Starmer’s Tory-lite Labour is no alternative
Let’s build a new mass workers’ party
Boris Johnson Estonian presidency/CC (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)
Kris O’Sullivan, Birmingham North Socialist Party
Under Boris Johnson it’s one law for us and one for the rich and powerful.
That means the recently revealed lockdown lawbreaking, sleaze and crony Covid contracts. But also the policies that make the rich richer while workers and our families suffer – public service cuts, low pay, fire and rehire, national insurance hikes, profiteering privatised utilities ripping us off, and so on and on and on…
The publication of the pared-down Sue Gray report into Westminster parties under lockdown shows we can’t rely on the current residents of Parliament to get Johnson and his anti-working-class policies out.
We obviously can’t rely on Tory backbenchers – but neither on the Labour so-called opposition under Keir Starmer, who have gone along with every Tory measure. Where is the voice of the working class? We need a new mass workers’ party.
On 3 March the first parliamentary by-election of 2022 is taking place in my home constituency of Erdington, Birmingham. Like every working-class area, we’ve suffered years of austerity cuts to vital services. Overcrowded housing is a huge problem. Jobs are being thrown on the scrapheap through, for example, the threatened closure of the GKN plant.
This election is seen as a popularity poll of the Johnson government. But for us here it’s also an opportunity to give a bloody nose to and fight the Blairite Labour council who’ve passed on all the Tory cuts.
I’m sick of Tory or Labour cuts, I want an alternative!
That’s why I will be voting for and fighting for Socialist Party member Dave Nellist, standing as the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidate on a 100% anti-austerity platform.
He’s offering a socialist alternative on the ballot paper: of a £15-an-hour minimum wage, kicking out parasitical privatisation from our public services and instead fully funding them, a mass council house-building programme so everyone has a decent and safe home. Take the wealth off the big corporations not the working class.
Dave has a proven track record of being a workers’ MP on a worker’s wage when previously in Parliament. There is an alternative to establishment politicians living on grotesque, bloated salaries divorced from the realities of working-class families, living in second homes when people in Erdington don’t even have one!
This by-election gives us an opportunity to get out a message that we can fight cuts, build our own working-class political voice – and organise a socialist fightback!
