This issue centres on the racist riots that convulsed Britain in early August, and the creditable response by the left in Britain. Both lead articles analyse the events from different angles, with the back-page lead focusing in more detail on the events themselves and the government’s attitude. It notes the racism and anti-migrant chauvinism which successive British governments, Labour and Tory, have promoted for many years, which provided the background to the eruption of violent racism, and the economic decline and decay which provides its economic basis. It touches upon the question of who funds the far right in Britain today, noting the Zionist interest and influence in promoting Islamophobia and targeting the Muslim population.
The other lead article goes into this more, noting the lack of any real political distance between the government and the far-right rioters, that both support the genocidal war being waged by Israel in Gaza, though in the case of the government they are now trying to cover their tracks with fake ‘peace’ gestures. It notes that both the government and the far right have a common interest in punishing the Muslim population for their role in the mass movement against the genocide, which is now spreading to the West Bank. Starmer may may punish rioters and jail the most ardent and violent, but at the same time they agree in targeting and persecuting the left and oppressed minorities. It was not the Labour government and the cops that defeated the planned and announced mass pogrom on August 9th – it was the left and anti-racist activists acting completely independently who out-mobilised the fascists by a ratio of sometimes hundreds to one and stopped this horror from materialising. This inflicted a serious tactical defeat on the fascists, for now at least.
Though the left, the trade unions and the labour movement need to create our own military organisations – we cannot trust the police and the racist Starmer government to deal with far-right thugs.
Other articles in this issue include a detailed programmatic analysis of the political roots of right-wing populism in the current state of decline of US hegemony and the inability of the imperialist bourgeoisie to break with the nation-state, an institution that is palpably obsolete. However, the bourgeoisie is bound to it, and when capitalist logic appears to point beyond it, we see the eruption of major factional wars within the ruling class between right-wing populists, on the one hand, and supposed ‘globalists’ on the other.
We also have a statement that was earlier agreed by our international organisation, the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International, and the ClassConscious trend in the US and Australia, on the apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump in July. This deals with the palpable threat of Civil War in the US. It is accompanied by an introduction by the Consistent Democrats noting what has happened since – the enforced retirement of Joe Biden from the Presidential election and the seeming rise of Vice President Kamala Harris to a stronger position in the contest with Trump.
It notes that even a Harris victory would not necessarily remove the threat of civil war, for what is driving much of it is the fear and hatred of ruling class white supremacists of the prospect of whites no longer being the majority population in the US, a change that is approaching. Egged on by Zionists who see Trump as their most fervent supporter. An entirely legitimate victory of the non-white Harris could easy precipitate an attempted overthrow. And though we abhor the Democratic Party and would not consider voting for this arch-imperialist party or especially this administration with its support for genocide in Gaza, we would advocate that the labour movement mobilise form a united front mobilisation, and in fact a military united front, to defeat any such attempt to impose Trump by such a coup.
Finally, we have a short piece noting the need for a new working-class party, addressing some of the problems involved in seeing George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain as qualified to take on that role. It is nowhere near as clear cut as that, as the article argues.
This article is being written on the 23rd August, which coincides with the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. It was on the 23rd August 1791, that enslaved people on the island of Saint Domingue (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) rose up against French colonial rule. The uprising played a crucial role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. A slave trade that ravaged the continent of Africa with around 15 million Africans of their sons and daughters enslaved and shipped across the Atlantic to the colonised ‘new world’. Around 2 million died in the middle passage, finding themselves thrown overboard to feed fish. Between 1640 and 1807, British ships transported about 3.4 million Africans across the Atlantic to create wealth for British capitalists.
Toussaint Louverture, leaader of the Haitian Revoluton and Great Slave Revolt of 1791
Capitalism and its evil twin imperialism is responsible for war, oppression, and environmental destruction on a huge scale, holding the world to ransom and the potential collapse of the biosphere. European nations and their bastard children, the Anglo-Saxon colonies of the US, Canada, and Australia preach their advanced civilised enlightened state with claims of moral superiority, their shouts of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” as they act as the world’s police forces. In reality their colonisation and slavery have not ended but taken on a new respectful phase in oppressing the Global South with ‘trade and funding deals’, allowing corporate exploitation of the extraction of resources, leaving a wake of pollution and poverty behind, and when that fails should the natives resist, regime change, or the raining down of bombs.
Nothing epitomises this more of the value of white corporate individuals over their less worthy poor brown counterparts than the recent sinking of the luxury super yacht, Bayesian, when it capsized off the coast of Sicily in the Mediterranean. The Morgan Stanley International chair, Jonathan Bloomer, and UK tech entrepreneur, Mike Lynch, were among six people unaccounted for, with wall-to-wall coverage in the media and a well organised search and rescue attempt provided. Contrast this with around the deaths of 25,000 refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean to safety. The reality is that European lives matter, others less so. Not all lives are equal. Europe is more than willing to accept this as it pays Turkey to act as its gatekeeper. Where is the outcry in the press or on the TV channels? Where is the public outcry? Where are the protests? The only guaranteed response from governments is to administer further restrictions on those seeking asylum – even making it a criminal offence to assist refugees, even saving lives at sea, which is a legal obligation under international law.
The recent riots in Britain were attributed to an explosion of racism directed towards refugees and migrants. Responsibility for this is due to the demonisation of Muslims, refugees, and migrants, carried out by successive governments. As the embers from the flames of unrest still smoulder, instead of reflection Starmer’s response has been to act tough on asylum, the victims themselves of the recent riots. His attack dog, the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, has just announced a new ‘major surge’ in deportations of asylum seekers with the re-opening of two more detention centres and a promise to achieve the highest rate of removals since 2018. Detention centres are another name for prisons to place those already fleeing persecution, all designed to deter those seeking asylum. Being held in these places impacts on an individual’s mental health, sometimes leading to suicide. The UK has one of the biggest detention centres in Europe, near Heathrow airport. It is also the only European country without a maximum limit on the length of time an individual can be detained. Research has shown that asylum seekers are five times more likely to have mental health needs than the general population with 61% experiencing severe mental distress.
So much for our civilised nature and tolerant nation. But this should come as no surprise, Labour has declared its neoliberal intent and drawn its line in the sand. Its removal of the winter fuel allowance for over 10 million pensioners, while at the same time allowing energy companies who are making record breaking profits to raise energy prices by 10% later this year shows the utter contempt it has for its own citizens. Why should it care about anyone else? This is how capitalism views human beings, nothing more than a commodity whose labour is to be exploited while also being encouraged to consume and feed the system. When that productive cycle comes to an end, the parasitic nature of the capitalist system is to spit the person out onto the scrapheap to fend for themselves.
The othering and demonisation of refugees, migrants, and especially Muslims, is designed to distract attention from domestic policies but it also importantly feeds into Britain’s war narrative as well as. They are entwined. A clear example of this is how white refugees from Ukraine were immediately given sanctuary against the racist back drop of Russophobia and how these refugees were ‘just like us’, Europeans with descriptions of ‘blond hair and blue eyes’. This allowed the clamour for war against Russia in Ukraine. Contrast that with the Palestinians now facing slaughter with an ongoing genocide sanctioned by Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin. Where are the safe routes for brown Muslims trapped in Gaza being bombed with our bombs? Why? Because they are our bombs raining down. Where is the outrage against this other than through the sanitised demonstrations taking place on the streets in London. Demonstrations organised by Stop the War and the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign with the full co-operation with the institutionally racist Metropolitan Police to ensure that it doesn’t impact upon anyone. Permission granted by the authorities to object against our imperialist war with set times and set routes on set dates, anything outside of this is open to arrest.
Palestine Solidarity march in London agasint Gaza genocide, April 2024
The truth is that now not only is colonisation taking place elsewhere but that we ourselves are also being colonised. As individuals we are being stripped of our humanity, we are allowing ourselves to be conditioned to accept anything and everything being put before us as ‘truth’. We allow ourselves to yield, to become hypnotised, and act robotically to seamlessly slide into the capitalist system, to become validated by being told of our productiveness as if there is no other system to satisfy our needs. In this we have become desensitised to the suffering of others or to the complete destruction of our environment, which not only sustains us but also alongside all other life on this planet. We conveniently divert our gaze from uncomfortable truths; we see the footage coming out of Gaza of children torn limb from limb, mothers wailing that their children are buried underneath collapsed buildings. But these atrocities do nothing to wake us from our slumber. Anyone not having their conscience pricked and feeling anything but rage is just as complicit as those that drop the bombs killing children. We are complicit with our tax dollars going towards this murder. War and environmental destruction are signs that the system is broken, a system that places profit over people with profit central to imperialist greed. We as individuals are broken.
Israel’s ongoing destruction of the Palestinian population did not start on October the 7th 2023, it started in 1947-48 and has been ongoing in our name ever since. Israel is nothing but a settler colonial state, while not in the classic sense of having a mother country, it has several mother countries; those predominately being Europe and the US, particularly the former who not only saw a way out of their ‘Jewish problem’ but through collective guilt at their own appalling history of ‘Jewish hate’. Those that were going to pay for European antisemitism and the Holocaust were to be the brown Palestinians. It didn’t matter, it created opportunities, namely a European state planted right in the middle of a ‘barbaric Muslim’ Middle East, providing the colonisers and their backers a strategic foothold and undue influence in an area in abundance with black gold.
October 7th and ‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ is described as another Jewish Holocaust to justify the massacre of Gaza. It plays on the European psyche and how Europe facilitated the Nazis leading to the murder of 6 million Jews. It uses the memory of those massacred to facilitate its own massacre. Those colonised have had to face atrocity after atrocity directed towards them in the name of Jewish supremacy for decades. The massacres of civilians, the incarceration of adults and children without charge or trial, often with torture, the deliberate targeting of children by snipers, and expulsion from and the demolition of homes, are everyday occurrences for Palestinians. The brutality meted out towards the Palestinians from the pariah Zionist state’s occupation forces and its backers in the US and Europe have stripped the Palestinians of their humanity. Trying to reason with colonists on a humane political level has never worked, it just returns with more violence from an occupier that sees it as a sign of weakness. Stripped naked with constant violence the oppressed eventually come to a realisation of their own power and what it is to be human by uprising. This is what happened on October 7th. They have nothing left but to rise faced with almost certain death and the death of their children.
How dare these oppressor nations talk of being civilised when using bombs dropped from advanced jets to silence the oppressed, or talk of the crime of rape when Palestinian detainees are being filmed by their captors as they are raped, or talk of children being beheaded when decapitated babies are being brought out from underneath rubble as occupation forces blow up buildings and laugh about their exploits on social media. All this under the watchful eye of the West with full material and political support. The Palestinians and Muslims in general have been reduced to zoological terms, described as ‘animals’ or ‘swarm’, even ‘cockroaches’ by those justifying this murder. How do we expect those being oppressed to find themselves and react? The only option open is to meet violent colonisation with violent resistance. Those that advocate non-violence are just as bad as those that avert their gaze. There is no option for non-violence, it has been removed as any option by their captors. The truth is that as Israel looks into the mirror it sees its own reflection. The occupation has made this resistance and its turn towards violence. When their colonial masters elevate violence as being necessary to keep order, provide safety, or economic and national stability, then it’s obvious that the Palestinians will view the same to be necessary.
For too long this oppression has been camouflaged with talk of ‘Jewish safety’ and a ‘Jewish home’, terrorism, and a two-state solution. Many on the left have facilitated this crime by raising similar concerns while ignoring a simple fact, a brutal planted coloniser and those being colonised and removed from their land. These same leftists have become nothing but mouthpieces for imperialism. Why should a ‘diaspora’ who have had no connection to a land for 2,000 years, except through religious scripture, have precedence over an indigenous population who have land titles and ties to the land running through generations? Why do modern-day Jews have a manufactured ‘right of return’ when those being dispossessed do not? How can Jews that now identify with their state of Israel claim to be unsafe when safe with dual nationality in nations that manufacture an antisemitism crisis to create a hierarchy of racism to afford privilege? How can one right of ‘self-determination’ and removal from ‘oppression’ be granted while removing others from theirs. This is the hypocrisy of the West.
Mass grave of genocide victims in Gaza
The reality is that the conditions on the ground in Palestine with Gaza destroyed and the Gazan population with nowhere to go, alongside with the annexation of east Jerusalem and the West Bank, it no longer allows for a viable Palestinian state alongside their murderous neighbour. Particularly one that has no intention of allowing it. The only option is a one-state solution. This presents problems for the coloniser, it undermines the demographic superiority of their state. Ultimately, it is for those that are occupied to decide what this one state looks like, not the occupiers. Where has history allowed the occupier to decide the terms of independence of the occupied and what sort of anti-imperialists are we should we argue against this? In the meantime, the Palestinians get to decide what their resistance looks like and what form it takes to shake off their chains. The West have no authority to moralise given their own bankruptcy.
This conflict and the bravery and resilience of the Palestinians, alongside the slide into fascism of the Israeli state will be Israel’s own undoing. It is eating itself from within as it becomes clear that oppression of the indigenous population is not leading towards ‘Jewish safety’ or solving its Palestinian problem. The drive religiously rightwards in Israel is creating political divisions, domestic unrest on the streets, increasing international ostracization, and its economic destruction. Only its Western backers are keeping Israel afloat, a West that that requires its own culture wars targeting refugees and Muslims as part of the wider ‘clash of civilisations’ pantomime to enable support for genocide.
It was no coincidence that Netanyahu said in address to the US Congress “We meet today at a crossroads of history. Our world is in upheaval. In the Middle East, Iran’s axis of terror confronts America, Israel and our Arab friends. This is not a clash of civilizations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life. For the forces of civilization to triumph, America and Israel must stand together. Because when we stand together, something very simple happens. We win. They lose.” This is a call for a wider imperialist war in the region, divide the Muslim world, and justify more aid to its chronically and psychologically ill colonial partner. They talk of barbarism. This is the language of racism. Victory to the resistance and the Palestinian struggle.
This is the text of the presentation today at our forum on August’s Attempted Fascist Pogrom, and the Left’s Successful Resistance.
The presentation and extensive discussion can also be listened to as a podcast here.
Genocidaire Starmer (above) endorsed Israeli blockade of Gaza for food, water and fuel. (below) Palestinian child dying of starvation in Gaza.
Even from afar, it was obvious that the recent wave of anti-immigrant race-riots, which were in fact an attempted nationwide pogrom, was not beaten-back by Starmer and his pro-Zionist, genocide-supporting/genocide-denying government. The problem is that however many police they sent out to supposedly ‘deal with’ those who were trying to burn down Mosques in early August, they were bound to be ineffective. Why? Because the government fundamentally agreed with the rioters. As David Miller has pointed out, the leading figures who incited the riots are in effect Israeli agents. Particularly Yaxley-Lennon, the most prominent British fascist, whose political projects have been funded by Israel, through various covert channels for many years, and who has been proudly photographed with the Israeli army, riding on tanks, etc. The motive for the attacks on Muslims is retribution and intimidation of a community that has been pivotal in building the mass movement in solidarity with the victims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
However much the government tries to evade the point, Starmer clearly supported the genocidal actions of Israel when in an interview with Nick Ferrari of LBC on 11th October 2023, he justified Yoav Gallant’s stated intention to deprive Gaza’s “human animals” (Gallant’s words) of food, water and power. That was Starmer’s real position. Everything he says now is evasion dictated by fear of political discredit or even possible prosecution for providing political support for the crime of genocide that the International Court of Justice, considered ‘plausible’ in January. The atrocities since make it a lot more than merely ‘plausible’. As he stood to be Labour leader in 2020, Starmer made a point of stating that he supported Zionism “without qualification”. And the Labour Zionists who funded him abhor the mass movement in solidarity with Palestine just as much as the far-right thugs like Yaxley do. Though they prefer state repression, Prevent and lies about ‘anti-Semitism’ to burning down Mosques. Not a good look.
And there is the smear campaign against the grouping of independent Muslim left-wing MPs who defeated New Labour in the General Election, bizarrely accusing them of ‘intimidation’ when in fact they clearly won the popular vote. The implication being that the population don’t have the right to vote out Zionist thugs and liars. That is a clear coincidence of interest between the Starmer government and the Zio-fascists.
Another manifestation of the Starmer regime’s affinity with the far right is its support for Maidan Ukraine, which is basically run by Nazis for the benefit of US imperialism. It also has a genocidal policy, of seeking to eliminate the Russian-speaking population of Donbass, the South-Eastern part of Ukraine, and the overwhelmingly Russian population of Crimea. The evidence of Nazi domination in Ukraine is overwhelming. Even the Jewish president of Ukraine, Zelensky, who was groomed by US imperialism precisely to try to camouflage the Nazi domination of Ukraine, was filmed leading a standing ovation in the Canadian parliament for a 98-year old veteran of Hitler’s SS. Zelensky is a Zionist: part of an increasingly common phenomena of Zionist Jews willing to forgive the Nazi holocaust of Jews as long as Nazis direct their genocidal proclivities against their enemies today – Arabs, Muslims and Russians. Support for Nazi Ukraine and its supposed fight for ‘freedom’ against the Russian population native to its own country – it literally is the case that they want rid of that ‘unwanted’ population – is a point of honour for Starmer and New Labour.
Not that the Starmerites won’t throw a certain number of fascist lumpens into jail for fighting the cops. Not that some of them won’t get severe sentences and lose a lot. That’s a given. That’s what happens to overtly criminal elements who brazenly defy the police when they involve themselves in behaviour that the ruling class finds inconvenient. They get more than just a slap on the wrist. A certain number will get 10-year sentences for riot. Quite a few already have. The rise of this racist lumpenism is a product of neoliberalism, deindustrialisation and the shrinkage of the working class resulting from that. New Labour offers no relief from that economic suffering, no strategy, just more of the same. The bourgeois media works overtime to incite such lumpen layers against ‘foreigners’ to make sure they don’t revolt against capitalism itself.
This government shares many of the hatreds and bigotries of the rioters. They too want to punish refugees and migrants. They too think that Muslims should be forced to shut up about the oppression and persecution they are suffering from so often, in Britain, today. In particular, the government want to silence blacks, Muslims, and other oppressed groups who are inclined to show solidarity with the Palestinians and have been marching for 10 months against the brutal Zionist mass murder of the people of Gaza. Along with the left, who they have wilfully driven out of the Labour Party by the hundreds of thousands to prove their ‘fitness to rule’ to the billionaire capitalist class and the Zionists. In that, they agree with the likes of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, with the provocateur Andrew Tate, with Laurence Fox, with Trump and Farage, and all the other criminal far right elements who incited these racist riots.
On 29th July a terrible triple murder of three young girls in Southport, and wounding of several other small children, apparently by a deranged, British-born teenager, was extensively lied about on social media by this fascist scum and attributed to a completely fictional Muslim refugee. Over the following week or more there were terrible attacks on migrants all over the country, mosques were attacked in attempted arson attacks. Hotels, reputed to be accommodating refugees, were also subject to arson attacks. Non-whites were physically attacked in the street by groups of racists. In Manchester a black man was challenged whether had a “problem” with “us English” – before being violently attacked. An Asian man was brutally attacked in Hartlepool simply for walking down a street that had been taken over by a mob of racist thugs. In Middlesborough, fascist ‘rioters’ set up ‘checkpoints’ on some streets to make sure that drivers were ‘white and English’ – with the threat of violence and even murder against anyone who is not. In many places these thugs fought pitched battles with the police, who in some situations were the only thing standing in the way of members of racial minorities being brutally attacked and even murdered.
On 7th August there was a call to attack Mosques, hotels being used to house refugees, lawyers who defend migrants, and other targets related to Muslims and various migrant communities. Right across the country. A British version of Kristallnacht, the massive Nazi pogrom in 1938 that laid the basis for the Nazi holocaust. The likes of Yaxley and Farage would love such a pogrom in Britain. But it never happened. And it is no thanks to Starmer that it did not happen.
What stopped it was mass demonstrations across Britain organised at short notice by the anti-racist left. The SWP’s ‘Stand Up to Racism’ front was one major locus of this organisation, but far from the only one. The many left independent campaigns that fought so valiantly in the General Election, returning five independent MP’s, along with several more near misses where the vilest Zionist racists in New Labour were challenged and came close to defeat, also threw their mass base in into the effort. From Walthamstow in East London, to Brighton, to Liverpool, Sheffield, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle and more, thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, turned out to demonstrate against the fascists, to defend the Muslim communities and in support of migrants. They massively outnumbered the miserable groups of neo-Nazis who turned out. In several places small groups of fascists were massively outnumbered by anti-fascist, anti-racist demonstrators. These thugs, who were previously in fights with the cops over their supposed ‘right’ to attack minorities, suddenly had to be rescued by the same cops from huge crowds of angry anti-fascists who would have made mincemeat out of them.
This was a major tactical defeat for the fascists. And neither the government, nor the police, had anything to do with it. In fact, Keir Starmer, our non-esteemed Prime Minister, attempted to ban Labour MP’s from taking part in anti-fascist demonstrations. One prominent black Labour MP who refused to abide by this and spoke publicly at an anti-fascist demonstration in Norwich, is Clive Lewis. Unlike in the case of the 7 MP’s who had the Labour whip removed for defying him over the two-child benefit cap, Starmer has not dared to do the same to him. Which mirrors what happened with Diane Abbott in the General Election, where Starmer was forced to reinstate the whip to her after attempting to purge her for the sacrilege of publicly doubting if Jews today suffer from systematic racist oppression, as is true for non-whites. Starmer fears taking on the black community at the same time as he is waging war against Muslims.
The forces of the state did not drive back the fascists, nor did the government. Stiff sentences for some of these far-right rioters are just a fig leaf to hide the government’s inaction and refusal to mobilise politically against the far right. Because the Starmer government agrees with the far right on so many things. That is why it ran in the General Election, and for the last few years, as a flag-shagging, Union Jack-laden party advertising its ‘patriotism’ in a manner strongly reminiscent of the way Donald Trump in the US wraps his campaigns with the bloody Stars and Stripes. This symbolises its adherence to the anti-migrant creed of the Tory and Reform Brexiters.
Prior to the 2019 General Election Starmer cynically manipulated the sentiments of many in the Labour Party – including most Corbynites – who opposed Brexit, not out of any faith in the capitalist-neoliberal bloc that the EU represents, but simply because of its anti-migrant thrust. He put forward a proposal for a second referendum with ‘remain’ on the ballot paper in 2019, and called for the reversal of Brexit, simply to sabotage Labour’s election prospects under Corbyn. It is worth noting that in 2017, Corbyn tactically accepted the narrow result of the Brexit referendum and campaigned for a soft Brexit maintaining the rights of EU workers, coming close to winning the General Election, robbing the Tories of their majority. Starmer’s policy destroyed that, by a brazen demand to overrule a previous popular vote before it had been implemented. It acted as rocket fuel to propel Boris Johnson into Downing Street. But the real motive was to destroy the leadership of Corbyn, because of its modest programme of social democratic reforms, which the boss-class will not tolerate, and his relatively weak, but real, criticism of Israel and support for the Palestinians.
Hence, we have a neoliberal, Zionist government that is carrying on with the austerity that characterised the Tories. It is determined to keep the two-child benefit cap which is a major driver of terrible child poverty. It has now removed the winter fuel payment for all but the poorest pensioners, those on pension credit. This while the supposed fuel-price cap goes up. This will cause thousands of pensioners to die because of the cold in the coming winter, even Labour MPs are warning. This is taking money straight out of the mouths of pensioners in the UK, who have the worst pensions in Europe, and sending the savings to fund Zionism and Ukrainian Nazism. Like Boris Johnson, they want the bodies of pensioners to ‘pile high’ so they can fund their far-right cohorts in Israel and Ukraine.
Expecting this anti-working class, racist government to do anything to deal with the threat of racist violence is a forlorn hope. Their ‘law and order’ will inevitably be used to attack those resisting far right violence. Like the scandalous arrest, and suspension from Labour, of black councillor Ricky Jones from Walthamstow, who called for the Nazi terrorists then rampaging and terrorising minorities across the country, to be executed by throat cutting. However crudely expressed, this is a completely understandable, emotional response to large-scale racist terrorism. The fear that this attempted pogrom caused among minority communities is enormous. Such responses are natural. It would be perfectly reasonable for a left-wing government, for instance, faced with such attempted mass pogroms, to resort to summary execution of the worst participants. The idea that minorities can rely on the police to defend them against such a systematic attack is a joke. Everyone knows that the police themselves persecute and abuse ethnic minorities, and often turn a blind eye to racist crimes. The list of scandals goes back many decades, in fact centuries. In fact, if the mass demonstrations that Ricky Jones participated in had not happened, the far right would have won.
This needs to be systematised, with the creation of independent working-class militias, centred on the trade unions, with the social muscle of organised workers behind them and their capacity to cripple the capitalist economy if the state tries to crush and outlaw such defence. The pro-capitalist trade union bureaucracy that blocks such things needs to be politically defeated. That is the way to defeat fascist terrorism. This would have the effect of breaking the bourgeois state’s monopoly of organised violence. Revolutionaries in Russia used these tactics to deal with the fascist Black Hundreds.
In tandem with independent working-class action against the fascists, we need working class resistance against austerity. We need political strikes against the attacks on pensioners. We need a general strike against renewed austerity. This has the potential to unite the whole working class, as in the end, we are all destined to be pensioners. Uniting all such battles and struggles, we need to crystallise a real mass party of the working class. Such a party would not see its role as passively standing in elections, but rather using elections as a platform to garner and mobilise resistance in struggle.
Ultimately, we need to unite the many left-wing trends that have emerged from the Corbyn movement over the last several years in a project to create a broad, genuinely working-class party that can develop politically beyond social democracy, and fight for these things. This is the purpose of our involvement in the Socialist Labour Network, to try to create the conditions for such unity and political development. Our perspective should not be one of fighting for a reformist, parliamentary government that can fill in gaps while the Tories recover from their crisis. Let alone a Red Tory regime like Starmer’s. Our perspective should be to fight for a workers’ government, based on mass organisations of the working class.
Jeremy Corbyn, newly elected Independent MP for Islington North, lambasts Starmer at Palestine Solidarity demo on 6 July
This is the text of the presentation today at our forum on the result of the General Election on July 4th.
The presentation and extensive discussion can also be listened to as a podcast here.
The headlines of our leaflet read:
“Starmer’s Regime has NO MANDATE for its Genocidal Neoliberalism! Independent Working-Class Forces promise Challenge to Zionist New Labour.”
This talk is based on that but expanded.
Media and conventional wisdom have it that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the July 2024 General Election by a ‘landslide’, with its overall majority of 174, and therefore has a strong mandate to rule, having supposedly ‘changed’ the Labour Party to make it ‘fit to govern’ by driving out the ‘unelectable’ Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing followers.
But the ‘landslide’ is a myth. Starmer got fewer votes absolutely than Corbyn’s Labour got in in the General Election of December 2019, which Labour lost by a considerable margin in terms of seats, producing an overall majority for Johnson’s Tories of 80. The Corbyn-led Labour Party got 10.29 million votes in 2019, whereas Starmer’s tally is well below 10 million. In percentage terms, Starmer’s Labour has 33.8%, not much higher than under Corbyn in 2019 (32.1%).
This is not the product of a surge of votes for Starmer’s Labour, but a much lower turnout, only 59.9%, the lowest since 2001. Caused by the well-known similarity between the main parties – “two cheeks of the same backside” as George Galloway put it. Over 19.5 million eligible voters did not vote. It is the undemocratic ‘First Past the Post’ electoral system yet again that produced this anomaly. In this case it was fuelled by the splintering and near–disintegration of the Tories. This has nothing to with any ‘achievements’ of Keir Starmer’s leadership, which is characterised by many of the same odious neoliberal, chauvinist and Zionist vices as the Tories.
In 2017, in a General Election that took on the character of a class confrontation between the Tories led by Theresa May and a resurgent left-led Labour Party led by Corbyn, Labour got 12.87 million votes and 40% of the vote. The Tories got only slightly more, and the result was a hung parliament where the Tories were forced to rely on the very right-wing Democratic Unionists in the North of Ireland to get their measures approved in parliament.
But in 2024 Starmer won precisely because the Labour vote was NOT a class vote, by virtue of the anti-democratic electoral system and the splintering and collapse of the Tories. Reform played a similar role in screwing the Tories as the Social Democratic Party did with Labour in the 1983 election. Though that was not as extreme a manifestation as today’s result, as in 1983, Thatcher’s Tories got nearly 44% of the vote – a genuine landslide.
Since the election Sunak announced his resignation. A leadership election process for the Tories has begun. Farage’s Reform Party is hopeful of either replacing, or taking over the Tories for a more consistent, xenophobic far right type of politics. More on this later.
Starmer today actually achieved a bigger majority than Thatcher with only 33%. Blair in 1997 got a slightly larger majority than Starmer, but he won 43.3% of the vote. That was also a genuine landslide, whereas this is not at all. Starmer has no real mandate. He will be a weak and likely vicious PM. Even before he took office, a warning sign was decision of the police to refuse to allow the Palestine Solidarity movement to march on July 6th in Parliament Square and Whitehall. The police by then knew full well that the Tories were finished and it’s obvious that they would consult and take note of the views of the Zionist clique around Starmer in deciding what would be allowed. This is a sign of weakness, not strength from Starmer. His party is likely to generate rebellions on the backbenches precisely because of that lack of a solid mandate. This will not be a stable government.
Jeremy Corbyn’s overwhelming victory in Islington North is a considerable political blow to Starmer and will damage his authority right from the start. Starmer brazenly ran a candidate who is involved in private healthcare and who spoke publicly about the ‘importance’ of healthcare privatisation. A serious threat from the new regime since its designated Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is also an evangelist for private healthcare.
The victory of Shockat Adam over would-be cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South is a wonderful blow to the Labour Zionists. Shockat made Gaza a big element of his campaign. The same is true of the victory of Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr, who took the seat of the neocon Zionist stooge Khalid Mahmoud, who has even served on the Council of the neocon arch-Zionist Henry Jackson Society.
Iqbal Mohammed, Newly Elected Independent MP for Dewsbury and Batley, West Yorkshire
Iqbal Mohammad, is a former Labour member who quit the party over Starmer’s endorsement of Yoav Gallant’s call for the deprivation of food, fuel and water to the population of Gaza (described by Gallant as ‘human animals’). He defeated the Labour candidate, Heather Iqbal, getting 41% of the vote to her 23%. A massive victory.
Then there is the victory of Adnan Hussein in Blackburn. There is some controversy over this as Craig Murray, the long-time anti-war activist and prominent campaigner in the successful campaign to free Julian Assange, was standing in this seat with the support of the Workers Party of George Galloway. Another independent Muslim candidate withdrew in favour of Craig Murray, but Hussein refused to do so. Murray offered to toss a coin for the left candidacy with Hussein, but the latter indignantly refused. It transpired that though the vote was split, Labour was just about defeated anyway. There are accusations that Adnan Hussein might be a ‘spoiler’ for Labour and that he has connections with the New Labour Iraq war criminal Jack Straw. We can only hope that this is untrue: if it were true. it would be very damaging. A ‘spoiler’ phoney candidate was run against Andrew Feinstein in Starmer’s seat, though he was exposed as such during the campaign and completely marginalised.
Prominent Palestinian activist Leanne Mohammad came within 500 votes of defeating the arch-Zionist Wes Streeting in Ilford North. Jody McIntyre, Muslim and disabled activist and supporter of the Workers Party, almost unseated Jess Phillips, friend of Israel, in Birmingham Yardley, by only 693 votes. George Galloway, founder of the Workers Party of Britain, lost the Rochdale seat he won in February, but quite narrowly – by around 1500 votes. He promises to take the fight to Labour on Rochdale council.
Starmer lost a lot of votes in his own seat. 17,000 of them. Andrew Feinstein came a very good second with over 7,000 votes after a very energetic campaign that attracted activists from a wide area keen to have a go at Starmer himself. It lays down a marker for the future: Stamer will not be able to consider his own seat to be ‘safe’ in future elections.
Halima Khan in Stratford and Bow for the Workers Party – former Labour whistleblower about corruption and the activities of the Zionist lobby in Newham – came a very good third, behind Labour and the Greens. She gained ten times the vote of prominent RMT activist Steve Hedley, who mistakenly stood without any real base. Faiza Shaheen, a respected economist and the overwhelming popular choice of Labour members in Chingford and Woodford Green was banned from standing for Labour, because she criticised Islamophobia in the Labour Party. She was set to defeat Iain Duncan Smith. She rightly refused to accept this, Labour imposed a stooge candidate, and a split vote ensued that allowed IDS to retain his seat. This is entirely caused by Labour Zionism and Islamophobia.
We live in a world where social democracy has failed, and imperialist capitalism is threatening human existence both by the destruction of the biosphere and through predatory, permanent imperialist wars, of which the genocide in Gaza is the most obvious and foul manifestation. We desperately need an alternative, both here and internationally.
The left needs to create a proper party to fight under in the next period. Unlike the situation in the 2000s under Blair, now as a result of the Corbyn surge in Labour in the late 20-teens and then it’s defeat, there is a large layer of ex-Labour working class people involved in this movement. Though Labour has an awful history and record as a party controlled by a pro-imperialist bureaucracy, its party loyalty element was correct. We need to recreate the party loyalty element without the pro-imperialist bureaucracy and go beyond the weaknesses of the far left in general and the Trotskyist movement in particular.
The struggle against the far right and Farage’s semi-far-right movement, which aims to parallel the rise of Marine Le Pen, Meloni etc., is going to be a key struggle in the next period. But it is going to be inseparable from the struggle to build a new party of the working class left. Trotsky wrote in a different situation, about the counterposition of the fascists, and what the party of the working class left, the communist party, should stand for. He said that the fascists were the party of counterrevolutionary despair, whereas the communist party was the party of revolutionary hope.
We are in a somewhat different situation today. In the 1930s, there were strong, highly political working-class movements all over Europe, and fascism was a petty bourgeois and lumpen movement directly aimed at crushing them. This time round there is not a strong, highly political working-class movement. Far from it. The parallel rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and the collapse of Stalinism caused a massive weakening of the working-class movement in the imperialist countries. A qualitative weakening, which has not yet been overcome.
This rise of fascism intersects a conflict within the imperialist bourgeoisie, because in the period since the collapse of Stalinism under the unprecedented US domination, the globalising factions of the bourgeois gained unprecedented dominance. The problem is that the imperialist bourgeoisie is a national class. Although, as Lenin pointed out, the nation-state is obsolete, and the proof of that is the world war that broke out in 1914. But the war in 1914 showed that, not only is the nation-state obsolete, but the imperialist bourgeoisie cannot abolish it. Rather, it will try to ‘abolish’ it by imperialist powers attempting to conquer each other, and the rest of the globe also. And tearing apart human civilisation in the process and threatening human existence today as today’s technology is quite capable, from climate pollution to the threat of nuclear war.
Today’s right-wing populist and fascist movements derive from a backlash within the various imperialist bourgeoisies against the ‘globalising’ liberal factions of the bourgeoisie. They are not particularly aimed at the workers movement, which is qualitatively weaker, both organisationally and politically, than it was in the 1930s. However, they are aimed at migrant workers, and the workers movement has to act as the tribune of the oppressed, and therefore has a duty to defend such workers tooth and nail. There is nothing remotely ‘progressive’ about this reassertion of the ‘national’ prerogative of the various imperialist ruling classes.
Unfortunately, the populist factions have managed to convince some sections of the working-class movement that there is something positive about them. Even some left-wing sections of the workers movement have been drawn into the orbit of the populists, at least partly. Thus, we see working class support for Brexit, so-called ‘Lexit’, the most extreme example of which is George Galloway, who openly allied with Farage during the period of the Brexit referendum.
Even now, as he advocates the most courageous defiance and attacks on the imperialist bourgeoisie over its criminal support for genocide in Palestine, and its criminal, equally genocidal (in intent) proxy war in the Donbass, he still echoes the demands of the populists over so-called ‘illegal’ migration. He embodies a contradiction. He should be both hailed and congratulated for his courage over Ukraine and Gaza and taken to task for his chauvinist politics over so-called ‘illegal’ migration. For the working-class movement, no-one is illegal. Migrants, legal and ‘illegal’, are part of the working-class and oppressed.
Galloway became particularly vulnerable to such deviations when, as Britain’s most radical MP, he was brutally beaten by a Zionist in 2014, and betrayed by every member of the House of Commons bar one (including the Labour left) who failed to publicly condemn this fascist attack. He appeared to become partially disillusioned with the left after that. But this is not a mere personal foible. There are other examples.
Similar such contradictory phenomena are so-called ’MAGA-Communism’ in the United States (would be communists who support, or at least are in the political orbit of, Donald Trump). Or the left-wing politics (over Ukraine and Gaza) of Sahra Wagenknecht – very courageous in today’s Germany, and yet similar chauvinism to Galloway – her chauvinistic politics over migration. Wagenknecht has formed her own party over this, and appears to have the same mixture of courageous anti-imperialism and chauvinism as Galloway. This has partly come about as the Ukraine war has been seen particularly as a project of the ‘globalising’ faction of the bourgeoisie, with their populist opponents (Trump, Farage, the AfD, being seen to be more dubious about it).
This needs to be properly understood by the workers movement. A key text in understanding it is a 1977 essay “On Bourgeois Class-Consciousness” the then-leading Marxist intellectual figure of the Spartacist League/US, Joseph Seymour.
I would like to see us do a public forum/discussion on that soon. It would be very useful for enhancing a Marxist understanding of populism and the roots of the current growth of the far right. And re-arming the workers movement and the left, to understand this phenomenon, to gain a sense of perspective and discover how to combat it.
For this we need to advocate a unification of the anti-neoliberal, anti-imperialist left including its sizeable ex-Labour, ex-Corbynite component. Programmatic development can only come through full debate and wide-ranging education. We need an anti-racist/anti-Zionist Socialist-Communist party with full freedom of programmatic debate. Freedom of criticism, unity in action, as in the early stages of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.
Independent Working-Class Forces promise Challenge to Zionist New Labour
Top: Jeremy Corbyn, witchhunted and expelled from Labour by Starmer for belatedly defending his leadership against ‘anti-Semitism’ scam, defeated the Starmerites in his long-held Islington North seat. Bottom: Ayoub Khan, former Labour councillor and now independent MP defeated neocon Zionist Blairite Khalid Mahmood in Birmingham Perry Barr.
Media and conventional wisdom have it that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the July 2024 General Election by a ‘landslide’, with its overall majority of 171, and therefore has a strong mandate to rule, having supposedly ‘changed’ the Labour Party to make it ‘fit to govern’ by driving out the ‘unelectable’ Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing followers.
But the ‘landslide’ is a myth. Starmer got fewer votes than Corbyn’s Labour got in in the General Election of December 2019, which Labour lost by a considerable margin in terms of seats, producing an overall majority for Johnson’s Tories of 80. The Corbyn-led Labour Party got 10.29 million votes in 2019, whereas Starmer’s tally is well below 10 million. In percentage terms, Starmer’s Labour has 33.8%, not much higher than under Corbyn in 2019 (32.1%). This is not the product of a surge of votes for Starmer’s Labour, but a much lower turnout, only 60%, the lowest since 2001. Caused by the well-known similarity between the main parties – “two cheeks of the same backside” as George Galloway put it. Over 19.5 million eligible voters did not vote. Around 80% of the eligible electorate did not vote for this government.
It is the undemocratic ‘First Past the Post’ electoral system yet again that produced this anomaly. In this case it was fuelled by the splintering and near–disintegration of the Tories. This has nothing to with any achievements of Keir Starmer’s leadership, which is characterised by many of the same odious neoliberal, chauvinist and Zionist vices as the Tories.
In 2017, in a General Election that took on the character of a class confrontation between the Tories led by Theresa May and a resurgent left-led Labour Party led by Corbyn, Labour got 12.87 million votes and 40% of the vote. The Tories got only slightly more, and the result was a hung parliament where the Tories were forced to rely on the very right-wing Democratic Unionists in the North of Ireland to get their measures approved in parliament.
But in 2024 Starmer won precisely because the Labour vote was NOT a class vote, by virtue of the anti-democratic electoral system and the splintering and collapse of the Tories. Reform played a similar role in screwing the Tories as the Social Democratic Party did with Labour in the 1983 election. Though that was not as extreme a manifestation as today’s result, as in 1983, Thatcher’s Tories got nearly 44% of the vote – a genuine landslide. Starmer today actually achieved a bigger majority than Thatcher with only 33%. Blair in 1997 got a slightly larger majority than Starmer, but he won 43.3% of the vote. That was also a genuine landslide, whereas this is not at all.
Starmer has no real mandate. He will be a weak and likely vicious PM. Even before he took office, a warning sign was decision of the police to refuse to allow the Palestine Solidarity movement to march on July 6th in Parliament Square and Whitehall. The police by then knew full well that the Tories were finished and it’s obvious that they would consult and take note of the views of the Zionist clique around Starmer in deciding what would be allowed. This is a sign of weakness, not strength from Starmer. His party is likely to generate rebellions on the backbenches precisely because of that lack of a solid mandate. This will not be a stable government.
Jeremy Corbyn’s overwhelming victory in Islington North is a considerable political blow to Starmer and will damage his authority right from the start. Starmer brazenly ran a candidate who is involved in private healthcare and who spoke publicly about the ‘importance’ of healthcare privatisation. A serious threat from the new regime since its designated Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is also an evangelist for private healthcare.
The victory of Shockat Adam over would-be cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth in Leicester South is a wonderful blow to the Labour Zionists. Shockat made Gaza a big element of his campaign. The same is true of the victory of Ayoub Khan in Birmingham Perry Barr, who took the seat of the neocon Zionist stooge Khalid Mahmoud, who has even served on the Council of the neocon arch-Zionist Henry Jackson Society. Iqbal Mohammad, a former Labour member quit the party over Starmer’s endorsement of Yoav Gallant’s call for the deprivation of food, fuel and water to the population of Gaza (described by Gallant as ‘human animals’). He defeated the Labour candidate, Heather Iqbal, getting 41% of the vote to her 23%. A massive victory.
Then there is the substantial victory of Adnan Hussein in Blackburn. There is some controversy over this as Craig Murray, the long-time anti-war activist and prominent campaigner in the successful campaign to free Julian Assange, was standing in this seat with the support of the Workers Party of George Galloway. Another independent Muslim candidate withdrew in favour of Craig Murray, but Hussein refused to do so. Murray offered to toss a coin for the left candidacy with Hussein, but the latter indignantly refused. It transpired that though the vote was split, Labour was overwhelmingly defeated anyway. There are accusations that Adnan Hussein might be a ‘spoiler’ for Labour and that he has connections with the New Labour Iraq war criminal Jack Straw. We can only hope that this is untrue: if it were true. it would be very damaging. A ‘spoiler’ phoney candidate was run against Andrew Feinstein in Starmer’s seat, though he was exposed as such during the campaign and completely marginalised.
Prominent Palestinian activist Leanne Mohammad came within 500 votes of defeating the arch-Zionist Wes Streeting in Ilford North. George Galloway, founder of the Workers Party of Britain, lost the Rochdale seat he won in February, but quite narrowly – by around 1500 votes. He promises to take the fight to Labour on Rochdale council. Starmer lost a lot of votes in his own seat. 17,000 of them to Andrew Feinstein, who came a very good second after a very energetic campaign that attracted activists from a wide area keen to have a go at Starmer himself. It lays down a marker for the future: Starmer will not be able to consider his own seat to be ‘safe’ in future elections.
We live in a world where social democracy has failed, and imperialist capitalism is threatening human existence both by the destruction of the biosphere and through predatory, permanent imperialist wars, of which the genocide in Gaza is the most obvious and foul manifestation. We desperately need an alternative, both here and internationally.
The left needs to create a proper party to fight under in the next period. Unlike the situation in the 2000s under Blair, now as a result of the Corbyn surge in Labour in the late 20-teens and then it’s defeat, there is a large layer of ex-Labour working class people involved in this movement. Though Labour has an awful history and record as a party controlled by a pro-imperialist bureaucracy, its party loyalty element was correct. We need to recreate the party loyalty element without the pro-imperialist bureaucracy and go beyond the weaknesses of the far left in general and the Trotskyist movement in particular. We need an anti-racist/anti-Zionist Socialist-Communist party with full freedom of programmatic debate. Freedom of criticism, unity in action, as in the early stages of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.
(Top) Jeremy Corbyn, Leanne Mohammad, (Below) George Galloway, Andrew Feinstein
The presentation and discussion at our forum this afternoon can also be heard here as a podcast
There is no major party standing in this General Election deserving of the support of class-conscious workers, socialists, anti-racists and fighters against oppression.
The Tories and Liberal Democrats are the open parties of the ruling class, speaking abstractly.
Being more concrete, we have all experienced the brutal austerity and increasingly decrepit corruption of this gang of looters of our social gains, public services, the Health service, the rivers polluted with raw sewage, the racist thuggery and sadism … I could go on.
First the Tory-Liberal coalition for 5 years, then the Tories alone. The rise of Jeremy Corbyn was a reaction from the workers movement to Tory-Lib Dem austerity attacks.
But today’s Labour Party was forged through a massive, reactionary driving out of the left that led the party from 2015-20 under Jeremy Corbyn.
This was the one period since the miners strike when millions of working-class people thought they had a chance of winning something back, through the election of a left-wing politician with a record of fighting for workers, of opposing privatisation and attacks on the poor, of standing up to bigoty and racism, and mobilisation against imperialist wars.
The current Labour leadership, as the whole country knows, buried that. They preferred the Tories. They engineered Johnson’s victory in 2019. Labour is standing in this election as a Tory second XI as they continue to stamp on the Labour left.
Some see the Greens as a potential repository of socialist possibilities. In Germany, the Greens are part of a coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD); they are deeply implicated in support for both Israel and Nazi Ukraine.
In this country sole Green MP Caroline Lucas, has been involved in ‘cross-party’ witchhunting critics of Zionism in academia, as shown in the case of David Miller.
They cannot be trusted, their environmentalism is bourgeois and depends on ‘Green’ capitalism, not socialist planning, which is the only thing that can solve the problem of human-induced climate change. We need a working-class alternative, not a petty bourgeois party that joins in with capitalist reaction.
But the main topic of this forum is Labour.
On October 8th Israeli ‘defence’ minister Yoav Gallant made his Hitlerian speech saying that the inhabitants of Gaza are “human animals” who should be allowed “no electricity, no food, no water, no gas”.
When Starmer was interviewed shortly after, he defended Israel’s “right” to carry out these genocidal measures.
This led to a major exodus of outraged members, particularly from Muslim working-class communities, and numerous defections of councillors.
The Labour leadership is dominated by genocidal Zionists.
The scam ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against the left during the Corbyn period, was driven by the realisation by those forces that a genocide of the Palestinian people was in the offing, and politics had to be purged of sympathy for Palestinian rights.
But they have a huge problem now. This election takes place in the middle of that very genocide, that Starmer gave his support to
However much he tries to wriggle and evade now, he, and his supporters, are on the rack.
The Starmer leadership is a reversion to the politics of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and their neoliberal New Labour governments, which followed in the footsteps of Thatcher and Major.
That government, like the Tories, demanded austerity to make the working class pay for the world financial crisis of the late noughties.
The neoliberal right, which is interpenetrated with the Zionists as a matter both of history and current political reality, was horrified by the near victory of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 election.
It appears that only the sabotage of the Labour right –the funnelling of campaign funds to safe Labour seats inhabited by neoliberals and Zionists – deprived Corbyn’s Labour of being the largest party.
The shocked expressions of ‘Labour Friends of Israel’ like Jess Phillips and Stephen Kinnock when May lost her majority, said it all.
They worked overtime to sabotage Corbyn’s leadership and bring Boris Johnson to power in the 2019 election. For the bourgeois/Zionist right-wing, Johnson was the lesser evil to Corbyn.
When the anti-Semitism scam was ineffective (as was shown in 2017), Starmer manipulated the issue of Brexit to sabotage Labour.
So, the idea that Starmer and his followers are somehow a lesser evil to the Tories today is at odds with reality. They have more in common with the Tories than they do with the labour movement.
This election gives the opportunity to the left to begin to clarify that and split this bourgeois workers party along class lines. We are seeing the small beginnings of that.
There is already a substantial layer of independent socialist councillors around the country, many of whom successfully defended their seats in the council elections on May 4th.
Starmer has the party’s internal life sewn up, dissent is ruthlessly punished, and internal party elections are shamelessly rigged.
Then in February Starmer colluded with Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, another “Labour Friend of Israel”.
Hoyle broke with an element of parliamentary procedure that has a democratic content. The rule being that on a party’s “Opposition Day”, that party is allowed to put a motion, and only the government is allowed to put amendments to it.
The purpose of this is to ensure that all opposition parties get to have their say; they have the right to have their motions voted on by the house, yes or no.
Hoyle allowed Labour to put an amendment to the SNP’s motion calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
Predictably, the Labour Party was able to outvote the SNP. So, the SNP motion was amended to remove its most important demands, for a ceasefire and condemnation of “collective punishment” of Palestinian civilians in this genocide.
Which were never voted on in counter-position to the government,
Labour was afraid that if they were forced to vote on a ceasefire, they would split. But voting for something with ambiguous wording that was deliberately unclear, would not cause a problem.
So, the SNP’s right to a yes-no vote/confrontation against the government on Gaza was buried.
If the Labour Party had been forced to vote on the SNP motion versus the government, the whips would have demanded that Labour either vote with the government or abstain. Many would have rebelled.
This manoeuvre was to stop that happening.
This showed that Starmer is not just a threat to Labour members’ democratic rights, but of all who criticise Zionism.
It is comparable, in some ways, to Boris Johnson’s illegal manoeuvre to prorogue parliament in the Summer of 2019. This was a kind of coup.
And Starmer/Hoyle carried out their own mini-parliamentary coup against the SNP and any MP in their own party or any other who wanted to vote to demand a permanent ceasefire.
This is an attack on an element of parliamentarism that actually has a democratic content.
Numerous independent socialists around the country are standing against Labour, as well as several left-of-labour political organisations.
The most prominent individual is Jeremy Corbyn himself.
His exclusion from Labour, when only a few years earlier he was the leader of a massive movement against austerity, racism and imperialist war, symbolises why socialists should not be supporting the Starmer-led Labour Party.
Hundreds of thousands of people loyal to Corbyn’s leadership have been impatiently waiting for him to defy Starmer in the election.
Now he has done so, he deserves the support of all in society who have a basic working-class consciousness, along with those fighting oppression and imperialist war, crucially the attempted genocide in Gaza.
But it should be a critical support, as many of Corbyn’s own actions when he was leader, did not help to resist the reactionaries who sought to overthrow him.
Corbyn showed chronic weakness in Labour with the position that he explicitly formulated later in the witchhunt period, that both Zionists and anti-Zionists should work together in Labour.
Jon Lansman of Momentum, who admitted to being a left Zionist, was among his most influential supporters. He played a key role in undermining his leadership.
Even more to the point, Corbyn’s adherence to the view that Zionists and anti-Zionists should work together, meant that when the Zionists came after outspoken opponents of Zionist racism in the party, Corbyn turned the other cheek, which meant throwing them under the bus.
Corbyn’s appointee Jenny Formby, as General Secretary, proved more efficient at purging the pro-Palestinian left in the guise of fighting ‘anti-Semitism’, than her right-wing predecessor McNicol.
So that was disastrous weakness.
He is still at it – in the ‘Collective’ Umbrella he has initiated for this election, and his ‘Peace and Justice’ initiative, ‘left’ Zionists: Justin and Clare Schlosberg, are active.
Justin Schlossberg denounced David Miller, the militant, victimised anti-Zionist professor formerly of Bristol University, as a ‘psyop’.
David Miller who defeated Bristol University at an industrial tribunal, establishing for the first time that anti-Zionist views are a protected belief under British law.
The types are a danger to the left and Palestine supporters. It is terrible to be allying oneself with such people, particularly in these terrible circumstances. It is wrong in principle in any case.
Zionism is a key driver of racism in the Labour Party.
Diane Abbot, the first black woman MP, was deprived of the Labour whip based on phoney allegations of anti-Semitism, driven by Zionists. Par for the course.
Abbott and her supporters appear to have forced Starmer to reinstate her as a Labour candidate. It is clear that Starmer wanted rid of her, and that she refused to go, and had the clout to insist, and defeat him.
This is because the Labour Party feared to take on black working-class communities in London, and in Britain generally, who still have considerable regard for Diane Abbott.
She is one of the few Labour candidates who deserve a vote in this election. For defying and defeating Starmer.
What happened to Faiza Shaheen is the converse of this. She was outrageously dropped as a candidate in Chingford/Woodford Green on the basis of feeble Zionist smears only a few days before the national candidate selection deadline
A highly regarded left-wing economist of Muslim family background, she was supposed to be crushed by this.
But not so, she denounced the ‘hierarchy of racism’ in Labour.
What this actually means is that Labour has a racial hierarchy, that privileges Jewish and white supremacists over the black and Asian communities.
She is now standing as an independent against the Tory Iain Duncan Smith and the Starmer stooge.
The quintessence of this racial hierarchy is Labour’s parachuting of Luke Akehurst into a safe Labour seat in North Durham.
He is a white supremacist, who as Diane Abbott has noted, had tried repeatedly to get rid of her from her Hackney seat.
He is also an ardent Zionist, but he is not actually Jewish. There is a famous photo of him wearing a T-Shirt bearing the caption “Zionist Shitlord”.
It appears that his Zionist fervour is driven by his hatred of non-whites – he has deleted thousands of his tweets and social media posts recently to hide this.
One reportedly referred to Palestinians as ‘rats’. Akehurst is basically a Zionist-Nazi and should be treated as one.
There is a proud working-class history in Durham, as symbolised by the Durham Miners’ Gala. They should ensure his type are better acquainted with the pavement.
George Galloway of the Workers Party is seeking re-election in Rochdale after his recent by-election victory.
There are also some independent candidates standing in Birmingham who are closely associated with GG and the Workers Party.
Jody McIntyre in Yardley against Jess Philipps, and Ahmed Yakoob in Ladywood against Shabana Mahmood.
They are making Gaza a big issue, but not just Gaza. Labour’s more general racism, neoliberalism and contempt for the working class, and particularly the British Asian working class, is crucial here.
Former UK Ambassador and Julian Assange defender Craig Murray is standing for the Workers Party in Blackburn (he may win also).
Chris Williamson, the former very left-wing Labour MP and Deputy Leader of the Workers Party is standing in Derby South, adjacent to his previous Derby North seat.
Former Labour whistleblower (about Zionist lobbying and witchhunts), Halima Khan, is planning to stand in Stratford and Bow, East London, also under the banner of the Workers Party.
George Galloway is excellent on Palestine and Ukraine and has a long and creditable anti-imperialist record.
But in the past decade he has shown softness on right-populism, and some of his followers follow in the same vein and to be treated with caution.
There are political debates to be had with the Workers Party about social conservatism and backwardness on questions involving immigration and oppression, including sexual oppression of various types.
However, Galloway’s views cannot be taken to represent the final word about the Workers Party and its politics. There are signs of it being a more inclusive project than that.
Galloway himself has appeared to welcome the idea of prominent figures with different views joining with him. If that were to happen, then it could become a real vehicle for political advance.
Williamson, Craig Murray and Halima Khan appear to give substance to that.
Possibly the most prominent independent socialist campaign in London, barring Corbyn, is Andrew Feinstein in Holborn and St Pancras constituency, against Starmer himself.
He is a Jewish former member of the South African Parliament for the African National Congress. He is an outspoken defender of the Palestinians and supporter of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ.
He was selected by OCISA (Organise Corbyn-Inspired Socialist Alliance), a left-Corbynite campaign group set up a couple of years ago with the aim of standing a socialist candidate against Keir Starmer.
Labour sees that as threatening politically, which is perhaps why a ‘left’-talking independent candidate, who appears to have family connections with the Labour right wing, is running in that constituency seemingly to split the left-wing opposition to Starmer.
Leanne Mohammad, a British-Palestinian Palestine solidarity activist, is challenging Wes Streeting is in Ilford North. Streeting can be considered an Israeli agent – and he evangelises for private healthcare. His defeat would be a major blow to the Zionists and neoliberals.
There are also the celebrated Liverpool Community Independents, who are standing Sam Gorst against arch-witchhunter Maria Eagle in Liverpool Garston.
They are now standing under the banner of Transform, another new leftist party that is partly the product of ex-Corbynites, notably the very youthful Breakthrough Party, which merged with the remnants of Left Unity as well as the Liverpool Independents last year.
Transform appears heterogenous; it has ‘socialist’ elements who are flatly on the wrong side in Ukraine, mixed with others with better views.
TUSC, which is basically a front for the Socialist Party, is standing in this election.
Its left-reformist sectarian caricature of Marxism makes it appear bureaucratic and sterile, but it does stand for some basic working class demands for trade unions, against privatisation, imperialist wars etc., so it is worthy of critical support in principle.
Though its habit of standing against other leftists gratuitously is part of what renders it sterile.
It does appear they might have a candidate standing under their ticket from the Spartacist League. That is an interesting anomaly. And also critically supportable.
The new Revolutionary Communist Party, formerly the labour entrist Socialist Appeal, that also has its origins in Militant is also standing on politics that appear critically supportable. It appears more political and open to debate.
What is necessary above all is a perspective that seeks to unite all of these fragmented initiatives in a new, democratically organised party, where proper political debates are possible, and thereby unity in action, so that political and programmatic development in a revolutionary direction comes onto the agenda.
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