JEREMY CORBYN’S victory in the Labour Party leadership ballot should be a cause for celebration for all workers, socialists and progressives.

Trade union support was vital to his success, especially the courageous stance adopted by some of the biggest Labour-affiliated unions, notably Unite, Unison and the CWU.

A gauntlet has been thrown down by the left and the labour movement to Britain’s wealthy and powerful ruling class centred in the City of London.

Without doubt, the banking and boardroom tycoons will pick the gauntlet up. They have to. Corbyn’s manifesto challenges their fundamental interests.

His rejection of austerity for the poor in favour of progressive taxation for the rich and big business threatens to derail their gravy train.

His proposals to take the railways and energy utilities back into public ownership, so they can be planned for the public good rather than for private profit, would smash the spell cast by neoliberal voodoo economics with its privatisation mantra.

His plans for a National Investment Bank funded by “people’s quantitative easing” would help rebalance Britain’s economy away from the City casino, towards manufacturing, R&D and new technology.

Scrapping Trident and investing instead in civilian production will contribute to this same end.

But it could also mark a decisive turn away from Britain’s dangerous and — for millions of people in the Third World — ruinous alignment with the US drive for what its strategists call “full spectrum dominance” of land, sea and space by military force.

Rejecting nuclear weapons would enable Britain to challenge the other atomic powers to do likewise in a multilateral process that could also help the United Nations recover from the damage done to it by US, British and Nato military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

At last, Britain could press the UN to take action to impose international law on the rogue state of Israel, bringing peace with justice to the Palestinian people.

UN agencies might at last be properly supported in their efforts — a vital element in Germany’s refugee resettlement policy — to promote peace, development and social justice in the Third World.

Britain would stop poodling along behind the US in its cynical attempts to deceive, misuse and undermine the United Nations and bodies such as Unesco.

The logic of an independent foreign policy based on solidarity and human rights is that Britain disengages from both the EU and Nato.
Corbyn’s domestic programme would also put the next Labour government on a collision course with EU treaties and directives, which undermine the purposes of public ownership and would outlaw QE for the people.

As EU competition commissioner and vice-president Joaquin Almunia informed the EU Parliament on November 24 2011: “The public authority making the nationalisation should behave like a private investor in a market economy, both in regard to the purchase price and the management of the business.”

Any policy resembling quantitative easing for the people rather than the bankers is outlawed by Article 123 of the EU Fundamental Treaty.

There should be no illusion that the EU Commission, European Central Bank and — with its anti-trade union judgements — the EU Court of Justice will not do everything within their considerable powers to obstruct the alternative economic and political programme that Labour under Corbyn’s leadership must now pursue.

The forthcoming EU referendum will provide a huge opportunity for the labour movement to inflict a massive defeat on the Tory government, its City paymasters and the EU by campaigning against continued membership.

If the left doesn’t stand up for popular sovereignty, for the rights of all workers against capital and the EU, Ukip and the Tory right will continue to posture unchallenged as the champions of democracy and the people.

Without an independent left campaign against the EU, based on the trade union movement, the one section or other of the right will win whatever the result. 

As for Nato, set up before the Warsaw Pact and bigger and more aggressive than ever now that the pact has disappeared, it stokes tension and terrorism from the Ukraine and the Baltic states to Georgia, the Caspian basin and across the Middle East and Asian sub-continent to China.

Its nuclear “umbrella” would be Britain’s shroud should the Nato warmongers ever succeed in provoking Russia or China into war.
Corbyn’s campaign has enthused many thousands of people, young and old, to see new hope in the Labour Party.

An alliance of internal and external forces is already forming in order to dash those hopes and prevent a Labour victory at the next general election.

The trade unions now have a vital role to play in ensuring that his victory helps chart a new course for Britain.

Their organisation, resources and democratic discipline will be needed inside and beyond the Labour Party, co-ordinated as never before.

Right-wing Labour MPs and pressure groups funded by big business cannot be allowed to sabotage the democratically expressed wishes of the party’s members and supporters.

Mass campaigning movements such as the People’s Assembly, CND and Stop the War must step up pressure on the Tories and help create the conditions in which the progressive Labour alternative can win further popular approval.

Any attempts by other bodies to try to divert the enthusiasm generated by Corbyn’s campaign into anarchist, adventurist and ultra-left stunts and slogans must be resisted.

Alongside a firm commitment to his manifesto must go a sustained drive to win friends and allies among the self-employed, small businesspeople, managers, soldiers and their families and rank-and-file police and prison officers.

Socialists and progressives in the Green Party, Plaid Cymru and the SNP will have to review their parties’ electoral and campaigning policies.

A Labour Party reclaimed by the labour movement could form a government that would pursue policies for peace, environmental security, sustainable economic development and social justice in a federal Britain.

How can we unite to make this prospect a reality?

Through all the challenges, battle and debates to come, the Morning Star can be relied upon to continue serving the interests of the working class and the labour and progressive movements.

Equally indispensible will be a stronger Communist Party, organised on every front of struggle, applying a Marxist analysis to concrete situations and projecting Britain’s road to socialism.

Rob Griffiths is general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.