A watershed in British politics?

 22nd April 2024

 

By Linda Wall

Since October 7th, a hundred plus councillors, many of them Muslim, have resigned from Labour. We’ve not seen anything like this before. Their statements often echo one another: Gaza was the catalyst, but there are other areas of concern as well, and the party under Starmer’s leadership seemed inflexible and unwilling to listen. On some councils in red wall seats the resignations have transformed the balance of political forces.

October 7th has also galvanised attempts to build left political alternatives to Labour. For national groups like Transform, it’s shaped our focus and our messaging. It’s inspired the growth of non-aligned networks such as For The Many, The Collective, and Owen Jones’s We Deserve Better. We’re seeing a proliferation of socialists planning to stand in the General Election – not just ones with an established profile like Corbyn and Driscoll, but grassroots candidates who’ve been selected to represent their communities.
In this context, the No Ceasefire No Vote conferences – in London on 2nd March and in Blackburn on 13th April – were an exciting initiative, an opportunity to come together in solidarity, learn from one another, and perhaps take a step towards building a durable movement.

Between 150 and 200 people attended the Blackburn event, where we were made to feel very welcome by our hosts, the Blackburn Independents. The Independents group was formed a few months ago when eight councillors signed a letter to Labour General Secretary David Evans saying they “could not continue being members of a party whose leadership is unwilling to callout atrocities Israel is committing against a civilian population”. Since then they’ve not looked back., and they’ve selected a panel of candidates all with solid working class credentials to stand all across the city in the upcoming local elections.

History tells us that winning elections as an independent is very difficult. People tend to vote on national issues, and for parties that they know and trust. Getting yourself known, and winning trust, takes a lot more than one A5 leaflet. So I was interested in hearing why the new independents think they can make more of an impact. Jan Cunliffe was selected to stand against Lisa Nandy in Wigan at a well attended meeting organised by the For The Many network. Jan has lived in Wigan all her life, and is known as a justice campaigner and co-founder of the grassroots organisation JENGBA. She seems confident that she has a strong base of people who’ll come out campaigning for her. Michael Lavalette was selected to stand in Preston at the General Election at a hustings organised by the Children of the Ghetto charity and the Preston for Palestine group. A former town councillor, and an organiser of marches for a ceasefire in Gaza, he won an overwhelming vote of confidence from the packed meeting. He told me that he felt it was beneficial that the election was contested. Within 24 hours he managed to get 180 people to sign his nomination papers – an amazing achievement, and the kind of target that every ambitious independent should be setting themselves.

The day-long conference heard repeated calls from platform speakers to oppose the genocide in Gaza, and to break with parties who were complicit in this genocide. On the aims and the politics of the movement there were, as one might expect, some differences. For some, this is primarily about local councillors representing their communities; while others expressed a wish to see a coming together in some shape or form of the forces to the left of Labour. Michael Lavalette argued that single issue campaigns couldn’t win, and that the programme should be “Gaza plus”. Many speakers, including Transform’s Alan Gibbons and Lotte Collett from the Independent Socialist Group in Haringey, supported the idea of campaigns that spoke not just about Gaza, but about a range of social issues. Others however tried to represent the independent movement as being about Gaza alone.

Andrew Feinstein, who’d been invited to speak as a prospective candidate against Keir Starmer in Holborn & St Pancras, also gave a dramatic account of how the day before the Palestinian scholar Salman Abu Sitta was barred from entering Germany to attend a congress on Palestine; and then when the Congress started to play a video of him speaking, Berlin police stormed the building and shut down the event.

George Galloway was given a hero’s welcome by the hosts following his victory in the Rochdale by-election. Galloway struck a discordant note however in his speech, urging independents to link up with his Workers Party (WP) and get themselves approved as WP candidates, warning that he couldn’t guarantee that the WP wouldn’t stand against them. Alan Gibbons challenged him on this: was the WP proposing to stand against rooted independent candidates with a record of solidarity with Palestine ? In response, the Workers Party MP made it clear that he wouldn’t shy away from a contest if he thought that his party was best positioned to win.

It felt like a weakness of the event that while it brought so many groups together and produced so many inspiring speeches, it didn’t set out to work through any issues that divided the left, or what needs to be done to build on our common ground to make the movement stronger. Among the people I spoke to, there was a thirst for political change, and an openness to finding ways of getting the left working more closely together. So I’m still excited by the possibilities – and Transform have the politics that can help to bring about the kind of collaboration that’s needed.