By International Socialist League
As the Labour Party continues its unrelenting shift to the right—often echoing the rhetoric and policies of the far right—a growing number of voices are calling for the formation of a new party rooted in the interests of the working class, many are also calling it a new party of the left. We think that to build a force against the Labour Party and capitalism it has to be based in workers struggle with a class independent and working class internationalism.
This article outlines some essential pillars we think are necessary for any new party serious about being a party of workers and all oppressed people that challenges the status quo.
Grassroots Democracy
A new working-class party must be founded on genuine grassroots democracy. It cannot replicate the bureaucratic, top-down structures that dominate existing parties. Decision-making must be in the hands of members, with annual conferences determining the party’s platform and strategic direction. Elected leaders should be tasked with carrying out this democratically agreed programme—not with issuing commands from above.
Equal rights and the struggle against oppression must be built into the party’s structure and its programme. Leaders must be subject to the will of the membership and recallable if they deviate from the agreed platform. Elected positions should have short terms—one or two years maximum—with firm rules to prevent individuals from simply rotating between leadership roles. This ensures that no single person or clique dominates the party, while giving more members the opportunity to develop leadership skills and shape the party’s future.
It must also fight for a genuine expansion of workers’ rights and democracy at every level of society. At a council level it should fight for more democratic control by communities and neighbourhood. It should seek to demand the devolution of power to working class communities and neighbourhoods. It should support radical electoral reform across every level of democracy. Supporting things like proportional representation, shorter terms limits for elected officials and more devolution.
Labour Is a Party of Austerity
A new party must unequivocally reject austerity in all its forms. Austerity is nothing less than class war—waged by the capitalist elite against working people. Supporting it in any capacity is a betrayal of the working class. Any elected representative of a new party must be bound by a clear mandate: never to vote for or accept austerity in any form. Doing so should be grounds for immediate expulsion.
Instead, the party must champion a programme of wealth redistribution through taxation and ending privatisation. This includes reversing wage stagnation by significantly increasing wages, pensions and properly funding and expanding all public services. Without a firm commitment to ending austerity and improving living standards, no new party can claim to represent the working class.
Britain is an enormously wealthy country, but that wealth has come from the deliberate suppression of wages. The rich must be taxed to fund the needs of working people.
Labour conducts war against workers, oppressed people and nations
Labour talks about military spending in the same way it once spoke of economic investment. In its quest to rebuild the economy it emphasises the arms industry—prioritising profits for weapons manufacturers over the welfare of the population. It has aligned itself with U.S. foreign policy and shown consistent support for Israeli state violence, including genocide in Gaza and supporting attacks on Iran by the U.S.
Labour is deepening the militarisation of the economy while simultaneously cracking down on protest and dissent through the repressive anti-terror, anti-protest, racist and anti-union laws in the UK.
Labour is using the anti-terror laws against those who are protesting Israel or refugees who dare to flee violence and hunger – often caused by British arms. They want to call music groups who support Palestine, non-violent direct action or waving a T shirt supporting Hamas, terrorist. Palestine Action sprayed engines of two RAF fighter planes with red paint. IDF destroying Palestine and committing genocide is, for Labour, not terrorism, but spraying red paint. Israel’s extermination policy includes killing starving Palestinians queuing for food. The revulsion to this keeps on expanding across the world.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrations in UK cities say “We are all Palestine Action” as all those fighting for Palestine recognise yet again that the Labour government and the state are using draconian laws against non-violent protest. That’s why the mass music festival of Glastonbury saw a sea of Palestinian flags while the group Kneecap played on (against Starmer’s request).
Despite their rhetoric about defence, Labour’s actual goal is the expansion of British military abroad. Their ‘defence’ spending is a smokescreen for imperial aggression and profit-driven warfare – that will soar. The party remains firmly committed to military interventions and has a long track record—including Malaya, Jordan, Iraq and Afghanistan and from genocide in Diego Garcia to massive heavy arms sales to authoritarian regimes like Nigeria beginning in the 1960s.
Labour’s leadership is part British imperialism. British military personnel also carry out mercenary-style operations, intelligence-backed coups, and training missions tied directly to arms exports.
The Labour government, deeply enmeshed with the British imperial state, its intelligence services and military-industrial complex, will never break from this legacy. Wherever the U.S. goes and profit can be made, Labour will follow—unless they are stopped by a mass movement of workers, organised resistance and the struggle for workers’ socialism.
Class Independence
A new party must be grounded in class independence—from Parliament to the grassroots. Without this, it will inevitably be co-opted or compromised, as was Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, which many left in Britain saw as a beacon of hope, but those parties failed. Starmer’s Labour is simply continuing the policies of the Tories: waging war on the working class at home and supporting exploitation abroad.
Labour’s leaders demand Birmingham bin workers, on strike to defend their wages against a Labour council, go back to work. The shame here is that many union leaderships continue to fund Labour, they must break from Labour. For workers the economic consequences of war will be even more brutal—further austerity and intensified attacks on working-class rights.
The creation of a genuinely independent, working-class party must encourage a broader united front—linking trade unions, community struggles, and mass mobilisations –that function democratically and are not restricted by bureaucratic controls, United Fronts must welcome all the organisations of the oppressed as well as the militant unions and link the struggle against austerity, racism and fascism and Israeli genocide
With clarity of purpose, democratic structure, and uncompromising commitment to working-class interests, a new party of struggle can become a mass force capable of confronting capital, fighting for real change and workers’ control.
For a revolutionary party
We believe that Britain has entered a situation where masses of the population will be going into struggle against capitalist exploitation and decay and considering quite realistically the building of a new political organisation to express their needs. The questions which follow are: how does Trotskyism participate in these essentially anti-capitalist movements for change and the movements toward revolutionary consciousness which are coming up?
The Labour parry is dying but the essential mass party of the working class with the necessary revolutionary internationalist programme, which can bring about Socialism, is not going to be created in one leap in the next period.
We are for assisting the working class to reject the Labour Party with the aim to build a new workers independent, internationalist and class struggle party, being part of that party but at the same time building the ISL (as part of the IWL) as a party based on the need for revolutionary socialism and the building of the Fourth International fighting to take forward the lessons of all great working class revolutionary struggles.
