ON THE eve of Labour conference, a former Labour MP argues that people should leave it and join the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) founded by Arthur Scargill.
Many Morning Star readers will disagree that Labour members should abandon the party and many more that they should settle on the SLP, one of many left-of-Labour projects.
Certainly the Morning Star does not call on socialists to join the SLP — so why publish such an article?
Because, firstly, a Labour veteran with decades of political experience including on the party’s front bench has a right to make their case in a broad left paper, unless we go down the road that those hounded from the party as part of the war to discredit Jeremy Corbyn should become unpersons excluded from the movement.
And more importantly, because Chris Williamson’s arguments for joining the SLP form one part of a much bigger discussion on where the Labour Party is going as it holds only its second post-Corbyn conference.
The Labour machine’s drive to exclude socialists from the party began as soon as it realised many were joining to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 and is documented in 2020’s leaked report and more recently in the Forde report.
These are not past problems: the faction carrying them out has been in sole control of the party since Keir Starmer took the helm and is continuing its purges on the eve of conference, with elected CLP delegates being told this very week they have been kicked out and may not attend.
The right’s no-holds-barred assault on left-wing members cannot be parked while we discuss policy, or focus on how Labour can be dragged kicking and screaming into support for striking workers — serious though these questions are.
It is intimately connected with Starmer’s betrayal of his election pledges and his hostility to workers standing up for their livelihoods. It should be meeting a fiercer response.
Left analyses of the Corbyn movement continue to roll off the presses.
For some, the left gaining the leadership of the party, holding on for five years and transforming the national debate around austerity in the process despite intense Establishment hostility remain an encouraging example — that Labour is not so hopeless as a vehicle for socialist change as many had assumed before 2015, even if in the throes of a right-wing reaction right now.
For others, the way MPs and the bureaucracy worked with the monopoly media and the state to break a socialist leadership and are now set on obliterating any chance that it could happen again teach the opposite lesson. Labour is after all irredeemable.
A huge constituency want to set that old controversy aside entirely and focus on the tremendous wave of strikes and campaigning being launched by trade unions — which must indeed be the focus of our efforts.
But the success of this wave is not helped by ignoring the war on the Labour left.
Labour might form a less aggressive government than the Tories, but in the current suite of crises its refusal to push for above-inflation pay rises, public ownership and peace abroad mean that its leadership is, like them, ranged against the working class and not for it.
It is not a democratic party and has demonstrated its ability to ignore conference, affiliated unions and the wishes of the vast majority of its members. Conference 2022 will not turn Starmer’s ship around.
But it should see efforts by the left to make its voice heard and start co-ordinating opposition to the leader.
A trade union leader of the Corbyn years warned recently that Labour is on “a very short and slippery slope” to irrelevance as regards working-class power.
How far it has slid and how far we can or ought to stop the slide are not questions any British socialist should ignore.
