Socialism Today

Barely two months after Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s July 24 joint announcement of “a new kind of politics”, under the temporary banner of ‘Your Party’, simmering tensions between their two camps erupted into the open on September 18.

Eager to knock down the possibility of a new alternative developing to the capitalist parties even before it is properly formed, the establishment media jumped in. The Guardian, the tame house-journal of Keir Starmer’s New Labour Mark II party, relished in the ‘terminal feel’ of an “early split” which leaves, “it would seem”, the hundreds of thousands who signed up “still politically homeless”. (19 September)

The most striking political development in Italy arising from the 2007-08 financial crash was the rise of the populist Five Star Movement. Described as ‘a new way of doing politics’ based on a digital ‘direct democracy’ model that allegedly empowered every ‘citizen member’, it was launched by comedian Beppe Grillo, speaking to mass meetings of tens of thousands of people. It defines itself as “independent progressives”, following an online membership vote in November last year, with the party’s representatives sitting in the Left group in the European parliament alongside Spain’s Podemos party and France Insoumise.

In 2018, the Five Star Movement emerged as the biggest single party with over 10.7 million votes, a 32.7% share. But from that position it led coalition governments that failed to resist the demands of capitalism and the Five Star bubble burst, falling to 15.4% in the 2022 election and paving the way for the election of an entirely right-wing populist government under Giorgia Meloni.

Here we are reprinting an abridged version of an article written by CHRISTINE THOMAS, which was first published in Socialism Today issue 238, May 2020, about the rise and fall of the Five Star Movement, as a contribution to the current debate about what form a new party should take in Britain.

With Reform ahead in the opinion polls and more than 100,000 marching on a demonstration called by Tommy Robinson, HANNAH SELL assesses the growth of the far-right in Britain, and the tasks facing the workers’ movement.

Labour is neck and neck with the Tories in current polls, both on an unprecedented low of 16%. More than two thirds of voters have broken with Britain’s traditional major parties.

Discontent is growing on Labour’s backbenches along with rumbles about Starmer resigning in the hope that a new face could fix their predicament. But it is the government’s continuation of austerity, and its failure to improve public services or living standards that are the root of its problems, not Starmer’s lack of charm. This is the inevitable result of Labour’s role as loyal lieutenants of diseased British capitalism. The warning lights are flashing on the dashboard of the world economy, but even before a new crisis, growth in Britain is flatlining and the cost of government borrowing has hit the highest level since 1998. The capitalists are demanding that Labour responds by further attacks on the working class. In this situation, November’s budget can only increase popular anger at this already hated government.

What is antisemitism? What are its roots? How has it been politically weaponised? And how can it be opposed? JUDY BEISHON critically reviews a recent book on the issue.

Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism

By Rachel Shabi

Published by Oneworld Publications, 2025, £10-99

It has been during the war on Gaza, with its massive and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians by the Israeli state, that Rachel Shabi has published her book about antisemitism. What she describes as “a wider global spate of antisemitism” – its reemergence from “dormancy” – came after the start of that war.

As Your Party supporters discuss what policies a new party needs, CALLUM JOYCE reviews a book by two Starmer apologists and argues that it’s not sufficient to criticise the consequences of austerity, you need a socialist programme to fight it.

The Only Way Is Up: How to take Britain from Austerity to Prosperity

By Polly Toynbee and David Walker

Published by Atlantic Books, 2024, £14-99

“The sorry tale starts with austerity, a deliberate Tory decision in the wake of the financial crash not to ask the better-off to pay more in taxes but instead to cut back welfare and public services”. This is how the authors of The Only Way Is Up begin their account of 14 years of economic and social decline under the previous Tory governments, outlining in graphic detail how Britain’s public services have been systematically stripped of funding and resources and the brutal consequences for workers and young people.

LINDA TAAFFE reviews a book that lifts the lid on a revolutionary period of British history that the ruling class would like to keep hidden.

Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-1660

By Alice Hunt

Published by Faber & Faber, 2025, £12.99

The year of the French Revolution, 1789, is celebrated every year, and not only in France! Even here we socialists honour our heroic forebears who stormed the Bastille.

Unfortunately, England has no equivalent celebrations. Yet more than a hundred years previously, in the 1640s, English peasants had done the same thing. They overthrew the rich and powerful and executed the king Charles I. This was the first bourgeois revolution that allowed feudalism to be swept away and capitalism to develop. Ever since the British ruling class have assiduously used the winning back of the crown by Charles II in 1660 to wipe out all memory of the English Revolution.