In the mess and confusion that has engulfed the Your Party (YP) formation process, it is vitally important that wider political perspective is not lost, argues David Jamieson
Consider the events of recent times: the wave of racist violence, often targeting Muslims; the demonisation of Muslim communities in places such as Birmingham, where Independent MP Ayoub Khan has been at the forefront of defending the city; the humiliating measures announced for the treatment of refugees by the Home Secretary, including the potential seizure of private property; the largest attack on democratic rights in a generation in the form of the mass arrests of anti-war activists.
Regarding all this, there is an extremely high premium for disciplined and principled unity on the left, including in defence of the Muslim community. Some criticism of the Independent MPs, elected in an unprecedented electoral rebellion in 2024, have not met this bar. The acrimonious departure of one of the MPs from the YP process, Adnan Hussein, has underscored these failings.
It is worth considering the political significance of the Independent victories. A wave of pop-up campaigns, four winning outright and more coming very close to toppling key Labour figures, delivered a hard blow to the new government even as it secured a national majority. This was a significant victory for the Gaza solidarity movement, of which socialists are an important part. But we should be honest that at least the extent of these victories took most on the left by surprise. They expressed tensions which have been developing against Labour in many areas of the country over a longer period, and over a range of failings by the party. They are not a small achievement, and socialists should be eager to learn from them.
But humility is in short supply. An unfortunate refrain is that the Independent MPs are motivated essentially by Gaza and share nothing else with the broader left. As one commentator on a Novara Media podcast put it: ‘Just having a singular point that you agree on: internationalist foreign policy, a foreign policy which is anti-American unipolarity, anti-support for Israel’s colonial project in the Middle East, is not big enough of an issue to be able to create a political alliance on.’
An alliance has, in fact, been forged on these questions: the anti-war movement of the last quarter century, the best achievement of the left in this country in a generation. But the claim is also simply false. A glance at the voting records of the Independent MPs will show support for raising corporate taxes, for public ownership and increasing workers’ and tenants’ rights alongside a range of commitments traditionally associated with the left. Given that these MPs are the product of an electoral rebellion from the left against the Labour machine, that’s hardly a surprise. It’s difficult not to conclude that assumptions about the Independent MPs, echoed elsewhere on the left, reflect the prevailing media and official political campaign of hostility towards Muslims in general and the Independent MPs in particular.
The establishment depicts Muslims as motivated by their own communal concerns and detached from the wider issues affecting the national community. In truth, religious groups, like all others, do not share homogenous worldviews. Not only are they internally divided along all kinds of axes within their own community, but they are a part of the wider society to which they belong and share in all its divisions and controversies. British Muslims are drawn from various social classes, have various political affiliations and a range of social views. They also reflect much of the mood in British society as a whole: exhaustion with the official political caste, anxiety over rising prices and failing services, and disgust at destructive foreign policies.
To depict the Muslim community as monolithically socially conservative is, therefore, obviously wrong. However, this is not permission for socialists to pick and choose the parts of the Muslim community it wishes to defend. Some Muslims do hold conservative views, some are middle class or business figures, and all deserve solidarity against bigotry. But more than this, we want to build common political action between conservative and liberal workers (and the majority who hold some liberal and some conservative attitudes, or whose attitudes are not easily definable as either), across all communities, towards common goals. It is a seminal feature of socialism that it exalts class politics above such distinctions. Those who wish to have a mass movement where everyone agrees on controversial social and ethical questions are bound to be disappointed. It will simply never happen.
Class politics
It is class politics that is the object of socialism, not just social class. We are not interested in class as a marker of identity, as some on the left have become under the influence of the general craze for individualised identity. We aren’t even centrally concerned with the fact of class as social position. It may be an issue, for instance, that some of the Independent MPs are landlords or small-business owners. But it is just that: an issue that has arisen and must be dealt with in the course of mass politics, in a society where asset ownership is a real complicating factor in the composition of the popular social classes. It is not a good reason to be dismissive of a massive electoral rebellion by principally working-class voters. Social democracy has always been a movement with a mainly working-class base and mainly middle-class local leadership. There is no reason to think its breakdown won’t express that contradiction, or will somehow resolve it in a clean or easy fashion. And that’s before we get round to querying the general class composition of the extant left. Suffice to say, the alienation of the activist left from the core of the British working class is a well-remarked upon phenomenon.
The ultimate question of class politics is the state. In this connection, there are much sharper and more important disagreements to be had. We will soon enter the fourth year of a terrible war in Europe, which has generated hundreds of thousands of casualties, and transfigured European and world politics. Some Independent MPs and their critics alike have declared support for continuing this war. It would be foolish for those of us who oppose the war in Europe, essential though that stance is, to allow this disagreement to disrupt unity on other questions.
We can observe (perhaps especially among my own cohort, millennials) a wild pendulum swing between opportunism and ultra-left sectarianism. From year-to-year, the same activist might support a ruling-class war or trade block (like the EU), before turning on a part of the movement deemed insufficiently socialist in outlook. No sooner is class rediscovered as important, after many years of neglect, but it is turned into another shibboleth with which to dismiss the impure. Many who criticise the un-radical will join the Green Party, an entirely conventional parliamentary outfit committed to capitalism and rooted in the middle class. Amid this wild motion, and the undisciplined behaviour it permits, initiatives like the anti-war movement could not have been born.
In the coming years, we will face many challenges: yet more war, economic crisis, the increasing authoritarianism of the state, and the real possibility of a Reform government. If these challenges are met, variously or simultaneously, by collapse into conventional left-liberalism and/or demands for a-priori agreement on arbitrarily selected ‘principles’, the left’s failure is assured.
The alternative is to combine a radical socialist politics with an eagerness to reach out to broad elements of the population who do not share all our ideas, and who may even oppose some of them, but who are willing to fight against war, the erosion of working-class living standards, racism and attacks on democracy. Regardless of what finally happens in the electoral arena, socialists will need such relationships, built on both political honesty and mutual respect. The conduct discussed above leads only to marginality and stagnation, as the threat from reaction mounts.
