Bad news on the doorstep…

Reform’s sweeping gains in this week’s regional elections were bad news for the Conservatives. Nigel Farage’s going round saying this is the beginning of the end for the Tories telling people “you’re witnessing the end of a party that’s been around since 1832, they are disappearing”. And while that may be a trifle optimistic there’s no doubt that the Faragist advance has plunged the Conservatives, and their lacklustre leader, into another crisis of confidence. But it wasn’t good for Labour either. Though the Tories were hammered in the local elections Reform also took one of Labour’s  safest seats in the country at the by-election in Runcorn & Helsby. Can any of us be surprised at this?
The Starmer government, led by the clapped-out old Blairites that run the Labour Party these days, differs little from the Conservatives they beat at the general election last year. The Starmer government’s decision to continue Tory austerity offers no real change to the millions of working people that once traditionally looked to Labour as the legitimate alternative to Tory rule. It’s no wonder that some of them are now turning to the Faragists who blame the asylum-seekers and immigrants for all our woes and whose only answer to the economic crisis that has plunged the country into the doldrums is to become an American protectorate and merge the British economy into that of the United States. 
Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, will doubtless come under fire from those who already covet her job. But the clamour for her departure is of no interest to working people who have no say in the matter one way or another.
For over a hundred years the Tory party has been the chosen political instrument of the ruling class. The capitalists, industrialists and land-owners who pull the strings, will not lightly change horses – least of all for Reform whose anti-European Union platform is anathema to the City of London.
Labour, on the other hand, was founded by the unions to give workers their own voice in Parliament. But the Parliamentary Party leadership has been dominated by the middle class intelligentsia since the days of Ramsay McDonald. Nevertheless the working class element within the party remained strong until the 1980s with figures like Nye Bevan and even Harold Wilson giving it credibility among the working class.
Though the Labour Party is dominated by the class‑collaborating 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. The defeat of the right‑wing factions in most of the major unions in recent years demonstrates this possibility – though it has to be said that the bogus “broad left” factions that run the bureaucrats’ gravy train do very little for the rank and file these days.
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. At the same time we must build the revolutionary party and campaign for revolutionary change. Social democracy remains social democracy whatever trend is dominant within it and, as we know, it has never led to socialism.
But for a start we must campaign for a democratic Labour Party controlled by its affiliates. A Labour Party whose policies reflected those of a democratic union movement would become a powerful instrument for progressive reforms that would strengthen organised labour and benefit the working class.