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.
Instead of resuming its efforts to build a working-class electoral alternative, they argued, TUSC should be “part of a far wider broader based non-electoral campaign, with other progressive organisations, to challenge austerity and fight for a fairer society”. The task was to campaign “both locally and nationally with supportive members of Labour and other parties and organisations such as the People’s Assembly” to answer austerity politics, they said, and not look to challenge the New Blairites at the ballot box.
At that time, in 2020, a majority of the NEC agreed to relaunch TUSC – still seen as a key part of the legacy of Bob Crow, who had died in 2014 – not as a ‘finished product’ but as part of the struggle for independent mass working class political representation. But two years later at the RMT’s 2022 annual general meeting (AGM – the national conference), using the authority he had earned as the union’s public face in the rail strikes which began that summer, Mick Lynch and what had become the misnamed ‘Broad Left’ group successfully got through the withdrawal of official RMT representation from the TUSC steering committee “for now”.
Since then there have indeed been countless ‘broad based’ campaigns, conferences, forums, summits, declarations, and projects declaiming ‘against austerity’ and ‘for a fairer society’. They included the ‘Enough is Enough’ campaign, launched five weeks after the 2022 RMT AGM by Mick Lynch and the Communications Workers Union (CWU) general secretary Dave Ward, which rapidly signed up over 500,000 people. And in the 2024 general election, again showing the vacuum and the search for an alternative, Jeremy Corbyn was elected as an independent MP – along with four other ‘Independents for Gaza’ candidates, the latter reflecting the outrage of workers from a Muslim background in particular at Labour’s acquiescence with the genocidal slaughter of the Palestinians.
But ten months on from the general election the stark fact remains – on May 1, in the first major electoral test for the Starmer government, working-class voters amongst the ten million or so people with the opportunity to go to the polls in the local elections being held on that day, will be ‘effectively disenfranchised’. Both Starmer’s Labour and the Tories are heading for an electoral mauling while Reform is certain to make gains. TUSC will have a hundred or so candidates on the ballot paper but it is not, and has never presented itself to be, the authoritative alternative that is needed. Who would laugh now at efforts to get the trade unions to fill the vacuum?
‘Community organising’ first?
There is, of course, no easy path to bring a new, mass-based workers’ party into being with the authority to put its stamp on events. But while emergent forces, like an anti-war movement, can propel things forward at certain points – and even a small group of parliamentary representatives can play a catalyst role if the conditions are there – the battle to win existing mass organisations of the working class is critical. That idea has been missing in much of the debate on the issue.
Jeremy Corbyn, for example, reflected on his election victory in his Islington North constituency and what it meant for building a new party in a Guardian newspaper opinion piece in July, which remains his most explicit written thoughts on the matter. He talked about establishing a “shared, democratic space” in his constituency “for local campaigns, trade unions, tenants’ unions, debtors’ unions and national movements to organise, together, for the kind of world we want to live in”. And organising beyond Islington “to build community power in every corner of the country”.
“Once our grassroots model has been replicated elsewhere”, he went on, “this can be the genesis of a new movement capable of challenging the stale two-party system”, and which “will eventually run in elections”. (People-power led to my re-election. It is the start of a new politics, The Guardian, 12 July 2024) But while over a hundred or so councillors have left the Labour Party in the recent period, with many setting up local ‘community independents’ parties on the ‘grassroots model’ – or the former North Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll launching a new party called ‘Majority’ – there is no cohesion or co-ordination of the fragments, either ideologically, organisationally, or with a clear programmatic platform. The Collective network of ex-Labour councillors and other figures previously around Jeremy Corbyn’s 2015-2019 leadership group, established over 18 months ago, attempted to play that role but have not been able to register a party with the Electoral Commission and will not be a clear presence in the May elections.
More generally, the strategy of ‘community organising first’ hugely underestimates the working class ‘people power’ that already exists in the trade unions. They remain the basic core organisations of the working class not for ‘ideological’ reasons, that workers like the ‘idea’ of trade unions, but because unions are the first line of defence for workers’ material interests, the conditions they share with each other, their collective class interests – and therefore with far greater potential cohesion and social weight than even other comparatively-sized voluntary organisations.
More than six million workers are currently organised in trade unions – what is this but a powerful ‘grassroots model’ of working-class organisation? One that, moreover, doesn’t need to be ‘replicated’ but instead mobilised in a systematic campaign, alongside continuing local community struggles and national movements.
Unions are not monoliths
‘But the unions support Labour’ is a refrain often heard from those, rightly, frustrated at the slow progress towards a new, mass party of the working class. In fact it is not correct to speak of ‘the unions’ as monolithic organisations, and certainly not as unchanging and unchangeable. After all, both Bob Crow and Mick Lynch were general secretaries of the RMT and played completely different roles in the struggle for independent working-class politics.
Then there is the experience of ‘Enough is Enough’, which was established by general secretaries from one union affiliated to the Labour Party – the CWU – and one not – the RMT – but who were united in trying to divert the mass sentiment for a new alternative that it revealed back behind support for Labour. This also puts into perspective the important but secondary tactical debate on ‘affiliation or disaffiliation’ in the eleven unions – out of the 48 TUC member unions – that remain formally linked to the Labour Party.
The fundamental issue, including in the critical union elections that are taking place now and in the coming months, is winning fighting leaderships of the trade unions – who will pursue workers’ class interests independently of the class interests of the capitalists, in the workplaces and politically.