CMWP have agreed to work with TUSC and other left groups to form a united general election challenge when standing candidates to oppose Labour in future elections.
At a Convention held on 3rd February, in Birmingham a number of aims and principles were debated, and a policy decided, that groups would not oppose other left candidates, based on a number of agreed principles.
Roger Silverman spoke for CMWP. “The Campaign for a Mass Workers’ Party was set up to argue for the trade unions and working-class organisations to found a mass party representing their interests. It’s true that so far there’s little sign of that happening. With the honourable exception of the Bakers’ Union, there’s no sign that the trade unions are moving away from Labour. They move only clumsily, ponderously, painfully slowly; the pre-war cartoonist David Low always portrayed the TUC as a lumbering carthorse.
It’s not surprising, for instance, that Sharon Graham’s appeal to the UNITE delegates sounded plausible: now is not the time, a Labour govt is coming in, let’s hold their feet to the fire, etc. But what will happen after a Starmer victory?
Starmer is already boasting of an openly Tory programme. He has even banned MPs from joining picket lines. Remember that in the 1970s, Labour cabinet ministers stood on the Grunwicks picket line… even Shirley Williams, who soon afterwards split from Labour to form the SDP. So once a Starmer regime is in office, what possible arguments will the trade-union leaders offer for refusing to break loose?
In 1900, when the elementary right to strike came under attack from the politicians to which the trade unions were then affiliated, they severed their links with the Liberal Party and established the Labour Representation Committee, which soon became the Labour Party. We are in exactly the same position today. The only difference is that Lloyd George and Co. were far more radical than Sir Keir Starmer today.
Again, in 1931 when Ramsay MacDonald adopted a programme not very different from that of Starmer today, trade-unionists revolted en masse and vomited MacDonald and his collaborators out of the party.
The Labour Party today is bleeding to death. Starmer was planted at its head for one sole purpose: to destroy it to appease a ruling class which was panic-stricken by the surge of support for Corbyn. He has carried through the plan systematically and methodically. Stalin himself would have been lost in admiration; even he felt the need to stage at least token show trials of his victims before executing them. Before their expulsion, the Militant editorial board had the right to appeal directly to the entire Labour Party conference. And the Liverpool councillors had the right to put their case directly in person to the National Executive. Starmer’s justice comes straight from Alice in Wonderland – or better still, from Kafka.
Starmer will probably win the next election, on a low poll, with record votes for various “none-of-the-above” parties. After a miserable couple of years, the Labour Party will slide into oblivion, like the socialist parties of France (which won 1.7% in the recent presidential elections); Sweden, on its lowest vote for a century; Germany, now overtaken by the racist AfD; Norway, Denmark, Greece… and soon Spain. Not to mention the Communist Party of Italy. As in the rest of Europe, it will be succeeded by a far right regime – a fusion of the dominant clique in the Tory party with the so-called Reform Party.
If there was ever a need for a genuine party of labour, it is now. There’s a real thirst for one. How do we know? From the surge of hundreds of thousands into the Labour Party when Corbyn was leader. From the four million new votes gained in the 2017 election. The test of a party’s popularity is how many people vote for it. And, despite the constant repetition that the 2019 election was Labour’s worst result for 80 years, the fact is that even in 2019 Labour under Corbyn still won more votes than in 2015 under Miliband, 2010 under Brown, and even 2005 under Blair – when Labour won!
One key factor in the replacement of the Liberal Party by Labour was the widening of the franchise in 1918. It found its electoral base among the millions of newly enfranchised workers previously deprived of a vote. But today too millions are politically disenfranchised. The surge of voters who flocked back to the Labour banner under Corbyn’s leadership in 2017 weren’t former Tory voters; they came from among those five million former Labour voters who had abstained in the three previous elections because they saw no difference between the Blairites and the Tories. (Their counterparts in Scotland had found an alternative home in the SNP.) This refutes the nonsensical idea that Labour can only win by moderating its policies to appeal to so-called “floating voters”. Millions of people consciously abstain; they are only motivated to vote when they find a party worth voting for.
So where are these hundreds of thousands of former party activists, and these millions of Corbyn voters? Why is there no mass socialist party today? Because of the paralysis of the Labour left. They are stuck in a time warp. No one nowadays can keep up the myth that Labour is a “broad church”, with even the pretence of a common objective, and with differences only on details of finer tuning and timing.
Many attempts have been made in the past to set up improvised pop-up alternative left parties, each under a self-appointed leader hawking a ready-made programme in a desperate search for a rank and file. The stage is littered with the remains of heroic failures. Right-wing parties can easily spring up overnight – all they need is a few billionaires and a couple of media conglomerates; that’s how Farage did it. But no individual, no matter how charismatic, can create a mass workers’ party on their own, out of thin air.
But we welcome all these initiatives. The Labour Party was founded on more than just the trade unions; it was an amalgamation of trade unions and socialist societies: the ILP, the Fabians, initially the Social-Democratic Federation. They all played a role in ploughing the soil and planting the seeds; and so will these contemporary formations.
But the decisive force which brought millions into political life came when the trade unions rose to their feet and asserted their right to political representation. And today seismic tremors are shaking the ground. There is a groundswell of revolt based on revulsion at Starmer’s treachery, above all for his support for the genocide in Gaza – an issue which has become a catalyst massively speeding up the process.
In this situation, the frayed strings still just about linking the unions to Labour will inevitably be snapped amid the upheavals ahead. And let’s remember that most of the unions recently on the front line of struggle – the teachers, the nurses, the doctors, the railway workers – are not even affiliated to the Labour Party. They should be at the forefront of efforts to gain political representation by their own initiative.
The Labour movement will create its own party; it will formulate its own programme; it will appoint its own leaders. By joining forces to stand candidates we can take a first step and help speed up this process, to help launch a mass workers’ party, campaigning for a clear socialist programme which will end the nightmare of capitalism and secure the future of civilization”.