Forget Movement-Building – the New Party Should Be the Ukip of the Left

“We don’t just want electoralism,” Zarah Sultana declared recently while setting out her vision for a new leftwing party. “We want a project that’s tied in to tenants unions, labour organising, the fight to defend the NHS from privatisation and the Palestine solidarity movement.”

The same sentiments have been expressed elsewhere. “The new left party must build its own ‘great human network’,” writer Joe Todd argued in July. “Food coops, workers’ centres, quilt clubs and sports leagues. Community canteens, really free schools and collective childcare. Renters’, workers’ and community unions”.

These arguments aren’t new. In 1964, British historian Perry Anderson diagnosed Harold Wilson’s Labour government as a “spotlit enclave where power surrounds the movement on all sides outside of parliament”. For many on the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, this image implied that for a leftwing party to govern, it must form ties with social movements, institutions and political campaigns beyond what was once Labour’s trade union base – at the time, groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. 

Now that the collective power of the working class has been eroded, it’s unsurprising that today we hear just as much about building new grassroots institutions as we do about the idea of forming bonds with existing ones. But plans to make the nascent leftwing party responsible for this task are misguided. 

This was also the idea in 2015 – and yet the results were mixed. In the early days of Corbynism, the new Labour leader promised to harness the power of his spectacular leadership campaign, “a democratic upsurge that has already become a social movement”. Crowds followed the charismatic clodhopper everywhere, with hundreds of thousands of people becoming party members. “This looked like movement politics,” writer Alex Nunns wrote in his brilliant account of the times.

The organisation Momentum was established to capture this burst of excitement. Then, as now, its co-founder James Schneider saw a chance to build new grassroots institutions that, he said, could change the world. But that wasn’t what happened. 

Instead, Momentum became a key tool for defending Corbynism inside the party and out, mobilising thousands to phonebank and knock on doors and reaching millions on social media. But support for Corbyn remained mostly fan-like, from his appearance at Glastonbury to the endless selfies, likes and shares.

In the end, the immediacy of the Labour right’s attacks, the electoral and news cycles and a hostile media were simply too great a time-suck from building the soviets. The institution-building would have to wait. 

Might this time be different? After all, factions aside, one would hope that Corbyn and Sultana wouldn’t have internal detractors to contend with.

There are reasons to think it won’t. “Socialists can shape struggles, but not suck them out the end of their thumbs,” Andrew Murray, a long-time advisor to Corbyn, recently pointed out. Indeed, while a sense of anomie in modern Britain may define the national mood, leading xenophobic vigilantes to symbolically undertake some of the roles of state – from flag raising to border patrol – it’s far from clear that a mass of Britons are calling out for food coop committees and socialist ping pong. 

The idea that there might be reflects a voluntarist strain on the New Left that celebrates the notion that the working class made itself, but downplays the extent to which this class was made by several great moulds of modern British history: urbanisation, industrialisation, empire and war. Workers may have joined their unions voluntarily, but they arrived at the shop floor through a mute compulsion. For a blitz spirit, one requires a blitz.

Today, many of the most powerful social forces are siloing and individualising rather than tending towards the collective. Some well-known sociology in the late 1990s blamed TV for the evident decline in civic life, and then came the internet and smartphones. British society has also long been parcelled up into middle classes and a fragmented working class, with each part gradually finding itself at ease with the liberal democratic order (Italy, by contrast, gave the world both fascism and what was once the largest communist party in western Europe). The best of intentions will struggle to change all this. 

And yet class war may well be the order of the day, which wasn’t obviously the case back in 2015. Ten years ago – and up to the end of 2021 – borrowing was cheap, and so state-directed investment (hundreds of billions of pounds’ worth of which was promised by Labour under Corbyn) was affordable, if not theoretically free.

In this setting, Corbynomics was premised on a win-win: the idea that borrowing and investing were good for both the poorest in society as well as most businesses. That’s why then-shadow chancellor John McDonnell conducted a “tea offensive” in the City aimed at convincing economic elites he had entered his role as a Marxist and emerged metamorphosed into a Keynesian. 

But in a post-deflationary world, someone has to lose, and so far, chancellor Rachel Reeves has decided that it must be the old and the disabled. Borrowing for investment is still necessary but now costly, while downward redistribution and de-privatisation can’t be ignored if the UK is to leave the doldrums, meaning that the rich and powerful must take a hit. Sultana has proposed cuts to military budgets as well as tax hikes on the wealthy – for which we’ll need more than tea and cake.

Thankfully, such a campaign may not need to prefigure new grassroots institutions. Take Brexit. The drive to leave the EU was carried through by a combination of cross-class conviction with compelling leadership plus support in Westminster. It showed that movements, with or without their own grassroots institutions, could be directed at transformational goals.

The new party should be open to a strategy that aims to affect and mobilise popular political discourse and influence existing institutional power, including Labour’s, just like Ukip influenced the Tories (who Reform now appear to be overtaking). Direct engagement in building grassroots institutions – erecting brick by brick the church and chapel of democratic socialism – could distract from this larger, electoral aim.

That’s not to say community building is pointless. Between 2017 and 2019, I organised extra-Labour party activities in the East Midlands, including a local version of The World Transformed, and helped run regular political events in pubs and community centres. I found these experiences to be socially nourishing, and in certain circumstances this kind of work may help create organisations that have immediate, valuable aims beyond governing the nation from Westminster. But we shouldn’t confuse this with the ambition to win or at least influence the primary levers of power in Britain.

For would-be supporters of the new party, there are reasons to be hopeful – not least that Keir Starmer’s Labour government is flailing, opening up a window for a more dignified alternative to its left. The Labour right insulated itself from popular, left-coded sentiment a decade ago, and the result was Corbynism 1.0. It did so more severely after the disastrous election in 2019, and so here we are again.