Build a new mass workers’ party
Fight for socialist change
Seamus Smyth, East Midlands Socialist Party regional organiser
As the war in Ukraine enters its fourth year, it continues to leave behind a path of devastation and has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides.
The conflict will no doubt be a major feature of discussions between Keir Starmer and Donald Trump when they meet on 27 February, after the Socialist goes to press.
Trump’s pronouncements have caused fear among masses of people. But it’s not the interests of ordinary people that Starmer will be there defending. Trump’s words have also caused consternation among big business and capitalist governments in Europe. Starmer will be in Washington DC trying to represent the interests of Britain’s capitalist bosses.
From well before either Starmer or Trump took office, British and US capitalism, as well as other European powers, have funded and assisted war in Ukraine. Not out of genuine concern for the rights and safety of ordinary people, but for their own strategic and profit interests.
Starmer and Trump are very different politicians. But both are staunch defenders of the profit-driven capitalist system which drives war, inequality and poverty, and which fuels environmental destruction. Capitalist politicians worldwide are pledging to increase military funding in anticipation of further conflicts and wars.
Meanwhile, Trump and Starmer alike are both pursuing austerity agendas – cutting back and underfunding public services to serve the bosses’ interests.
Rather than focusing on building council housing or improving the NHS, ahead of meeting Trump, Starmer pledged to increase military expenditure to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, an additional £13.4 billion a year, and to 3% beyond that! And has baldly stated that if a Ukraine deal is to be struck, he is “ready and willing” to put British ‘boots on the ground’.
To fight back against cuts to services and the horrors of capitalist wars, the working class needs to form its own parties that stand firmly against war and oppression – in Britain, the US, and Ukraine and Russia.
This type of party, fighting for socialist change, would demand full funding for essential services and fight back against the super-rich elites. Establishing such a party in Britain would do more to undermine and weaken the Trump, Putin and Zelensky regimes, offering a way forward for the working class internationally, than any amount of military spending.
Such a party would champion working-class solidarity internationally, as well as supporting national rights of self-determination with guaranteed rights for minorities, laying the road for genuine peace and an end to capitalist wars once and for all.
Now is the time to fight for that party and for socialist change!
