Odun, Leicester Socialist Party
About 150 people gathered in Leicester at an event organised by independent MPs Shockat Adam and Jeremy Corbyn.
There was some enthusiasm by the attendees who were expectant to hear the speeches and possibly a way forward.
Shockat and Jeremy highlighted the attacks on ordinary people ranging from the disability benefits cuts, the two-child benefit cap and Starmer’s choice of warfare over welfare.
Both rightly mentioned the need for solidarity with the people of Palestine and the need to mount pressure on Starmer’s government to stop arming the Israeli state. They shared experiences of their visits to the occupied territories in the West Bank and decried the horrific turn of events in Gaza with Starmer’s complicity.
Jeremy and Shockat both spoke eloquently but did not really put forward a concrete programme to take the struggle forward. Jeremy put forward the idea of a wealth tax, for example, but stopped short of explaining the struggle that would be needed to take the wealth off the super-rich, including demanding nationalisation.
There was emphasis on the need for community cohesion, and an urge to keep electing independent MPs like Shockat as a solution.
While the election of anti-war and anti-austerity independent MPs like Shockat is a reflection of a positive break with the establishment parties, it also raises the question of working people’s political representation on a national scale and this important point was missing in the discussion.
Only a few questions were entertained and appeared to have been screened as they had mostly been submitted beforehand. One that got heard was about how we could fight the rise of Reform UK.
Shockat was correct in his response by saying Reform supporters and other white communities gravitating towards Reform UK as a result of feeling excluded should not be dismissed as racists but rather approached with a view to taking up their issues on housing, NHS and jobs.
Socialist Party members attended the event with a petition initiated by Dave Nellist calling on the need for a new mass workers’ party and the trade unions to take the lead. A sizeable number of attendees left before the end of the meeting, which we suspect was because they wanted to hear more about the next steps, which were not sufficiently dealt with unfortunately.
