Political Statement from the National Executive Committee of the Labour Representation Committee
A. BUILDING THE RESISTANCE
Some on the left have advised us not to be “oppositionist”. But we are in opposition!
We are in opposition, firstly, of course, to this right-wing government.. It’s a government out of control, whose responses to Covid have been beyond incompetent and, in many cases, corrupt, with tragic consequences. It will attempt to recoup the cost of the pandemic by lowering working-class living standards, levels of employment, wages and benefits. All this in the context of a global climate crisis that threatens our very existence.
There are, of course, movements of resistance – within the trade unions, climate change protests, Black Lives Matter, in solidarity with the Palestinian people, defending asylum seekers and migrants, resisting violence against women or discrimination against disabled people, fighting Universal Credit and the cut in its uplift, parts of the mutual aid movement and many more. It is from these movements, and those that follow them, that the mass base for resistance will develop.
Daniel Kebede, NEU vice president, explained: “The only thing that can protect us from a government that does not value the lives of ordinary people is organised trade unions in the workplace.” It is the NEU and other organisations of resistance – not Labour’s front bench – that are the real opposition. Even footballers Marcus Rashford and Tyrone Mings are more effective!
The Labour Party should be championing these struggles, trying to connect them and providing a political and governmental alternative.
But that Labour Party no longer exists, or, rather, it exists at the grassroots but certainly not in the leadership. For we are in opposition too within the Labour Party. At the 2019 General Election, with the toppling of Corbyn and the election of Starmer as Labour leader, the left suffered a serious defeat at the hands of the establishment wing of the party.
The left has been pushed back to the margins, suspended and expelled for telling the truth – about the exclusion of Jeremy Corbyn, on antisemitism in the party, on the report of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. Even talking about the witch-hunt can get you witch-hunted! Constituency parties have been shut down, candidates removed and preferred candidates imposed by the party machine. Our CLP AGMs have been gerrymandered, we have had regional and national party interference and removal of access to our members. And now socialist organisations within the party are being proscribed, with the threat of more to follow. We are all under threat!
And these are just symptoms of a greater malaise in the leadership – its invisibility and timidity, failure to oppose the Spycops bill, the sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey on trumped-up charges of supporting antisemitic conspiracy theories, when in fact she was ousted for being too close to the National Education Union. The dismissal of Black Lives Matter as “a moment, not a movement”, the party shrouding itself in the Union Jack and running away from the Green New Deal and the more radical parts of our manifestos under Corbyn are part of the same dynamic. Now, Labour is conceding to Unionist pressures with Starmer’s commitment to campaign against a united Ireland. Such a campaign would be in breach of the Good Friday Agreement.
Whole communities, in particular Muslim communities, have been marginalised. The real structural racism in British society today, against Black and Asian people, is sidelined and relegated by the Labour Party hierarchy – whether through Windrush deportations, police violence, disproportionate imprisonment, economic injustice or Grenfell.
There is a huge danger here. After the loss of Red Wall seats in the North and Midlands, there is every possibility this could be followed by the loss of Labour’s Muslim Wall and Urban Black Wall if the leadership continues to take the support of these traditional voters for granted. These are communities disproportionately affected by Covid, more likely to live in poverty, to be unemployed, to suffer from the ‘hostile environment’ and the increasingly racist agenda of the criminal justice system. We have seen the electoral consequences in Hartlepool, and many – though not all – areas of England, with a party membership often demoralised and demobilised. The warning was there in Batley and Spen – a warning our party ignores at its peril.
Starmer may be safe for the moment, but Batley and Spen was an appalling result. Yet, where Labour resisted the Tories, the electoral results were positive – in Wales, Preston, Manchester and Sussex.
Starmer may think he can do without the membership. He may hope that, with friends in the establishment and in the press, he has no need to take account of party members who have ideas of their own. This is a delusion! Attacking party activists is the surest way to lose elections. The results are there for all to see.
And yet this is a price the new leadership is prepared to pay – if it must. Labour has returned to being a safe pair of hands for the establishment. In order to prove itself as a safe pair of hands for the establishment.
Starmer’s leadership represents the establishment wing of the party – a faction more loyal to the establishment than to working-class interests and which, in its attacks on the left and the democratic rights of the membership, could destroy the party – if it has to and if it can. In this sense, Starmer is different from traditional Labour bureaucrats like Wilson, Callaghan and John Smith.
The Labour bureaucracy expresses the pressure of the ruling class on, and into, the labour movement, but its position depends on the survival of its power base, the organisations of the working class. New Labour was the beginning of a break from this – it was a much more direct, rather than mediated, expression of the interests of the establishment. We warned that the trajectory of New Labour was to destroy the Labour Party’s organic connection with the trade unions. We were right to sound that warning, but it didn’t happen. Blair didn’t complete that task, primarily because he didn’t have to.
We must sound that warning again. Starmer, too, represents the direct interests of the ruling class. Unlike Blair, he may try and finish the job, creating a broad Liberal-type party. There are two reasons why this might be necessary. Firstly, the economic crisis post-2008 and post-Covid. Secondly, the frightening experience of the Corbyn years when the leadership – and the membership – was out of control, was a lesson the establishment wing will not forget.
This explains the Labour leadership’s ferocity. Their removal of Corbyn from the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) was clearly part of a strategy to demoralise and crush the movement. The wholesale suspensions are a continuation of this. This is a scorched earth policy. Whatever it may cost in electoral terms, it is, for the right wing, a price worth paying.
How do we respond?
Two errors should be avoided:
1. A search for short cuts, responses outside of and against Labour, of which support for Galloway in Batley and Spen is only the most extreme example.
2. Business as usual – the view from sections of the left that this is part of a cyclical movement within a broad church. It isn’t! This fight is a class struggle! Our opponents realise this. We need to as well. The only force that can stop these attacks is the combined weight – class weight – of the CLPs and trade unions.
But the basis for our opposition, our resistance, already exists in embryo. Within the party, it is remarkable how party members and CLPs have resisted without leadership from the top. The enduring strength of the left and opposition to Starmer’s drive to the right was shown by the remarkably positive results for the CLP section of the National Labour Women’s Committee.
Yet members are leaving the party in the tens of thousands. It says much for our resilience that it is not more. But tens of thousands will become hundreds of thousands unless there is a fightback. The key is to resist and, above all, to be visible. The time for keeping our heads down has gone!
Organisations of resistance are springing up all over the place. Our task is to embrace them, and help unite them. We must connect and unite from the bottom, link up with the left of the NEC, the trade unions and beyond, build alliances. We must break out of our isolation, link the different wings of our movement and, above all, focus on building the resistance on the ground, often outside the formal structures of the Labour Party - in the trade unions, in the social movements - and bring that pressure, that class pressure, into the party itself.
We need also to reassess the lessons of the Corbyn years and try to ensure that the mistakes are not repeated. After all, the establishment wing of the party is doing just that! The left is paying the price for our failure to seize the moment in those years of hope under Corbyn – the possibility of transforming Labour into a movement for fundamental change – that chance of a lifetime.
We were fighting the establishment outside and inside the party. It was obvious from the outset that the PLP and the Labour bureaucracy would be serious obstacles to any programme of fundamental change. A precondition for challenging the establishment forces from outside would have been to take on the forces of the establishment within our party. So, for example, it was inconceivable that the parliamentary party, unless fundamentally transformed, could ever have been an ally for transformation. And so it proved. The PLP – in refusing to accept the party’s overwhelming verdict, briefing against Jeremy and forcing a second leadership contest – was acting as a party within a party that feared a Corbyn government more than another Tory government.
The only possible way to fight against such powerful opposition forces would have been to build an anti-establishment insurgency from below.
BUT this was not the late ’60s, ’70s or early ’80s, when the working class in Britain was powerful – so powerful that Heath called an election in 1974 on the theme of “who rules: the government or the unions?”, and lost!
We have suffered decades of defeat since the miners’ strike. Although Jeremy’s victory reflected, in part, a genuine disaffection from below against austerity and neoliberalism – part of an international movement, such as in Spain, Greece and the US – our movement was also at a low ebb.
This was the key contradiction – between the rise of the most left-wing leadership in Labour’s history and the low ebb of class struggle.
Our task was to rebuild the movement. We needed a democratic grassroots movement – rooted in our trade unions and communities – that would try, openly and transparently, to transform the party itself. That insurgency had to be a radical crusade against the establishment and an authentic voice for the dispossessed. Those tasks remain key today.
But here was the conflict for our leaders of the left: how to achieve the wholesale reshaping of the party mechanisms while, at the same time, achieving some unity within the PLP and shadow cabinet sufficient to keep the parliamentary opposition on the road? How could these two opposites – the building of a radical, democratic grassroots movement and party unity – be reconciled?
That tension reached a critical point. After the split by the gang of nine, Jeremy had almost impossible choices. He feared another parliamentary rift could make a general election victory – even against what was a weak, split, crisis-ridden Tory government – desperately difficult.
But to abandon the radical grassroots movement to the power of the parliamentary party would have been to give up in advance on the chance of achieving a radical Labour government.
Under Corbyn, Labour became a mass membership party of 600,000+ – the biggest party in western Europe. But ultimately the left – we – failed to deliver. Why? Of course, above all, it was the balance of class forces – the power of the establishment – that we were up against, but it was also a political weakness and a failure to give political leadership.
The project of building a democratic grassroots movement was largely outsourced to Momentum, which proved increasingly unequal to the task. It would further seem that recent changes in the leadership of that organisation have not solved their problems.
Against huge establishment pressure – above all from the PLP and party bureaucracy – the left began to divide and crumble on key issues such as fighting the witch-hunt and on open selection of MPs. Key allies of the left – and key objectives to transform the party – were sacrificed in a vain attempt to appease the right.
And sections of the left, at various times, colluded with the witch-hunt. This was primarily based on mainly false, exaggerated allegations of antisemitism, allegations which parts of the left often failed to challenge.
All of this took place in the context of a vote on Brexit that put Labour between a rock and a hard place.
The decline in Labour support in Scotland arose from years of neglect, of taking support for Labour for granted, of joining the Tories to campaign against independence and the generally right-wing nature of many local Labour councils. The near death of Labour Scotland will take years to recover from, whoever is Labour leader
The left has suffered a severe defeat. In the short run, there is little immediate prospect of victory within the party.
We can only begin to recover by:
1. Being visible as a Labour left, for otherwise there will be an even greater exodus by the left from the Labour Party.
2. Building our forces by connecting with the class struggle – often outside of the party – reinforcing movements of resistance in the trade unions and beyond and trying to give this political expression within the party. We must try to co-ordinate the various movements of resistance. Inside the party of course - but also beyond the party as well. This is a fight that will not be won just within the CLPs.
We must attempt – patiently, with some humility, and if necessarily, piecemeal – to help bring the left, above all, the Labour left, together, to co-operate. It means breaking habits of a lifetime. But the price of failure is immense. The LRC has argued consistently for greater collaboration and co-ordination of the Labour left, including crucially the trade unions. We have been part of attempting to build that through our involvement in the ‘What Next for the Labour Left’ discussions, which have involved around 25 organisations. While progress has not been as quick and transparent as we would like, we will continue to encourage this process, supporting future conferences of the Labour left in which there is participation and decision-making by the wider movement.
As we develop our resistance, we should remember the words of a Palestinian activist in the West Bank: Despair is a luxury we cannot afford.
The contradiction for us is that while we need patiently to build alliances, the planet is teetering towards extinction, and we do not have all the time in the world.
The dangers engulfing us are terrifying and worldwide. None of the countless millions suffering from forest fires, floods and pandemics across the planet will be inspired by a Labour leadership which waves its tainted and reactionary national flag. Our flag is international. We are part of a global movement of resistance. It is a fight within the Labour Party, but it is more, much more, than this. We have a world to save!
B. TRADE UNIONS
The next period, coming out of the pandemic, will be tough for workers. Employers and government are already using the situation further to attack terms and conditions, including health and safety protections. The end of furlough and the extension of pre-tested fire and rehire tactics are set to make working life harder.
Overall, our unions are not well set to resist this. Numbers of union members have barely risen, and organisation is primarily in the public sector. Fewer than 25 percent of workers are in a union, and a smaller percentage is covered by collective bargaining. The post-pandemic reality will require a greater degree of engagement from left trade union activists who are also party members.
The TUC proposed a social partnership approach to the pandemic, which was clearly rejected by government and employers. Tension continues between trade unions that think they can appeal to employers’ better nature and those that prefer a more realistic class-struggle approach.
Despite a few high-profile disputes, there has not been a significant increase in industrial action, yet, among those which have taken place, such as the Manchester bus strike, determined action has been victorious. Similarly, the NEU showed that a resolute stand against the government’s intention to re-open schools prematurely beat back those plans and won many new recruits (and workplace representatives). Wildcat action took place in some sectors over health and safety, but the pandemic also exposed how little notice many employers take of existing regulations, the prime example (though far from the only one) being Boohoo in Leicester.
Overall, however, many unions are reluctant to see disputes through, and the level of member engagement is extremely low, which is reflected in election turnout and low numbers of workplace representatives.
Convoluted union structures and decision-making processes often militate against members getting involved, let alone taking control of workplace disputes. A key task of activists is to address this, primarily to ensure membership control and oversight. It is worth noting that, in some unions (especially GMB and Unite), undemocratic constitutions were drawn up with the specific aim of preventing the left from gaining control. An obvious target is to reform how elections take place, to avoid situations, as in Unison and Unite, where left candidates are competing against each otherunder first past the post. And rather than general secretaries having the power to appoint their chosen candidates to key positions in the movement (such as TUC General Council and Labour Party NEC), these should be democratically determined.
With some honourable exceptions, the unions are still dragging their feet (or worse) in organising, defending and supporting the demands of workers in precarious and other low-paid sectors. This has led to the growth of United Voices of the World (UVW)/Industrial Worker’s of the World (IWW) and Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) to fill the gap, not afraid to take strike and legal action, although their reach has been limited to date. The LRC will continue to support and encourage such actions and urge other unions to do the same, opposing the insistence of some that, because these new unions are not affiliated to the TUC, they cannot be supported.
Elections of general secretaries and executives have taken place in several key unions recently. It is too soon to pass judgement, but the new faces in RMT and GMB are unlikely to change the political direction of the respective unions. Coming from a long line of GMB regional officers, Gary Smith seems more committed to industrial action than previous general secretaries, and he has said he will take on the misogynist culture exposed in the union. Time will tell.
In Unison, the right won the general secretary post, but the left won an overwhelming majority on the executive. We are set for a period of conflict between the two. The only way for the left to ensure that its victory is lasting is to rapidly engage with as wide a section of the membership as possible and give a lead to a fightback against the bosses’ offensive.
The majority of unions do not campaign against Britain’s restrictive anti-union laws, even if they are opposed on paper. The LRC will continue to argue for the repeal of all anti-union laws, not just the latest one. We support the Free Our Unions campaign, and we encourage activists to advance this wherever possible through union and Labour Party bodies. Failure to campaign against, or even challenge, existing laws will no doubt embolden the Tories to bring in further restrictions on the right to strike, as they are already attempting to do with the Policing Bill.
This faintheartedness over anti-union legislation was evident even under left control of the Labour Party. Despite successive conferences having voted to repeal all anti-union laws, official statements were either ambiguous or only called for the repeal of the latest law. More emphasis was placed on the introduction of sectoral collective bargaining, which, while positive, falls woefully short without the right to take collective action. The thresholds for strike ballots under current legislation are difficult to achieve, requiring levels of agitation and organisation beyond what most unions are used to.
Only the postal section of the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) has repeatedly met the threshold at a national level, through a combination of workplace meetings and TV broadcasts. Several other unions have fallen just short. The evidence is that the larger the workforce, the harder it is to achieve these targets. For this reason, national strike action may be unlikely, especially in the NHS (justified as it would be). More likely is, for instance, action by workers on the London Underground, given the level of cuts being demanded by the government of Transport for London. The LRC will support and encourage resistance to employers’ plans wherever it takes place.
Interestingly, the supposed new deal for workers retains the gist of Corbyn-era policies. Whether this is a sop to the unions from Starmer, in an attempt to keep them on board, or whether it will be dropped remains to be seen. Either way, the left needs to keep up the pressure, while welcoming Andy McDonald’s support for strikers and for a higher increase for health workers than Starmer has spoken for.
During Corbyn’s leadership of the party, the consensus throughout most of Labour’s history – that the unions leave the political to the party and the party leaves the industrial to the unions – began to break down. The risk now is that many unions will fall back to not rocking the boat because of their desire for a Labour government at any cost. Socialists have to argue that such an approach might result in a Labour government, but one with policies far removed from those needed to address the key issues facing workers.
The LRC uses every opportunity to work with the unions, but on the basis of arguing that the unions continue the fight for radical policies and against attacks on party democracy (including bans and proscriptions). The unions need support in the CLPs to win those policies, just as the left in CLPs need the unions.
The Bakers, Food and Allied Workers' Union (BFAWU) has been consulting its members on their attitude to the Labour Party, with the result that an overwhelming majority feel that the party does not represent their interests. Whether this leads to BFAWU disaffiliating remains to be seen, but it is clear that Starmer’s ‘policy-lite’ approach poses a challenge to the left unions.
It is now three years since new union members were expected not only to opt in to political funds but also to pay extra fees, and reports of new members paying those fees is near zero. This situation is unlikely to change under Starmer, meaning the slow death of affiliated political funds. The LRC believes it better for unions to stay and fight and not reduce their level of affiliation (as against donations). Developments will need to be watched closely.
The fight for union democracy must also include arguing for affiliated unions to support democratic change in the Labour Party, including mandatory reselection. We also uphold the right of Labour-affiliated trade union members, rather than regional or national officers, to decide their own delegates to CLPs and preferences for PPCs.
Many unions are affiliated to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and virtually all supported the resolution to 2020 TUC that referred to Israeli apartheid, but most unions have refused to defend party (including union) members subject to spurious allegations of antisemitism. This has to be recognised as part and parcel of the same attack on party democracy as other measures and opposed just as vigorously.
Organisation of the left in the unions is extremely weak, in both left and not-so-left unions, with some (e.g. CWU) disappearing altogether. Where it does exist, there has been a splintering, often around personalities as much as policies (Unite, PCS, Unison). The LRC argues for inclusive, democratic formations within the unions, based around policy.
C. LOCAL GOVERNMENT
Following the pandemic, local government finances will be in an even more parlous state than they have been for many years, with cuts in grants from central government combined with the effects of Covid on councils’ revenue and costs. Expenditure due to the pandemic has not been fully reimbursed by the government, and the Tories will see council spending as an area where they can reduce further. Several local authorities have already gone bankrupt.
There has been little resistance to funding cuts from Labour in local government or nationally. Labour authorities have seen it as their task to manage the resources drip-fed to them rather than campaign for greater resources. While some authorities, such as Preston and Salford, have done this in a way which involves local people and does least harm to the community and the workforce, this is not an alternative to a fightback.
The LRC will continue to argue for councils to work together in drawing up budgets based on local needs and for a mobilisation of party, unions and community to demand funding for these needs to be met. We are not in a situation where councils can mount a confrontation with central government as in the ’80s, but that does not mean they should simply be conveyor belts for Tory cuts.
The LRC supported a motion to Annual Labour Conference 2021 which called for the party to commit to building a campaign with trade unions, service users, community and tenant organisations for the funding necessary to not only stop but also reverse cuts. As a minimum, we will demand of the government that it:
Honours its commitment to fully fund councils to cover the extra costs of dealing with the pandemic and lost revenue resulting from the lockdowns.
Cancels local authority debt held by the Public Works Loan Board, which will provide councils with an extra £4.5 billion spending power a year, including £1.25 billion extra for Housing Revenue Accounts.
Provides councils with a £10 billion annual grant to fund the building of 100,000 council homes per year, addressing the housing crisis and providing socially useful work.
Opens urgent negotiations on a new financial settlement for local government, with funding based on identified social needs in each local authority, with an annual assessment to uprate for inflation.
D. REFUGEE CRISIS
Figures for the end of 2020 from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimate that 82.4 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order. This is an increase from 65 million at the end of 2018 and more than at any time since the Second World War. Around a million refugees come to Europe every year, according to figures from UNHCR. Of these, a few thousand are trying to get to the UK. In France, most are stopped at the border which the UK government pays French authorities to maintain. Therefore, the inhumane policing of our border in France by the French authorities and the paramilitary Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité ( Republican Security Corps)is funded by British taxpayers’ money.
Tony Benn said:
“The way a government treats refugees is very instructive, because it shows you how they would treat the rest of us if they thought they could get away with it.”
Jeremy Corbyn has described the global refugee crisis as one of the defining issues of our time. How we deal with it will be how history judges us.
So, how will history judge this Tory government – the designers, architects and builders of a hostile environment that has devastated the lives of almost every demographic among their own citizens? The same policies have seen homelessness double to at least 320,000 and more than 14 million people, including 4.5 million children (33%), are living below the breadline, refugees and asylum seekers are condemned to death by drowning, or a miserable existence in scrubland and shanty camps. If they do get to the UK they may well face possible indefinite detention in isolated accommodation out of city centres.
The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, is determined to uphold the hostile environment in every way possible – via deportations (including those entitled to stay from the Windrush generation); by housing asylum seekers in uninhabitable barracks at best and distant islands at worst; by discouraging rescue at sea, etc. The LRC rejects her plans and actions and supports all resistance to them (such as the magnificent action by the residents of Glasgow’s Kenmure Street), and reaffirms its opposition to all immigration controls.
E. INTERNATIONAL
Since the last LRC conference, there have been many changes in different parts of the globe.
We celebrate the removal of Trump from the US presidency, although Joe Biden is very much a representative of the capitalist establishment and Trump’s base remains powerful and able to wreak serious damage.
In other places, where the far right has not been in government for some time, for example in the Spanish state, a formation such as Vox, with its blatantly Francoist symbols, has shot to prominence in a relatively short period of time. While attacks on migrants – and in Europe on Muslims – remain central to these formations, the self-organisation and confidence of women and LGBTIQ movements are also increasingly a significant target.
In Latin America, there has been a wave of positive developments of a different order to the previous ‘pink tide’ in that they are more rooted in grassroots mobilisations. This has been notable in Chile, where the despised constitution of Pinochet has been overturned in a massive defeat for both the right and the ‘respectable’ left. The right in Peru was unable to prevent the inauguration of Castillo, the country’s first indigenous president. In Colombia, a national strike at the end of April opened a period of daily strikes lasting for a month and forcing the Duque regime to withdraw its deeply regressive tax reform.
Other deeply right wing governments remain in place in strategically important countries, for example in Brazil, in India – despite the huge farmers’ movement and strike wave – and in Myanmar, where there has been a military coup of extreme brutality, particularly targeting trade unions and working class neighbourhoods. The political conflict between the US and China has meant there has been little international reaction.
China was able to impose the National Security Law on Hong Kong and decapitate a very vibrant movement there as well as to continue its repression of the Uyghur population – including mass internment and the forced separation of children from their parents.
Overall, international politics has been marked by a number of key factors, all continuations of long-term tendencies, affected by changes in international, national and regional relationships of class forces. One of these factors is the deepening and sharpening environmental catastrophe, set out in a separate section.
The second factor – the pandemic – is a function of the deep rift between the need of capitalism for infinite expansion and the limited resources of the planet on which we live. Massive deforestation, industrial agriculture, wet markets, increasing population density in megacities and mass use of aviation are key factors that led to the development and spread of Covid, aided and abetted by the criminal reaction of the majority of the world’s governments.
Even before the pandemic, signs were developing of a significant economic crisis – an economic slowdown, including in China – and the beginning of a financial crisis in the US.
Alongside the huge impact on public heath in all but the small number of countries that adopted a Zero Covid approach this was compounded by the economic effects of the pandemic, which brought chains of production, supply and distribution to a standstill alongside its huge impact on public health.
Many governments have increased public spending in the short term to avert an even greater slowdown, but they will be determined to claw that back as soon as it is politically possible. Overall, the period has seen a deepening of existing inequalities. Those outside, or on the margins of, the formal economy have been forced further into poverty, and employers have deepened attacks on workers’ rights.
States have used measures to control the pandemic as a cover to deepen or impose repression, particularly impacting on already marginalised populations. Examples include Orban’s state of emergency in Hungary, the clearance by Modi’s regime of those living on the streets in India and Duarte in the Philippines extending his previous so-called war on drugs to a war against the pandemic, i.e. against civil society, by imposing an anti-terrorism law. And internationally, there has been an epidemic of violence against women and LGBTIQ people - home is not a safe place for us all.
The rise of the Black Lives Matters movement was a huge phenomenon, not only in the US but also internationally, including in Britain, but the forward dynamic has been paused on both a US and international basis. Indigenous movements in the Americas and Australia, in particular, are a huge factor in the environmental movement but have a significant impact on other forms of organising. For example, they challenge the horrors of settler colonialism and its legacy in the Canadian state and area major component of the movement to impeach Bolsonaro in Brazil.
There has been a significant strengthening of feminist politics, led particularly from Latin America in opposition to the barbaric growth of femicide and violence against women more generally. Campaigns for reproductive justice, particularly for the right to abortion, have challenged the intersection between religious and state hierarchies from Argentina to Poland.
The growth of the solidarity movement with Palestine – particularly focused on the demands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions and the labelling of the Israeli state as an apartheid state – has been a key factor in international politics. That significant sections of Jewish populations, particularly of young Jews, are active participants in those movements is to be celebrated. At the same time, the settler colonial state in Israel continues to wreak unspeakable suffering on all the people of Palestine, whether those fighting to defend their homes in Jerusalem, strangled by the sanctions in Gaza, denied elections in the West Bank or exiled by the lack of the right to return. It is their voices we seek to amplify whenever we can.
Each of these struggles and others to which we should relate, such as the organisations supporting the fight of the Kurdish people for self-determination, have their own network. Co-ordination between struggles has become harder since the World Social Forum, launched in Porto Allegre in Brazil in 2001, and its offshoots, such as the European Social Forum, no longer exist. We will seek to strengthen the relationship between the LRC and these networks as well as continuing to try to give them a voice through our magazine, Labour Briefing.
There are those on the left, including on the Labour left, who take a dangerously simplistic approach to international politics based on ‘campism’. This approach includes rejecting support for movements for democracy and justice because the regime they are protesting against is regarded as ‘anti-imperialist’, or at least not in the imperialist ‘camp’. An example is the attitude of much of the left to the secular opposition to Assad in Syria. The situation in Cuba currently is another example, where the clearly criminal blockade of US imperialism is one of the key factors in the impoverishment of the mass of people. But that certainly does not mean that everyone protesting for more food and/or more democracy is an agent of that imperialism and hostile to the revolution.
This approach was originally derived from the communist parties for whom the world was divided into two camps: the Soviet Union and its supporters (or after the Sino-Russian split, China) on the one side and western imperialism on the other. The job of the international left, according to this view, was to uncritically back the Soviet Union even when it was, for example, invading Hungary. That approach has, to a significant extent, persisted, with the result that sections of the left give support to Putin’s Russia – a deeply reactionary capitalist state.
The international political situation is volatile, and it is not always possible to predict where the next flashpoint will happen. Eruptions – whether of mass strikes, coups from the right or so-called natural disasters increasingly a result of environmental catastrophes – will undoubtedly occur. Our response must, as always, be in the spirit of internationalism which remains central to the work of the LRC.
F. EMERGENCY ON PLANET EARTH
Not until 1990 did scientists begin warning that the burning of fossil fuels was dangerously over-heating the planet. A majority recommended globally co-ordinated emergency action prior to the millennium to avoid heating to a point where the planet would begin catching fire. The year 2000 passed and emissions continued to rise exponentially. Anxious not to appear alarmist, many scientists decided to allow the world’s politicians a further decade to take the action so desperately required. When that extra time ran out in 2010, yet another decade was added. None of these ‘extra time’ allowances had any scientific basis.
On 1 May 2019, MPs in Westminster approved a motion, tabled by Jeremy Corbyn, to declare an environment and climate emergency. Addressing Extinction Rebellion protesters from the top of a fire engine in Parliament Square, Jeremy said: “This can set off a wave of action from parliaments and governments around the globe. We pledge to work as closely as possible with countries that are serious about ending the climate catastrophe.”
The Labour Party under Corbyn’s leadership accorded absolute priority to this emergency, pledging to approach housing, jobs, health and education from our understanding that a habitable planet is the condition of all else. Despite our recent defeats, the LRC is determined to maintain and indeed strengthen this commitment.
With Starmer and his allies now determined to crush all hopes for a truly internationalist Labour Party inspired by reason and science, bitterness and disillusion are having alarming effects. Alongside new biological viruses, such despair has fostered the emergence of far-right cultural and political memes in the shape of conspiracy theories of every hue, the more virulent strains claiming that medical science, climate science and indeed science in general are corporate-driven fake news.
Scientific rationality is now having to fight for its life. These are some of the truly terrifying facts:
The global temperature has increased by 1.2°C since industrialisation. Canada is warming twice as fast, with the highest rates occurring in the North, the Prairies and northern British Columbia. Temperatures in the Arctic are increasing at three times the global rate.
The ice sheets at Earth’s poles have begun melting at rates ten or more times faster than scientists predicted, causing havoc to ocean currents and weather systems and threatening to drown the earth’s most densely populated cities within the lifetime of our children.
2021 has seen record temperatures and unprecedented forest fires across northwest Canada and America, while uncontrolled fires and abnormally high temperatures in Alaska and Siberia have been releasing unknown quantities of previously frozen methane – a potent greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere.
Forests are drying out and rapidly turning into tinder for when lightning strikes. As it dries up and burns, much of the Amazon rainforest is now emitting more carbon into the atmosphere than it is absorbing. Similar tragedies are destroying the lungs of our planet in every continent.
Without drastic action, our planet will heat up by more than three degrees in less than 100 years, with unknown rises in temperature thereafter. A leading climate scientist even fears the ‘Venus effect’ – runaway heating culminating in a planet whose water has passed boiling point and becomes steam.
The disaster of global heating is intersecting with other tipping points of environmental catastrophe including massive loss of biodiversity and air and ocean pollution, each deepening the disastrous impact of the others.
The actions taken so far in relation to climate have been pitifully inadequate:
· Greenhouse gas emissions have increased 1.5 percent annually over the past decade.
· As agreed in Paris six years ago, the planet must not be allowed to heat up more than 1.5°C by the end of the century. If we are to meet this target, the world’s current efforts must increase at least fivefold starting this year.
COP26 in Glasgow will be the most important global climate event since the Paris Agreement in 2015. It is a key moment for governments to be forced into action to prevent global over-heating from spiralling beyond control. As we approach this event in November, the LRC undertakes to always base our policy recommendations on science – the one truly internationalist, collectivist, accountable source of knowledge our species has.
We note the development of the COP26 coalition which has been working in Scotland, across Britain and internationally to bring together a broad and radical convergence of forces based on the principles of climate justice, making the polluter pay, amplifying indigenous voices, organising in trade unions and working with young people, who, through organisations like Fridays for the Future, have stressed the urgent need for genuine change rather than greenwashing. We will work to build support in CLPs and trade unions both for the mass demonstrations called by the coalition on 6 November in Glasgow, in London and many other towns and cities across the globe – and for direct action in the run-up to the summit.
The LRC has been re-energised by the vision of a global Green New Deal in response to the climate emergency: creating green jobs, apprenticeships and re-training programmes to stimulate renewable energy generation, increase energy efficiency, reduce waste and promote public transport and scale down meat production and intensive farming in favour of sustainable, ecologically aware land use and management.
At the very least, Labour’s manifesto must include renationalising energy, waste, agriculture and transport companies to carry this out efficiently, while also addressing fuel poverty with a combination of cheaper state-generated clean energy and energy savings schemes. We need large-scale investment in public infrastructure, the provision of free green transportation and a reorientation away from oligarchic energy companies in favour of democratic public ownership. We will urgently work to convince trade unions and trade unionists, especially those in the most carbon intensive industries, of the necessity of supporting this approach.
The end of the 21st century isn’t that far away. It’s one lifetime: a mere 80 years from now. Given the devastation we are witnessing already in many parts of the world, the prospects for our children and grandchildren do not look good – unless we listen to the science, rise up internationally, take back control and care for the one planet we’ve got.
In the words of Leon Rosselson’s Diggers' song, World Turned Upside Down:
This earth divided
We will make whole
So it will be
A common treasury for all.
The sin of property
We do disdain
No man has any right to buy and sell
The earth for private gain.
G ADDENDUM
No to imperialism – No to the Taliban
US and British imperialism have suffered an historic defeat in Afghanistan by a reactionary force, the
Taliban. The speed with which the Taliban took over should come as no surprise – as the Afghan
government were mere stooges of the Americans and were unlikely to survive for long after the
withdrawal of their support.
The chaotic withdrawal was a significant moment in the decline of the US as the world’s’ superpower.
But their defeat comes at the hands of a profoundly reactionary force. Twenty years of bloody
occupation and the creation of a corrupt regime, based around the tribal warlords of the Northern
Alliance, and with little popular support, has strengthened the Islamic fundamentalism of the Taliban
and leaves many, particularly women and young people, terrified about their fate.
The shape of the withdrawal was set by the 2020 Doha agreement between the US administration of
Donald Trump and the Taliban. On this, as on most other foreign policy questions, Biden has not
indicated any break with his predecessor at all. The agreement was a result of declining support in the
US for the ‘forever war’, partly as part of a shift to isolationism, but partly influenced by the abject
failure of the so-called ‘nation building’ project.
The LRC will:
● · Support campaigns for solidarity with Afghan refugees here and in the region.
Open our borders to allow refugees safe haven into the UK.
● · Attempt to build links with progressive organisations of Afghans especially
women’s organisations.
● · Demand no recognition of the Taliban regime.
● · Demand aid be given to local organisations in Afghanistan.
● · Oppose any further moves to imperialist intervention in Afghanistan – or
elsewhere.