By The World Transformed

The World Transformed (TWT) festival is back in Liverpool from 7th to 10th October, as the British left prepares to resist Starmer in government. The festival will host meetings between striking workers, climate activists, migrant solidarity activists and Labour Party members planning to oppose its leadership‘s lurch to the right.

This year’s festival  promises to be the most newsworthy yet, with the left likely to be looking to pick big fights over the Labour Party’s positions on migration, climate change, law and order and trans rights. Plans are afoot to hold events at the festival to rally forces who oppose what they see as a right wing and reactionary direction taken by the leadership.

With anxiety building about multiple emergencies, many of TWT’s partners are acutely aware that Starmerism is nowhere near adequate for the political moment. The main theme of this year’s festival will be clear-eyed honesty about the scale of the crises – from the economic crisis to the climate catastrophe and creeping authoritarianism – along with an insistence that more radical approaches are not merely desirable, but necessary.

While the left’s influence on parliamentary politics has diminished as Keir Starmer has abandoned almost all of the ten pledges of his leadership campaign, there has been an uptick in union militancy, as well as an increase in protests around policing, immigration controls, and climate change.

The festival will be attended by several thousand activists. Organisers say that many of the 2,000-plus attendees will be Labour Party members, but also expect a large number of unaligned attendees who feel politically homeless due to Labour’s rightward trajectory. They believe this year’s festival will bring together progressives and radicals from across the spectrum to discuss key issues and build a new, radical coalition capable of taking action in election year.

Image: Arena & Convention Centre, Liverpool. https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1039210. Creator: Nick Mutton | Credit: Nick Mutton Copyright: © Nick Mutton and licenced for reuse under cc-by-sa/2.0