Socialism Today

In June 2016 the PLP organised a 172 to 40 vote of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn and another leadership election was held, with balloting closing on September 21. The following Socialism Today editorial was published in the October 2016 edition, issue No.202.

At the time of writing – and bar what would be an election stitch-up of monumental proportions – it appears that it will be Jeremy Corbyn who is announced as the victor in Labour’s leadership contest on 24 September, the day before the start of the party’s annual conference.

Corbyn’s expected re-election triumph will be a significant defeat for the capitalist establishment – big business, the media tops, and their political representatives. Despite Owen Smith’s recently-discovered verbal radicalism – he stood, he said, for a ‘cold-eyed socialist revolution’ – he was the candidate of the ruling class, with their vested interest in keeping the Labour Party a safe, New Labour-style alternative to the Tories.

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Jeremy Corbyn decisively defeated Owen Smith in the 2016 leadership election. Writing in the November 2016 edition of Socialism Today, issue No.203, PETER TAAFFE, discussed the Corbyn movement in the context of an international wave of left-wing populism.

Jeremy Corbyn, through mass support, has fought off the attempted coup by right-wing Blairite Labour MPs and their supporters. Corbyn actually increased his majority in the second Labour leadership campaign in twelve months. But the Labour right and behind them the strategists of British capitalism still remain unreconciled to his victory, so the ‘civil war’ that has raged throughout the party since his initial election will continue unabated. The main reason for this is to be found in the determination of the pro-capitalist Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and its supporters, backed up by the venal capitalist media, to continue their campaign, not even excluding a third attempt to unseat Corbyn.

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The 2017 general election created another opportunity to carry through the transformation of Labour into a mass working class party fighting for socialist change. The following article by HANNAH SELL was published in the immediate post-election edition of The Socialist, issue No.952, 14 June 2017.

Theresa May’s failed election gamble is a nightmare for the capitalist class in Britain. Seven weeks ago most of Britain’s elite were hopeful that May would succeed in dramatically increasing the number of Tory MPs, thereby buttressing her government to be able to weather the storms of economic crisis, to carry out vicious austerity against the majority in society, and to implement a Brexit in the interests of the 1%.

Instead she is now a ‘dead prime minister walking’, only able to temporarily cling to power by leaning on the reactionary, sectarian Democratic Unionist (DUP) MPs, describing them as her ‘friends’ on the steps of Downing Street.

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After the general election a new debate opened on how the left-led trade unions should act to transform the Labour Party. This article by CLIVE HEEMSKERK was first published in The Socialist, issue No.956, 12 July 2017.

In a significant development for the whole labour movement, the recent annual general meeting (conference) of the RMT transport workers’ union agreed to open a branch consultation on re-affiliation to the Labour Party. A special general meeting will be organised subsequently to discuss the results.

An RMT predecessor union was one of Labour’s principal founding organisations in 1900, as the larger unions initially maintained their support for the capitalist Liberal Party. Expelled over a hundred years later in 2004, the union continued to fight for a political voice for working class voters, effectively disenfranchised by the transformation of Labour into Blairite New Labour.

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Re-grouping after the general election, the right renewed their destabilisation campaign against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The following Socialism Today editorial was published in the September 2018 edition, issue No.221.

Jeremy Corbyn’s insurgent Labour Party leadership election campaign in the summer of 2015 raised the hopes and expectations of millions of workers and young people, not just in Britain but internationally.

The late Michael Meacher MP, one of the handful in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) backing Corbyn, spoke at the time of “the biggest non-revolutionary upturning of the social order in modern British politics”. The enthusiasm for Corbyn’s anti-austerity challenge, he said, was a product of mass discontent with “20 years of swashbuckling capitalism”.

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The 2019 local elections saw Labour suffer a net loss of councillors. The editorial from the June 2019 edition of Socialism Today, issue No.229, was published just before the further warning sign of the 2019 European elections.

The promise of the Corbyn insurgency that began in 2015 is in danger. The triumph of the left-wing backbench outsider in the Labour leadership election four years ago opened up the prospect of overturning Tony Blair’s 1990s transmutation of the Labour Party into New Labour. By qualitatively changing Labour from a ‘capitalist workers’ party’ working-class political representation had effectively been eliminated as a mass force for over two decades. Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected victory was a bridgehead from which, potentially, this process could be reversed and workers achieve a mass party of their own.

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By summer 2019 Theresa May had fallen, but the Labour right were blocking a no confidence motion in the new Johnson government. The following Socialism Today editorial was published in the October 2019 edition, No.232.

Have the September shenanigans in Westminster fatally undermined the chances of a Corbyn-led government being elected this autumn? And, as pertinently, what do they say about the character of such a government if it were to come to power in the midst of the political crisis and looming economic turbulence now confronting British capitalism?

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The 2019 general election was held on December 12. The following article is the text of the special supplement of The Socialist, issue 1067(1), produced as the results came in and printed and distributed on 13 December 2019.

The Tories have won a substantial parliamentary majority. Boris Johnson’s victory speech talked about being a ‘one-nation Conservative’ and promised increased spending on the NHS. This is a lie. When Maggie Thatcher won in 1979 she quoted Frances of Assisi, promising to bring harmony and hope to Britain.

Instead, she ruled ruthlessly and attacked the working class. Johnson will do the same and rule not for the ‘whole nation’ but the billionaires. His manifesto promised an immediate assault on the rights of rail workers to strike. This, combined with the recent brutal anti-democratic court rulings against the postal workers’ union, the CWU, gives a glimpse of the attacks on workers’ rights to come.

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