Trump’s behaviour is straight out of the fascist tyrant’s playbook. In 1933 Hitler used the Reichstag fire as an excuse to unleash German state forces backed by his armed militias to outlaw any opponent. In Los Angeles supporters of migrant workers inevitably reacted to the mass arrests and planned deportations by ICE of their families, friends and neighbours. Workers of California and the US must stand with the migrant communities. It is workers in the wonderfully multi-racial, multi-ethnic cities of the US who have the social power to confront Trump through organised protests and strikes in the workplace. Trump is mobilising the full military strength of the state and sending in the Marines. There is huge dissent with Trump across the US – far greater than there was against Hitler at the time of the Reichstag fire. California Governor Gavin Newson on the right wing of the Democrat party has opposed Trump’s use of the National Guard. Trump now threatens even him with arrest. Dissent against Trump will reach into the National Guard and even the Marines. But their immediate response will be to do as their Commander in Chief demands. First California and US workers have to be seen to organise in social and class revolt. This cannot wait for elections in 18 months time.
After yesterday’s election it has to be recognised that what we are seeing in America under Trump could soon happen in the UK!
May 1st should have been the day of workers, socialists and trade unionists – a day to feel the unity and solidarity of the international workers movements.
And in places as far away as South Korea, there were tremendous displays of such solidarity. Even in the US there were mass trade union rallies.
But in the UK, in Runcorn and in Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and many other counties – it has been a dreadful day of reaction with the refugee-hate party, Reform making huge gains that will encourage more active racists to raise their voices.
The Labour Party leadership under Keir Starmer bears the primary responsibility for this.
But this is no time for self-righteous gloating – the wider left too has to reflect on our own failures.
Labour’s 2024 general election victory was a welcome defeat for the Tories but Labour promised nothing other than an illusion.
Labour’s manifesto peddled an illusion of economic progress without any restraints on capitalist greed and inequality. No raising income tax on the super-rich, no plans to bring back into public ownership the hugely profitable privatised services like telecommunications, water and energy.
Labour’s policy was weak but its reach into the community through its branches and union connections had already reached an all-time low.
Since the election, the Labour government’s cuts on welfare, its continuing racist attacks on refugees and its timid foreign policy before the US, now under Trump’s rule, have not only alienated huge sections of the left electorate but also many working class communities.
Labour’s results yesterday shows it has already lost even what it claimed it had won in 2024.
And it is not only political damage that has been inflicted.
Under Starmer, the Labour Party is determined to the point of obsession to bludgeon internal opposition from the left.
This has been especially the case in local government where services have been slashed by 15 years of austerity. For years opposition to cuts demanded by the Tory government had been feeble from Labour councils.
But in the last two years, the cuts demanded by a now Labour government on many councils has led to a kick back from a few Labour councillors. There is no argument that cuts being imposed are leading to real poverty and desperation.
Labour councillors opposing them are suspended or driven out of the Party if they go public on their concerns about Labour’s strategy. That has happened to 3 Labour councillors in Nottingham over the last year and the threat is made to a far greater number.
In my own local borough of Broxtowe, anyone who objects to increased austerity and privatisation were not even allowed to stand as councillors or as Labour parliamentary candidates even if selected by party members.
This provoked a split in Broxtowe with most Labour councillors leaving the Party in protest. The insane authoritarian regime in the Party here which began in 2016 with my own expulsion is now destroying it electorally.
But we cannot win simply by fleeing the Labour Party for a multitude of small parties, local or national.
In the council division where I voted yesterday, there were three candidates standing against each other: Labour, Broxtowe Alliance and Greens. Two candidates I know personally. They and most of the other candidates of these parties are decent and committed local politicians. Most were all in the Labour Party a few years ago.
Wider friends of mine here who are also committed activists are also divided on who to vote for.
The result of the elections in Notts have not been announced yet but they are likely to see significant gains for Reform.
There have always been divisions on the left on electoral strategy. Not necessarily a huge problem – our movement can learn through debating political options and it is always better than meek compliance.
But there was no debate anywhere – in the Labour Party, in unions, or any public forums on the election options before this year’s disastrous show.
Over the last 6 years the division has not led to learning but only to increased bitterness and demoralisation.
New left wing parties have been declared but have fizzled to nothing – nothing that looks remotely capable of challenging for government now or in a 2029 general election.
Neither the Greens nor local independent parties – though they might win a council seat – can impact on national issues of government? They can be ‘against’ and ‘for’ all sorts of policies of but do they have a credible strategy to take government?
To either replace the leadership of Labour or form a new government accountable to workers that can create an alternative the rule of an increasingly voracious capitalism?
Revolutionary marxists like myself believe in the possibilities of rapid change. But belief in revolutionary change is not like a belief in Xmas. It cannot be just wishful thinking – waiting for it to fortuitously happen. We have to elaborate how it can be brought about.
And if we believe, as I do, in the possibilities of rapid change for the better, we have to also acknowledge the possibilities of rapid change for the worse.
For decades radicals were told that change could only be incremental. Political parties, public opinion, bipartisan politics, the law, and in the US the constitution, would only allow gradual change.
Trump has blown that apart.
No-one can ignore the horrifying fascist threats in the US or the possibility of those being repeated by Farage’s Reform with Badenoch/ Jenrick Tories in the UK.
In the face of the chronic division of the left, we are now seeing Reform victories. What do we do?
Campaigns like Stand Up to Racism call on people to simply not vote Reform – that sounds fair enough. But if we can’t just continually say ‘no’, we need a ‘yes’ – a meaningful strategy to stop a Trump-like Reform/Tory government getting in 2029 – a strategy to address the crisis of the left’s retreat and division.
The current Labour leadership is the primary cause of this crisis. But the left has failed too.
When it was close to being in control, it never built a vibrant democracy in the Labour Party. It never created a social movement. It never had a concerted drive into the unions to promote democratic involvement.
It often failed to challenge reactionary views – whether they were the nationalist ones of Brexit or antisemitism. It ducked issues of how to defend asylum seekers and migrants.
In some areas it has now gone local, closing its eyes to the fact that we have to act on national government issues and they have to be fought on a national terrain.
So we see the fragmentation of what had in the past been a united Labour vote.
Some of the worst fragments such as those around George Galloway and Chris Williamson and their ‘Workers Party’ are on many issues indistinguishable from the far right. But the history of Galloway and a few others on ‘the left’ makes people rightly cautious of breakaway parties and the risks of populism there.
A couple of months ago I spoke to a quite a few prominent local figures in the Labour Party as well as those who have left, been driven out and are prominently active. These are all people I have known for a decade or more and have a lot of respect for.
I enquired on the possibilities of averting or limiting the damage of electoral division.
It became clear very quickly that any united stance was impossible in these elections.
Those in the Labour Party were too fearful even to be seen talking to people who had been expelled or had left the Labour Party.
None had any confidence in the Labour leadership, its mimicking of Reform on immigration issues, its endless austerity, its demand for unquestioning loyalty to No 10.
But there was a remarkable degree of hostility between people who only months ago had been comrades.
Now is not the time for self-righteous recrimination. We have all failed.
We need to build a democratic movement – not competing self-declared leaderships either local or national.
We have to recognise that the division we have today must be overcome – otherwise a Trump-like catastrophe in Britain will follow the fall of Starmer.
If debate is blocked in the Labour Party, then unions, campaigns and socialists need to organise it elsewhere.
It should be an inclusive debate to all who oppose austerity and racism.
It should be a forum where union activists can get support for their fightback on defending their services and jobs.
It should be a forum where we can organise against the demonisation of asylum seekers and refugees.
It should be a forum where we use whatever weapons we can find within the Labour Party as well: MPs, Party members, union affiliates etc.
To stop in particular further government attacks on migrants and compromises with Reform’s racist narrative.
It probably won’t lead to immediate agreement on what we do in elections. But even if socialists find themselves in the short-term on different electoral paths, it can counter the endless division that has got us to where we are now.
The division which in the US led to Trump and the greatest fascist threat in 80 years.
AddendumMay 3: 9:25am
We now know the results of the council and mayoral elections across the country. Huge increases in Reform councillors who now run many whole counties. A virtual wipeout for Labour in counties like Notts and an odd independent councillor elected here or there.
The immediate response from the Labour leadership has been shocking if predictable – indicating they will further embrace Reform policies.
There are also worrying indications from some councillors who lost to them, that Reform should be respected as much as any other party.
Meanwhile we see all the hallmarks of Trump and Musk in statements by Farage telling diversity and climate staff to ‘find alternative careers’ after Reform’s success in County Durham and their new Mayor in Lincolnshire Andrea Jenkins pledges to make migrants sleep in tents, saying if sleeping under canvas is “good enough for France, they should be good enough for here in Britain.”
Some commenters including an official Unison tweet have scoffed that Farage’s threats to jobs in diversity and the environment cannot be acted on and will be fought. Fine as long as they mobilise to do so.
Reform can and will move ever more to the right mobilising hatred behind them. We should not allow them to be sanitised. We need to mobilise the whole labour movement against them.
I also made some unfortunate omissions mainly to reduce size of my post. Thanks to those who pointed them out.
Whilst mentioning the earlier failures of the left to deal with nationalism and antisemitism, I didn’t specify other serious more recent issues that the left cannot shy away from. Such as active support for Ukraine and solidarity in support of trans people now under attack.
The left that fights the far right today must be clear on those.
Over recent years they have enabled millions of dollars being thrown at Trump and his Republican supporters in Congress and the Senate. Through his obscene attacks on migrants and imprisonment of migrant children, through his support for fascist white supremacists and police murders of black people, his use of federal thugs in attacking black activists, his callous indifference to, and responsibility for an eventual 500,000 US Covid deaths.Throughout these actions of Trump, corporate America said nothing – ever grateful for his tax hand-outs to the super-rich.
But now they are worried. Worried because the rabble he called to siege the Capitol didn’t succeed. Worried that with Trump’s encouragement, these marauding mobs may create long term civil strife and armed confrontations that might be bad for American business. So corporate America calls for a ‘pause’ on Trump.
It might have been different if Trump hadn’t had an ignorant mob behind him but a disciplined political and paramilitary force. If fascists had been successful with their plan to take the Capitol, had got Pence to refuse to validate the election result, terrorised other members of Congress and declared Trump de facto dictator, it would have been different.
So now corporate America try and pull back the fascists – but for how long?
As Trump’s handling of the pandemic and the political disorder hit the economy, when US workers demand that it is the super-rich that should pay the bill and not them, when black workers demand an end to the poverty and oppression that blights their community – will corporate America be attracted back to Trump and the political power he wields?
Big business has no principles or morality. They will do what suits their wealth. As Mafia mobsters say ‘it is nothing personal, just business’.
This post started as an email response to an argument over whether reliance on Section 44 of the Employment Act/ Health & Safety of 1999 was risky. It grew into a longer reminiscence of something I had long been meaning to write.
When I worked long ago in a notoriously unhealthy and dangerous steel works, Stanton near Nottingham, we often had disputes about safety. When I first worked there the plant had the worst industrial accident record in the East Midlands region. Worse than any colliery. More deaths, limbs lost, massive burns as well as cancers and lung disease as a result of fume inhalation.
Noise levels were rarely less than 100 decibels. In some areas over 125dB. Not surprisingly when the company was eventually required to give hearing tests, one third of the workers were found to be suffering from it, Including myself who religiously wore ear protection. Most likely the result of perhaps a couple of shifts or part of shifts, like many of my work mates, when I didn’t stuff cotton wool in my ears – the only protection available in the first years. I suffered the consequences with Tinnitus ever since. Continue reading →
The article in the Guardian today reports how angry Anna Soubry is for being excluded as the PV campaign’s preferred candidate in her constituency of Broxtowe.
She is quoted “What are they going to do in Broxtowe? The People’s Vote campaign have to get behind the people who launched the idea of a people’s vote. We were making the case in the face of total derision from some people who are now on board.”…
The article continues “Organisers acknowledge that there will be hard cases in which “brutal” decisions will have to be taken” Poor old Soubz.
[PLEASE NOTE, THE PV CAMPAIGN IS DISTINCT FROM THE CONCEPT OF A PEOPLES VOTE, OR FINAL SAY REFERENDUM. I SUPPORT THE SECOND NOT THE FIRST.]
So which way should Remain voters vote? Sure, lots of voters are confused about where Labour stands on the issue of Brexit. It took a lot of time explaining to MPs and candidates that hiding from the racist backlash within the Brexit movement was not the way forward. Some Labour MPs and candidates still stupidly refuse to personally call for a final say referendum. Continue reading →
There are two surprising things about Rudd’s resignation and the response of other business Tories sacked by Johnson.
The first is her and their complete lack of fight to save their party. They are just giving up – they appear as petulant as the leader they leave behind.
The second thing is how coy they are about their ambitions. It is as if they have never been politicians. “Nah, just not that interested”.
At this time, at this place they become apathetic? I’m sorry, I just don’t believe it.
The only sense I can make of it is that something is afoot. Continue reading →
Yesterday Chief Executive, de facto ruler of Hong Kong said she was considering using Emergency Regulations –
Hong Kong’s emergency powers are viciously totalitarian.
They are a remnant of HK’s colonised past – last used against ‘Cultural Revolution’ Maoists in 1967. They could be a stepping-stone into potential HK absorption into the China regime.
Many protestors expect invocation of Emergency Regulations soon and there are no end of tweets with the hashtag #HKlastwords. They expect the total closure of the Internet and their own arrest facing life imprisonment or extradition to China to face worse.
At the same time the police banned the more radical trade union federation, the CTU, holding a rally. The implications for CTU affiliated workers who work at the target of the protest – Cathay Pacific airline who have sacked 20 democrats – are extreme. They would face immediate dismissal.
The rally has been relocated but may still face legal harassment.
Hong Kong teachers, one of the most militant sections of HK workers and also affiliated to the CTU, are being named as trouble-makers by the People’s Daily of the Chinese regime. They are clearly targeted for arrest.
I think Carrie Lam is making threats on Emergency Powers that she may not be able to deliver. She doesn’t have sufficient forces of repression to enforce the totalitarian elements of the emergency powers.
The Chinese regime is known to be divided between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ regarding Hong Kong. If Beijing sends their army in, it will massively damage not only the Hong Kong economy but that of the whole of China.
The protestors need to stick to their demands, refuse to be intimidated and seek out additional and alternative working class methods of struggle; strikes, defiance built in working class neighbourhoods etc.
However the Hong Kong trade unions are still new. Unlike the South African trade unions during the dying days of apartheid that were modeled on the Lula-led Brazilian unions, the Hong Kong ones are modeled on British unions of the post-Thatcher era. Focusing almost exclusively on workplace bargaining. There is no history of them organising united working class political struggle.
They need to learn fast. A successful fight for democracy in Hong Kong needs them.
And new layers of working class activists are getting involved.
The situation is getting increasingly tense in Hong Kong. To the fury of the Hong Kong people their Chief Executive and de facto ruler, Carrie Lam has given no concessions to the protest movement. She is seen as the direct and transparent agent of the Chinese Communist Party leaders back in Beijing whose support she needs to stay in her position. She has been unable even to respond to questions from the press, when any answers might go beyond her latest briefing from Beijing.
The protest movement
On the other hand, the protests get ever stronger and more numerous. At the latest demo on August 18, 1.7 million came out despite torrential rain. It was called by the broad coalition, the Civil Human Rights Front. One of whose demonstrations in the past exceeded 2 million – when it had not faced such bad weather.
These figures are about 1 in 4 of the entire Hong Kong population and in between these mass demonstrations, there have been more than a hundred other demos.
Generally more militant than and frequently defying police bans and attacks, these protests have still organised hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong people. The core of these demonstrations are generally designated ‘protestors’, often distinguished from ‘residents’. Their protests have increased in frequency and militancy over the last three months. Continue reading →
Paul Mason, one of the most influential journalists and writers on the pro-Corbyn left, has recently called for Labour to embrace the tradition of popular fronts to oppose the ramping up of right wing nationalism that is threatened by Johnson and his Brexit. He argues that ‘a progressive pact with Greens and Lib Dems is … (Labour’s) only option’.
Mason was the first of the more avowedly pro-Corbyn journalists to demolish the pretence that there was a potentially left-wing Brexit that could be negotiated. He preceded by many months other similar journalists such as Owen Jones, Ash Sarkar and Matt Zarb-Cousins who have recently come to that position. For months he continually punctured the myths that Brexit was in any way an essential feature of working class consciousness. He attacked the delusion that that there were ‘Labour heartlands’ of ‘traditional’ supporters – conveniently defined by Lexiters as not including migrant workers, precarious workers, many BAME workers, those in education or anywhere else that challenged their assumption that ‘the workers were for Brexit’.
Those of us in the anti-Brexit left, such as Another Europe Is Possible, who have been making similar arguments for about 18 months and the more recent Labour for a Socialist Europe have a lot to be thankful to Paul for.
However Paul’s advocacy of popular frontism embraces strategies that will not strengthen our fight against the rise of the new right but weaken it practically and ideologically.
We have a problem
The alarm bells that Paul rings are genuine and a great many activists will share his concern that there is real risk of the UK being ‘ruled by a faction of elite Tories who have abandoned their moral and intellectual dividing lines with the far right’. In the face of this, those dominant in the Labour Party leadership seem almost to be in a semi-comatose state. Continue reading →
Made at protest in Nottingham on Monday, 22nd July
50 of us in Nottingham came back on Saturday from Another Europe Is Possible’s protest in London. On this occasion 100,000 people marched under the No to Boris, No to Brexit call. The two cannot be separated.
Johnson is where he is now because of the demand from Tory members for a new party, significantly worse than any Tory Party before.
There was a time when the Tories used to promote themselves as the professionals in running capitalism. Some people, including workers voted for them because they thought they knew how to run the economy in alliance with their big business friends.
We now have a Tory Party that models itself on UKIP and hopes to pull the Brexit Party into it. Continue reading →
Observations from a Third Camp perspective 