
Soon after Sir Keir Starmer’s accession to the Labour Party leadership the Socialist Party wrote to the RMT transport workers union, in June 2020, proposing to relaunch the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) – which the RMT’s Bob Crow had been central to establishing in 2010. In response a minority group on the union’s national executive committee (NEC), including the then acting general secretary Mick Lynch, produced an alternative report which scoffed at our argument that Starmer’s victory meant that “once again working-class voters face being effectively disenfranchised” with no mass party available which represented their interests.
“The real threat to members at this present time is the Tory Party”, they said. The union’s decision at a special general meeting in 2018 to “align itself towards the Labour Party” under Jeremy Corbyn’s radical leadership – which led to TUSC suspending all its electoral activity, having already stood aside in the 2017 general election – was now interpreted by them as not being “dependent on who is leader of the Labour Party” but as standing policy.
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