15.05.2025
Corbyn is coming
Hints are being dropped here, there and everywhere. But exactly what is going on remains a closely guarded secret. As for programme, everything tells us it is going to be on the soft end of the soft left. Carla Roberts provides an update
Charlie Kimber informed us last week that at a “conference of resistance” on May 10 “Jeremy Corbyn almost declared a new left challenge to Starmer”.1 This almost made us laugh out loud, seeing as it is so very indicative of Corbyn’s modus operandi. It is also somewhat amusing, because Charlie fails to mention that this conference launched yet another, altogether different, grouping - namely the People’s Alliance for Change and Equality, “a new movement bringing together community campaigns, trade unionists and social movements in Kirklees”2 … maybe because it is not run by the SWP.
Before you ask - no, Corbyn is not about to launch the Collective party that has been simmering away on ever lower heat for the best part of a year. Pamela Fitzpatrick, company director of ‘Justice Collective Ltd’, might have declared only a few short months ago that the new venture was about to take flight, while internal working groups were drawing up all sorts of constitutional rules and documents. Alas, Collective looks like it is not going to hatch - there were just too many weird and wonderful organisations, wanting to have a say on the programme and structure of a new party. Can’t have that.
It’s a date
Some of the groups involved, however, have been allowed into secret, second-tier discussions. At Counterfire’s weekend school on May 9, Corbyn said that in the recent local elections
… a whole lot of people have been elected as socialists, as independents, and the important thing is to bring them together. The Peace and Justice Project is in intense contact with all of them. I want all of these groups to come together ... There’s no point looking inwards in small rooms: we have to be out there on the various demonstrations. Let’s go for it and do it.3
But the interesting thing here is that Corbyn finally seems to have decided that some kind of new organisation will be launched - and “before the English local elections in May 2026 - earlier if possible”. That is at least how Socialist Worker reports his PACE speech.
The next day, Corbyn collaborator Andrew Feinstein told us a bit more about the secret negotiations taking place. “We can’t just build another political party”, he said, because that just “does not appeal to people who do not already think like us and come to our meetings”. Instead, he wants to “bring all these local community initiatives together”: ie, “the Preston Independents, the Liverpool Community Independents, a group in Newcastle, the about to be announced Camden Independents and many, many others across the country”.
He tried to explain why these talks have to take place in camera:
I have to apologise. I know that people are very frustrated but I want to assure you, and I can’t say more than this, there have been extensive discussions/conversations/engagements going on, on the left, for a few months now and they are intensifying.
I wish they were just open and transparent conversations, but there are people who are in very sensitive positions that makes it very difficult to make public some of the conversations that are taking place, but what I can say to you is that we together - not as a small group of leaders or self-appointed saviours, but as communities - we’re going to create, in this country, a national movement, that, when strategically appropriate, will decide to become a national party, before the next general election and we’re going to introduce to this country a totally different type of politics.
We need to ensure that every metre in this country, every local community, has its own independent organisation that is driven by the community, for the community and then, once we have spent a small time doing this organising, we need to have a launch congress for a new national party.
Why do it in that way? Because if it is not democratic and accountable from the outset, it will be just another political party.
Comrade Feinstein went on to praise the Workers Party of Belgium, a former Maoist organisation, which he seems to want to emulate (also see letter ‘Neo-Maoists’):
The BWP has gone from a little grouping - some might even say a cult - of a few hundred people to having the second most representatives in Belgium’s legislatures. And how have they done it? By ensuring, firstly, that their representatives give a percentage of their salaries back to their communities, so that careerists are immediately excluded. Two, by not contesting an election in a community until they have been present and working with that community for at least two years. Three, by ensuring that it is the communities that hold representatives to account.4
Forgive us, comrade Feinstein - but that does not look like a “totally different type of politics” to us - and it does not sound particularly democratic or accountable either.
Democracy?
The first question to ask is, who exactly has decided on this particular strategy? Was it perhaps “a small group of leaders or self-appointed saviours” in what presumably were “small [Zoom] rooms”? There is nothing wrong with democratically elected leaders making such decisions on behalf of their members. That is, after all, how our communist fusion process currently operates. However, there is a massive problem if you do so entirely in secret and without publishing any reports or minutes of your meetings. Because that means there is no way to question or challenge you and the other ‘non-leader leaders’ on your strategy and tactics - let alone get you to change them.
The argument that you have to protect people in “sensitive positions” does not really hold water either. Presumably we are not talking about sitting Labour MPs, but possibly some of those who have had the whip withdrawn by Sir Keir Starmer anyway. Maybe a couple of trade union bureaucrats. Why can’t they openly argue for what is necessary - and at the same time make the process open and democratic? This method of organising sounds in fact even less democratic than the many, many incarnations of Corbyn-without-Corbyn ‘parties’ we have seen in the last few years. The working class will simply have to wait to be presented with the finished product.
What about the possible programme of such an organisation? Obviously, there is nothing public - yet. Corbyn mentioned his usual recipe of “justice, peace and wealth re-distribution” - ie, don’t frighten the horses with talk of socialism or the necessary overthrow of capitalism.
Comrade Kimber writes that the SWP campaigns for it to become an “umbrella organisation”, in which candidates would sign up to six ‘socialist’ principles: “These could be no austerity, refugees welcome and fight racism, LGBT+ liberation, welfare not warfare, free Palestine and real action on climate change. Candidates would accept these, but could go further than them if they wanted to.” Allegedly that is how vague you have to keep things, so as to not repel the “independents” and “the communities”. Indeed it is hard to imagine the late pope, Francis, or even the current pope, Leo XIV, having any particular problems signing up to the SWP’s six ‘socialist’ principles (precisely because they aren’t ‘socialist’ principles, but vacuous banalities).
Cart and horse
A real party of the working class would, of course, organise in “the communities” - but Corbyn and Feinstein want to put the cart before the horse. Or at least that is how they are trying to dress up this new initiative. In reality, it is a bit of a stretch to claim that the various “independent” groups that are part of these secret talks are “community initiatives”: After all, Preston is where Counterfire member Michael Lavallette has just been re-elected as a councillor - for the fifth time, incidentally. He admits quite openly that he won five times “with five different hats on”, including Respect and the Socialist Alliance5 - in other words, he is well known as a long-standing local socialist. The Liverpool Community Independents is a small group of former left-of-centre Labour Party members led by former Momentum honcho Alan Gibbons and former Labour councillors. The leader of the Camden Independents is a certain Andrew Feinstein. He could have also mentioned Jeremy Corbyn’s “local community assembly” in North Islington - which is in fact the MP’s monthly constituency meeting.6 The list goes on.
We also suspect that some socialist and left groups have been invited along, though this is speculation. Counterfire, probably, SWP maybe, via its shiny new ‘We Demand Change’ talking shop, and possibly the Socialist Party in England and Wales. Why aren’t we told? It is not, after all, that we are operating under illegal conditions.
From such bad beginnings we should not expect anything much good to happen.