24.07.2025
In for the long haul
Polls showing the yet-to-be-formed ‘Corbyn party’ neck and neck with Labour have caused great excitement. But we must squarely face the obstacles confronting the working class, argues Paul Demarty
Though its long gestation has been troubled, there are some positive signs for the putative Labour Party breakaway to be led by Jeremy Corbyn.
Opinion polls, for a start, have been generally favourable, with the ‘Jeremy Corbyn Party’ - as pollsters are calling it - tending to grab double-figure vote shares. One poll even had it level-pegging with the rump Labour Party, though even this would seem to play out rather as Reform UK’s high vote did in 2024 - rather than delivering a large contingent of ‘JCP’ MPs, it would gobble up Labour votes to ensure a drubbing for Sir Keir Starmer and friends.
This reflects something quite obvious, which is that the government is deeply unpopular, including among its own voters. The latter are spinning off in many directions - some to the right and the beckoning embrace of Reform, others to the Greens and Liberal Democrats, and a healthy share to the hoped-for JCP. So far as a grand plan seems to exist among Starmer’s circle, it is to set up a direct contest between Labour and Reform, such that these voters will return, no matter what assaults Labour conducts on the welfare state, and no matter how deep its complicity with the Gaza genocide. In the meantime, as off-year polls and by-elections roll around, it is a good time to be a third party.
The general excitement on the left about this project is thus understandable, and to the above we could add the overall sense that something, finally, is moving. That said, there is a need for a reality check here. We should consider, first of all, the fate of various previous splits, to the left and right, from the Labour Party.
History
The first illustration would be the Independent Labour Party, which broke away from Labour in 1932. Having done so, it never again returned more than a handful of MPs, though it continued to stand on its own ticket as late as the 1960s. Eventually, it was renamed ‘Independent Labour Publications’, and under that name continued for a time as a ginger group back inside the Labour fold.
The ILP was no mere fringe organisation. It was formed in 1893, out of seriously embedded local organisations, especially in London and Scotland. It could fairly be credited - if that is the word - with the foundation of the Labour Party itself, being the principal political force dedicated to the overthrow of the ‘Lib-Lab’ politics that preceded it, in which working class and trade union candidates would typically stand as Liberals. It had some tens of thousands of members on its own account, and, along with the Fabians and later communist sympathisers, constituted one of the main intellectual currents in Labour: staunchly socialist, pacifist and Marxist-influenced. Yet its split with Labour, under the very severe provocation of Labour’s austerity government in the depths of the great depression, inflicted a slow but mortal wound.
By the time the ILP departed in 1932, there had already been the split to the right, named National Labour - those Labour MPs who joined the national government, led by former ILP leader and serving prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald. National Labour never even bothered founding itself as a party, but stood candidates in the 1935 election, its returns dropping from 20 to eight. With the outbreak of World War II, elections were delayed, and by the time of the 1945 election, the rump of National Labour saw the writing on the wall, and wound up.
We can now fast-forward to the early 1980s, when there was a real upsurge on the Labour left around the technocrat-turned-socialist icon, Tony Benn. This greatly disturbed MPs on the right of the party. Soft-left compromise candidate Michael Foot had been elected leader, with rightwing warhorse Denis Healey as his deputy. Benn opened a challenge to Healey’s position, forcing an election in 1981. Healey’s high-handedness with some of his ‘natural’ supporters led four current and former MPs - David Owen, Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers - to break away to form the Social Democratic Party.
The SDP had considerable success in its early days. It polled highly, and gained the support of a certain constituency - especially of salaried professionals, alarmed alike by the new-right extremism of Thatcher and the autarkic-pacifist leftism of the Bennites. It secured the defections of dozens of Labour MPs (and one Tory).
The people behind the SDP were no fools, and knew that agreements with other parties would be essential to securing electoral success. So the SDP formed an alliance with the Liberals, not too long after this great historic party had returned parliamentary fractions famously small enough to fit in a London taxi. The SDP bubble effectively burst at this moment, and the rationale of the party was radically diminished after Neil Kinnock took over the Labour leadership and began a rightward ratchet in its politics that would be all but uninterrupted until the 2010s.
The end result was the Liberal Democrats, and in a sense this is some kind of success story: the Lib Dems enjoyed greater success than either of its component parts had done for some time. Yet there was little enough distinctively ‘SDP’ about the fused party; it was a larger, rejuvenated Liberal party with its remaining connection to the heritage of the labour movement all but severed. There remains a rump SDP today - David Owen took a small remnant to form it - and its politics have lately galloped dramatically to the socially conservative right, without any obvious success following on from this shift.
We could finally mention the leftwing splits from Labour in the Tony Blair years - first of all, the Socialist Labour Party formed by Arthur Scargill. For all Scargill’s credibility gained during the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85, this organisation never achieved more than trivial election returns and certainly never returned an MP to parliament. The Respect coalition, formed by George Galloway with the Socialist Workers Party after he was expelled from Labour, at least succeeded in electing Galloway in Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005, and again in Bradford in 2012, along with clutches of councillors in London and Birmingham. Yet it slowly dissolved under the pressure of fallings-out between its major players and never succeeded in truly breaking the mould of British politics, as all these breakaways intended.
If we ask why this should be such a litany of failure, we arrive first of all at the practical matter of this country’s electoral system, which exerts brutal punishment on smaller parties. When the Tories warned the Reform-curious last year that big votes for Nigel Farage’s party would result merely in a larger Labour majority, they were proven spectacularly correct by events. The SDP recognised this early, and therefore was able to funnel its energies in effect into creating a larger, more effective Liberal Party.
Unsurprisingly, many enthused by the Corbyn project are already talking about stand-down agreements with the Greens. If we take the objective merely to be to maximise electoral returns in 2029, that is a quite sensible idea. Yet the SDP is something of a cautionary tale here. The result, in the end, of the stand-down agreement with the Liberals was - as we have said - effectively to create a larger Liberal Party. The distinctive SDP political brand - something with clear historical connections to the labour movement - more or less disappeared.
That is not to be wondered at, since Labour’s connection, despite its total political subordination to capital, survives because it is based on a social reality, not a mere idea: the link that really exists to wider organisations of that movement - primarily the trade unions, but also the cooperatives. The SDP took dozens of MPs from Foot, but no significant contingents of this wider movement. For all the wishful thinking going on in relation to Unite, there is no serious chance of Corbyn and co doing any better. The bureaucratic leadership of the unions prefers to be inside the tent, pissing out. It wants a link to the government, not a heroic stand in opposition. Indeed, unions like Unite and the GMB prefer to support the warfare state in the name of their members’ jobs, and in the past consistently acted to blunt Corbyn’s instinctive pacifism during his Labour leadership.
Obstacles
So there are two major obstacles to the short-term success of any Corbyn party - or indeed any other breakaway of whatever type. The first is the constitutional machinery of British politics as such, which is precisely designed to protect the ship of state from any insurgent challengers. There is the ‘first past the post’ electoral system, but we could also mention the regulatory functions of the monarchy and judiciary, and many other things besides. The second is that the labour movement is under the control of a conservative, bureaucratic caste (and this caste is discreetly supported by the machinery of the state).
It follows that the immediate tasks of a serious, insurgent left political force are to delegitimise that constitutional regime, and to prise control of the labour movement from that bureaucratic caste. A handful of parliamentary seats may follow, and if they do, are to be welcomed and exploited for all they are worth, to wreak merry havoc in the enemy camp. (The only thing worse than parliamentary cretinism is anti-parliamentary cretinism.) Yet that is not the major point, because the obstacles to our success are not purely contingent accidents, but immediately have to do with the very mechanisms by which the bourgeoisie rules.
For an insurgent left political force to do any such thing, however, imposes certain limits on its political character. It cannot, in short, take up the politics of Corbynism, as it existed between 2015 and 2019, which amounted to an attempt to deliver a Labour government on a social democratic manifesto within the existing constitutional set-up, and with the support of the labour bureaucracy. To acknowledge the reality of the obstacles to power is immediately to adopt revolutionary rather than reformist (we should say, more precisely, constitutional-loyalist) politics. Whether what emerges from the interminable game of chicken that is the ‘Jeremy Corbyn Party’ formation process is a loose network of local campaigns or a centralised party is immaterial here, except inasmuch as only a centralised party could have the required political character.
So even leftwing interventions in the JCP debate have their blind spots. Max Shanly has made a few waves with his intervention on the pro-party side, but envisages his party organising “socialists/anti-capitalists of all stripes - both reformists and revolutionaries”.1 Yet the historical record here is clear - wherever revolutionaries achieve victory in struggles in such parties, the result is the split of the reformists. This is no surprise, since the political character of reformism consists precisely in its subordination to the existing constitution and the labour bureaucracy.
Ironically, it is the right which has had more ‘revolutionary elan’ in recent years, according to my definition (obviously it is not the labour bureaucracy that is relevant here, but the traditional hierarchy of conservative politics). Reform UK has succeeded precisely because it is able to cast today’s Britain as a “foreign land”, to quote William Hague many years ago - the ‘yookay’, as they call it. There is a contradiction here: Reform proposes tearing up the status quo essentially in the name of a more profound, esoteric status quo underlying it - in this respect similar to those traditionalist Catholics who have spent several years denouncing the pope in the name of papal supremacy. Yet the success of the radical right nonetheless demonstrates the need for opponents of the status quo to be all in.
In short, the party we need is not some gimmicky attempt to sneak into the corridors of power, but one capable of a real assault on the basic centres of political power - in short, a communist party. Our attitude to the Corbyn party - should it ever exist - must be based on this perspective.
Our politics is based on the fact that we must be in it for the long haul.