is not so surprising, as on Middle East questions, as I noted earlier, the current US President is a sponsored puppet of the Israel lobby. See later.

That Israel is not ‘winning’ in Gaza, in spite of its newly expanded incursions, and its open insistence that it will expel the populations that it is massacring, is shown by the fact that it has had to enlist the help of ISIS gangs to help it to abuse and murder the Palestinian population. It wouldn’t need to do this if it had the military strength to clear out Gaza by itself. It doesn’t. that is another remarkable indicator of this crisis. All this is reflected in a sea change in Western public opinion about Israel itself. The Pew Research Centre survey of views of Israel in 24  countries makes sobering reading for supporters of Zionism and its lobbies:

“In 20 of the 24 countries surveyed, around half of adults or more have an unfavorable view of Israel. Around three-quarters or more hold this view in Australia, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Turkey. 

[…]

“The recent survey is not the first time Pew Research Center has asked about international views of Israel. We have asked about views of Israel before in some countries – including in the United States, where the share of adults with a negative view of Israel rose 11 percentage points between March 2022 and March 2025.

In 10 other countries, we last asked this question in 2013. In seven of these countries, the share of adults with a negative view of Israel has increased significantly. In the United Kingdom, for example, 44% had an unfavorable view of Israel in 2013, compared with 61% now.

[…]

“In some countries, younger people are more likely than older people to have an unfavorable view of Israel. This is particularly the case in the high-income countries surveyed: Australia, Canada, France, Poland and South Korea and the U.S. In fact, the U.S. has one of the largest age gaps in views of Israel.” (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/03/most-people-across-24-surveyed-countries-have-negative-views-of-israel-and-netanyahu/)

Pew Research Center is a highly ‘respectable’, ‘non-partisan’ think tank based in Washington DC. Not a ‘radical’ body at all. Its report is highly symbolic of a massive acceleration of an already-existing shift in popular consciousness in Western countries that is a huge problem for the Israel lobby, and the material forces behind it.

That is despite the material, bourgeois nature of the Israel lobby, and its strength in the older imperialist countries, which I will now address. It has been noted by an important minority of ruling class commentators in the imperialist countries, including some quite conservative, imperialist ones, that the subservient nature of the relationship between Western mainstream imperialist politics, the media, is irrational, taken abstractly, from the point of view of the interests of the main imperialist powers themselves. Nowhere is this clearer than with this genocide. The refusal of the US, and the European powers, to condemn the Israeli attempt to exterminate the Gaza population, and their insistence on continuing to arm Israel and to aid it militarily even while sometimes expressing hypocritical ‘regret’ for various particularly outrageous Israeli actions, strongly implies that this policy in the West is not freely arrived at even within the framework of imperialism.

John Mearheimer, for instance, who is among the most forthright bourgeois expounding this thesis, believes that the US should be concentrating on combatting the Chinese workers’ state, and that its involvement in supporting Israel’s crimes is both a waste of military resources and discredits US imperialism in ‘moral’ terms, destroying its ‘soft power’ to combat China ideologically. Within his own imperialist framework, this is logical and consistent. But he is marginalised, not because he is wrong within the imperialist framework, but because he is outgunned. Even though he and his ideological partner and co-author, Stephen Walt (who is Jewish), talk at length about the nefarious activities of the Israel lobby, they do not, out of fear, properly address the material basis of this phenomenon.

The material basis for it is quite straightforward, though the historical reason for it is anything but simple. I pointed it out 11 years ago in my Draft Theses on the Jews and Modern Imperialism, which aroused the ire of capitulators to Zionism on the Jewish and non-Jewish left. This pointed out that Jews are massively overrepresented in the wealthiest elements of the capitalist class in most Western imperialist countries. I citied some Zionist sources that actually boasted about such disproportionate Jewish wealth and influence. Such as the World Jewish Review. A recent manifestation of this is the evidence from Forbes that 10% of the world’s billionaires are Jewish. As compared to 0.2% of the world’s population being Jewish. This is 50 times overrepresentation. It is well known that Zionism is by far the hegemonic bourgeois ideology amongst bourgeois Jews.

These are factual questions – they are either true, or not. But that it not how this was treated by the aforementioned capitulators – for them only an ‘anti-Semite’ would be interested in whether this was true or not! Such attitudes are in deep trouble with this genocide. The argument they use is that the Nazis made use of this feature of the Jewish social structure as propaganda for their genocide, and therefore this subject should not be touched by socialists. But today this is somewhat undercut by the obvious fact that this layer of Zionist-Jewish bourgeois, both in Israel and outside, is the prime mover in this Nazi-like genocide in Gaza.

Though they have many cult followers and fellow-travellers, they are the core. The top-heavy Jewish social structure has its origins in the nature of the Jews as trading ‘people-class’, the embodiment of a pre-capitalist commercial capital, under European feudalism. This was analysed in a book on The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation, by Abram Leon, a Jewish resistance fighter and Trotskyist in Belgium in WWII, who was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz. This meant that under capitalism, when that class disintegrated due to being obsolete, a much higher proportion of Jews became members of the bourgeoisie than Jews in the general population. For many decades before WWII, this layer of the bourgeoisie was regarded with some suspicion by the imperialists themselves, as linked by community ties with the radical Jewish elements of the workers movement. But ironically, it was Hitler’s genocide, which mainly wiped out that radical Jewish element, and the foundation of Israel (which would not have been possible without the Nazi genocide), which overcame that.

The attitude of the bulk of the bourgeoisie changed, from demonising and mistrusting Jews, to virtually worshipping them, particularly as the neoliberal trend that came to dominate bourgeois thought in the 1970s was mainly Jewish is in its cadre. So, there is a powerful faction, or caste, within the imperialist bourgeoise, who are loyal to the racist state of Israel which treats Jews, overseas, as having birthright citizenship in Israel. Given the bourgeois nature of Israel, this benefits particularly bourgeois Jews. This creates the material base for the Israel lobby – a powerful pro-Israel, ethnically defined faction of the ruling class in the West. That is a powerful overlap of the ruling classes, which created a strong link between Israel and the Western powers. This is a material presence, which means that Israel is much more powerful in the West than the old, white-ruled South Africa ever was.

Its power is buttressed still further by phenomena like the Jeffrey Epstein scam. For instance, Trump’s falling out with Musk involved Musk stating on Twitter that Trump is on Jeffrey Epstein’s client list of those having sex with underage girls. This is a Zionist Kompromat operation and part of the way that the Zionist lobby maintains its power in the United States. And it is matter of record that this involves senior figures in both parties, as well as British Royalty like Prince Andrew, and perhaps the likes of Peter Mandelson even.  This is a strong structure. But it is not indestructible. It is being tested by this genocide. And it is showing signs of crumbling with the huge wave of popular anger that is building about this, worldwide.

We see the rifts, the hypocrisy, the beginning of defections – Piers Morgan taking on Zionists when he was previously taking on critics of Israel, is one important index of this. We need to actively encourage the deepening of this. We need to encourage mass popular movements to bring to justice perpetrators and collaborators with this genocide. And we need to make the links with capitalism – that Zionism is a bourgeois death cult. The imperialist bourgeoisie virtually worship Zionism because it believed that it saved their system in the 1970s. and given the barbarism of this genocide, it becomes clearer what the bourgeoisie will do to save their system today. To plunge the word into the kind of barbarism we are seeing in Gaza. We need to organise politically and socially to destroy their system before it destroys human existence.

The notes for this presentation (25th May) are now available to read, and the presentation and discussion are also available to listen to as a podcast.

The international situation has changed compared to expectations in the first five months of 2025. The Liaison Committee for the Fourth International has some impressions to share about this period:

Trump is not a centripetal force, but a centrifugal one. He is not regaining the ground lost to China in the world market, he is not unifying the imperialist system, nor is he containing its decline. The White House is currently acting as a divisive force within the imperialist system itself, demolishing the mechanisms of domination of the US imperialist state itself, but intensifying internal political repression against the left and oppressed sectors of the US population, such as immigrant workers. In addition, he is causing damage to the accumulation of capital for Big Tech and other multinational conglomerates.

While Washington deepens the crisis of domination in the geopolitical field and in the world market, Tel Aviv is trying to accelerate its expansionist plans, as the vanguard of imperialism and Islamophobia in West Asia. Israel has broken the truce and is moving to try to crush the resistance throughout occupied Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. This is terrible. This current and pure form of fascism, expansionist and resorting to all means of annihilation of the enemy, such as genocide through starvation, is proving more effective than the tariff war. Therefore, we must still prepare for the worst. Trump may be overcome by a more Zionist MAGA right wing, as Bannon predicted.

The US has had to back down on its plans regarding Yemen and Iran. Yemen managed to establish a truce with the US, but not with Israel. The truce seems to have been Trump’s initiative. The US has had problems with losses in the Red Sea. In addition, the Houthis have threatened to retaliate against the US for the attacks they suffered, attacking Saudi oil production infrastructure. This seems to be why Trump proposed the truce with Yemen. This is another reason why Trump seems to be less interested in engaging in West Asia, he needs to concentrate resources in East Asia, but he is not making progress.

In South Korea, the coup was defeated by a series of popular protests. South Korea, like Japan, has recently been pushed to strengthen its ties with China by Trump’s tariff war. Trump also tried to get more involved in Hindustan, provoking the war between Pakistan and India, but the imperialist system has shown itself to be even more fragile to promote a third world war. In the first skirmishes of the war, Chinese weapons, used by Pakistan, defeated the best French weapons, used by India. And this first military rehearsal by Trump against China, through India, was a complete failure and Washington immediately redirected India to the truce.

In the military and technological sphere, North Korea and Iran have become essential states for the resistance, through Iranian drones and North Korean soldiers, in Russia, Yemen and central Africa. After helping Russia defeat NATO mercenaries in Kursk, North Korea has deployed 700 soldiers to Burkina Faso. In this brave African country, Traoré has just imposed an agrarian reform by presidential decree. This means that the BRICS periphery is assuming a greater anti-imperialist role.

Global resistance is advancing, taking advantage of the weaknesses and contradictions of the United States, which have been deepened by Trump. It is this geopolitical situation that communists must take advantage of in the fight to defend oppressed peoples, workers’ states and for socialism.

The involvement of the British Section of the LCFI, the Consistent Democrats, in the Socialist Labour Network (SLN) has been a bumpy ride at times over the past couple of years, but our comrades have played a constructive role in trying to push it forwards. A number of our comrades were elected to the Steering Committee last year – three stood together on a joint platform as supporters of the Consistent Democrats, and played an important role in sorting out a proper website presence for the SLN, and drafting a resolution that outlined a role for the SLN as a kind of think-tank promoting unification of the various left-wing electoral challenges to Starmer’s neoliberal, hard-Zionist, anti-left Labour Party.

That there is a crying need for such a party is shown by the obvious flaws of those pretending to offer such an alternative. First you have the Workers Party, led by George Galloway, which on the positive side has solid anti-imperialist positions on Gaza and defending the people of the Donbass against NATO’s proxy war. But on the negative side you have their mimicking of the reactionary chauvinism of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, and others on the populist and far right, in demonising immigrants, and their hostility to oppressed groups such as trans and gays. This has not done them any favours – in the recent Runcorn by-election they touted candidate Peter Ford, as a real challenger to Labour and Reform for working-class votes. But their candidate revealed himself as in no sense to the left of Labour, and by chauvinist anti-migrant slogans they even implicitly attacked Starmer for not being ‘tough’ enough on immigration. Ford got a pathetic 164 votes.

Then there is Transform, which was founded in 2023 from a unification of the very youthful left-wing Breakthrough party, the Liverpool Community Independents, and Left Unity. Transform is much better in defending migrants, and oppressed groups such as trans and gays, and different trends of left-wing thought within it, but echoes imperialist Russophobia. Those signed up for Transform emails in November 2024 received one headlined: “Victory for Putin, Netanyahu and Musk, more misery for the American people” which then went on to rave that “Trump’s victory was a big moment of triumph for Vladimir Putin”. Thus, buying into the Democrats’ ‘Russiagate’ hoax from the Trump first term. You would not get the slightest indication from this that Russia has been the target of an imperialist proxy war since 2014, when NATO, led by the US Democratic Party administration of Barack Obama, spend $6 billion on a far right coup in Ukraine overthrowing the elected president, Yanukovych, put in positions of power nationalist politicians like Poroshenko and Zelensky, who have treated such Nazi collaborators as Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych as national heroes, while persecuting the nearly half of Ukrainian people who speak Russian. During Trump’s first term, he tore up the 1987 Reagan-Gorbachev INF treaty banning intermediate range nuclear missiles from Europe, a major nuclear escalation against Russia, and he also groomed Zelensky as a Jewish front man to deflect criticism of the obvious pro-Nazi politics of the Maidan regime. But he wasn’t anti-Russian enough for some of the left Russophobes in Transform, who implicitly prefer Biden, who in the two months after he lost the November 2024 US election, went for broke and risked WWIII in encouraging ‘Ukraine’ to be a base for firing obviously NATO controlled cruise missiles such as Storm Shadow into Russia (which has now resumed under Trump).

We are pleased that in June 2023, our comrades moved to an SLN All Members Meeting, and got carried, a motion that clearly stated the need for “an anti-war movement that is principled, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist, and stands against the drive of the far-right Maidan regime in Kiev to destroy and ethnically cleanse the Russian speaking population of what was the South-East part of Ukraine (Donbass). We must stand with the Donbass people”.  The motion also criticised the politics of the Stop the War Coalition: “Although Stop the War condemns the US and NATO, it also condemns Russia. This is to condemn the Russian assistance to the people of Donbass to resist ethnic cleansing and to avoid being forced into NATO”. Thus, the SLN changed its position to a principled anti-imperialist defence of the targets of NATO’s anti-Russian proxy war. We followed this up in September 2023 with a successful motion for the SLN to support International Ukraine Anti-Fascist Solidarity (IUAFS), which campaigns to defend the Donbass people. These were important policy changes that our comrades initiated, which were a real step forward for the SLN.

Origins of the SLN

The SLN was founded as a merger of two former bodies from within the Labour Left during the period of Corbyn’s leadership, Labour Against the Witchhunt (LAW) and Labour In Exile Network (LIEN). Labour Against the Witchhunt was effectively a front for supporters (in both the narrow and broad sense) of the Communist Party of Great Britain/Weekly Worker, the third-campist splinter from the old official Communist Party of the same name when it renamed itself the Democratic Left after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. This group previously published the Leninist, but in 1991 they took the CPGB name and began publishing the Weekly Worker, claiming to be the (albeit ‘provisional’) leadership of the Communist Party. Those in the old party who wanted to carry on as before continued publishing the daily Morning Star, and in time reestablished themselves as the Communist Party of Britain, leaving a confusion of names for the uninitiated.

The Weekly Worker group was quite an energetic, younger group around Jack Conrad, but with erratic, centrist politics that rejected aspirations to orthodox Marxism and Trotskyism, instead influenced by social-democratic (and in fact liberal Zionist) critics of the Trotskyist movement like Shachtman and Hal Draper. They have been an interventionist force among the left-of-labour political initiatives since the 1990s, and they involved themselves heavily in the Corbyn movement. Politically, they appeared as a less-virulently pro-imperialist version of the Alliance for Workers Liberty. They prided themselves as being neutral, or ‘dual defeatist’ in conflicts between oppressed Arab or Muslim countries and imperialism, including Israel. They were for a long time two-statists regarding Israel-Palestine, though prepared to be ambiguous when they allied with leftists like Tony Greenstein who rejected two-states. They are also neutral in the conflicts between imperialism and Russia/China, though their main leader Conrad, appears to consider Russia not to be imperialist, but China to be so. (https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1446/notes-on-the-war/).

Irrespective of all this, the role of the CPGB in Labour was, albeit with some degree of subtlety, promoting its own eccentric version of third-campism, Islamophobia and soft-Zionist apologetics. They were probably the main initiators of LAW, which we in Socialist Fight, (our predecessor group as the British section of the LCFI), an orthodox Trotskyist group who also worked within Labour and the Corbyn movement for straightforward Marxist reasons, regarded as a correct and positive initiative. We attended its founding meeting, seeking active involvement.  The CPGB then showed their real political nature by seeking to have us expelled from LAW for alleged ‘anti-Semitism’ – that is, for our orthodox Marxist/Trotskyist understanding of Zionism and the Jewish Question. Derived from the political tradition of Karl Marx and Abram Leon, this position is explained in both factual and historical terms here (https://www.consistent-democrats.org/draft-theses-on-the-jews-and-modern-imperialism-sept-2014/)

The CPGB, and some of the allies around it, had previously, in 2014 excluded one of our leading comrades from its ‘Communist Platform’ bloc within Left Unity for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’ for writing this set of Theses in the first place. But when similar accusations of ‘anti-Semitism’ were laid against him in Left Unity itself, he was exonerated by their disciplinary body. It was a politically motivated smear by these semi-Zionist third campists. On the Labour Left, including some who gravitated around the CPGB in this period, there were several Jewish comrades, some driven by leftist forms of identity politics, who considered criticism of a Jewish layer of the imperialist bourgeoisie with Zionist politics – a prime mover of the Israel lobby – as an ‘anti-Semitic’ concept. No matter how many facts could be cited in support, to them this was ‘anti-Semitism’. The CPGB got support from this layer. When SF challenged this in an LAW meeting in December 2017, the CPGB and co. lost the vote. So they called a ‘national mobilisation’ for a meeting in January 2018, and mobilised all kinds of people with reactionary positions, including supporters of Maidan Ukraine and the so-called ‘Syrian revolution’. Socialist Resistance, now called Anti-Capitalist Resistance, who were notorious then for all these things and even cheering for the imperialist intervention in Libya that overthrew Gaddafi, turned up to vote us out. Predictably, this rotten bloc had more voting power than our own smallish group. The whole affair made national headlines at the time as an eccentricity: an obvious, public witchhunt within Labour Against the Witchhunt.

The other component of what became the SLN was the Labour in Exile Network, simply a network of former Labour Party members, victims of the extensive purges that took place in Labour during the late Corbyn period. After the 2019 election, when Corbyn was forced out, Starmer took over, LAW and LIEN were proscribed and there was an obvious objective case for them to merge, to act as an organising centre to keep together the many leftists who had been purged. When that happened, the CPGB walked away, as they feared they would be unable to control it, though some of their allies, such as Tony Greenstein, stayed in. Our longer-standing comrades were able to join the merged group in part through joining LIEN and no objections were raised by those such as Tony Greenstein who had previously accused us of ‘anti-Semitism’.

Policies and Mission of the SLN

As recounted above, we were instrumental in bringing to the SLN a much better policy on Ukraine. But the problem with the SLN was what its purpose was. The lack of a clear purpose somewhat stalled its growth and led to a certain decline in late 2023 and early 2024. So later, in September 2024, the organisation held a ‘re-founding conference’ – and our group drafted the main resolution, which defined the SLN as a kind of think-tank, to draw together the various initiatives that aimed to provide a left alternative to Labour, though principled debate:

“… the watchword of any new party should be ‘freedom of criticism, unity in action’. This goes right beyond the limits of the present democratic-socialist and social-democratic parties and the bureaucratised ‘communist’ parties and ‘Trotskyist’ groups, where dissent is seen as a challenge to their leaderships. Working class democracy is not an optional extra, it will be the most effective weapon for building such a party.

“We in the SLN cannot declare ourselves to be such a party. But we can advocate unification of the various forces that have been driven out of the Labour Party by its authoritarian and neoliberal decline, together with other socialists, to come together as a network, on the same basis as ourselves, to deepen collaboration and lay the basis for such a Party. We need a convention of the Left to be convened on a broad basis to begin this task.” (https://socialist-labour-network.org.uk/the-need-for-a-democratically-run-party-of-the-socialist-left/)

This was to be the role of the SLN, through providing a forum for such debates, to lay the foundation for such a unifying process to draw these strands together.

Unfortunately, it did not work out that way in the last few months, in part because Tony Greenstein insisted, in the context of the genocide in Gaza, in treating the SLN as virtually his property. The SLN organised a couple of well-attended public meetings, one (co-sponsored with Jewish Network for Palestine) on 27^th January for Holocaust Memorial Day, denouncing the Gaza genocide, with a good platform and mainly Jewish, but also Palestinian and other Arab speakers. And one on 10^th February defending the Right to Protest, notably in the context of a series of repressive arrests using “Anti-Terrorism” laws of journalists and pro-Palestine activists. Those victimised included Tony Greenstein himself, David Miller, Richard Medhurst, Sarah Wilkinson, Natalie Strecker and many more. Organising these events was completely correct and 100% supported by us.

But Tony objected to organising broader political discussions with those with a broader range of views on Palestine and Zionism. Proposals to organise public debates involving such speakers as David Miller, Lowkey, Chris Williamson, Ian Donovan of the Consistent Democrats, as well as speakers from Jewish Network for Palestine, were ruled out by Tony Greenstein on the supposed ground that a number of these speakers held ‘incorrect’ views on the influence of the Zionist lobby, or more bluntly were ‘anti-Semitic’. Since Tony had been the main person organising these public meetings, he was in the short term able to make it very difficult to do anything else. This issue came to a head after our comrades were mandated by the Steering Committee to co-write a motion critical of the International Holocaust Memorial Alliance (IHRA) ‘working definition’ of ‘anti-Semitism’, a crucial tool in the witchhunt against the Corbyn movement, which has now been de facto incorporated into US law as part of criminalising and persecuting opponents of today’s Zionist genocide.

The IHRA and ‘anti-Semitism’

The IHRA is quite a complex tract, incorporating a short, banal ‘definition’ whose real purpose is as an introduction to 11 ‘illustrations’ or ‘examples’ of supposed ‘anti-Semitism’. These are of three types – those that resemble Neo-Nazi positions (Nazi holocaust denial and similar), those that are associated with pro-Palestinian anti-Zionism (saying that Israel is a ‘racist endeavour’), and some that are formulated to be ambiguous. The whole thing is an amalgam, that equates anti-racist hostility to the persecution of Palestinians, with Nazi racism against Jews, in quite a subtle, interwoven manner. Previous critiques of the IHRA had been defensive and criticised it merely for ‘conflating’ anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, with the aim of showing that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. The motion we produced included a full analysis of the various amalgams with the text of the fake-definition, and concluded that its overall purpose and effect was that of a tract which treated Palestinians as inferior human beings – prohibiting meaningful criticism of their racist victimisation as “racist” itself, and thus like Hitler’s Nuremburg Laws. Also, in the context of today’s Gaza holocaust it has played the role of a ‘warrant for genocide’, as originally said about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the Nazi holocaust, seeking to prohibit criticism of, and indeed justify as part of a struggle against supposed ‘anti-Semitism’, what clearly has been an accelerating progression of atrocities whose logic was always a genocide.

The motion was unwieldy, as it had the complex analysis of the amalgams embedded in the body of the motion. At the 7^th February AMM it was referred back to the Steering Committee for reworking, where it was to be redrafted for the next AMM. This was done by changing the format, so that it contained a few simple points at the beginning, and the bulk of the analysis in an appendix. The opening points included the analogies with the Nuremburg laws and the Protocols. Tony Greenstein vehemently objected to these and sought their removal. We formulated his objections into an amendment, removing these points, and replacing them with the traditional points about ‘conflation’ of anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism, ready to be proposed by Tony and voted on at the 11^th April AMM. But Tony objected to this proposal, instead creating his own version of the motion, with many other small amendments, as well as the two changes he was really driving at. The net result was that two similar looking texts were voted counterposed, with Tony’s voted as a ‘delete all and insert’ amendment, but with the two contentious points removed. Not only that, but Tony moved, a day or two before the meeting, another motion denouncing David Miller among others as theorists of the idea that the “tail wags the dog” – i.e. that US imperialism’s Middle East policy is influenced or dictated by the Zionist lobby. Roughly coinciding with this, Tony denounced David Miller on his blog, and the site of Jewish Voice for Labour, for supposed ‘anti-Semitism’. We, who have considerably different views on David Miller and Zionism, countered that by initiating an Open Letter in his defence (see opposite).

Tony then submitted a second motion, aimed at David Miller and us, attributing the genesis of Zionism as a movement to non-Jewish Christian ideologues in the early days of capitalism, when to Marxists capitalism was still its progressive epoch. This being derived from the form of Jewish identity politics that Tony adheres to, which denies that any Jews played any real role in the creation of the Zionist movement at all. In response to that, we responded with a ‘delete all and insert’ amendment reaffirming that Zionism is a product of imperialist capitalism from the late 19^th century onward and rejecting the anti-Marxist position that seeks to dissociate Zionism from imperialism. This is a complex debate, and this online version of this article includes links to the motions so that readers can make their own judgements.

Two things distinguished the AMM on 11^th April. One was that those invited were not all members. It was Tony’s idea that all previous members of LAW and LIEN should be invited, as the SLN membership was supposedly in the doldrums. This, in hindsight, was clearly a ploy to mobilise his base. The other was confusion about which amendment was for which motion. The agenda was a confused mess. This was raised by us as a point of order at the beginning of the meeting, but Tony, among others, dismissed this. This may not have been deliberate but caused confusion. Parts of the discussion had to be re-run as it became clear that the motion/amendment order was indeed scrambled. In some heated exchanges, Tony blamed the chair of the meeting, although most of the confusion came from his behaviour. In the end, Tony got his motions through with what appeared to be a voting bloc of around 30, whereas most of the remaining members abstained, probably out of confusion. So, Tony won his votes, though apparently with the help of quite a few who were not actually SLN members.

A Pyrrhic Victory

It proved to be a pyrrhic victory. Regarding his attempted witchhunt of David Miller, we countered this with a collective statement/petition which, though not huge, included some prominent names. The real political upshot of his ‘victory’ at the AMM was that he had mobilised a crowd of his old supporters, many of whom were not even members of the SLN, to dilute a criticism of the IHRA fake definition that he considered to be too sharp (or ‘hyperbole’ as he put it). In mobilising for this, and afterwards, he accused supporters of the CD group of anti-Semitism, on the same basis as he did in previous encounters, such as in 2014 and 2018. This argument has continued after the AMM in Steering Committee forums, with Tony denouncing our comrades for our supposed ‘anti-Semitism’, and our people countering with criticism of his form of identity politics.

The upshot of this is that Tony Greenstein resigned from both the Steering Committee and the SLN. He also approached non-CD members of the Steering Committee offering to withdraw his resignation if they would back a motion saying that, because the Consistent Democrats derive from Socialist Fight, which was excluded from LAW in 2018, CD should be proscribed from the SLN. But this is unviable – he has been working with us in the SLN without complaint since 2023 and earlier and has earlier defended our comrades against the same allegations, knowing full well what our views are, from other critics who for their own reasons, walked away from the SLN. He only resorted to this when a concrete difference arose, over the IHRA. Given that, endorsement of such a motion would simply discredit anyone who co-signed it.

The problem for Tony Greenstein is that the world has changed since the days when he, and the Weekly Worker, were able to excommunicate so-called ‘left-wing anti-Semites’ (i.e., authentic Marxist anti-Zionists) from their version of the ‘labour movement’ and influence the Corbynite left. Today, fearless leftist critics of bourgeois Zionist Jewry, such as David Miller strike a chord among left wing opinion in the context of the genocide, and the likes of Tony Greenstein, for all his undoubtedly genuine anti-Zionism, look like backsliders and capitulators when they trot out their form of Jewish identity politics. Which to a degree they are. They should seriously examine the authentic Marxist analysis of Zionism we put forward, and thereby politically rearm themselves.

So now we are making proposals to try to drive the SLN forward on the lines of the September 2024 relaunch conference, proposing some public meetings/debates on resisting Starmer’s austerity attacks, and a proper, open debate on Palestine and the genocide, with a range of speakers with counterposed views when they exist. Hopefully, in implementing this perspective, the SLN can go forward.

The local election results, and Reform’s defeat of Labour by 6 votes in the Runcorn and Helsby By- Election (previously one of Labour’s safest seats) shows that Starmer’s government is in free fall, the weakest and most hated British government less than a year after winning a general election outright, that anyone can remember. It should be recalled that Tony Blair’s political ‘honeymoon’ after his landslide election victory in 1997 lasted for the entirety of his first term, until 2001, and in some ways only fully ended with the eruption of the mass movement against the Iraq War. Starmer’s government, which was elected with an overall majority in the House of Commons of 174 seats, only received just over 33.7% of the vote in July 2024, and is now in second place behind Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform party, with the Tories in third place, according to most opinion polls. Liberal Democrats and Greens are coming up behind as Britain’s two-party system, as previously known, shows sign of disintegration.

Starmer’s government is riven by severe contradictions. Sometimes it seems like a far-right government itself, but objectively it is a government of very right-wing social-liberals, not even traditional right-wing social democrats, but still formally attached to the labour movement through the Labour Party’s long-time link with the trade unions. It was not created as part of any class-based election campaign or class polarisation. It was openly touted by many in the ruling class as a failsafe for them given the chronic dysfunction of the Conservative Party, which came close to disintegration in its final post-Brexit term, with three different Prime Ministers: Johnson, Truss and Sunak, and obvious decay.

This government has a huge majority, but a weak social base. It retained the Tories hated two-child benefit cap, attacked the winter fuel payment for pensioners, and now undertaken a large-scale austerity attack on the disabled. The attacks on pensioners and the disabled, grotesquely, happen concurrently with many in the government, including Starmer, promoting the Assisted Dying Bill (i.e., legalising euthanasia for the elderly and sick). This now seems to be in parliamentary trouble. There have been revolts before against these attacks, but the local elections and Runcorn seem to have bought about blind panic in the Labour Party. So, there is now talk of the attacks on pensioners and the disabled being reversed, so desperate is Labour to try to regain some sort of initiative. This is despite Rachel Reeves’ insistence that these attacks were supposedly essential for economic stability. Now blunting their impact on Labour’s political fortunes appears to be essential for the government’s political stability. So, some of Reeves’ policies could be thrown overboard.

Starmerite privatisation of the NHS

There is more turmoil and polarisation on the way. The government has also made a show of putatively attacking and cutting the Tories’ previous neoliberal bureaucracy in the damaged National Health Service, phasing out the ‘NHS England’ quango, and local Integrated Care Boards which are also Tory creations as part of their stealth privatisation drives in the Cameron and May governments, mostly preceding Johnson and Brexit. But this is a deceptive flank attack from Labour’s uber-Zionist Health Secretary, Streeting, who is heavily invested in private healthcare himself. It appears that by attacking Tory-created NHS admin, it is using a ‘thin-end-of-the wedge’ tactic that will be used for alternative models of stealth privatisation later.

The only sop the government has made to the workers movement is some gains for trade union rights, extending protection against unfair dismissal to day one of employment. It also promised to outlaw zero-hour contracts. The latter has been considerably diluted, but this is one of the very few things on which leftists must support the government insofar as it acts, however tepidly. This is the only aspect of Corbynism it was unable to simply abolish, because it depended on right-wing trade union leaders, who had to deliver something, to tolerate its purges of the left.

This was buried since the election with an avalanche of attacks on democratic rights particularly of those critical of the government’s support for genocide in Gaza. Almost the first crisis it faced after the election was a wave of far-right near pogroms occasioned by a murder of children in Southport, Merseyside, by a deranged young person who was widely misreported as being a Muslim asylum seeker. The Starmer regime supressed the pogroms as best it could by mobilising the police, but it was the anti-racist left, including left-wing forces around the SWP, who mobilised a mass protest response that successfully undercut the wave of attempted pogroms. However, since then the government has gone on the warpath, starting its own campaign of deportations and further attacks on refugees and migrants.

But the most outrageous attacks by the government have been on the Palestine Solidarity movement, and to a lesser extent other causes, such as environmentalists and more recently, there have been outrageous arrests of those protesting Labour’s disability benefit cuts. Regarding the Palestine movement, there have been a plethora of phoney charges of support for ‘terrorism’ and vicious, police-state type raids on Palestine activists, as well as harassment and attempts to ban Palestine solidarity events in the face of the genocide that have gone much further than the Tory regime ever dared. Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman had to resign after she tried and failed to find a pretext to ban Palestine marches, but Labour in power found a pretext to forbid the coalition that calls the marches – Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War Coalition and Friends of Al Aqsa – from assembling at the BBC on 18^th January. There were numerous arrests over that, including of some of the key organisers of the protests. Even MPs who participated were threatened by the cops. The pretext being that there is a synagogue half a mile away. Now the government is seeking to pass new anti-protest laws to give the police powers to ban protests that supposedly might disrupt religious services by passing near to some prayer house. It’s obviously designed to find excuses to arbitrarily ban demonstrations, particularly against the Gaza Holocaust. Thus, this pro-genocide government is as big a threat to democratic rights as Trump in some ways.

Reform, racism and working-class alienation from Labour

A revolt against the government’s anti-worker character being directed through substantial working-class electoral support for the right-wing populist Reform is a dangerous occurrence in many ways, given that only last summer Britain erupted in a wave of racist riots and attempted pogroms led by people who are very much on the radar as part of Reform’s social base. Reform is a racist, xenophobic party, and a great deal of its appeal is to the most backward sections of the working class who given the defeats inflicted on the left in the previous period by Starmer, have gained influence in the wider working class. There is evidence in the public domain that Starmer’s project for the ruling class always was to destroy the Labour Party as a party with roots in the working class and hand it over to such right-wing forces, and even grounds for suspicion that Starmer was some kind of operative for British intelligence, or something similar, even in the days in the early 1980s when he professed to be a supporter of Militant and other more obscure factions of the Trotskyist left. He was promoted with great rapidity by the ruling class after serving some kind of apprenticeship, it seems.

Those in the Labour Party who want to throw Starmer/Reeves’ draconian attacks overboard to save the Labour Party are behaving quite logically. For Reform, while much of its appeal to backward layers of the working class is simply xenophobic and racist, there is also an element reflects working class discontent with neoliberalism that a working-class party ought to find ways to give expression to. There were already, before the May elections, the beginnings of stirrings of opposition in the labour movement to the government’s attacks: threats of large-scale rebellion by MPs pushed by opposition to the disability benefit cuts. Though these MP’s, except for the fringe of leftists such as Zahra Sultana who were previously punished by Stamer for rebelling also over the two-child cap, tend to be opportunists whose words mean little. There is agitation against the cuts in some trade unions, particularly the Fire Brigades Union, and there is already a major local clash between the government and the UNITE union over a bitter, and militant, bin workers strike in Birmingham, whose council is bankrupt due to austerity. The possibility of some attempt to impose conscription of young workers to fight in Ukraine is a possibility, though maybe remote due to the sclerotic state of the British armed forces. Whether they could even organise conscription effectively is open to massive doubt. But this is also a possible source of mass opposition.

Such things are tangential to the contradictions within Reform’s base. Craig Murray points out:

“So what are the actual politics of this? Well, Reform voters are primarily motivated by dislike of immigration. While there are respectable economic arguments over the desirability of immigration, the simple truth is that most Reform voters are rather motivated by racist dislike of foreigners. I know that I have commenters here who like to deny this, but frankly, I do not live under a rock, I have fought elections, I used to live in the then-UKIP hotspot of Thanet, and I do not have a romanticised regard for the working class, and I have no doubt that Reform primarily channels racism.

“But the interesting thing is that does not mean that Reform voters are ‘right-wing’ in an economic sense. Opinion polls have found that most Reform voters favour renationalisation of public utilities, for example, and Farage has appealed to this by advocating for the nationalisation of the water industry and backing the nationalisation of the steel industry. Reform voters also favour rent controls, employment protections, and minimum wage legislation. On the left/right axis in economic policy, Reform voters are very substantially to the left of their party leadership, who almost certainly do not really believe in any of those things at all, though they may sometimes pretend.” (https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2025/05/the-strange-death-of-social-democratic-britain/)

This really is a symptom of how the Labour Party has betrayed the working class. Over 50 years since the Wilson-Callaghan government kicked off the neoliberal offensive with its 1976 IMF-dictated cuts in the Welfare State and the NHS, and then Labour betrayed the miners’ strike of 1984-5 on the road to transforming itself into an openly pro-capitalist, neoliberal party under Tony Blair by abolishing Clause 4, Labour’s formal commitment to something approximating to parliamentary socialism. One particularly salient aspect of Craig Murray’s narrative is the way he points out how George Galloway’s Workers Party of Great Britain (WP) has adapted to this mixed sentiment, including the xenophobia and implicit racism, instead of acting to separate out these two strands in its intervention in the Runcorn by-election:

“George Galloway with the Workers’ Party has attempted to provide the mix of social conservatism in culture wars, including anti-immigration messaging, combined with left-wing economic policy, which might define a kind of left-wing populism, but failed miserably in Runcorn. It is only fair of me to make my own position clear, having stood for the Workers’ Party in the General Election on the issue of stopping the genocide. I do not support the culture wars agenda of the Workers’ Party and would not associate myself with the ‘Tough on Immigration, Tough on the Causes of Immigration’ messaging the party used in Runcorn, even with the second half of that message emphasising an end to imperialist destabilisation of vulnerable countries. It is still too dog-whistle for my taste.”

The Workers Party, in pandering to anti-migrant sentiments of this sort, even though to a degree it is benefiting from an element of semi-submerged class-consciousness that is part of the political makeup of Reform’s base, is not acting as an independent working-class force. Divide and rule is the agenda of the British ruling class – dividing the working class along xenophobic and racist lines. In tailing after Reform, the WP is tailing after the agenda of the British ruling class. Those rulers may have serious disagreements with Trump about Ukraine, but they are broadly in favour of his social reactionary measures and the role they are playing in dividing workers. This lack of class politics is also shown in the Workers Party’s approval of the British Supreme Court’s recent ruling against transexual rights. The “Workers Party’s” idea of the working class appears to resemble Alf Garnett.

A Fascistic Attack on Transexuals

This judgement asserted the ‘primacy’ of ‘biological sex’ in determining who is allowed to go where when single sex facilities are open to the public, the most common of which are public toilets. As a result of this judgement, and the Equalities and Human Rights Commission ‘guidance’ that was rushed out shortly afterwards, it has been pointed out that in some cases transwomen – male to female transexuals – will be banned from using women’s toilets, while in other cases, the same transwomen will be banned from using men’s toilets as well. The converse is also likely to be true for transmen – female to male transsexuals.

Transsexuals are a tiny minority of the population, and this is a policy of the ruling class in using them as scapegoats, again for a divide-and-rule agenda.  This is a fascist-like agenda that is obviously designed to terrorise and exclude trans people from public activities generally, and to whip up bigots and vigilantes against them. It is fitting that the new US administration whose political clout no doubt acted upon the minds of Britain’s lackey Supreme Court ‘Justices’ in coming up with this decision, at its inaugural in January, greeted the world with two Nazi salutes from the world’s richest billionaire, Elon Musk, which signified the culture wars the Trump regime intends to wage against workers and oppressed minorities around the world, including first of all against the social and political gains of the US civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The British ruling class are on this, as on so many other issues, simply lackeys of the US.

Starmer certainly is a lackey of the US, and a partner in crime of Trump. In this regard he immediately did another about-face and wholeheartedly backed the British Supreme Court’s anti-trans judgement. Though he, and others in Europe, have been whinging for the past few months that Trump had not been on board for Biden’s previous policy of arming and funding Ukrainian Nazis, which culminated in the last period of Biden’s presidency in Britain being given permission to fire Storm Shadow cruise missiles into Russia, skirting WWIII  (at least Biden was sufficiently discreet as to not have his leading spokespeople giving Nazi salutes at public events, however). Starmer must be very pleased that now Trump has now once again given the green light for such blatant acts of war, which they clearly are since Ukraine does not have the skills or satellite equipment to fire and target Storm Shadow. The latest Starmerite provocation in this regard is a contingent of troops from Nazi Maidan Ukraine marching on VE Day, supposedly to celebrate the defeat of Hitler, while these Nazis engage in terrorist threats and actual attacks against Russia aimed at the real 9^th May Victory Day celebrations of those who actually did defeat the Nazis, in Moscow.

For all the confected outrage from various US and European social liberals and the like over Trump’s pause in Biden’s war, Starmer hastened to Washington to kiss Trump’s posterior, and now even jointly attacked Yemen with Trump’s forces in defence of the genocide of the Palestinian people. This joint action with a US president who has openly endorsed the forcible expulsion of the Gaza population to make way for an Israeli-US ‘Riviera’ in the Gaza Strip intensifies even more Labour’s involvement in the genocide. The only government in the region that has tried to enforce the Genocide Convention against Israel is that of Yemen, and now British forces have joined Netanyahu-Trump’s SS Einsatzkommandos in directly committing atrocities against those resisting the genocide, which has apparently forced Yemen into a ceasefire. It could well be the most successful act of genocidal solidarity since Hitler destroyed the Czech village of Lidice in 1942 as retaliation for the Czech partisan assassination of Reynard Heydrich, the Nazi butcher of Prague.

What is really missing is a party that can crystallise opposition to this dying neoliberal regime on a class struggle, Marxist basis. The British section of the LCFI participates in all initiatives that point in that direction, such as the Socialist Labour Network, with the aim of crystallising such a party programmatically capable to developing in a revolutionary direction beyond failed social democracy, whose neoliberal remnants are strangling the labour movement.