Back to the Future

Everybody expects the Conservatives to get trounced at the local elections next month. Few doubt the outcome with Labour still at least 18 points ahead in the opinion polls and the Tories undermined by growing support for the new Faragist Reform Party. But nothing can be taken for granted these days, least of all where Labour is concerned.
Starmer says “our mission-driven government will restore pride and purpose in our country. Let’s make this a reality, together”. Meaningless platitudes that will not get the vote out.
No one knows what Labour stands for these days beyond slavish support for the United States and Israel and an economic programme that differs little from the Sunak plan that Starmer claims to oppose. Starmer may have won the blessing of the City of London and the Murdoch media empire but he’s lost hundreds of thousands of party members in the process.
These are the people Labour relied on to get their vote out. Some 200,000 have dropped out of the party under Starmer’s watch. Some were supporters of the Palestinian cause hounded out on trumped up charges of “anti-Semitism”. Others were Corbynistas who’ve simply dropped out of the party whose leader has abandoned all of Labour’s core beliefs.
Some, not many, have turned to George Galloway’s latest political slate or the alternative platforms of the assorted left that try and repeatedly fail to build an alternative “workers’ party” to replace Labour. They’ve always failed – even Arthur Scargill’s valiant attempt came to nothing – because no alternative social-democratic party can get off the ground without the support of the trade unions. And the unions, for good or bad, are still largely in the sway of Labour’s bureaucrats.
George Galloway has proved, once again, capable of tapping the protest vote amongst the Muslim community to get back into parliament. But that’s as far as it goes and that’s as far as it will ever go. Without mass support from the labour movement Galloway’s “Workers Party” will fizzle out – like Respect which died the death in 2016.
Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott are a different matter. They certainly have mass support amongst the Corbynistas that rebuilt Labour’s strength in London during the Corbyn era. That may be enough to hold their parliamentary seats at the next general election. But on its own it won’t be enough to force Starmer to let them back into the Parliamentary Labour Party let alone build a new left social-democratic platform to challenge Starmer and the old Blairite gang.
As always the battle remains on the union front. Though the Labour Party is dominated by the right wing in the parliamentary party the possibility of their defeat exists as long as Labour retains its organisational links with the trade unions that fund it.
A genuine rank-and-file movement has to be built to sweep out the opportunists and bureaucrats who have reduced the unions that once represented millions of working people into hollowed out avenues for career advancement.
The fight for a democratic Labour Party is linked to the fight for a democratic trade union movement. In the unions we must struggle to elect genuine working class leaderships, who are prepared to represent and fight for the membership against the employers and against the right wing within the movement and to campaign for the removal of all anti‑trade union legislation.