By Michael Barker
Yesterday, Novara Media released a podcast hosting a discussion between three political figures who debated the need for a new political party on the left. These individuals were Pamela Fitzpatrick who is the Director of Collective, Jamie Driscoll who has just launched Majority (a new local party in Tyneside sourcing its policies through people’s assemblies), and Shockat Adam, MP for Leicester South who works closely with Jeremy Corbyn as part of the Independent Alliance.
In one particularly noteworthy segment of the discussion, Shockat Adam, who is admittedly fairly new to politics, argued that new political formations should adopt an approach that promoted “principled politics but without creating polarisation”. However polarisation has never been absent from politics.
The ruling class will always polarise issues so they can maintain their precarious rule over the lives of the ordinary people that they exploit — the majority of us, the working class. Hence Pamela Fitzpatrick correctly responded to Adam’s programmatic plea for civility by saying:
“This is the problem: this is why parties have failed in the past and why they are failing in other countries right now. If you take Mélenchon in France, when he talks tough, when he talks on the left, he does really well, but when he’s done deals with the right or in the kind of middle, people are not interested. We are in a very polarised position. So for me class politics is not what the definition of working class is now, and it is not about messaging. We have to be clear about what is going on in this country and beyond.
“The problem is that when you try to accommodate everybody you accommodate nobody, and this is what happened with the Labour Party in 2017 and 2019, because we kept the Labour right in the party when they should have been gone.
So let’s talk about what people need. If you had a party that was saying ‘we are going to nationalise all housing’ I think that would be very popular because most people don’t have a home that they are happy to live in. If you said ‘we are going to nationalise the railways’, they would be very happy because we pay a fortune.
But let’s go further than that: what about nationalising the banks, because it is all very well talking about ‘let’s tax the rich a bit, let’s ask people to be nice, we can work with landlords and the super-rich, we just all need to be nice to one another’. Well that just hasn’t worked in the past, because the super-rich are very good at getting very super lawyers and very super accountants to hide their money. And when you look at any other countries where they have tried this it simply hasn’t worked… We need fundamental radical change.”
Later, in another useful contribution, Pamela Fitzpatrick highlighted some of the reasons behind the left’s failure to reclaim the Labour Party. She explained:
“What happened was that, because of [Corbyn’s] very nature, being very kind and wanting to include everybody, the Labour right destroyed any hope of us coming to power. So we can’t reach out to the landlords, to the private schools, you know the people who have lots of money. They are not going to vote for us anyway. What we need to reach out to are the 99% who actually need radical change. We need to be unashamed about what we stand for and then people will join us.”
Shockat Adam in turn responded by asking “how did they demonise Corbyn?” And after observing that “he was happy to learn from everybody” Adam then went on to just emphasise how the demonisation campaign had been coordinated by “the corporates, the media and institutions”. He added that:
“They will do exactly the same because they haven’t changed. So we can have these noble intentions but they will destroy any entity that wishes to do that. If they could do that to Jeremy can you imagine what they would do to a person like me. So we have to learn, we have to be cleverer and be more pragmatic in how to address this issue…”
Here Adam totally misses the point. The capitalist institutions were certainly against Corbyn. However Fitzpatrick was making the point that Corbyn (and the team around him) made the mistake of thinking they could allow capitalist politicans to continue dominating the internal machinery of the Labour Party. Fitzpatrick responded to Adam with some exasperation saying:
“Trying to be pragmatic was the problem before, wasn’t it? If we had been absolutely strong and had dismissed all of these claims then we wouldn’t have been in the position we were… If we had ridiculed the claims that were made [against Corbyn, things may have turned out been better], but instead we were apologetic, mainly because we were in shock at being accused of all these things… and we were naïve, we didn’t understand quite how bad the Labour right were.
Absolutely, we have to learn, which is why our history of the movement is so important. None of this is new, it has happened before. Think back to 1926, to the General Strike. The TUC didn’t support it. We need to be absolutely firm, we are not going to put up with it, and then you bring the people with you.”
Shortly after this point was made, Jamie Driscoll made his most useful contribution to the discussion when he admitted:
“We absolutely should not have flinched on the open democratic selection of MPs in the Labour Party. And actually I think that was the moment that it was bottled. After that it was pretty much downhill.”
Socialist Alternative is fighting for the establishment of a new mass left party, which we believe must root itself in the struggles of working-class people. Where we are able, we are playing whatever part we can in fighting to bring together different campaigns to organise together and challenge both Labour and Reform.
In Kirklees, we have played an important part in establishing the People’s Alliance for Change and Equality, which is currently making plans to contest next year’s local elections. We agree strongly with the point made by Pamela Fitzpatrick, that any new party needs to adopt clear and unapologetic class politics.
For us, this means the party must seek to represent the interests of working-class people, independent of those of the bosses. This requires the adoption of a clear socialist programme based on breaking with capitalism.
