Camden and Haringey Socialist Party members
The parliamentary by-election taking place in Holborn and St Pancras has become a race between the Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, and Sagal Abdi-Wali, the new Labour leader of Camden council.
Camden council has been run by Labour for most of the time since it was created and recently since 2010. In March this year, the previous Labour administration voted for another austerity budget which included a nearly 5% hike in council tax. The budget was even supported by a Tory councillor!
So, in this election, most people wanting to protest against Labour’s austerity programme will do so by voting Green. It is possible Polanski could win the seat – which will show there is mass support for anti-austerity and anti-war policies.
This is not what the Labour government has delivered. Labour has a -32 point approval rating because the last two years have felt shockingly similar to the proceeding 14 years of the Tories. While Burnham has announced some popular small-scale policies, he is a Starmer continuity candidate and his government, not withstanding a few crumbs, will fundamentally continue with austerity.
After even failed prime ministers in ten years, voters have had enough of the capitalist establishment parties and instead are looking for a political alternative and are open to socialist policies to challenge the crisis of capitalism facing people today.
The Socialist Party argues that we need a democratically run workers’ party, backed by the trade unions, with a socialist programme as a step towards creating a real alternative. The need to build an independent working-class political voice to fight austerity is a pressing issue, and a popular idea. Last year, delegates at the Unite the Union conference voted overwhelmingly to open a debate about their union’s relationship with Labour. The popularity of a new political voice was also seen in the large initial support for Your Party (YP). Unfortunately, that opportunity was squandered and, with few YP candidates in the May elections, most people looking to register their anger at Labour austerity by voting to the left, did so by voting for Greens.
The result was five Green-run councils, including in neighbouring Haringey. These are a potentially powerful force against local authority cuts, but only if councillors take a stand. If they did so, the Socialist Party would fight for the whole weight of the trade union movement to support them, because they would be using their positions to lead a fight against the establishment austerity agenda. We would also support others elected to office who used their position in this way.
So far though, the Green councils have not taken that approach. Hackney Green Mayor Zoe Garbett said that “cuts would have to be made” to make a balanced budget, otherwise unelected “commissioners” would be sent in to seize control of the council. It is not true that Hackney Greens must follow in Labour’s footsteps and make cuts to set a balanced budget (see ‘Green anti-austerity Hackney summit: What strategy to fight the cuts?’ at socialistparty.org.uk). When Highgate Wood School in Haringey was struggling under mounting debt, the newly elected Green council initially said they couldn’t help because it would set a ‘precedent’. What ‘precedent’? That underfunded schools in the borough would be supported by the council?
Against the backdrop of London Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan reducing the affordable homes quota on builds in London, Garbett and others have launched a legal challenge. But there is no reason why these mayors should wait for a legal challenge when people are struggling now. Green councils and mayors should launch serious campaigns to build public support for government funding to enable them to take control of the housing situation in their areas by building council homes.
House building by Camden council reached a six-year high in 2024, but this meant just seven homes for social rent and 52 council houses being built. This is a truly pitiful number, but the council has done nothing serious to fight successive governments’ policies to cut council houses and instead encourage speculators building for private profit. Are newly elected Green councils going to buck the tread of accepting the building unaffordable ‘affordable’ homes, challenge central government support for speculators and fight for the right to build council ones on a mass scale instead?
To do this may mean challenging unelected council officers to produce a balanced budget using borrowing to fund investment. This immediate solution should be linked to building a campaign with other boroughs, trade unions and activists against the government to demand back the money cut from local authority funding.
Socialist Party members at the anti-austerity summit hosted by Hackney Green council in September called for the summit to campaign for at least ten councils to agree to set no-cuts budgets together. We also petitioned in the run-up to the May elections for Polanski to agree that every Green council candidate commit to no-cuts budgets. He refused to do this, and made the same mistaken arguments as Garbett, that it would mean commissioners being sent in.
Polanski has said voting for him will mean he can keep Burnham ‘in check’. But his election material doesn’t explain how he will do this. We would support a candidate if they were democratically accountable to the workers’ movement. This would mean standing on a programme agreed by trade unions, community organisations and, for example, young people organising for the 20 November anti-cuts and anti-war walk outs, with local structures to ensure he implements these. This is how a workers’ MP would operate. Polanski could say that this is what he would do if elected.
A Labour defeat in the Holborn by-election would no doubt be a blow to them nationally. But it will leave the Labour austerity government intact. The workers’ movement must discuss serious action against the government, such as starting with a Saturday trade union-led demonstration this autumn against austerity. The workers’ movement must also discuss building an independent, anti-austerity political voice, which could include many Green Party supporters.
The Labour government is sacrificing our futures and the environment with their move towards rearmament and continued austerity. But the working class has huge potential power if it is organised both politically and industrially to fight for the vast wealth and resources in society to be democratically controlled and used to meet the needs of the majority of people and the environment.
