Tag: Galloway

Where now for the Left after the General Election?

Jeremy Corbyn, newly elected Independent MP for Islington North, lambasts Starmer at Palestine Solidarity demo on 6 July

This is the text of the presentation today at our forum on the result of the General Election on July 4th.

The presentation and extensive discussion can also be listened to as a podcast here.

The headlines of our leaflet read:

“Starmer’s Regime has NO MANDATE for its Genocidal Neoliberalism!  Independent Working-Class Forces promise Challenge to Zionist New Labour.”

This talk is based on that but expanded.

Media and conventional wisdom have it that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the July 2024 General Election by a ‘landslide’, with its overall majority of 174, and therefore has a strong mandate to rule, having supposedly ‘changed’ the Labour Party to make it ‘fit to govern’ by driving out the ‘unelectable’ Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing followers.

But the ‘landslide’ is a myth. Starmer got fewer votes absolutely than Corbyn’s Labour got in in the General Election of December 2019, which Labour lost by a considerable margin in terms of seats, producing an overall majority for Johnson’s Tories of 80. The Corbyn-led Labour Party got 10.29 million votes in 2019, whereas Starmer’s tally is well below 10 million. In percentage terms, Starmer’s Labour has 33.8%, not much higher than under Corbyn in 2019 (32.1%).

This is not the product of a surge of votes for Starmer’s Labour, but a much lower turnout, only 59.9%, the lowest since 2001. Caused by the well-known similarity between the main parties – “two cheeks of the same backside” as George Galloway put it. Over 19.5 million eligible voters did not vote. It is the undemocratic ‘First Past the Post’ electoral system yet again that produced this anomaly. In this case it was fuelled by the splintering and near–disintegration of the Tories. This has nothing to with any ‘achievements’ of Keir Starmer’s leadership, which is characterised by many of the same odious neoliberal, chauvinist and Zionist vices as the Tories.

In 2017, in a General Election that took on the character of a class confrontation between the Tories led by Theresa May and a resurgent left-led Labour Party led by Corbyn, Labour got 12.87 million votes and 40% of the vote. The Tories got only slightly more, and the result was a hung parliament where the Tories were forced to rely on the very right-wing Democratic Unionists in the North of Ireland to get their measures approved in parliament.

But in 2024 Starmer won precisely because the Labour vote was NOT a class vote, by virtue of the anti-democratic electoral system and the splintering and collapse of the Tories. Reform played a similar role in screwing the Tories as the Social Democratic Party did with Labour in the 1983 election. Though that was not as extreme a manifestation as today’s result, as in 1983, Thatcher’s Tories got nearly 44% of the vote – a genuine landslide.

Since the election Sunak announced his resignation. A leadership election process for the Tories has begun. Farage’s Reform Party is hopeful of either replacing, or taking over the Tories for a more consistent, xenophobic far right type of politics. More on this later.

Starmer today actually achieved a bigger majority than Thatcher with only 33%.    Blair in 1997 got a slightly larger majority than Starmer, but he won 43.3% of the vote. That was also a genuine landslide, whereas this is not at all. Starmer has no real mandate. He will be a weak and likely vicious PM. Even before he took office, a warning sign was decision of the police to refuse to allow the Palestine Solidarity movement to march on July 6th in Parliament Square and Whitehall. The police by then knew full well that the Tories were finished and it’s obvious that they would consult and take note of the views of the Zionist clique around Starmer in deciding what would be allowed. This is a sign of weakness, not strength from Starmer. His party is likely to generate rebellions on the backbenches precisely because of that lack of a solid mandate. This will not be a stable government.

Jeremy Corbyn’s overwhelming victory in Islington North is a considerable political blow to Starmer and will damage his authority right from the start. Starmer brazenly ran a candidate who is involved in private healthcare and who spoke publicly about the ‘importance’ of healthcare privatisation. A serious threat from the new regime since its designated Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is also an evangelist for private healthcare.

The victory of Shockat Adam over would-be cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South is a wonderful blow to the Labour Zionists. Shockat made Gaza a big element of his campaign. The same is true of the victory of Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr, who took the seat of the neocon Zionist stooge Khalid Mahmoud, who has even served on the Council of the neocon arch-Zionist Henry Jackson Society.

Iqbal Mohammed, Newly Elected Independent MP for Dewsbury and Batley, West Yorkshire

Iqbal Mohammad, is a former Labour member who quit the party over Starmer’s endorsement of Yoav Gallant’s call for the deprivation of food, fuel and water to the population of Gaza (described by Gallant as ‘human animals’). He defeated the Labour candidate, Heather Iqbal, getting 41% of the vote to her 23%. A massive victory.

Then there is the victory of Adnan Hussein in Blackburn. There is some controversy over this as Craig Murray, the long-time anti-war activist and prominent campaigner in the successful campaign to free Julian Assange, was standing in this seat with the support of the Workers Party of George Galloway. Another independent Muslim candidate withdrew in favour of Craig Murray, but Hussein refused to do so. Murray offered to toss a coin for the left candidacy with Hussein, but the latter indignantly refused. It transpired that though the vote was split, Labour was just about defeated anyway. There are accusations that Adnan Hussein might be a ‘spoiler’ for Labour and that he has connections with the New Labour Iraq war criminal Jack Straw. We can only hope that this is untrue: if it were true. it would be very damaging. A ‘spoiler’ phoney candidate was run against Andrew Feinstein in Starmer’s seat, though he was exposed as such during the campaign and completely marginalised.

Prominent Palestinian activist Leanne Mohammad came within 500 votes of defeating the arch-Zionist Wes Streeting in Ilford North. Jody McIntyre, Muslim and disabled activist and supporter of the Workers Party, almost unseated Jess Phillips, friend of Israel, in Birmingham Yardley, by only 693 votes. George Galloway, founder of the Workers Party of Britain, lost the Rochdale seat he won in February, but quite narrowly – by around 1500 votes.  He promises to take the fight to Labour on Rochdale council.

Starmer lost a lot of votes in his own seat. 17,000 of them. Andrew Feinstein came a very good second with over 7,000 votes after a very energetic campaign that attracted activists from a wide area keen to have a go at Starmer himself. It lays down a marker for the future: Stamer will not be able to consider his own seat to be ‘safe’ in future elections.

Halima Khan in Stratford and Bow for the Workers Party – former Labour whistleblower about corruption and the activities of the Zionist lobby in Newham – came a very good third, behind Labour and the Greens. She gained ten times the vote of prominent RMT activist Steve Hedley, who mistakenly stood without any real base. Faiza Shaheen, a respected economist and the overwhelming popular choice of Labour members in Chingford and Woodford Green was banned from standing for Labour, because she criticised Islamophobia in the Labour Party. She was set to defeat Iain Duncan Smith. She rightly refused to accept this, Labour imposed a stooge candidate, and a split vote ensued that allowed IDS to retain his seat. This is entirely caused by Labour Zionism and Islamophobia.

We live in a world where social democracy has failed, and imperialist capitalism is threatening human existence both by the destruction of the biosphere and through predatory, permanent imperialist wars, of which the genocide in Gaza is the most obvious and foul manifestation. We desperately need an alternative, both here and internationally.

The left needs to create a proper party to fight under in the next period. Unlike the situation in the 2000s under Blair, now as a result of the Corbyn surge in Labour in the late 20-teens and then it’s defeat, there is a large layer of ex-Labour working class people involved in this movement. Though Labour has an awful history and record as a party controlled by a pro-imperialist bureaucracy, its party loyalty element was correct. We need to recreate the party loyalty element without the pro-imperialist bureaucracy and go beyond the weaknesses of the far left in general and the Trotskyist movement in particular.  

The struggle against the far right and Farage’s semi-far-right movement, which aims to parallel the rise of Marine Le Pen, Meloni etc., is going to be a key struggle in the next period. But it is going to be inseparable from the struggle to build a new party of the working class left. Trotsky wrote in a different situation, about the counterposition of the fascists, and what the party of the working class left, the communist party, should stand for. He said that the fascists were the party of counterrevolutionary despair, whereas the communist party was the party of revolutionary hope.

We are in a somewhat different situation today. In the 1930s, there were strong, highly political working-class movements all over Europe, and fascism was a petty bourgeois and lumpen movement directly aimed at crushing them. This time round there is not a strong, highly political working-class movement. Far from it. The parallel rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and the collapse of Stalinism caused a massive weakening of the working-class movement in the imperialist countries. A qualitative weakening, which has not yet been overcome.

This rise of fascism intersects a conflict within the imperialist bourgeoisie, because in the period since the collapse of Stalinism under the unprecedented US domination, the globalising factions of the bourgeois gained unprecedented dominance. The problem is that the imperialist bourgeoisie is a national class. Although, as Lenin pointed out, the nation-state is obsolete, and the proof of that is the world war that broke out in 1914. But the war in 1914 showed that, not only is the nation-state obsolete, but the imperialist bourgeoisie cannot abolish it. Rather, it will try to ‘abolish’ it by imperialist powers attempting to conquer each other, and the rest of the globe also. And tearing apart human civilisation in the process and threatening human existence today as today’s technology is quite capable, from climate pollution to the threat of nuclear war.

Today’s right-wing populist and fascist movements derive from a backlash within the various imperialist bourgeoisies against the ‘globalising’ liberal factions of the bourgeoisie. They are not particularly aimed at the workers movement, which is qualitatively weaker, both organisationally and politically, than it was in the 1930s. However, they are aimed at migrant workers, and the workers movement has to act as the tribune of the oppressed, and therefore has a duty to defend such workers tooth and nail. There is nothing remotely ‘progressive’ about this reassertion of the ‘national’ prerogative of the various imperialist ruling classes.

Unfortunately, the populist factions have managed to convince some sections of the working-class movement that there is something positive about them. Even some left-wing sections of the workers movement have been drawn into the orbit of the populists, at least partly. Thus, we see working class support for Brexit, so-called ‘Lexit’, the most extreme example of which is George Galloway, who openly allied with Farage during the period of the Brexit referendum.

Even now, as he advocates the most courageous defiance and attacks on the imperialist bourgeoisie over its criminal support for genocide in Palestine, and its criminal, equally genocidal (in intent) proxy war in the Donbass, he still echoes the demands of the populists over so-called ‘illegal’ migration. He embodies a contradiction. He should be both hailed and congratulated for his courage over Ukraine and Gaza and taken to task for his chauvinist politics over so-called ‘illegal’ migration. For the working-class movement, no-one is illegal. Migrants, legal and ‘illegal’, are part of the working-class and oppressed.

Galloway became particularly vulnerable to such deviations when, as Britain’s most radical MP, he was brutally beaten by a Zionist in 2014, and betrayed by every member of the House of Commons bar one (including the Labour left) who failed to publicly condemn this fascist attack. He appeared to become partially disillusioned with the left after that. But this is not a mere personal foible. There are other examples.

Similar such contradictory phenomena are so-called ’MAGA-Communism’ in the United States (would be communists who support, or at least are in the political orbit of, Donald Trump). Or the left-wing politics (over Ukraine and Gaza) of Sahra Wagenknecht – very courageous in today’s Germany, and yet similar chauvinism to Galloway – her chauvinistic politics over migration. Wagenknecht has formed her own party over this, and appears to have the same mixture of courageous anti-imperialism and chauvinism as Galloway. This has partly come about as the Ukraine war has been seen particularly as a project of the ‘globalising’ faction of the bourgeoisie, with their populist opponents (Trump, Farage, the AfD, being seen to be more dubious about it).

This needs to be properly understood by the workers movement. A key text in understanding it is a 1977 essay “On Bourgeois Class-Consciousness” the then-leading Marxist intellectual figure of the Spartacist League/US, Joseph Seymour.

I would like to see us do a public forum/discussion on that soon. It would be very useful for enhancing a Marxist understanding of populism and the roots of the current growth of the far right. And re-arming the workers movement and the left, to understand this phenomenon, to gain a sense of perspective and discover how to combat it.

For this we need to advocate a unification of the anti-neoliberal, anti-imperialist left including its sizeable ex-Labour, ex-Corbynite component. Programmatic development can only come through full debate and wide-ranging education. We need an anti-racist/anti-Zionist Socialist-Communist party with full freedom of programmatic debate. Freedom of criticism, unity in action, as in the early stages of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

Starmer’s Regime has NO MANDATE for its Genocidal Neoliberalism

Independent Working-Class Forces promise Challenge to Zionist New Labour

Top: Jeremy Corbyn, witchhunted and expelled from Labour by Starmer for belatedly defending his leadership against ‘anti-Semitism’ scam, defeated the Starmerites in his long-held Islington North seat.
Bottom: Ayoub Khan, former Labour councillor and now independent MP defeated neocon Zionist Blairite Khalid Mahmood in Birmingham Perry Barr.
 

Media and conventional wisdom have it that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the July 2024 General Election by a ‘landslide’, with its overall majority of 171, and therefore has a strong mandate to rule, having supposedly ‘changed’ the Labour Party to make it ‘fit to govern’ by driving out the ‘unelectable’ Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing followers.

But the ‘landslide’ is a myth. Starmer got fewer votes than Corbyn’s Labour got in in the General Election of December 2019, which Labour lost by a considerable margin in terms of seats, producing an overall majority for Johnson’s Tories of 80. The Corbyn-led Labour Party got 10.29 million votes in 2019, whereas Starmer’s tally is well below 10 million. In percentage terms, Starmer’s Labour has 33.8%, not much higher than under Corbyn in 2019 (32.1%). This is not the product of a surge of votes for Starmer’s Labour, but a much lower turnout, only 60%, the lowest since 2001. Caused by the well-known similarity between the main parties – “two cheeks of the same backside” as George Galloway put it. Over 19.5 million eligible voters did not vote. Around 80% of the eligible electorate did not vote for this government.

It is the undemocratic ‘First Past the Post’ electoral system yet again that produced this anomaly. In this case it was fuelled by the splintering and near–disintegration of the Tories. This has nothing to with any achievements of Keir Starmer’s leadership, which is characterised by many of the same odious neoliberal, chauvinist and Zionist vices as the Tories.

In 2017, in a General Election that took on the character of a class confrontation between the Tories led by Theresa May and a resurgent left-led Labour Party led by Corbyn, Labour got 12.87 million votes and 40% of the vote. The Tories got only slightly more, and the result was a hung parliament where the Tories were forced to rely on the very right-wing Democratic Unionists in the North of Ireland to get their measures approved in parliament.

But in 2024 Starmer won precisely because the Labour vote was NOT a class vote, by virtue of the anti-democratic electoral system and the splintering and collapse of the Tories. Reform played a similar role in screwing the Tories as the Social Democratic Party did with Labour in the 1983 election. Though that was not as extreme a manifestation as today’s result, as in 1983, Thatcher’s Tories got nearly 44% of the vote – a genuine landslide. Starmer today actually achieved a bigger majority than Thatcher with only 33%.    Blair in 1997 got a slightly larger majority than Starmer, but he won 43.3% of the vote. That was also a genuine landslide, whereas this is not at all.

Starmer has no real mandate. He will be a weak and likely vicious PM. Even before he took office, a warning sign was decision of the police to refuse to allow the Palestine Solidarity movement to march on July 6th in Parliament Square and Whitehall. The police by then knew full well that the Tories were finished and it’s obvious that they would consult and take note of the views of the Zionist clique around Starmer in deciding what would be allowed. This is a sign of weakness, not strength from Starmer. His party is likely to generate rebellions on the backbenches precisely because of that lack of a solid mandate. This will not be a stable government.

Jeremy Corbyn’s overwhelming victory in Islington North is a considerable political blow to Starmer and will damage his authority right from the start. Starmer brazenly ran a candidate who is involved in private healthcare and who spoke publicly about the ‘importance’ of healthcare privatisation. A serious threat from the new regime since its designated Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is also an evangelist for private healthcare.

The victory of Shockat Adam over would-be cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South is a wonderful blow to the Labour Zionists. Shockat made Gaza a big element of his campaign. The same is true of the victory of Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr, who took the seat of the neocon Zionist stooge Khalid Mahmoud, who has even served on the Council of the neocon arch-Zionist Henry Jackson Society. Iqbal Mohammad, a former Labour member quit the party over Starmer’s endorsement of Yoav Gallant’s call for the deprivation of food, fuel and water to the population of Gaza (described by Gallant as ‘human animals’). He defeated the Labour candidate, Heather Iqbal, getting 41% of the vote to her 23%. A massive victory.

Then there is the substantial victory of Adnan Hussein in Blackburn. There is some controversy over this as Craig Murray, the long-time anti-war activist and prominent campaigner in the successful campaign to free Julian Assange, was standing in this seat with the support of the Workers Party of George Galloway. Another independent Muslim candidate withdrew in favour of Craig Murray, but Hussein refused to do so. Murray offered to toss a coin for the left candidacy with Hussein, but the latter indignantly refused. It transpired that though the vote was split, Labour was overwhelmingly defeated anyway. There are accusations that Adnan Hussein might be a ‘spoiler’ for Labour and that he has connections with the New Labour Iraq war criminal Jack Straw. We can only hope that this is untrue: if it were true. it would be very damaging. A ‘spoiler’ phoney candidate was run against Andrew Feinstein in Starmer’s seat, though he was exposed as such during the campaign and completely marginalised.

Prominent Palestinian activist Leanne Mohammad came within 500 votes of defeating the arch-Zionist Wes Streeting in Ilford North. George Galloway, founder of the Workers Party of Britain, lost the Rochdale seat he won in February, but quite narrowly – by around 1500 votes.  He promises to take the fight to Labour on Rochdale council. Starmer lost a lot of votes in his own seat. 17,000 of them to Andrew Feinstein, who came a very good second after a very energetic campaign that attracted activists from a wide area keen to have a go at Starmer himself. It lays down a marker for the future: Starmer will not be able to consider his own seat to be ‘safe’ in future elections.

We live in a world where social democracy has failed, and imperialist capitalism is threatening human existence both by the destruction of the biosphere and through predatory, permanent imperialist wars, of which the genocide in Gaza is the most obvious and foul manifestation. We desperately need an alternative, both here and internationally.

The left needs to create a proper party to fight under in the next period. Unlike the situation in the 2000s under Blair, now as a result of the Corbyn surge in Labour in the late 20-teens and then it’s defeat, there is a large layer of ex-Labour working class people involved in this movement. Though Labour has an awful history and record as a party controlled by a pro-imperialist bureaucracy, its party loyalty element was correct. We need to recreate the party loyalty element without the pro-imperialist bureaucracy and go beyond the weaknesses of the far left in general and the Trotskyist movement in particular.  We need an anti-racist/anti-Zionist Socialist-Communist party with full freedom of programmatic debate. Freedom of criticism, unity in action, as in the early stages of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.

Presentation and discussion: General Election: No Vote to Zionist New Labour – Support Left Independents/Anti-Zionists

(Top) Jeremy Corbyn,  Leanne Mohammad, (Below) George Galloway,  Andrew  Feinstein
 

The presentation and discussion at our forum this afternoon can also be heard here as a podcast

There is no major party standing in this General Election deserving of the support of class-conscious workers, socialists, anti-racists and fighters against oppression.

The Tories and Liberal Democrats are the open parties of the ruling class, speaking abstractly.

Being more concrete, we have all experienced the brutal austerity and increasingly decrepit corruption of this gang of looters of our social gains, public services, the Health service, the rivers polluted with raw sewage, the racist thuggery and sadism … I could go on.

First the Tory-Liberal coalition for 5 years, then the Tories alone. The rise of Jeremy Corbyn was a reaction from the workers movement to Tory-Lib Dem austerity attacks.

But today’s Labour Party was forged through a massive, reactionary driving out of the left that led the party from 2015-20 under Jeremy Corbyn.

This was the one period since the miners strike when millions of working-class people thought they had a chance of winning something back, through the election of a left-wing politician with a record of fighting for workers, of opposing privatisation and attacks on the poor, of standing up to bigoty and racism, and mobilisation against imperialist wars.

The current Labour leadership, as the whole country knows, buried that. They preferred the Tories. They engineered Johnson’s victory in 2019. Labour is standing in this election as a Tory second XI as they continue to stamp on the Labour left.

Some see the Greens as a potential repository of socialist possibilities. In Germany, the Greens are part of a coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD); they are deeply implicated in support for both Israel and Nazi Ukraine.

In this country sole Green MP Caroline Lucas, has been involved in ‘cross-party’ witchhunting critics of Zionism in academia, as shown in the case of David Miller.

They cannot be trusted, their environmentalism is bourgeois and depends on ‘Green’ capitalism, not socialist planning, which is the only thing that can solve the problem of human-induced climate change. We need a working-class alternative, not a petty bourgeois party that joins in with capitalist reaction.

But the main topic of this forum is Labour.

On October 8th Israeli ‘defence’ minister Yoav Gallant made his Hitlerian speech saying that the inhabitants of Gaza are “human animals” who should be allowed “no electricity, no food, no water, no gas”.

When Starmer was interviewed shortly after, he defended Israel’s “right” to carry out these genocidal measures.

This led to a major exodus of outraged members, particularly from Muslim working-class communities, and numerous defections of councillors.

The Labour leadership is dominated by genocidal Zionists.

The scam ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against the left during the Corbyn period, was driven by the realisation by those forces that a genocide of the Palestinian people was in the offing, and politics had to be purged of sympathy for Palestinian rights.

But they have a huge problem now. This election takes place in the middle of that very genocide, that Starmer gave his support to

However much he tries to wriggle and evade now, he, and his supporters, are on the rack.

The Starmer leadership is a reversion to the politics of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and their neoliberal New Labour governments, which followed in the footsteps of Thatcher and Major.

That government, like the Tories, demanded austerity to make the working class pay for the world financial crisis of the late noughties.

The neoliberal right, which is interpenetrated with the Zionists as a matter both of history and current political reality, was horrified by the near victory of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 election.

It appears that only the sabotage of the Labour right –the funnelling of campaign funds to safe Labour seats inhabited by neoliberals and Zionists – deprived Corbyn’s Labour of being the largest party.

The shocked expressions of ‘Labour Friends of Israel’ like Jess Phillips and Stephen Kinnock when May lost her majority, said it all.

They worked overtime to sabotage Corbyn’s leadership and bring Boris Johnson to power in the 2019 election. For the bourgeois/Zionist right-wing, Johnson was the lesser evil to Corbyn.

When the anti-Semitism scam was ineffective (as was shown in 2017), Starmer manipulated the issue of Brexit to sabotage Labour.

So, the idea that Starmer and his followers are somehow a lesser evil to the Tories today is at odds with reality. They have more in common with the Tories than they do with the labour movement.

This election gives the opportunity to the left to begin to clarify that and split this bourgeois workers party along class lines. We are seeing the small beginnings of that.

There is already a substantial layer of independent socialist councillors around the country, many of whom successfully defended their seats in the council elections on May 4th.

Starmer has the party’s internal life sewn up, dissent is ruthlessly punished, and internal party elections are shamelessly rigged.

Then in February Starmer colluded with Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, another “Labour Friend of Israel”.

Hoyle broke with an element of parliamentary procedure that has a democratic content. The rule being that on a party’s “Opposition Day”, that party is allowed to put a motion, and only the government is allowed to put amendments to it.

The purpose of this is to ensure that all opposition parties get to have their say; they have the right to have their motions voted on by the house, yes or no.

Hoyle allowed Labour to put an amendment to the SNP’s motion calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.

Predictably, the Labour Party was able to outvote the SNP.  So, the SNP motion was amended to remove its most important demands, for a ceasefire and condemnation of “collective punishment” of Palestinian civilians in this genocide.

Which were never voted on in counter-position to the government,

Labour was afraid that if they were forced to vote on a ceasefire, they would split. But voting for something with ambiguous wording that was deliberately unclear, would not cause a problem.

So, the SNP’s right to a yes-no vote/confrontation against the government on Gaza was buried.

If the Labour Party had been forced to vote on the SNP motion versus the government, the whips would have demanded that Labour either vote with the government or abstain. Many would have rebelled.

This manoeuvre was to stop that happening.

This showed that Starmer is not just a threat to Labour members’ democratic rights, but of all who criticise Zionism.

It is comparable, in some ways, to Boris Johnson’s illegal manoeuvre to prorogue parliament in the Summer of 2019. This was a kind of coup.

And Starmer/Hoyle carried out their own mini-parliamentary coup against the SNP and any MP in their own party or any other who wanted to vote to demand a permanent ceasefire.

This is an attack on an element of parliamentarism that actually has a democratic content.

Numerous independent socialists around the country are standing against Labour, as well as several left-of-labour political organisations.

The most prominent individual is Jeremy Corbyn himself.

His exclusion from Labour, when only a few years earlier he was the leader of a massive movement against austerity, racism and imperialist war, symbolises why socialists should not be supporting the Starmer-led Labour Party.

Hundreds of thousands of people loyal to Corbyn’s leadership have been impatiently waiting for him to defy Starmer in the election.

Now he has done so, he deserves the support of all in society who have a basic working-class consciousness, along with those fighting oppression and imperialist war, crucially the attempted genocide in Gaza.

But it should be a critical support, as many of Corbyn’s own actions when he was leader, did not help to resist the reactionaries who sought to overthrow him.

Corbyn showed chronic weakness in Labour with the position that he explicitly formulated later in the witchhunt period, that both Zionists and anti-Zionists should work together in Labour.

Jon Lansman of Momentum, who admitted to being a left Zionist, was among his most influential supporters. He played a key role in undermining his leadership.

Even more to the point, Corbyn’s adherence to the view that Zionists and anti-Zionists should work together, meant that when the Zionists came after outspoken opponents of Zionist racism in the party, Corbyn turned the other cheek, which meant throwing them under the bus.

Corbyn’s appointee Jenny Formby, as General Secretary, proved more efficient at purging the pro-Palestinian left in the guise of fighting ‘anti-Semitism’, than her right-wing predecessor McNicol.

So that was disastrous weakness.

He is still at it – in the ‘Collective’ Umbrella he has initiated for this election, and his ‘Peace and Justice’ initiative, ‘left’ Zionists: Justin and Clare Schlosberg, are active.

Justin Schlossberg denounced David Miller, the militant, victimised anti-Zionist professor formerly of Bristol University, as a ‘psyop’.

David Miller who defeated Bristol University at an industrial tribunal, establishing for the first time that anti-Zionist views are a protected belief under British law.

The types are a danger to the left and Palestine supporters. It is terrible to be allying oneself with such people, particularly in these terrible circumstances. It is wrong in principle in any case.

Zionism is a key driver of racism in the Labour Party.

Diane Abbot, the first black woman MP, was deprived of the Labour whip based on phoney allegations of anti-Semitism, driven by Zionists.  Par for the course.

Abbott and her supporters appear to have forced Starmer to reinstate her as a Labour candidate. It is clear that Starmer wanted rid of her, and that she refused to go, and had the clout to insist, and defeat him.

This is because the Labour Party feared to take on black working-class communities in London, and in Britain generally, who still have considerable regard for Diane Abbott.

She is one of the few Labour candidates who deserve a vote in this election. For defying and defeating Starmer.

What happened to Faiza Shaheen is the converse of this. She was outrageously dropped as a candidate in Chingford/Woodford Green on the basis of feeble Zionist smears only a few days before the national candidate selection deadline

A highly regarded left-wing economist of Muslim family background, she was supposed to be crushed by this.

But not so, she denounced the ‘hierarchy of racism’ in Labour.

What this actually means is that Labour has a racial hierarchy, that privileges Jewish and white supremacists over the black and Asian communities.

She is now standing as an independent against the Tory Iain Duncan Smith and the Starmer stooge.

The quintessence of this racial hierarchy is Labour’s parachuting of Luke Akehurst into a safe Labour seat in North Durham.

He is a white supremacist, who as Diane Abbott has noted, had tried repeatedly to get rid of her from her Hackney seat.

He is also an ardent Zionist, but he is not actually Jewish. There is a famous photo of him wearing a T-Shirt bearing the caption “Zionist Shitlord”.

 It appears that his Zionist fervour is driven by his hatred of non-whites – he has deleted thousands of his tweets and social media posts recently to hide this.

One reportedly referred to Palestinians as ‘rats’.  Akehurst is basically a Zionist-Nazi and should be treated as one.

There is a proud working-class history in Durham, as symbolised by the Durham Miners’ Gala. They should ensure his type are better acquainted with the pavement.

George Galloway of the Workers Party is seeking re-election in Rochdale after his recent by-election victory.

There are also some independent candidates standing in Birmingham who are closely associated with GG and the Workers Party.

Jody McIntyre in Yardley against Jess Philipps, and Ahmed Yakoob in Ladywood against Shabana Mahmood.

They are making Gaza a big issue, but not just Gaza. Labour’s more general racism, neoliberalism and contempt for the working class, and particularly the British Asian working class, is crucial here.

Former UK Ambassador and Julian Assange defender Craig Murray is standing for the Workers Party in Blackburn (he may win also).

Chris Williamson, the former very left-wing Labour MP and Deputy Leader of the Workers Party is standing in Derby South, adjacent to his previous Derby North seat.

Former Labour whistleblower (about Zionist lobbying and witchhunts), Halima Khan, is planning to stand in Stratford and Bow, East London, also under the banner of the Workers Party.

George Galloway is excellent on Palestine and Ukraine and has a long and creditable anti-imperialist record.

But in the past decade he has shown softness on right-populism, and some of his followers follow in the same vein and to be treated with caution.

There are political debates to be had with the Workers Party about social conservatism and backwardness on questions involving immigration and oppression, including sexual oppression of various types.

However, Galloway’s views cannot be taken to represent the final word about the Workers Party and its politics. There are signs of it being a more inclusive project than that. 

Galloway himself has appeared to welcome the idea of prominent figures with different views joining with him. If that were to happen, then it could become a real vehicle for political advance.

Williamson, Craig Murray and Halima Khan appear to give substance to that.

Possibly the most prominent independent socialist campaign in London, barring Corbyn, is Andrew Feinstein in Holborn and St Pancras constituency, against Starmer himself.

He is a Jewish former member of the South African Parliament for the African National Congress. He is an outspoken defender of the Palestinians and supporter of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ.

He was selected by OCISA (Organise Corbyn-Inspired Socialist Alliance), a left-Corbynite campaign group set up a couple of years ago with the aim of standing a socialist candidate against Keir Starmer.

Labour sees that as threatening politically, which is perhaps why a ‘left’-talking independent candidate, who appears to have family connections with the Labour right wing, is running in that constituency seemingly to split the left-wing opposition to Starmer.

Leanne Mohammad, a British-Palestinian Palestine solidarity activist, is challenging Wes Streeting is in Ilford North. Streeting can be considered an Israeli agent – and he evangelises for private healthcare. His defeat would be a major blow to the Zionists and neoliberals.

There are also the celebrated Liverpool Community Independents, who are standing Sam Gorst against arch-witchhunter Maria Eagle in Liverpool Garston.

They are now standing under the banner of Transform, another new leftist party that is partly the product of ex-Corbynites, notably the very youthful Breakthrough Party, which merged with the remnants of Left Unity as well as the Liverpool Independents last year.

Transform appears heterogenous; it has ‘socialist’ elements who are flatly on the wrong side in Ukraine, mixed with others with better views.

TUSC, which is basically a front for the Socialist Party, is standing in this election.

Its left-reformist sectarian caricature of Marxism makes it appear bureaucratic and sterile, but it does stand for some basic working class demands for trade unions, against privatisation, imperialist wars etc., so it is worthy of critical support in principle.

Though its habit of standing against other leftists gratuitously is part of what renders it sterile.

It does appear they might have a candidate standing under their ticket from the Spartacist League. That is an interesting anomaly. And also critically supportable.

The new Revolutionary Communist Party, formerly the labour entrist Socialist Appeal, that also has its origins in Militant is also standing on politics that appear critically supportable. It appears more political and open to debate.

What is necessary above all is a perspective that seeks to unite all of these fragmented initiatives in a new, democratically organised party, where proper political debates are possible, and thereby unity in action, so that political and programmatic development in a revolutionary direction comes onto the agenda.