Editorial of the Socialist issue 1387
The campaign to bolster Andy Burnham’s premiership, by undermining its political opponents in the hope this Labour government can actually deliver the programme demanded by the big business capitalist class, continues. That is the context for the ultimatum presented to Green Party councillors by Burnham this week. In other words, this is a battle with class interests at play.
At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday 14 October, Burnham said: “We cannot support a partnership with a party that holds the position that has recently been adopted”. The next day, the Labour Party ordered its local groups to “review” their coalitions with Greens and to end them if Green councillors did not disavow the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion. Labour and the Greens currently share in the administration of around 20 councils, including in coalitions involving the Lib Dems.
The Financial Times is a key mouthpiece for the capitalist class. It said: “The move is seen as an attempt to capitalise on tensions within the Green Party over the motion”. To what end is not spelled out, but the article later says: “Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader, was expelled from the party in 2024 after refusing to apologise for saying that accusations of antisemitism in the Labour Party during his leadership had been ‘dramatically overstated’ for political reasons”.
Jeremy Corbyn’s expulsion from the Labour Party on the basis of disproven accusations of antisemitism were the culmination of a sustained onslaught by the defenders of capitalism inside and outside the Labour Party. They were fighting to maintain the advantage they had gained through Tony Blair’s transformation of Labour from a capitalist workers’ party into New Labour, a party fully committed to defending the interests of the capitalist class. Killing off any green shoots from which working-class representation could grow was pursued by any means necessary.
Both the surge to Corbyn’s Labour and Polanski’s Greens are in their own ways expressions of the search for a voice to fight austerity, and also war. 192,000 people have joined the trade unions, the biggest growth in years, which also shows a determination to find a way to organise to defend living standards. Young people are getting organised for collective action in defence of their future around the N20 international student strike with the slogan: ‘Fight for our future, not their wars’.
There is more than a whiff of familiarity about the attack on Zack Polanski. The representatives of big business are seeking to use their ‘winning formula’ of false accusations of antisemitism for the same ‘political reasons’.
Gaza mass movement
One difference they face today is that we are three years into a mass sustained Gaza anti-war movement. There is widespread opposition to the actions of the Israeli state in Palestine – and to Labour’s association with it. Burnham is seeking to present a break with Starmer’s obscene support for genocidal slaughter. But the interests of British capitalism remain the key motivation of this government too – not solidarity with the suffering masses across the region, who under profit-first capitalist conditions will always be denied safety and the democratic right to self-determination, let alone decent lives.
The building of a mass working-class party here that challenges Labour’s war, austerity, and capitalist agenda is a key task in strengthening the fight for Palestinian liberation. In defence of its interests, the capitalist class will fight tooth and nail to stamp out even partial political expressions of opposition to their agenda. And so, they have taken the opportunity to try to kill off Polanski’s leadership.
Corbynism
From the moment of Corbyn’s election as leader in 2015 – when his defeated challengers on the right included Andy Burnham – the defenders of capitalism inside and outside the Labour Party organised energetically to remove him. ‘Project Anaconda’ was a strategy to undermine his authority. The Blairites launched the infamous ‘chicken coup’ attempt in 2016. But Corbyn increased his vote within the party on the historic 2015 result, again among them thousands who had seen the opportunity to fight for their interests by joining Labour and backing him.
The problem that the capitalist class faced was the enormous popularity of Corbyn’s anti-austerity programme. The 2017 general election manifesto gave a glimpse of free education, council housing, trade union rights, and nationalised utilities. In 2017 Labour’s vote under Corbyn increased by 3.53 million or 9.6%. That was the biggest increase between elections by any party since the 1945 general election – in both the absolute number of votes won and the percentage share of the vote. The danger of a working-class political voice emerging meant the defenders of capitalism could not stand by.
Outside the Labour Party, the representatives and institutions of capitalism also played their part. In September 2015, for example, a senior serving army general was quoted threatening mass resignations and even mutiny if Corbyn became prime minister.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) gets described as an ‘independent’ body, but it played a role in the onslaught on Corbyn. It announced a report into antisemitism in Corbyn’s Labour in 2019 – just as he had the potential to defeat then Tory leader Theresa May. And today it is one of the bodies piling in on Zack Polanski, cynically using the weaknesses in the motion passed at the Green Party conference to ‘justify’ the deluge of attacks on him. The billionaire-owned press of course played its role amplifying the onslaught – then and now.
Like in Labour under Corbyn, the Green Party contains those who want a party that defends the capitalist status quo which ultimately means war and austerity – and those seeking to fight it. The situation is not the same. Even though ultimately the class character of Labour did not change under Corbyn, the potential existed for Labour to be transformed into a mass workers’ party. The Greens are currently picking up the votes of a layer of left-leaning voters, but their anti-austerity programme is more limited than Corbyn’s was and, most importantly, they are not seen by significant sections of workers as ‘their party’ that represents their interests. Nonetheless, the representatives of the capitalist establishment inside the Greens – as the Blairites did – are fighting to maintain their party as one that can safely channel discontent over environmental issues and so on, without encroaching on the limits of existing capitalism.
Within minutes of the polls closing in the Holborn by-election, Caroline Lucas was on the airwaves criticising Polanski’s leadership. Lucas has form. In 2019, she proposed a female cross-party alliance – including the Tories! – as an alternative to Jeremy Corbyn.
The Socialist Party programme to carry out the potential transformation of Labour under Corbyn to become a workers’ party included democratic deselection and removal of the Blairites. We argued for the return of the trade unions, the main bodies of the organised working class, to their central role under the democratic control of their members, and for Labour to develop a socialist programme. We also called for Labour councils to commit to a no-cuts position.
Anti-cuts council programme
Labour had around 7,000 councillors running over 100 councils in 2015. But only 400 backed Corbyn for leader, reflecting that the majority were on the pro-capitalist right of the party. No Labour council had done what the socialists running Liverpool under Thatcher did in the 1980s, when they refused to implement the Tory cuts and won the funding to provide jobs and services instead. Unfortunately, Corbyn did not demand that his councillors do the same.
Had Labour councils, even a minority of them, taken the Liverpool road it would have powerfully shown millions more suffering cuts why it was worth joining the fight against the capitalist attacks and helped turn Corbyn’s 2017 vote into one that took Theresa May’s government down – not just her majority. That would have opened the next even greater phase of struggle.
Today, Green councillors are taking part in coalitions with pro-austerity, pro-war parties, and are implementing council cuts. But if even a few hundred of them instead committed to fighting cuts in action, it would form a powerful addition to building the anti-austerity movement.
The threat that Corbynism represented for the capitalist class was the potential that, from the experience of fighting for even the limited anti-austerity programme he put forward, the confidence and aspirations of the working class for a decent future would grow. Above all, bosses fear mass working-class organisations whose demands challenge the limits of their capitalist system.
Even one hundred councillors in a party committed to fighting war and austerity, uniting with the trade unions, anti-war movement, and youth on a socialist basis, could help break the current logjam on developing working-class political representation and lay the basis to realise the capitalists’ greatest fears.
