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Join the Campaign for a New Workers’ Party

The Campaign for a New Workers’ Party aims to bring together trade unionists, socialists, anti-capitalist young people, and community, anti-war and environmental activists.

Our premise is simple: that, while the mainstream parties are of varying hue, they are all fundamentally the same in that they represent the interests of big business; and that we urgently need to campaign for the establishment of a new party that represents the majority - working class people.

The millions who voted for New Labour in 1997 – hoping that things could ‘only get better’ after 18 years of Tory government – have been cruelly disappointed.

Under the Tories the gap between rich and poor had reached the highest level since records began.

Unbelievably, under New Labour it has increased further.

Since 1997, the wealth of the top 1% has doubled from £355 billion to £797 billion – more than the government spends in five years on education, the NHS and housing combined! At the same time, every year 200,000 babies - one third of all those born - are born into poverty.

In total, 12.5 million people live below the poverty line. More and more people who would have previously seen themselves as middle class, such as teachers and civil servants, are now relatively low paid and are increasingly being forced downwards into the ranks of the working class.

Even many sections of the middle class who are still better off are increasingly insecure in this dog-eat-dog world.

New Labour claims that it is helping the majority, particularly ‘hardworking families’, but this is a myth.

Some families have had a few crumbs in terms of tax credits but this is weighed against the severe erosion of the welfare state – with services such as good public hospitals and schools, a living pension, affordable, high quality public housing going down the drain.

 Even relatively wealthy ‘middle-class’ families have seen their standard of living stagnate or suffer under New Labour. For the poorest the situation is much worse.

At the same time as our services are being cut and privatised, we have to work longer hours, in more casual jobs, often for less pay.

For many young people the national minimum wage has become not a minimum but the norm.

The average working week in Britain is now 43 hours, the longest in Western Europe. More than 20% of workers work more than 48 hours a week.

One of the key demands of our grandparents and great-grandparents was for the shortening of the working day and working week.

Their struggle for an eight-hour day, which was to some degree won in the past, is now becoming relevant again.

What was won is being taken back by the billionaires who want squeeze every last drop of profit from the toil of Britain’s working people.

In the last year, unemployment has started to increase. But for the first seven years of New Labour government, while there were still pockets of severe unemployment in Britain, most working-class people could get work – but not work that pays a living wage.

Most of us get by only by relying on credit or, as it is otherwise known, debt.

The ratio of household debt to pre-tax income now stands at 120%, its highest ever level. If, as is likely, unemployment continues to increase many more families will find themselves literally drowning in debt.

The decimation of manufacturing industry has continued apace under New Labour – an average of 400 jobs a day have been lost over the last two years alone.

They are being replaced by lower-paid service jobs – for example, more than 400,000 people now work in call centres. But even these jobs are under threat as big business tries to lower wages by moving jobs abroad.

Most young people today have never experienced the Labour Party as anything other than an out-and-out warmongering, privatising party.

Many older workers, however, remember the days when they considered Labour to be their party.

The early history of the Labour Party – which was founded at its base as a workers’ party, even though the leadership had a foot in the capitalist camp – has important lessons for us today.

Just over 100 years ago, 129 delegates came together to found the Labour Representation Committee, precursor to the Labour Party.

No longer willing to settle for voting for parties that sided with business against the trade unions and attacked the rights of workers, they set out to found a new political party.

A socialist newspaper at the time, the Clarion, described the Labour Representation Committee as, "a little cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand, which may grow into a united Labour Party".

From these small beginnings, thanks to the dedication of the working-class men and women who willingly gave their scant time and money, the Labour Party became a mass force which, however imperfectly, did provide a voice for the working class.

The capitalist class would have liked to strangle the Labour Party at birth and have never given up trying to do so.

Tony Blair has seen his role as making their dreams come true by destroying any vestiges of independent political representation for the working class.

He has declared that Labour should never have split from the Liberals and that he is, "absolutely determined to mend the schism that occurred in progressive forces in British politics at the start of the century". "I want a situation more like the Democrats and the Republicans in the US," he told the Financial Times in 1997. "People don’t question even for a single moment that the Democrats are a pro-business party. They should not be asking that question about New Labour."

Blair and his cohorts have succeeded in their mission. In the process he has transformed the Labour Party into an empty shell, with a membership half of what it was in 1997. Even some of those who have been loyal advocates of the New Labour project have begun to despair at the terrible reality they have helped bring into being.

Polly Toynbee, once of the rightwards split from the Labour Party, the Social Democratic Party, declared: "Labour is in danger of becoming a phantom party – a self-perpetuating oligarchy given absolute power by only 25% of the electorate through a perverted voting system that will, with a swing of the pendulum, deliver the same power to an equally unrepresentative Tory clique."

Driven by the demands of the multinationals, all three mainstream parties offer up the same unpopular diet of privatisation and cuts.

No surprise that their membership and support is haemorrhaging.

Never before in history has there been such a vast gulf between the mainstream political parties and the mass of the population.

This includes the Liberal Democrats. Even though, at least in the past, their general election propaganda has been slightly to the left of the big two, when they have been elected at local level they have carried through the same cuts in services as the Tories and New Labour.

Nationally they are now competing to outdo New Labour with their plans to privatise prisons, the royal mint, and several other services that New Labour hasn’t got round to yet!

In 2005 this government was elected with the lowest percentage of the popular vote, 36%, of any governing party in Britain’s history: the most unpopular party to form a government since the 1832 Reform Act.

For the first time, a majority government in Britain has been elected by fewer people than those who did not vote: 36% voted for New Labour, while 39% of the electorate did not make it to the polling station.

Many of those who did vote New Labour did so through gritted teeth because they wanted to prevent the Tories being re-elected.

It is the working class which has been effectively disenfranchised and, in protest, many sections have stopped voting at all. Blair and the ‘Blairistas’ of every mainstream party argue that class is a thing of the past, no longer relevant in modern Britain. New Labour claims to represent the ‘forces of progress’ from every class in society.

In reality, modern Britain is increasingly polarised between rich and poor – between a handful of billionaires at the top and the mass of the working class.

Continued...Time for a new party