The May elections, covering almost one-third of voters in England, provided an important snapshot of how political consciousness is developing after ten months of the Starmer government.
But even before the first results were counted – after Socialism Today was printed – one thing was clear. That is, how woefully unprepared for the elections were almost all the socialist and ‘Marxist’ organisations in Britain – with the exception of those, including the Socialist Party, participating in the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC).
TUSC is not, and has never presented itself to be, the authoritative workers’ party that is needed to provide a mass alternative to the capitalist establishment parties, including Starmer’s New Labour Mark II and the threat of Reform. But in the absence of such a party it does provide an inclusive banner, registered with the Electoral Commission as legally required, for socialists to appear as such on the ballot paper.
Candidates from different organisations can still promote their own party and its policies in their election material if they wish, but they are part of a larger, national umbrella. In May there were 105 candidates using one of the TUSC descriptions, the sixth-biggest bloc after Labour, the Tories, Reform, the Lib Dems, and the Greens. But how many of the rest of the left even made it onto the ballot paper, and in what guise?
The Communist Party of Britain, linked to the Morning Star newspaper, stood four council candidates. George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain managed five, plus a candidate in the Runcorn and Helsby parliamentary by-election – the former UK ambassador to Syria – and for the Doncaster mayor.
This was a far cry from their 152-candidate presence in the 2024 general election. May’s contests were in less demographically favourable areas to maximise Galloway’s standing as an anti-war campaigner. But the Workers Party still had 26 parliamentary candidates in 2024 in constituencies which had council elections this May. And yet only three of them were prepared to stand again this time.
There were also candidates – one apiece – from Arthur Scargill’s still extant Socialist Labour Party; Transform, previously the Breakthrough Party; Majority, led by the former North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll; and the Social Justice Party. But everything they did to promote their own parties could still have been done – more effectively probably – if they had been part of TUSC’s national stand.
And then there was the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Having withdrawn from TUSC, and from standing in elections, in 2017, the SWP had a candidate at the 2024 general election in Sheffield, and another in Chesterfield this May. But both chose to appear on the ballot paper as independents, while the SWP nationally has declined repeated offers to rejoin the TUSC steering committee.
The SWP’s turn back to elections has been accompanied by warnings from their newspaper’s editor Tomáš Tengely-Evans of the “dangers” of doing so “without fighting for revolutionary politics”. (Socialist Worker, 4 April) Elections can exert “a rightward pull to tone down” class politics, he went on, “to win more votes”. But isn’t standing as an independent rather than taking up a socialist identifier doing exactly that? Isn’t it saying that ‘avoiding fewer votes’ – how many is ‘more votes’? – is the decisive metric for the SWP?
That is particularly ‘dangerous’ – a bowing to rightward pressures – when some former Labour party members and councillors, and others from a Muslim background especially, are making a welcome first step by standing against Starmer’s austerity and war agenda, even when they do so as independents or local community parties. There were over 20 who stood in May. But positive though this is, it can only ever be a first step towards a new mass workers’ party, not its realisation, and socialists should not bring confusion to the debate. It is the working class, and sections of the middle class hit by capitalist crises, who lack their own party, not a classless ‘people’.
In the context of a world in turmoil, and as we predicted the rapid growth of opposition to the Labour government, the unpreparedness for the May elections – the low numbers standing, and the lack of clarity on the need for a new workers party – was not a technical, organisational failure but a defining political one.
