In the Holborn and St Pancras (HSP) By-Election, there is currently no Labour or left-wing candidate that is sufficiently on the side of the working class and the oppressed to merit electoral support from those communists who are concerned, as Marx and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party says, to “represent the interests of the [working class] movement as a whole”.
In order to merit critical support, a non-communist candidate has to have something that they stand for that is unambiguously positive from the standpoint of the working class, even though the communist minority may very well suspect that they will betray such policies or promises if elected. The point of the tactic of critical support is to exploit some kind of contradiction between a claim to stand for the working class and the oppressed, and their real politics and deeds.
There are three contenders for such critical support in HSP. They are – Sagal Abdi-Wali, the Labour Party candidate, George Galloway, the Workers Party (WP) candidate and indeed WP leader, and Zack Polanski, the Green Party (GP) candidate and also GP leader.
There are fundamental problems with all three, not abstractly but concretely, in the current context. Abdi-Wali is the leader of Camden Council and, though she is of Somali origin, is an unrepentant supporter of Keir Starmer. Notwithstanding the traitorous Zionist and arch enemy of the Corbynite left being driven out of Downing Street and replaced by Andy Burnham, Burnham’s words about how Labour “got it wrong” after October 7th 2023, and even Ed Miliband’s supposed sanctions against Zionist settlers in the West Bank, Labour at its conference is still arresting people for protesting against genocide, using the fraudulent proscription of Palestine Action for ‘terrorism’ as a fig-leaf. Meanwhile, the real neo-Nazi terrorist movement Patriot Platform, whose masked thugs have been terrorising the streets of cities like Dover and Portsmouth, are not proscribed, but their thugs are free to threaten all opponents of the far right. Opposition to electoral support to Burnham’s Labour is a no-brainer.
Then there is George Galloway, and his Workers Party. He has some very good positions, on opposing Zionism and opposing NATO’s proxy war against Russia over Ukraine. If these were only what he was known for, it would be correct not just to just advocate a vote for him, but to actively get involved in the campaign. But he also stands for ‘Stop the Boats’. In the Runcorn and Helsby by-election of May 2025, WP candidate and Deputy Leader Peter Ford stood on the slogans “Stop the Boats” and “Tough on Immigration, Tough on the Causes of Immigration”. This by-election was won by Reform at the most dangerous point (so far) of the far-right wave assisted by this very right-wing ‘Labour government’. Instead of fighting against the reactionary tide, Galloway’s party tried to swim with it. With miserable results – Ford got only 0.5% of the vote in a by-election where Reform defeated Starmer’s Labour by just 6 votes.
Galloway’s own statement for the HSP by election states, in attacking the Greens, says “Instead of addressing poverty, immigration, energy prices, they were voting together last week to introduce legislation to make killing people legal. We believe voters will welcome the chance to reject this madness.” We don’t share the Green Party’s support for the (defeated) Assisted Dying Bill, but we do not consider “addressing” “immigration” – that is, targeting migrant workers for repression and exclusion, to be the job of a working-class party. Our job, on the contrary, is to defend the rights of, and promote solidarity with, migrant workers and refugees. This is criticism of this foul government from the right, and makes a mockery of the correct criticisms the WP makes of the NATO/Zionist atrocities in the Donbass and Gaza. And with the masked fascist attacks on migrant workers, this issue is centre-stage, and has been ever since Labour was elected. We cannot give any support to a party that stands on such an anti-immigrant platform.
Then there is the Green Party. This is not even a working-class party – it is a party of the radical middle class; it does not orient to the labour movement. It doesn’t have a solid base of outright bourgeois support either; it represents a social layer that is capable either of following the working class or the bourgeoisie. It is a party of protest against the environmental destruction that capitalism brings. Whether it attributes this to capitalism is thus pretty important as to whether it has any potential to be won to the side of the working class. Recently the Greens in England and Wales have acquired a more left-wing reputation because of Polanski’s outspoken attacks on Israeli crimes. He actually publicly apologized to Corbyn for reactionary positions he took regarding the witchhunt in the Labour Party prior to the genocide, which is significant. The failure of Your Party to organize the 800,000 who signed up a year ago as potential supporters of a new working-class socialist party allowed Polanski’s party to win over around 200,000 of those people with his leftist rhetoric particularly over Zionism. It also led the former independent candidate Andrew Feinstein, who stood against Starmer in this seat in the General Election, to call for votes to Polanski in this by-election, and then Chris Williamson, until recently a deputy leader of the Workers Party, to resign from that party in disagreement with Galloway’s decision to stand, and call for votes for Polanski also.
Both of them did so on the understanding that Polanski was supporting the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion at the coming Green Party conference. And in the case of Andrew Feinstein, he did so on the basis that Polanski endorsed the demands of the Camden People’s Alliance, the left-wing local independent umbrella group that Feinstein would have stood for before Polanski standing became a live issue. But these were hardly challenging – mainly about local issues. After these endorsements, Polanski backed away from supporting the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion demanding extensive amendments to dilute it. Which led to criticism of Polanski, including from Chris Williamson. But there is an inherent problem in such support, in that it does nothing to address the question of the non-working-class nature of the Green Party, vague ‘left’ verbiage notwithstanding. The record of the Greens in local councils, in coalitions often with Liberal Democrats where they have regularly carried out austerity, is appalling. However, because of the mass influx of erstwhile YP supporters, which quadrupled its membership, there is a potential class-based division in the Greens. A coherent working-class party could, if it were not simply able to stand itself, place some much more stringent demands on the Greens, as a possible lever to split them. This is what one of our comrades proposed in a motion in Croydon Your Party: three demands, on top of a decent position on “Zionism is racism”:
“(a) a clear statement from the GP that the root cause of the environmental crisis their party was set up to address, is capitalism, which therefore needs to be abolished.
“(b) That Zack Polanski and Your Party should issue a statement jointly defending Diane Abbot against the renewed witchhunting of her in the Labour Party, for her justified attack on NATO aggression as the cause of the war in Ukraine.
“(c) That the Greens should jointly with us and others in the labour movement, launch a trade union and community-centred campaign against the environmentally ruinous plans for AI Data Centres in numerous parts of this country. And to encourage similar activities internationally.”
This was topped off with “This motion should be sent to the [Your Party] CEC for their attention.” Given the appalling disaster that the Corbyn leadership have made of the Party’s evident potential a year ago, placing these demands could have had a political impact. If they were to be accepted, it would have meant that the pro-socialist elements would be in the ascendancy in the Greens. Point 2 goes some way to counter the Greens’ reactionary position on the Ukraine War, and the others would mean a pro-working class, anti-capitalist agenda instead of illusions in ‘Green’ capitalism. This might be a long shot, but it could have been a way to try to pull away the numerous supporters lost to the Greens by YP back to a working-class project.
Without this being a realistic possibility, as is now clear, socialists and class-conscious workers in Holborn and St Pancras should spoil their ballots in this election.
