This presentation was given at a Consistent Democrats forum on 1st March 2026. .
A recording of the full presentation and discussion at this meeting is available here.
The world, and the working class, are now in very dangerous circumstances thanks in large measure to a combination of two linked major questions: One is the decline of US world hegemony vis-à-vis Russia and China, two major world-power states that, in different ways, owe their present power in the world to factors related to the 1917 Russian Revolution. The other is Israel and the Jewish question as manifested in the Middle East. The existence of Israel as a rogue, transplanted imperialist power with a major base of support in the older imperialist world, and a project of attempting to dominate West Asia and North-East Africa, the area of the world usually known as the Middle East, complicates the world situation and has brought it to the brink of a major world confrontation.
I will talk about some of those issues later. But first I will focus on Your Party, which in a way, is a product of these contradictions, of the activities of the dominant pro-Zionist element of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Clearly the pro-Zionist wing of British imperialism will not tolerate any even reformist opposition to support for Israel, its oppression of the peoples of the Middle East, and sees that as a make-or-break issue for any party as to whether it will be tolerated, or not. Likewise, regarding support for NATO and its wars, particularly the proxy war in Ukraine. That is the reason why Your Party, much delayed, came into existence in the first place. Even though Corbyn’s opposition to Zionism and NATO was tepid, and he capitulated on both questions, it still put him, and more importantly the movement behind him, beyond the pale.
The Blairite infatuation with neoliberalism is also important, but the bourgeoisie would be more prepared to tolerate a fully social imperialist party, at least for a while, that was at variance with the neoliberal ethos to an extent. They realised in the past that such a Labour Party was useful if the masses threaten to escape their control. However, so disturbed was the bourgeoisie by the rise of a mass movement that expressed popular discontent with these issues behind Corbyn in the mid 20-teens, that it has seriously attempted to steer politics toward bringing the far right to power. That is what Starmer represents. A Labour government that, coming off fourteen years of Tory government that exhausted that party in a manner that would normally take it two or three terms to recover from, being replaced by a ‘Labour’ regime more brutal and reactionary than its Tory predecessor. That is a ticket for its collapse and being later replaced by a far-right party. Starmer is thus a transitional figure to that.
This is a risk for capital though, as it can also bring into an existence a left-wing nemesis of the Labour Party. The Corbyn leadership, though they seemed radical in 2015 when gained office in Labour, proved very tame. After his ejection from the Labour leadership after the engineered defeat of 2019, Corbyn procrastinated for so long and only dared to begin the creation of a new party when were pushed by a younger and more militant figure on the newer Labour left, Zarah Sultana, whose radicalisation has gone much further than Corbyn was capable.
Those are the underlying reasons for what is happening now, and the division in YP. Corbyn did not really want Your Party, though much of his base did, and largely still do. The real difference between the Corbyn led TM slate, and the pro-ZS Grassroots left, is that the programme of the Corbyn wing is a vague left populism – they chose the name, which is anodyne, and they have little explicit to say about policy. Whereas the GL is overtly opposed to NATO, overtly hostile to Zionism, defends oppressed groups forthrightly who the ruling class wants as a scapegoat and a thin end of the wedge – trans rights, and its leader openly advocates ‘class war’ politics. Also, they advocate a ‘party of the whole left’, which means no witchhunts, and the opportunity for all trends to contend and gain influence according to their political strength (or lose it according to their weaknesses)
So that was what the contest between slates was about, and why it was correct to involve ourselves in the GL. The GL is very heterogenous, and it includes people who are often not a model of clarity or anti-imperialism, some with awful or naive views on things like Ukraine, Iran, etc, but in conflict nevertheless with the Corbyn group over many questions. We have no reason to be fearful of this, evidently, as orthodox Marxists. Our record in the SLN can serve as an example of what can be done, as we won it to a correct position on Ukraine, for instance. There is real comradeship emerging in the GL; this is the progressive aspect – the antidote to sectarianism. But the results remain to the be seen.
The results of the election for the CEC were: 13 seats to The Many slate, 7 to the Grassroots left, and 2 friendly independents elected including one from Scotland. There seems to have been a major rise in the Your Party electorate, from around 25,000 at the time of the founding conference in November – when only 11,000 actually voted, to today, when there are, out of just short of 60,000 members, 35,000 or so actually verified and able to vote through the website. Though again, the actual number who voted was much less, around 25,000 this time. There were also a very small number of postal votes – only a couple of dozen valid ones, according to sortitioned observers of the electoral process. So that aspect of it was negligible. More to the point was the monopoly of data in the hands of the Corbyn faction, The Many. Behind the scenes, the apparatus that had charge of the data and organised the election was completely in the hands of supporters of the TM faction. I.e., the likes of Karie Murphy and other apparatchiks who work with her. She is both a former UNITE official and the partner of ex-General Secretary Len McCluskey, who it will be recalled, used UNITE’s block vote to ram the IHRA definition of anti-semitism through the Labour NEC in 2018 – supposedly to disarm the issue. He then was surprised that this failed, that the witchhunt against the left accelerated once this had been done. But of course, if you give an inch to the Zionists, they will take a mile. This is elementary.
These are the kind of people who controlled the electoral process, with very little oversight as to how they controlled the data. I know that I and many others repeatedly got emails promoting TM, despite that I never signed up for such promotions. They got this from the membership list – that is clearly true. The GL did not have access to the membership list. And the TM slate and its bureaucratic supporters were no slouch. As pointed out, the number of verified members, able to vote, rose considerably between the conference and the CEC vote. In fact, it seemed to grow considerably between the end of endorsements, and the actual vote – there was a big effort to get voters verified and work on them with many being sent repeated campaign literature by the TM people, who could evidently access the data. This is clearly why the results of endorsements of candidates was so different from the results of the actual vote. The electorate had effectively doubled by these means.
Otherwise, where did all these emails from TM, come from? Not there is anything wrong with expanding the voting membership. But only one side had access to the data to do this. Anyway, the results were that, whereas the Grassroots left in London overwhelmingly won the endorsements, only one of our two people won the CEC seat. This was the product of the TMs monopoly of the membership data. There were simply large parts of the membership that no one else other than TM could reach. Then there was the choice of Imperiali as the method of STV that was chosen to use for the election. This one is significant in that it strongly favours larger blocks. As it was though, there was a risk that with this, it could potentially favour the GL just as much as the TM. So, it had to be supplemented with the use of the TM’s data monopoly to make sure Imperiali worked the ‘right’ way. (much of the work done in analysing this was done by Matt Cooper of the AWL, whose politics are unconscionable – and who did not endorse the GL – but were useful nevertheless).
Anyway, what is the result of this? The CEC is elected, but members are worried that there seems to be no sign as yet that the CEC is being convened. The CEC should be running the party, it should meet regularly, take control of the data, appoint and oversee the apparatus, etc. It is early days, but no sign of that yet. It is speculation, but will the TM and Corbyn try to sideline the CEC and carry on with running the party as much as possible the way they were before? Will the proto branches get the data? Hannah Hawkings proposal to bar existing officers of proto branches from standing for real branch offices. She has apparently rowed back on that. But the 20% quorum to establish branches at an initial meeting is stupid and will have to be revisited. Quorums need to wait for branches to be really established. Otherwise we have a catch-22 where the branch cannot inspire the members to come to meetings through its activity because it is not a allowed to be an official branch at all!
Will there be an attempt to continue to run YP bureaucratically, without real member input or a real CEC? Will that even be possible? If they try, it will result in more factional conflict. It may even result in a re-founding of the party in some form – I will leave open the format – there are several variants possible, but we just don’t know. The point is that, while this is a sizeable party, it is not a truly mass party as yet. And the idea that a truly mass party can be built by bureaucratic methods is fantasy. Remember the Labour Party was able to be built with mass trade unions – often bureaucratic – as its base. YP does not have that. If TM people want to have a mass party that can do things, they will have no choice but to relent on some of this bureaucratism.
Finally, we must move on to the greater events. The obvious big one that leaps out at you is the US -imperialist attack on Iran, and the murder of Ayatollah Khamenei. Obviously, for all the professed distaste for Trump, there is a barely concealed consensus in favour of this from our rulers. It brings into play all the issues mentioned earlier – the rapid decay and evident loss of US world hegemony to Russia and China, together with the influence of the Greater Israel project over the ruling classes of the West. Iran has already defeated Israel once, in the 12-day war last June, and this is the attempt to reverse that. It is ferocious, and once again, Iran appeared naïve – allowing its leaders to be lured to death with the promise of negotiations from the US and Zionists. Yet Khamenei appeared to be very willing to be martyred. They have a backup plan. They will replace him, likely with someone much more hard-line. They have also been considerably well armed with more powerful missiles, air-defence and even warplanes by Russia and China. They are still likely to defeat Israel and the US. Our leaflet calling for an Iranian victory was exemplary, in my view. There will be more to come.
The other is the Gorton and Denton by -election, and the victory of the Green Party, beating both the far-right Reform and Labour, pushing Labour into third place. This really shows that politics abhors a vacuum, and just because Your Party is not consolidated as yet does not mean that social discontent cannot find other, left-wing outlets. Obviously, what happened is not unwelcome in the circumstances. But we cannot give the Green Party, as it currently is, any political endorsement, as it is an overtly petty bourgeois radical party and this is an imperialist country. It is a satellite party of an imperialist bourgeoisie. We need to build a genuine working-class party that can win over the socialist-minded element of the Greens, as well as undercutting the appeal of the right to the sections of the working class that, having been abandoned by Labour, have been driven to Reform. There need to be partial tactics for doing so that stop short of any liquidation of class politics into a political bloc with the Greens. This is likely a subject for future discussion. But I will leave that there for now and open this up for discussion.
