Socialist Party members are standing in the general election as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, which is standing 40 candidates. Socialist Party members campaign for:

• Fully publicly fund the NHS and other public services. Stop and reverse privatisation
• Mass council house building. Rent control now. Don’t make workers pay for the housing crisis – reject rent and service charge increases.
• Stop the slaughter in Gaza. No to war! For mass trade union action to stop arming the Israeli state
• Renationalise rail, mail, energy, water and steel. And other privatised utilities, under democratic workers’ control
• For real workers’ rights. For inflation-proof pay rises. For a £15 an hour minimum wage. Repeal the anti-trade union laws. Ban zero-hour contracts and fire and rehire
• Free education and training. Scrap tuition fees. Grants not loans – for college and university. Votes at 16
• Combat climate change. For a free-to-use, expanded, renationalised public transport system. Don’t make workers pay for the bosses’ climate crisis
• Fight for socialist change. Take the wealth of the 1%. Run society in the interests of the many not the few

To see more of what we fight for read What We Stand For

Campaigning and canvassing in the general election, fighting for socialist ideas, Socialist Party members engage in thousands of discussions with working-class people. Here are just some of the questions that come up, and our responses.

You’re not going to win, what’s the point in voting for you?

For every Socialist Party member standing as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), the election is not the end in itself. On 5 July there will be a likely Starmer-led government. This government will come to power with massive crises facing working-class people. We have been campaigning in this election to help build campaigns among trade unionists and community members for the battles ahead.

We have campaigned to make elections about the direct issues facing working people and built campaigns around them. When Socialist Party member and TUSC council candidate Nadia Ditta stood for the Bevois ward in Southampton earlier this year, the community was able to use the election campaign as a platform to successfully stop the closure of a local playground (see ‘Southampton Venny victory’ at

socialistparty.org.uk). In many areas of the country, Socialist Party members are standing and building a launchpad for further campaigns around housing, pay, council cuts, and more over the summer.

Labour are on course to easily win the election, but they won’t get a free ride in government. The working class in Britain needs its own party, armed with socialist policies. Every vote for anti-cuts, anti-war socialist candidates is a message to the next government that we will keep fighting for the change we need. Showing them that they cannot expect to come to power without such a fight will be vital to arm the workers’ movement for the battles ahead.

Callum Joyce

What good would one socialist MP do?

There are a great many members of parliament who push the interests of big business, and make sure that its voice is heard loud and clear. The working class – potentially the most powerful force in society – needs the same.

A socialist MP would use parliament as a platform to make sure that the voice of working-class people is there and support for their struggles spread.

They could provide a pole of attraction around which different sections of working-class people in struggle – workers on strike, community campaigns, etc – could be drawn together and strengthened.

Militant, the forerunner of the Socialist Party, had three MPs in the 1980s and they played such a role. One of them, Terry Fields, was described even by The Times as “a class warrior to his fingertips”.

Terry and other Militant-supporting MPs used their positions in parliament as a platform for the mass working-class struggles that took place with Liverpool council between 1983-87, winning millions of pounds of funding back for the city, and during the epic Militant-led anti-poll tax struggle that ultimately brought down Thatcher.

Terry went to prison for 60 days in 1991 rather than pay Thatcher’s anti-working-class poll tax. And through that campaigned and spread the mass non-payment campaign.

A socialist MP now could play the same role Militant MPs did – use parliament as a platform to provide a voice for working-class struggles. Speaking up for workers on strike for better pay, students fighting back against tuition fees and campaigners against the cuts. Drawing together these struggles and exposing the rotten capitalist system as the cause of working-class misery.

Alex Smith

A fully funded NHS, free education and a mass council house building programme would be great, but the country can’t afford it.
Don’t we have to wait for economic growth first?

Working-class people can’t afford to wait. And whether the economy is growing or not, the only way to win a bigger share of the wealth in the form of wages or services is to fight the capitalist bosses for it.

The British economy has grown slightly these past few months but have your wages gone up with inflation? Capitalism creates fat cats at the top and poverty at the bottom and, globally, the number at the top is ever diminishing whilst there are billions of us at the bottom. Let’s have a system for the billions, not the billionaires!

A 20% wealth tax on the top 350 people on the Sunday Times Rich List could raise £159 billion. Some people say the rich will just move their money to other countries but we say bring the banks into genuine public ownership before they get a chance!

And what happens when public services are sold off? Do you know how much debt Thames Water had before it was privatised? £0. And now? £14.7 billion. When we run utilities for profit, the shareholders fill their own pockets at our expense. So, we don’t just want a wealth tax, we need to renationalise public services too. Let’s have some growth that improves our lives, instead of just growing the balance sheets of the super-rich.

Ellen Kenyon Peers

Don’t we just need the rich to pay a bit more tax?

It’s outrageous that while working-class people struggle, with the lowest paid paying even more because of Jeremy Hunt’s tax threshold freezes, the super-rich pay barely a morsel from their massive wealth. A tax system placing the burden on the rich not the working-class is something we’re in favour of. And working-class struggle can force them to cough up a bit more cash in the short term if they feel threatened enough.

But the bosses have at their disposal a biased justice system, countless lawyers and accountants, not to mention politicians that have been showered with lavish donations and services. Any attempt to make them pay for the goods and services working-class people need would be met with massive opposition and even more shady schemes to move wealth and income to bank accounts all round the world.

We can take the wealth and resources that the bosses control at the moment to generate massive profits for a few at the top of society, into the hands of the working-class majority. We could democratically plan society on the basis of what we need – you can’t control what you don’t own. To be able to use it we would need to take the economic levers out of their hands – to nationalise under democratic workers’ control the banks and big businesses – to plan investment and production for need not greed.

Mark Best

Person 1: The planet’s burning – the most important thing in this election is stopping climate change what would you do?
Person 2: I work in an oil refinery, is ‘net zero’ going to mean my bills going up, having to buy a new car and losing my job?

The Socialist Party agrees that climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing us all. But with the world’s wealth and resources in the hands of a tiny super-rich minority, the bosses will attempt to make us pay. Measures like ULEZ and other regressive taxes hit workers not the bosses.

None of our green policies would be paid for by ordinary workers. We say make the super-rich mega-polluters pay! We would implement a democratically planned, expanded, free-to-use, publicly owned transport system. We would retrofit and insulate existing housing stock with the latest carbon-saving technology, as well as launching a mass programme of council-house building to the highest environmental standards. These measures would create millions of new well-paid green jobs, implemented with the democratic oversight of the trade unions.

The resources required to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy can only come from nationalising the commanding heights of the economy under democratic workers’ control.

Fat-cat bosses don’t deserve a penny, we say compensation only paid on the basis of proven need.

As part of a democratic socialist plan, the massive wealth generated by the working class could be invested in a major switch to clean, green energy, without any loss of jobs, pay or conditions.

The main driver of climate change is capitalism, a system which values private profit over public good – it produces waste and pollution making profits for the super-rich, while billions live in poverty. We appeal to workers across the world, to join us in fighting for socialist change so the needs of all can be met on an environmentally sustainable basis.

Oscar Parry

I think Nigel Farage has a point – don’t we just need to stop immigration to improve services and access to housing?

Our message to the likes of Nigel Farage, a former investment banker: Stop blaming migrants for the crisis in Britain – a crisis of privatisation, low pay and housing shortages, created by the ruthless profit-hungry capitalist system you support.

To the big-business capitalist bosses we say: stop seeking ever-cheaper labour, exploiting migrant workers less likely to be organised in trade unions and who you see as easier to bully and intimidate – pushing down all our wages.

It is not exploited workers who gain from this ‘race to the bottom’, it’s the bosses!

There’s no question public services are crumbling after years of underfunding and privatisation. We say: fully fund services, build council homes and pay decent wages to all workers – make the super-rich pay.

We are fighting urgently for a mass united struggle – of all working-class people – for fully funded public services, NHS and decent jobs and housing for all. We are fighting for a socialist world where wealth and resources can be harnessed to meet the needs of the majority through democratic workers’ control and planning.

Lenny Shail