Joe Woolfall, Liverpool South Socialist Party
Socialist Party members in Liverpool attended the ‘Your Party Rally for Real Change’ at St Georges Hall on 9 October, with hundreds in attendance.
Around 30 Socialist Party members met outside beforehand to speak to the attendees, handing out our Socialist Party petition calling for:
- No cuts to public services
- Councils to set needs-based budgets and refuse to pass on Starmer and Reeves’s austerity
- For Your Party to be built as a mass workers’ party based on trade union organisations, with socialist organisations – like the Socialist Party – allowed to affiliate
There were multiple speakers, on the platform were Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana as well as Liverpool Community Independent (LCI) councillors, including Alan Gibbons.
Jeremy Corbyn’s speech was received well by the crowd, and in her speech, Zarah Sultana referred to Liverpool as “the city that took on Thatcher” – a reference to the city council’s historic battle against the Thatcher government in the 1980s, led by Militant, the forerunner to the Socialist Party.
In her speech, Sultana defined socialism as “the working class owning the means of production” and said that ‘Your Party’ shouldn’t limit itself to reforms within the capitalist system.
After the meeting, approached by young Socialist Party activists, Corbyn and Sultana put their names to our petition, as did LCI councillor Sam Gorst.
The petition called for “Your Party to be built as a mass workers’ party based on trade union organisations”. Socialist Party members will be arguing that the next step to translate the fighting language into action is for Liverpool Trades Union Council (LTUC) to call a meeting inviting Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, Sam Gorst and the other independent councillors around Merseyside. The meeting should be centred around how a trade union campaign can be built in the region in support of the petition’s call for “councils to set needs-based budgets and refuse to pass on Starmer and Reeves’s austerity”.
In the recent period, LCI councillors have refused to vote for the Labour council’s austerity budgets. In Liverpool City Council’s struggle against the Thatcher government in the 1980s, when councillors took an anti-austerity stand, behind them – pushing them every step of the way – was the organised working class in the city. It was this force that ultimately pushed the Thatcher government into largely ceding to the council’s demands in 1984.
Workers’ counter-pressure
This is why it is so important that we now mobilise the trade union movement in the city and elsewhere behind councillors who have backed our petition’s call for an anti-austerity stand. Elected representatives who take the Liverpool road will inevitably come under enormous pressure from capitalism. A campaign in support – led by working-class organisations – is essential to apply counter-pressure to back them up.
The Green Party was also discussed by both Sultana and Corbyn. At a meeting in Manchester two days later Zack Polanski – the new leader of the Green Party – said he thought councillors had to make cuts to avoid the government taking over. The Liverpool struggle showed the government won’t easily be able to impose its cuts on a city where the organised working class is mobilised behind councillors taking an anti-austerity stand. Not without a fight.
Corbyn and Sultana also outlined some differences they have with the Green Party. For example, Sultana raised the idea that the UK should immediately withdraw from NATO (the western capitalist military alliance set up during the Cold War) multiple times. A clear difference compared to the Green Party’s more pro-NATO position. Corbyn was less explicit, but he did say that his disagreements with the Green Party were partially related to foreign policy, socialism, and social justice.
Both Corbyn and Sultana restated their commitment to supporting the use of a one-member-one-vote (OMOV) system at the ‘Your Party’ founding conference, slated to take place in late November in Liverpool, with ‘sortition’ – a lottery system – due to be used to select conference contributors. This type of horizontalist structure is far removed from the system of representative workers’ democracy that the Liverpool struggle was based on, where local working-class organisations met and elected accountable fighting delegates through OMOV in local meetings.
These delegates would then go on to mass delegate meetings of the Liverpool District Labour Party (DLP). The DLP then set the fighting programme and provided the necessary support for the councillors who were mandated to implement it. This is why Socialist Party members are arguing for Your Party’s founding conference to be based on a similar system of representative workers’ democracy, with the trade unions at its heart, and with accountable delegates elected democratically by the working class – not chosen out of a hat. Such a system is needed if we are to win trade unions over to Your Party, and make it a genuine mass workers’ party.
