09.01.2025

New year, new left party?

Collective is pursuing Corbynism without Corbyn - it all looks very unpromising and very undemocratic … especially if the SWP tries to jump on board, says Carla Roberts

Having become an official supporter of Collective many months ago (paying £2 a month for the privilege), I received my first ever communication on January 2. “Welcome to 2025 - the year we will make a class-based, mass political party on the left a reality!”, the unsigned email breathlessly states. Further down, this is somewhat qualified: “be assured that we are closer than ever to bringing about the class-based, mass left-wing party we so urgently need”. The current favourite party name is ‘Fightback’, I am told - even less political than the dire ‘Collective’.

It all depends what you mean by “mass party”, of course. Socialists should quite rightly aim to build a mass party in order to win over the majority of the working class. Revolution has to be the conscious desire of the majority, otherwise it is a putsch, and one that will all too soon turn the aim of socialism into its opposite, as the history of the 20th century has shown far too many times.

But there is little chance of a real mass party being launched anytime soon. The left is in disarray in the aftermath of the defeat of the Corbyn movement. Here is the full list of organisations participating in Fightback/Collective, according to the email: “Aspire, Assemble and Just Stop Oil, Campaign For A Mass Workers Party, For The Many, Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL), Reliance, Social Justice Party, Socialist Party and Tusc, The Muslim Vote, Transform, TWT and others.”

SPEW

The most serious of the groups is probably the Socialist Party in England and Wales, and that is saying something. Perhaps they are looking for a way to put its Tusc front out of its misery.

Collective claims internally that it has 4,000 people paying £2 to be a “member”, writes the blog Left Lane¹ - though this figure seems to be on the ‘optimistic’ side, if not a total exaggeration.

Not that relatively small numbers are a problem per se. It all depends on what you are doing with them and what programme you are fighting for. I suspect that the author of the email actually means that Collective will soon launch as a broad party - rather than a mass party. Politically broad and therefore amorphous, no doubt - and certainly not a party that aims for revolution or, judging by the email and the bits of info leaking out, even socialism.

Take for example the discussion paper produced by the ‘Collective working group on campaigns and elections’. It says any election campaign should first “define principles”. Quite right - until you read what “principles” they have in mind: “Anchor the campaign on local concerns like affordable housing, transport, and jobs, rooted in class and community politics”. That is it, in terms of politics. The rest of the four-page document is inane PR waffle about the need to “listen and learn”, “communicate effectively” and “celebrate wins together”.

There is certainly a lot of political overlap between the participating organisations. They all agree that the programme required has to be a version of Jeremy Corbyn’s tame Labour manifesto For the many, not the few. With much common sense and ‘the things we all agree on’, but very little in terms of actual answers and ideas on how we can get to a truly different society. So, clearly, no need to go into any of that in particular detail.

As Pamela Fitzpatrick recently explained, “Corbyn’s policies were pretty mild - and very popular.”² Well that’s because they were put forward by the leader of the Labour Party, who might have been able to actually implement some of them. There is no chance Collective will ever get as close to office as Corbyn did.

Fitzpatrick, a former Labour Party councillor in Harrow, is one of the two directors of ‘Justice Collective Ltd’. Funnily enough, they still haven’t got around to removing Justin Schlosberg as the second director, even though he resigned from Collective on November 5 with an untypically frank open letter.³

He should really be replaced with Karie Murphy, former right-hand woman of Corbyn when he was Labour leader. She is by all accounts the person in charge and makes pretty much all the decisions. For example, she decides who is allowed to participate in the real-life organising meetings - and repeatedly reprimanded a participant in the November 9 gathering, because her organisation (the Campaign for a Mass Workers Party) had previously sent a different representative. “It was very humiliating”, I am told.

Also involved is Murphy’s partner Len McCluskey, former Unite general secretary, whose participation is somewhat covering the ‘trade union base’, it seems. “Collective has co-ordinated and communicated with leadership of the non-aligned trade unions”, the February 2 email states. In other words, none of them are on board.

Proceedings so far have been less than promising. Tightly controlled by Murphy in particular, we hear that the two in-person meetings (a third one takes place on January 25) have spent much time on pointless report backs, general waffle and very little in terms of actual decision-making.

Rizz level

Much time and effort has been spent on convincing Jeremy Corbyn to come on board as leader. After all, a Corbynite party does look a lot better if it has Corbyn in it! Despite his many shortcomings, Corbyn still has some level of rizz, as young people say. Murphy and Fitzpatrick have gone through every trick in the book. When Corbyn attended the first in-person meeting on September 15, the news was immediately leaked to The Guardian, which breathlessly proclaimed Corbyn to be the leader of the party, which was set to launch imminently.⁴ The man was less than pleased about this and made sure that he was not present at the second meeting on September 9 in Birmingham, though he dialled in via Zoom for a bit.

Still, the mainstream press continues to keep a close eye on Corbyn and do what they do best: make up stuff. On December 10, the Spectator proclaimed that “the Gaza 5” (ie, Corbyn and the four independent Muslim MPs who have formed the ‘Independent Alliance’ in parliament) are “about to register as a political party”.

The Times on December 12 first poured cold water on the story, pointing out that “their [the five minus Corbyn] politics and voting records are already more than complicated. If their presence has been noted in the Commons it has been for votes against VAT on private school fees and, in one case this week, a defence of cousin marriage”.⁵

Corbyn himself went on BBC Newsnight on December 17 to clarify: “We are an independent alliance, we’re happily and effectively working together on a number of issues. We do not intend to become a party. We’ve only just got to know each other. I do think it is important that there is an alternative political voice in Britain. I think that will come from the very large number of independent councillors and independent groups around the country that are campaigning against the two-child benefit cap, the winter fuel allowance, issues such as housing and the Waspi women.”⁶

In other words, Corbyn is happy to be associated with the new organisation, but he will not be leading it, that much is clear. Perhaps he is just tired (the man is 75, after all). Perhaps he really does find the local ‘assembly’ he set up in North Islington super exciting. Or maybe, just maybe, he remains unconvinced that the Labour Party is “dead”, as so many of his former supporters are keen to exclaim. He will remember long periods when the left in Labour was as good as finished - only to spring back to life as, for example, when he was elected leader of the party in 2015.

A pure accident, we should remember, caused by the self-declared “morons”, like Margaret Beckett, who lent Corbyn their vote to get him onto the ballot paper. Fitzpatrick is wrong to state, as she did on the Crispin Flintoff Show, that, “It was not Jeremy who created that mass movement. That movement was there and that’s why Jeremy became the leader. The movement pushed him into that leadership position. He was a reluctant leader and we shouldn’t be criticising him, but we need to analyse what happened and learn from our mistakes.”

A lot of contradictions in that short paragraph. Yes, hundreds of thousands of people joined the Labour Party and Momentum - but there was no coherent mass movement to speak of. There was a mass sentiment that wanted to see some form of ‘change’. But Corbyn and his allies did nothing with that. They did not educate, lead, let alone organise those who hoped to be organised. Momentum jumped fully on board the ‘anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism’ smear campaign. It was also transformed into an undemocratic voting machine - by Jon Lansman, but with the full backing of Corbyn. How can you possibly learn from mistakes if you do not criticise them and, crucially, those who have committed them?

Fitzpatrick is, of course, trying to tweak history to fit her own purpose - ie, having unsuccessfully tried to get Corbyn to lead Collective, she now pretends that, actually, we do not really need Corbyn to set up a Corbynite party. She tried to assure the online audience:

that movement has not gone away - it has grown. I can see it all over the UK. People are ready for something new. No doubt Jeremy will be involved, but he will not lead a new party. We have to move on from that. We have got to have a democratic party that is grassroots and not based on one particular person. There were lots of groups formed after the election, the left did come together, but the reason it failed is because it was all top down. It has to be from the bottom up, that’s the main lesson learned really.

We daresay that if Corbyn had said ‘yes’, she, Murphy and McCluskey would have happily based Collective on that “particular person” and would be less concerned about the ‘bottom up’ bit. There is, after all, nothing wrong with the leaderships of various organisations getting together to discuss how to build a united party with a coherent programme, a solid structure and a democratic constitution - ie, top down. The problem arises when this party is undemocratic and members cannot form factions or overturn the leadership, for example. Or when the programme is based on washed-up reformism rather than fighting for what is actually needed. Which looks exactly where Collective is going.

Callinicos

The possible inclusion of the Socialist Workers Party is unlikely to change this general trajectory, though it could breathe slightly more life into the project - if this is indeed what Alex Callinicos has in mind with his article in this week’s Socialist Worker. “The conditions are developing for the formation of a powerful radical left alternative to Labour”, he writes, and that, “the Labour monolith is showing signs of crumbling. Jeremy Corbyn and the pro-Palestine independents enjoyed remarkable successes in the general election.”

This powerful alternative “is badly needed to prevent the far right dominating the challenge to a fumbling Starmer government. An effective radical left alternative couldn’t simply contest elections. It would have to get stuck into struggles in workplaces and neighbourhoods and in the Palestine solidarity movement. To make sure this happens, revolutionary socialists are needed to help initiate and build this alternative.”

This does sound like the SWP wants to jump onto the Collective ship. However, that is news to many of the groups involved in the project. Which is of course not saying much, considering that it is so tightly controlled. Perhaps Callinicos is preparing the troops for such a move. Perhaps it is his way of signalling to Karie Murphy that they would like to be approached, thank you very much.

But the chances are that there will be no such invitation. Surely the last thing Murphy wants is an SWP, still tainted with the Martin Smith rape scandal, on board.