The number of people who have signed up for Britain’s new left-wing party has surpassed 650,000: a figure that dwarfs the membership of every other outfit in Westminster. Preparations are underway for its founding conference, likely to be held in November, where registrants will decide on its initial platform and develop some of its democratic structures. As part of the ongoing debate on such questions, Sidecar recently published an interview with James Schneider, the former communications director for Corbyn’s Labour, in which he set out his case for an organisation that would avoid the electoralist pitfalls of the 2010s by basing itself mostly outside Westminster and striving to construct different forms of popular power.  

For our next instalment in the series, we turn to Andrew Murray. Born in 1958, Murray joined the Morning Star as a lobby journalist at the age of nineteen. He moved sidelong into the labour movement in the 1980s, playing a key role in the foundation of Unite, one of the country’s largest unions, and later serving as its Chief of Staff. During the 2000s he was appointed to the executive committee of the Communist Party of Britain and co-founded the Stop the War Coalition, set up to oppose the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. An early supporter of Corbyn’s leadership, Murray was seconded from Unite to assist with its 2017 general election campaign, before joining the team as a Special Political Adviser. He is also the author of numerous books on UK politics: a devastating indictment of railway privatisation, Off the Rails (2002); an account of the structural processes that produced the Corbyn project, The Fall and Rise of the British Left (2019); and an analysis of the political lessons to be drawn from that experience, Is Socialism Possible in Britain? (2022).  

Murray spoke to Oliver Eagleton about the politics of the nascent party, its priorities at this early stage, the discussions about its leadership, and the attitude it should cultivate towards social movements and working-class institutions.  

Oliver Eagleton: Why, in your view, is there a political opening for this new party? What is it about the state of contemporary Britain that gives it a chance of success?  

Andrew Murray: You could say that the current political opening was created by the 2008 crash. Since then, the ruling establishment has been unable to maintain the neoliberal economic model in a way that satisfies people’s aspirations and has also been unwilling to replace it with a different framework. This means that British politics has been more or less running on empty. Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party expanded the Overton window of what was ideologically acceptable, shifting it away from the very narrow parameters of Thatcherism and Blairism, and making the idea of radical social democracy – which had been completely marginalised since the end of the post-war period in the 1970s – mainstream again. This was reinforced by the mass movements against war and austerity, which generated a huge amount of political energy.  

From 2020 onward there was a concerted attempt by Starmer’s Labour Party to shut this opening. But he did not try to close it down by winning the argument. Instead he relied simply on coercion: suspending MPs, driving Corbyn out of the party, denying local branches the right to choose their candidates, and later taking the same authoritarian approach to society at large, with the extraordinarily repressive clampdown on Palestine solidarity. As we can see from the response to the new party’a announcement – with well over half a million people already signed up as supporters – Starmer’s strategy has failed. The forces mobilised by the Corbyn leadership, and turbocharged by the movement around Gaza, are still present, still active, and seeking some form of political expression, in a context where both Labour and the Tories have refused to address the underlying problems that flowed from the global financial crisis.  

OE: How can the party provide that kind of political expression?  

AM: Well, that is the main question. Debates about the organisation’s structure (federal, coalitional, central) or even its leadership (sole, joint, collective) are secondary to its political positioning. The new party needs to be absolutely, clearly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. It needs to see itself as creating the space for a transition to socialism. Parts of its political profile can perhaps be assumed: certainly its position on Gaza and its opposition to austerity. But it needs to go further, in my view, by generalising outward from these two urgent issues and offering a systemic alternative. 

This is, broadly speaking, what the party’s supporters want. It is also what millions of people across the country are craving, including many of those who are gravitating towards Reform. In the present political landscape you have a crumbling centrism identified with Starmer and with Rishi Sunak before him, which takes a managerial approach to the colossal problems that have accumulated since 2008, and then you have a right-wing pseudo-opposition which the FT’s Martin Wolf rightly describes as ‘plutocratic populism’, which engages in all sorts of demagoguery, including posing as pro-worker, when in fact it is the project of millionaire Thatcherites. With this as the current polarisation, the left has a unique opportunity to redraw the lines of division: placing the centre and the hard right on one side, and itself on the other. The issues that it can use to do so are clear: opposition to austerity, opposition to medieval levels of social inequality, and opposition to war. Our slogan in the Stop the War Coalition is ‘Welfare not Warfare’. The government’s might as well be ‘Make the Poor Pay For War’. It is right now embarking on a major military build-up while slashing social spending – and it is doing so in lockstep with the pluto-populists, who don’t even pretend to have the same non-interventionist inclinations as Trump’s national-populists in the US.  

So, undoubtedly, there is a political space to be occupied. Corbyn’s leadership filled it from 2015 to 2019, but it was tethered to the Labour Party, which already had an entrenched position in the British status quo that many of its parliamentarians and staffers were determined to defend. The new party is in a very different situation. It will be unencumbered by these problems; it will be a novel and galvanising force. But at the same time it will not have the strength that comes from being a part of the political fabric for 120 years, nor the historic roots and power bases which, although they have massively atrophied for the Labour Party, have not disappeared entirely. 

OE: Let’s talk more about what it would mean for the party to articulate a systemic alternative, especially when it comes to the UK economy. The Corbyn leadership tried to draw distinctions between productive and predatory capital, hoping to empower the first at the expense of the second: pitting green industry against big finance and so on. But in some respects this was more of a radical extension of Ed Miliband’s lukewarm domestic platform than it was a resolutely socialist programme. It had a structural critique of British capitalism – emphasising the outsized power of the City – but it also reflected the extraordinary political pressure your team was under at the time: to capitulate, to accommodate, to soften your stance. Given that the new party won’t face the same kind of pressure from within its ranks, do you think it will find it easier to take bolder positions than Corbynism 1.0?  

AM: Breaking the power of capital is going to be a huge challenge, to state the obvious. My view was that, had Corbyn got into power, we should have advanced our agenda on the basis of our democratic mandate and then dealt with obstructions as they arose, whether from the House of Lords or the City of London or the security services or Washington. John McDonnell was very strong as shadow chancellor; I have almost nothing but praise for how he played his role there. But I didn’t agree with him when he said that Labour would not implement capital controls, because that locks you into the Starmer–Reeves position of operating within the coordinates set by the markets. By not forswearing capital controls you immediately adopt a much more confrontational approach to capital, and you are forced to think through how you would respond to its resistance. The fact is that any movement towards socialism in this country is going to have to involve a period of relative autarky and disengagement from the world-system. During this period, the aim should be to encourage people to seize control of their own political and economic destinies – taking advantage of the very low esteem in which parliamentarism is already held.  

You’re right that the new party has an opportunity to forge this kind of agenda without being subject to internal sabotage. From the beginning, Corbyn faced intense opposition from the majority of MPs, the party apparatus, and a whole host of established structures and procedures that shaped his leadership, as well as the external forces seeking to undermine him. Yet one of the decisive factors that led to the unravelling of the project, quite possibly the single most decisive one, was its position on Brexit. Here, the entirely incoherent and inane policy Labour ended up with in 2019 was driven in part by the establishment, but also by the party membership. Six years later, Brexit is not going to be a problem for the new party; no one is campaigning for its reversal. But similar internal tensions could still resurface on other questions, and we have to be mindful of how we manage them. It might seem like we’re getting ahead of ourselves in discussing how to take power when, as yet, this entity has no name, no leader and no real structure. But we need to think big, and have these strategic discussions now, rather than waiting until it is too late.  

OE: Even if this new project is free from the constraints of the Labour Party, it will still have to operate within the narrow confines of the British state. It will be disadvantaged by the first-past-the-post electoral system and Westminster’s highly centralised political structures, both of which have previously stifled the left’s attempts to develop a popular, independent platform. Shouldn’t it therefore take explicit aim at these antidemocratic obstacles, advocating electoral reform and the breakup of the Union as key parts of its agenda?  

AM: The case for proportional representation is getting more powerful as the political system fragments. We are now looking at five-party politics in England and six-party politics in Scotland and Wales, so PR should clearly be on the agenda of the next Parliament, and I think the new party should champion it. Even if it brings its own set of problems, they are clearly preferable to sticking with the present arrangement. Then again, nothing is going to change before the next election, which will have to be fought on first-past-the-post, so that will condition some of the immediate decisions that the new party has to make: about where it can win majorities and which seats it plans to prioritise.  

The union is a trickier problem. A majority in the labour movement, and even in the Labour Party, have swung in favour of electoral reform; but there are still deep divisions among workers and socialists over the future of the multinational state itself. So here I think the new party has to be guided by its members in Scotland and Wales, who may of course come to different conclusions. It was my view in 2019 that Labour should have adopted the position that if the next Scottish Parliament had a majority in favour of a further independence referendum, following the defeat of the previous one in 2014, then it would be wrong to stand in its way. This was one of the few issues on which I think we had a democratic deficit, and I hope the new party will set that right by establishing structures that allow a legitimate policy decision to be made. But I think that’s some way off at present.  

OE: You said that politics must be the first priority, ahead of organisational questions. But it isn’t necessarily straightforward to come up with an abstract conception of the politics that will hold together all the disparate groups on the left, from the independent MPs to tenants unions to existing socialist parties. Given this fractured situation, isn’t the priority to figure out what kind of organisation would allow these forces to cohabit, so that they can then decide collectively on their programme?  

AM: That is true to a degree. Policies can only be determined in a democratic forum, presumably the founding conference due to be held this autumn. That will hopefully put the party on a firm footing and determine its first positions, if not an exhaustive list of them, as well as adopting an initial constitution. So yes, we have to start by taking some structural steps. We need to find a way to organise these 650,000 people, presumably on some geographical basis, so they can have an input: perhaps an electronic voting system, perhaps a series of more localised meetings or both. But we don’t at this point need a full elaboration of exactly how the organisation will work or how it will deal with all these inevitable challenges. I am somewhat agnostic, for example, on the question of electoral alliance versus a party. A loose version of the former could fail to articulate a coherent politics, while a tightly centralised version of the latter could struggle to draw in independent forces; we need something that’s able to do both. What I think most of the prospective members want, along with the wider public, is a clear sense of where the party stands. Some of them will remember Corbyn’s Labour leadership and see that as a reference point, but others may not. Some will know that the party is left wing, but they may not have a set of clear associations with this term. So we need to set out our socialist orientation. There will be a spectrum of views, of course, but they can be incorporated into this anti-systemic framework.  

OE: What is the social basis of the new party? In his interview last month James Schneider proposed that the three non-mutually-exclusive categories of asset-poor workers, downwardly mobile graduates and racialised communities could make up a possible electoral majority.  

AM: There is no doubt that we need an alliance that can win in Bristol and Birmingham and East London and Brighton, and have an impact in Burnley and Barnsley too, respecting the different social compositions of those places. Towards that end, you can obviously make an argument for different types of electoral targeting, where you look at the size of, say, the Muslim community in a particular constituency. But when it comes to our political vision and strategy, I’m not really in favour of this disaggregation of the working class, which often seems like it’s only a few steps away from talking about ‘Worcester woman’ and ‘Mondeo man’. I don’t see the value of using terms like ‘asset poor workers’, for instance. The defining feature of the working class is that it lives by selling its capacity for wage labour; none of it survives on assets alone. We should aim to be a working-class party, and we should not submit to the political fragmentation of the working class by forever slicing-and-dicing it sociologically.  

James makes a number of strong arguments in his interview, but when it comes to this point there is a certain paradox, because he starts off by saying that we must pursue a strategy of electoral ‘density’, in which we run election campaigns in places where these three groups are numerically preponderant. But then he goes on to suggest that winning elections should not be among the main priorities of the new party: that its foremost concern should be building ‘popular power’ as opposed to parliamentary power. I’m not sure he quite reconciles these two positions.  

OE: The argument, as I understand it, is that the party should be a lever for a popular mobilization. That is to say, it should both strengthen existing working-class institutions and set about creating new ones, so as to lay the civic foundations for contesting state power. What do you think of this general approach? 

AM: What James is talking about, although he doesn’t use the phrase, is the reconstitution of the working class as a class for itself. I don’t underestimate the central importance of this. The Communist Manifesto enjoins socialists to first of all organise the proletariat as a class – and this task clearly needs recapitulating. The old organisations and institutions, both formal ones within the labour movement and informal ones within communities, have been broken apart over the past forty years. Reversing this, even partially, is an imperative for moving towards socialism. But whether one should overburden the new party with this as an executive responsibility, as opposed to framing and articulating the project, is another question. My view is that by articulating a strident class politics – by taking that message into elections, into parliament, into the media and the public sphere – we will already be helping that process of reconstitution. We will diffuse the idea that there is a coherent class project that could rescue society from its present depredations, without which the idea of a class-for-itself is meaningless. And that will have cascading political effects. 

Popular mobilizations don’t necessarily require the leadership of a new party. The Gaza movement did not have a party apparatus behind it, yet it has brought hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets of London every few weeks for a year and a half, as well generating intense local activity. Mobilizations of this kind tend to develop organically. If there is a need for them, working people will find a way to articulate it. You can’t have figures from the party telling them to get active if they do not already feel that need. A potential unintended outcome of viewing the party as a vector for social movements is that it ends up assuming leadership of everything that’s stirring in the progressive undergrowth – which is a capacity that it simply doesn’t have. You would then end up with a cod-Leninism in a party not ideologically equipped for such an undertaking.  

Of course, there is an important role for socialists to play in such movements. Take Stop the War as an example: we brought together organisers from different traditions – Communist, Trotskyist, Labour – and established a unified structure that helped to give shape and purpose to the mass resistance to the Iraq war. Had we not done so, that resistance may have been more fragmented, with different blocs of Muslims and pacifists and trade unionists going in separate directions. But the crucial point is that the movement would have happened anyway. It was always going to emerge in some form because the urgency was great enough. Socialists can shape struggles but not suck them out the end of their thumbs. 

The party needs to act as a force of opposition at every point of effective political intervention. Make no mistake, the party should stay very close to mass movements. While Starmer is telling his MPs ‘Don’t go on picket lines!’ our party should be saying ‘You must go on picket lines!’ Its local branches should associate with the Palestine solidarity movement, with housing campaigns, with pensioners’ groups. I’m not presenting my view as the opposite to James’s. But I think that the translation of these multiple struggles into a single party form would be very challenging. And I don’t think we should see this as a prerequisite for fighting elections and promoting our politics at the highest level. While the hope is to make the working class a much more powerful social actor, we must also think about what is possible and doable at this initial stage.  

OE: Would the same argument apply to the trade unions, or would you put them in a different category to say the Palestine movement when it comes to their relationship with the new party? 

AM: In the short term I don’t see the trade unions, as collective bodies, having a formal relationship to the new party. Obviously, vast numbers of trade unionists have signed up, which could have a positive influence on the politics of the labour movement; and members of the new party should of course be encouraged to get active in the unions: indeed, one immediate outcome of this founding process will likely be that people who are currently not engaged in the labour movement become engaged. But the idea that we should replicate the erstwhile, often caricatured strategy of the Communist Party – bringing together party members who belong to a given union in a sort of conclave and directing them to follow a particular line – does not seem practical. Later down the line, if the Starmer government continues to flounder, and if the new party is run properly, then we may see the unions moving away from one and towards the other. In which case we could think about the precise lineaments of that institutional connection.  

OE: It’s ironic that a more movementist view of the party’s purpose threatens to shade into Leninism, since it could mean imposing centralised direction on various popular struggles. And, conversely, a more Leninist perspective – which foregrounds the party’s electoral leadership – is at risk of becoming movementist, because it relies on the idea that effective popular struggles will simply happen spontaneously, or ‘organically’, to use your word.  

AM: It’s not that the strategy of effecting class regeneration through a range of different organisational forms is wrong, but I struggle to see the new party being able to make that an effective priority. I remember McDonnell and Jon Lansman and others sitting in my office in the Unite building in 2015 and talking about how they wanted Momentum – the new organisation established to support Jeremy’s leadership – to be a social movement. My response was that Momentum’s necessary role was to defend Jeremy inside the Labour Party. It ended up doing that pretty effectively, and made a powerful intervention in the 2017 election. It never became a social movement because that wasn’t the political imperative in those circumstances. As for Leninism: that requires a much higher degree of ideological militancy and unity from the outset than we are likely to get with this new party. I feel we are several stops short of democratic centralism right now…

OE: If we’re talking about how the party can make the most effective electoral interventions, then its leadership model is important. What is your view on that? 

AM: Any discussion at this stage will be provisional until a conference or a leadership election is held to settle the question democratically. But the organising committee that was established to try to drive this process forward considered various leadership possibilities, including Jeremy as interim leader along with deputies, and Jeremy co-leading with Zarah Sultana. A majority voted for the latter, which is where my sympathies would lie. Of course, no one can make people co-leaders if they don’t want to be co-leaders, so this depends on the active assent of the individuals concerned. But Jeremy and Zarah are clearly complementary. Their politics are the same. Their personal characteristics, their approaches to the project, the way they intervene in parliament, the issues they prioritise: they are aligned on all these fronts. So this seems like the most forward-looking approach. On the left we often say that we can’t pretend it’s still 1917, but nor can we pretend it’s still 2017 either. No one can rationally wish to rerun the 2015-2019 experience. Honour the past, face the future. 

OE: The recent anonymous briefings against Sultana seem wildly destructive.  

AM: I wouldn’t exaggerate their importance. They are the work of about three or four people. I wish they would stop, but they will not diminish the enormous enthusiasm for the project, and my understanding is that even those who were on different sides of the debates hitherto are now working together: putting the financial, legal and organizational infrastructure in place so that the conference – and what comes after – will be a success. The briefings won’t have a great deal of impact on public perceptions, especially when the leading figures are presenting a united front. 

OE: Many of the international examples that are often cited as models for the British left have limited applicability. The UK’s comparatively weak traditions of popular struggle suggest that it would find it difficult to develop anything resembling the most successful parties of the Pink Tide; its parliamentary system and political balance of forces mean that any left-wing electoral alliance wouldn’t function like La France Insoumise; it lacks the social base to establish a vehicle like the Belgian Workers’ Party… 

AM: Everyone on the left is still trying to find a route to socialism that is neither simply electing a parliamentary majority nor storming the Winter Palace. And, unfortunately, we have very few historical examples of how one actually does that: what combination of mass pressure, parliamentary work, organic struggle and perhaps some form of coercive power actually gets you over the line. The new party needs to open up a space where these questions – which were very much alive in the 1970s but have since slipped off everyone’s radar – can be considered. 

Fortunately, we do have a wealth of negative examples to avoid repeating. With Syriza, we saw a political explosion that led to the rapid formation of a government led by the new left, which soon ended in ignominy when it capitulated to the EU, reproducing the problems of classical Greek social democracy rather than transcending them. Podemos was weakly rooted from the beginning; it was described as having been launched by two corridors of professors from Complutense University. When it became the minority partner in a social-democratic-led government it learned that, without deep social bases, it really couldn’t make the weather. In Germany, the left split partly along culture-war lines, although more substantive questions of war, Palestine and migration also separated Die Linke from the BSW. Its division has greatly diminished its political influence. So there are a number of ways in which European left parties have shown the path to ruin: by capitulation to monopoly capital, by a failure to embed themselves in the working class, by fracturing over particular issues like imperialist war and migration. 

The Workers’ Party in Belgium is interesting. When I first knew them they were still followers of Mao, but that has not proved a barrier to their advance. There is a lot to be studied in how they manage to unite parliamentary, community and trade union struggles. But each of these parties is sui generis, and ours will be too. I mean, five out of its initial six-person parliamentary group are Muslims; its very existence is a product of previous mass movements, its connection to the current ones is strong; and it draws on Corbyn’s leadership of Labour – so we need to start from these particular defining features.  

Read on: Tom Hazeldine, ‘Neo-Labourism in the Saddle’, NLR 148.