‘Your Party’ – what does the Socialist Party say?
Sarah Sachs Eldridge, Socialist Party England and Wales Executive Committee, responds to questions from socialists in Germany, members of Sol, the German section of the CWI (the socialist international which Socialist Party Scotland is affiliated to)
700,000+ have signed up to support the call for a new party announced by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana. What is the background to that development?
Since the world economic crash of 2007-08 enormous austerity has been inflicted on the working class. The Tories cut central government funding to local authorities by 60% since 2010, including about 600,000 jobs.
It has especially impacted young people. Today most young people can’t even imagine a youth club or a service dedicated to them. University fees were trebled to £9,000 in 2010 – and the average student debt now stands at £53,000. With further increases on the cards, no wonder a new party, even though it hasn’t yet been formed, wins among 18 to 24-year-olds in the polls.
There was huge anger – but in 2012 right-wing trade union leaders derailed national strike action. Labour-controlled local councils wielded the axe just like their Tory counterparts.
That anti-austerity anger found expression in the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015 – accidentally enabled by an attempt to remove the last vestiges of the collective voice of the trade unions from the party. But Keir Starmer’s counter-revolution since means Jeremy is now excluded.
In 2022-23, the biggest strike action since the 1980s miners’ strike involved over a million workers. It showed a new generation that striking can win. Tens of thousands, often hundreds of thousands, have marched on demonstrations almost every month since October 2023 against the slaughter in Gaza.
All of this led to an historic general election result last July. The Tories, the most successful capitalist party the world has ever seen, were smashed. But Starmer also seeks to defend the interests of the capitalist class. He won a massive landslide as the best means voters had to punish the Tories – but with the lowest ever vote for the winning party, just 20.1% of the electorate!
This tiny mandate means that driving through the interests of the capitalist class is not straightforward. For example, Starmer was forced to U-turn on £5 billion of cuts to support for disabled people, and on other cuts. These retreats have given confidence that this is a government that can be beaten.
But there is polarisation. His government attacks democratic rights in preparation for mass opposition and gives legitimacy to the divisive racism of right-populist Reform UK. A new anti-austerity party could cut across Reform’s ability to present itself as the anti-establishment alternative.
Why is a new party on the agenda now?
Back in 2022, two trade union leaders who had become household names in the strike wave launched ‘Enough is Enough’. Half a million signed up. Mass rallies were in some areas the biggest meetings since the 18-million strong anti-poll tax movement in the late 1980s that brought down Thatcher! But those trade union leaders sought to turn the movement towards Labour and it dwindled away.
What has changed is that Labour is in government. The capitalist class hoped that Starmer would be more effective at driving through austerity using the last memories linking previous Labour governments with gains workers won. But not only has there been a continuation of Tory austerity, by removing anyone who opposes it Starmer adds to the difficulty the trade union leaders have in painting Labour as ‘our party’.
Today there are more than six million workers in trade unions. In those which are still affiliated to the Labour Party, including the biggest three – Unite, GMB and Unison – there is huge anger about paying members’ money to a party that is attacking workers.
For example, at Unite’s conference this year the Labour-led council in Birmingham announced that it would sack striking bin workers organised in Unite if they didn’t accept pay cuts of up to 25%. An emergency motion was passed overwhelmingly which agreed to reassess the union’s relationship with Labour. The ability of the trade union leaders to contain the enthusiasm for a new party that stands in workers’ interests is extremely limited today – and a debate is already starting.
What kind of party should it be?
To be able to fight Starmer’s austerity and war agenda, a new party must be a party of the working class. The Labour Party was founded when the working class, organising and fighting in the workplaces and communities, understood it needed its own political voice.
Labour began as a highly federal organisation with representation from different trade unions and socialist organisations. There are lessons to learn from Labour’s foundation – and from every stage of its existence including when Corbyn was leader. And from Blair’s transformation into New Labour in the 1990s into a party that the capitalist class could rely on to represent its interests.
Before that, Labour had been a ‘capitalist workers’ party’ with a leadership that defended the capitalist system but, unlike today, structures through which its mass working-class base could apply pressure. In the late 1960s that pressure was able to stay the leadership’s hand on anti-union laws and sending troops to back Nixon in Vietnam.
The pandemic showed that the working class, despite claims it no longer exists, is key to keeping society going. The strike wave showed how collective action can win. The conclusion we point to is that the working class has enormous potential power arising from its role and its collective nature under capitalism. Capitalism is a system based on the exploitation of the majority for the profits of the few. In 2025 we do not need to explain the misery it engenders, nor the inequality inherent to it.
But it is essential we make the point clearly that our class has the power to transform how society is run. Part of explaining that is pointing to how to realise that potential – and key is the building of a mass party in which workers could fight collectively for all our interests.
A socialist programme of planning society’s resources to meet social need – instead of a handful of billionaires controlling it – most clearly expresses those interests, and would win over wider sections of society quickly.
There is a discussion about the structure of the new party. What do you propose?
There is a lot of discussion. An open debate between Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn about the structure is of course being used by the capitalist-owned press to say the left is always split. But debate is necessary.
The Socialist Party is energetically involved in the debate. Our members elected to their trade union executives are calling meetings in their unions, to discuss how to campaign for a political voice that represents members’ interests. Our branches have called around 60 public meetings across England and Wales.
Central is the question of how the party can most effectively be a collective voice for the working class and how can it express the voice of the organised working class in the trade unions. That is being expressed in the wider debate between supporters of One Member One Vote (OMOV) and those who favour a federal structure for initiating a new party, as we do.
Many of those who have signed up to the mailing list will not be aware that John Prescott, before he was Blair’s deputy, helped win the argument for OMOV and later credited it with being central to the transformation of Labour into ‘New Labour’.
OMOV undermined the collective role of the trade unions in party decision making. Former militant RMT union leader Bob Crow actively fought for working class political representation – but he opposed his union participating in the Respect party which came out of the 2003 movement against the war in Iraq because the RMT as a union would have had no say over things like candidates, policy, and so on.
In a trade union members have a say, but their democratic organisation means they can act collectively. OMOV would be akin to saying that all trade union members are merely individual members – thereby negating their ability to decide a collective course of action or policy. And removing the vital element of representative democracy.
When she attended the ‘trade unionists for a new party’ meeting hosted by former socialist Labour MP Dave Nellist on 21 July 2025, Zarah argued “for a party that stands with workers not the wealthy, a genuine democratic socialist alternative that is rooted in the trade union movement and built by and for our class, the working class.”
However, in interviews since then she has argued for a structure based on OMOV. In one she said: “We should be striving for mass participation, as opposed to a narrow delegate structure which could be unrepresentative of our base.”
In the debate Jeremy has suggested a federal structure. In fact, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), an electoral coalition in which the Socialist Party participates, has adopted a democratic federal ‘umbrella’ structure. That has allowed TUSC to bring together trade unionists and socialists to contest elections with a basic – and democratically agreed – anti-austerity platform. For ten of TUSC’s 15 years, the RMT with 80,000 members had a seat on the steering committee – and a say.
What does this mean for the first steps today?
The other experience the Socialist Party can draw on is when Militant, our predecessor, led Liverpool city council 1983-85. Through the council, the Liverpool working class won tremendous victories – including thousands of council homes, nurseries, youth apprenticeships, and more.
Through the District Labour Party, with more than 600 delegates from unions, ward Labour parties and so on, the course of the struggle was decided. It was a kind of parliament of the workers’ movement – both setting policy for councillors to implement and organising strikes and demos to back them up.
What does that translate to for a new party today? We are proposing a founding conference with delegates from affiliated trade unions, affiliated political and working-class community organisations including socialist organisations, plus groups of independent councillors. Autonomy for the party structures in Scotland and Wales.
Local members’ organisations of the party could also have representation at national conferences as the party develops. They could also operate on a federal basis. Local district committees could again have delegates from more localised units made up of individual members, probably based on wards, plus affiliates, a youth wing and so on.
Our point about structure is that the new party’s ability to be a voice for our class is a question of how it is organised – and what it stands for. The two are completely connected. The capitalist class will use every means at its disposal to try to make the leadership of a workers’ party accept the limits of existing capitalism – and not go ‘too far’.
The Socialist Party has been campaigning for a new mass workers’ party for many years. How would the Socialist Party relate to a new party?
The Socialist Party has campaigned for a new mass workers’ party since the Labour Party was transformed by Blair – and of course in 2015-20 we campaigned for the transformation of Labour under Corbyn into an anti-austerity party.
Throughout we have campaigned for the trade unions to stand candidates. Hundreds of trade union and community fighters have stood as TUSC candidates over the years, offering a socialist alternative at the ballot box and showing in action how the trade unions could strengthen their struggle against the bosses.
But in the general elections in 2017 and 2019 when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader, TUSC stood down. The Socialist Party applied to be re-admitted to Corbyn’s Labour on a federal basis. But that was unfortunately not accepted.
Even so we enthusiastically campaigned for Jeremy’s anti-austerity programme, unlike the Blairite MPs who did all they could to sabotage the potential for it to become an anti-austerity party. A key task then was to kick them out!
If the programme of a new party was something like the 2017 manifesto which spoke of nationalising the privatised utilities, mass council housebuilding, rent control, free education, raising the minimum wage, a green new deal and removal of anti-trade union laws, it would be very popular – as it was then.
We warned in 2017 that: “The hostility Jeremy Corbyn faces in opposition is only a pale shadow of how they would attempt to derail a Jeremy Corbyn-led government. To prevent this will pose the need for far-going socialist measures including nationalising the 100 or so major corporations and banks that dominate Britain’s economy, in order to be able to introduce a democratic socialist plan. This would allow a socialist government to begin to manage the economy in a planned way under democratic workers’ control and management – that really would be ‘for the many, not the few’.” We will do everything we can to strengthen our ability to fight for socialist ideas within a new party.
If you look ahead imagining such a party comes into being – how could it change the UK within the next years?
That is an impossible question in one way given where we are right now. In another it is straightforward. If organised workers can start to build a party of their own it will accelerate the growth in confidence and cohesion of the working class. That is a step on the road to challenging the capitalist class for power that cannot be passed over.
That will include facing attempts at sabotage as the capitalist class tries to prevent such a party developing. This will be a struggle both inside and outside the party. The question is how we prepare.
These vital issues will inevitably be debated in any party that is serious about fighting in the interests of the working class, and the Socialist Party will be to the fore in arguing for the clear socialist programme that is needed.
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