Vince Mills reflects on how best to win support for a socialist programme in the new political context.

Last week’s election exposed a crisis for the disintegrating Tories and for the unloved victors of the Labour right, whose power base is so palpably fragile that it provoked Professor John Curtice to write that “Labour’s strength in the new House of Commons is a heavily exaggerated reflection of the party’s limited popularity in the country.” It is, however, also a crisis of strategy on the left and in particular the left that believes that the emergence of a radical Labour Party is the most feasible way of winning socialist advance in Britain.

The basis of that strategy is best encapsulated in the British Road to Socialism which provides the political framework for the Morning Star Newspaper:

“For as long as many of the biggest trade unions are affiliated to the Labour Party, the potential exists to wage a broad-based fight to secure the party for the labour movement and left-wing policies. Certainly, this is the most direct route to ensuring the continued existence of a mass party of labour in Britain and is a goal that every communist and non-sectarian socialist should support.”

And yet that centrality of the Labour Party as the potential engine of socialist change was certainly not front and centre of the Star’s election coverage. Here are a couple of examples from editorials in the run up to the election.

“It has been left to those outside the official Labour campaign — left independents, communists, some Greens, but also unions representing doctors and teachers who are warning of industrial action if the next government doesn’t immediately get serious on pay rises — to raise the questions everyone wants answers to.”

“Our economy serves no-one but the super-rich and Labour’s commitment to Treasury orthodoxy closes off the alternative. Our only option is to force that alternative on politicians from below, by rebuilding a movement of and for working-class power.”

The Star was also generous in its coverage of independents’ campaigns. Nor were they alone in this shift. Owen Jones’ resignation from the Labour Party to support “We Deserve Better” was part of a wide spectrum of the left whose belief that the Labour Party could be won to socialism is now in question.

For those now looking to some alternative to Labour, its failure to support the oppressed people of Gaza gave rise to a hope that a sort of “left” bloc of independents might emerge as a consequence of the election. And indeed, the election of four independent candidates (five if you include Jeremy Corbyn, though his policy platform was wider) may suggest how progressive politics can break through in Britain in the post-Corbyn era. Further, the successful independent MPs’ election materials (available online) do suggest a broadly anti-austerity, pro-equality stance that might allow for a progressive alliance. However, none of them espouse socialism.

The more traditional left parties standing more than a few candidates that did argue the socialist case like the Communist Party of Britain (CPB),  which stood in 14 seats and won  2,622 votes, the Socialist Labour Party, which stood in 12 seats and won 3,609 votes, and the Trade Union Socialist Coalition (TUSC), which stood in 40 seats and won 12,562 votes – all received votes below the number required to be given a percentage share. The Workers Party which stood in 152 seats with 210,194 votes managed 0.7% – a disappointing result  given it had benefited from the high profile by-election win in Rochdale by George Galloway.

So faced with a Labour Party failing the people of Gaza, the purge of left candidates and the endless, mendacious shifts from the initial commitments by Keir Starmer to a position close to the Tories, especially on “fiscal rectitude”, why not look to some other form of alliance that might punch a hole in the iron-clad politics of Britain’s two party system, given the failure of parties to the Left of Labour – a failure that suggests that simply bringing existing fragments into a new formation is not likely to add up to more than a percentage point of the share of the vote?

The reasons are that building a broad and coherent movement based on ‘independents’ elected, mainly, on a single issue, is nearly impossible. Even trying to get parties like George Galloway’s Workers’ Party, which had a broad left platform, together with Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign, was fraught with difficulty. Jeremy, a strong advocate of equal rights was clearly uncomfortable with views on the ‘non-normality’ of homosexuality expressed by George Galloway during the campaign. And perhaps more importantly, unless the campaign to end the war and occupation in Gaza morphs into something wider, or better still is successful, there will be a point at which its supporters shift focus from electoral politics and the tactic of protesting through the election of independent candidates.

We have yet to see how the group of independents will conduct themselves in Parliament, but the only declared socialists in the new Parliament are members of Labour’s Socialist Campaign Group.  The Labour Party is the broad alliance that the left needs to work within. That is why Keir Hardie and his allies set it up and why since its inception it has offered the only serious possibility of building a vehicle for radical politics – but it is only a possibility.

To make that possibility a reality, socialists in the Labour Party will need to think about not only winning the Party to a transformative political programme, but this time, how to sustain support for that programme especially in the membership and affiliated unions.  That means working closely with the affiliated unions to deliver the New Deal, campaigns to restore Party democracy which reach out to Labour’s social democrats inside and outside Westminster and continuing to fight alongside groups like Labour and Palestine for an end to support for an Israeli government that denies the Palestinians justice. If we cannot persuade Labour Party members to support that agenda, what makes us think we can convince the wider population?

Vince Mills is a member of the Campaign for Socialism and Chair of Unite West of Scotland Education Branch, writing in a personal capacity.

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