24.04.2025
What’s the point?
It was going to be the left electoral alternative. But the SWP soon found itself with no takers. Then the back peddling began, leaving We Demand Change as a completely pointless exercise, says Carla Roberts
It is rather amusing to watch from the outside the latest political scheme dreamed up by the Socialist Workers Party. To be fair, it did not set up ‘We Demand Change’ as an independent initiative, but was somewhat forced to, as a way to sneak into Jeremy Corbyn’s maybe-party, Collective. At the end of last year, it looked like the launch of the Collective Party was imminent - with its chair, Pamela Fitzpatrick, announcing to all and sundry the happy news. The Guardian was tipped off and published a couple of puff pieces, quoting Jeremy Corbyn and Andrew Feinstein.
However, unlike its old rivals, the Socialist Party in England and Wales, the SWP had been told rather vocally by many of those participating in the secret organising meetings that there was no way it would be allowed in. There are - at least - two major reasons: Firstly, there is the ongoing refusal of the SWP leadership to stop Zionists from attending events and demonstrations organised by its front campaign, ‘Stand Up to Racism’. This has made the SWP extremely unpopular with many in the pro-Palestine solidarity movement - and unsurprisingly so: you cannot fight racism by walking arm in arm with racists, duh. Secondly, the SWP also continues to suffer from its bungled attempt to cover up the rape allegations against its former national secretary, Martin Smith (‘Comrade Delta’). It is still widely referred to as ‘rape apologists’.
Collective
So the SWP scrambled around for ways to squeeze sideways into the proposed organisation. And, hey presto, WDC was born, and a ‘launch rally’ was announced for the end of March. It did not look like very much, because it was not supposed to be very much.
However, it turns out that Collective was doing even less. We are told that Corbyn was extremely unhappy about Fitzpatrick trying to bump him in, which has, in fact, achieved the exact opposite reaction she hoped for: rather than forcing Corbyn’s hand to say ‘aye’, he pulled away.
There are probably a number of reasons why he opposes launching a new party (for now), pushing instead for some sort of ‘network’ of ‘independent’ campaigns and candidates. For a start, he is still a Labourite, through and through. He quite rightly does not believe the ‘common sense’ view of many of the left that the Labour Party is ‘dead’. In his many decades on the Labour left, he will have heard that proclamation too many times. And, of course, the trade unions remain affiliated, because they judge that they will get more crumbs from capitalism’s table if they stay in rather than walk out. Naturally, Corbyn is happy to speak from the platform at many a demonstration, but that is as far as his confidence in ‘the power of the streets’ goes. Add to that the fact that Collective has attracted no union backers, but lots of weird and wonderful groups and grouplets, and you can see why he has not been too keen to lend his name to this particular venture. The organising meetings are still continuing, incidentally - but all participants seem aware that Collective has had it.
Having said that, we understand that some of the groups within Collective are involved in yet another separate set of secret negotiations (god help us), and that these might or might not lead to the formation of a party - in a year or so, in time for the next general election.
Step forward WDC. It seems that Corbyn and his lieutenants are happy to go along for the ride … as long as it does not go anywhere. Corbyn spoke at the WDC launch on March 29, as did the other Collective ‘big name’, Andrew Feinstein - this helped the event to morph from a planned ‘rally’ into the grand ‘summit of resistance’ attended by over 2,000 participants (not delegates, ie, something like half the SWP’s claimed membership). It was a very enthusiastic event. The SWP knows how to generate lots of sound and fury signifying absolutely nothing. Interestingly, it was not visibly dominated by the SWP - in fact, the SWP had not a single official speaker on the platform. It did, however, run and staff the event.
Officially there are 10 organisations involved in WDC, as was explained in the ‘organising meeting’ on Zoom on April 23 (chaired by ‘Artin’ “from the Peace and Justice Campaign”) - with the SWP not listed.1 However, you would have to be naive indeed (and we know there are a few) not to pick up on the fact that about half of the people who spoke on April 23 are, in fact, leading members of the organisation, wearing different hats. For example, long-time cadre Sean Vernell - the first and main speaker - was introduced as just a trade unionist from the UCU and, most amusingly, Lewis Nielsen as being “from Stand Up to Racism”. He just happens to be the SWP’s national secretary!
Lewis Nielson
After the SWP’s conference in January 2025, Socialist Worker reported quite openly about WDC being the SWP’s initiative. This is how comrade Nielsen was quoted: “One such initiative is to bring together all the forces of resistance in the streets and workplaces against the Starmer government. We need to work with wider forces to unite trade unionists, anti-racists, Palestine activists, climate campaigners and others to confront the Labour government’s policies.”
This is exactly what WDC has set out to do now, as unimaginative as that sounds. The same conference also agreed that the SWP wants to start “building a left electoral alternative to Labour [which] is both possible and necessary”.2 That explains why some SWP members at the March summit got a bit, shall we say, carried away, arguing for WDC to stand candidates in the various local elections. After all, that is what the party decided, right?
It turns out the SWP seems to have ‘forgotten’ to brief its own members on what WDC is supposed to be. The more likely explanation is that, when it comes to standing in elections as WDC, Jeremy Corbyn said ‘no’, John Rees and Lindsey German of Counterfire said ‘no’, the Greens, of course, said ‘no’ … leaving them isolated and embarrassed. Hence the desperate back peddling.
Comrades Lewis Nielsen and Jess Walsh, the SWP’s workplace and trade union organiser, had to ‘clarify’ the leadership’s view with an editorial in Socialist Worker a couple of weeks ago:
We Demand Change is not and should not be an electoral initiative or new left party that many want to see. Instead, it can bring together different parts of the movement, so that we can be more than the sum of our parts. This is no easy task. So what needs to happen next? The organisers of the summit have outlined three next steps - collating demands, mobilising for protests and days of action, and a roll-out of local summits.
But even that seems to have not been clear enough and we were told at the April 23 Zoom event (attended by over 300 people) that “there will be a clarifying statement going out soon”, explaining why WDC cannot possibly be an electoral alternative. We very much suspect that it will not actually mention the real reasons.
Instead, Alex Callinicos tried his best to square the WDC circle in the latest edition of their paper:
The most important task of We Demand Change is not to strengthen existing coalitions, but to broaden resistance to Starmer and his austerity and militarism. ‘Welfare, not warfare’ is an old slogan, but its time has come again. It expresses the interconnection between resistance to Reeves’s cuts, opposition to Starmer’s rearmament, the movements against racism and the far right and in solidarity with Palestine. If We Demand Change helps to promote the development of mass struggles against Starmer, the resulting confidence can invigorate a left electoral alternative. Building the kind of broad and pluralistic network required to sustain this alternative is a delicate task.3
Clear as mud. Build, build, build - and then do nothing with it. As one SWP member from the floor said on April 23, “Take as many leaflets as you can, go out every night after work to distribute them all and then get some more and distribute those, so that you can build a local summit.” And what exactly are these summits supposed to do? Nothing at all, it seems, apart from ‘bringing people together’ - and then watch them, as they all go home again.
The SWP, of course, does not want to build anything more coherent than that. After all, they are ‘it’ already - the revolutionary kernel that will massively grow in a revolutionary situation, overthrow capitalism and lead the masses towards socialism! Until then, keep your powder dry politically and build ‘united fronts’ that fight for programmes that you know are well below what is actually needed.
The eight-point platform of WDC is not quite as ‘motherhood and apple pie’ as the usual recent trite offerings, though not far off. There is “Welfare, not warfare”, “Tax the rich”, the demand for “public ownership of water, rail, mail and energy”, and there is also “Stop arming Israel”, and the long-time SWP slogan, “Refugees welcome” (an aspiration rather than the true state of things).
There is also a serious lack of political and organisational transparency, as Archie Woodrow from Revolutionary Socialism in the 21th Century pointed out in the Zoom call:
I still don’t really understand what We Demand Change is supposed to be. Is it an organisation or just a series of events? It’s not a united front campaign on a single issue like Peoples Assembly or PSC, but it doesn’t seem to be a political party either. Is it going to have local branches? Democratic structures? What is the plan of activity other than running some ‘summits’ and maybe some protests? Does WDC already have a leadership, and if so, who is it? Or are all the people who’ve signed up supposed to constitute the leadership?
Unsurprisingly, he did not get a coherent answer. I suspect the SWP does not quite know what it is doing with it now - apart from waiting for Corbyn to launch a new left party and recruit some people from WDC while waiting.
Socialism
Needless to say, no mention is made of the need to fight for socialism. But that is the usual way the SWP acts in its ‘united fronts’: subordinating its politics to the (perceived) views of the right. In Respect, for example, that led to SWP members arguing and voting against a woman’s right to choose an abortion, open borders and, indeed, the demand for socialism.
WDC is also supposed to attract Reform voters! - another good reason to keep quiet about the real politics of the ostensive revolutionaries leading it . As Sean Vernell explained on April 23, “We want to go beyond the left and speak to those who want to vote Reform.”
This marks a change from the SWP’s usual attitude of characterising Reform voters (or Trump supporters or those being attracted to the Alternative für Deutschland) as “racists”. Clearly, many of their supporters are working class people who are seriously alienated from the establishment and those running capitalism.
But there is one way to make absolutely certain you will not attract them (or others for that matter) in the long run: by lying and pretending that you are not actually socialists.