London Socialist Party meeting and book launch

Tories Out: Corbyn can win with a socialist, anti-austerity programme

Plus launch of the important new book ‘From Militant to the Socialist Party’

• Speakers include Peter Taaffe, Socialist Party general secretary and author of the new book

Thursday 25 May 2017, 7.30pm

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, 235 Shaftesbury Avenue, WC2H 8EP (nearest tubes: Holborn and Tottenham Court Road)

• All are welcome to this public event. It is an opportunity to discuss and debate how the Tories can be defeated on 8th June.
• It is also an opportunity to buy Peter Taaffe’s book and get your copy signed.
• Or you can buy your copy by clicking here

The Tories send nurses to foodbanks! A million more people are homeless while disabled and elderly people die due to service and benefit cuts.

Meanwhile the richest are just getting richer and richer – the richest 1,000 people in Britain now have an obscene £658 billion.

Socialist Party general secretary Peter Taaffe will argue that a bold socialist stand can beat the Blairites and the Tories. There will also be speakers from the transport union RMT, and from NHS campaigns.

Jeremy Corbyn’s policies are popular. Meanwhile Theresa May is in a race against time. Economic growth is slowing. Inflation is rising while pay is held down, so real wages are falling. No wonder the Tory prime minister has been minimising her exposure to questioning and debate, as she aims to inflict ongoing brutal austerity – to make working and middle class people pay for British capitalism’s inability to provide sustained and healthy economic growth.

May also wants to make the majority in society pay for whatever damage to the profits of the top corporations result from Brexit. She wants five more years to continue smashing up the welfare state and grinding down the living standards of ordinary people.

This general election campaign will see a choice for those opposed to Tory austerity. The battle within Labour rages over Tony Blair’s legacy and those seeking to continue it, and supporters of Corbyn who want to see working-class political representation.

In this battle, the influence of the Socialist Party, formerly Militant, has been a touchstone, showing how it is possible for working-class people to organise and win.

From Militant to the Socialist Party covers developments from the New Labour takeover of the Labour Party to the first rumblings of the world economic crisis of 2007-08, and is the sequel to The Rise of Militant.

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, capitalism’s representatives proclaimed ‘the end of history’. But the struggles of workers and young people continued. From the Liverpool Dockers’ strike to the mass movements against the invasion of Iraq, From Militant to the Socialist Party charts the fightback, and highlights the lessons of these movements for today.

As Blair and New Labour implemented neoliberal policies, the fight for working-class political representation is a fundamental battle charted out in the book.