Transform Newsletter 20th November 2024

Welcome to issue 15 of the Transform newsletter. We reported last month that our Strategy Working Group has been doing some great work. Today, the Working Group sets out for the first time the party’s new strategic objectives.

Our strategic objectives

There is a lot happening, and a lot that needs to be done – but we hope having a clear strategy in place can clarify our direction and prioritise our energies.

Our mission is (and always has been):

To create a mass party of the Left

How do we do that? Broadly, in three ways:

Objective 1. Create broad alliances on the Left with people and organisations that agree with our principles – on a national and local basis.

Objective 2. Build Transform in a way that prefigures and complements the creation of a wider party.

Objective 3. Develop activists by providing discussion, education and training to increase knowledge and skills of our members and supporters to grow grassroots campaigning.

All our actions will be supporting those clear objectives. These are some examples of the work we are doing and planning right now:

1.      Create broad alliances on the Left…

Bringing together left wing campaigners who agree with our values is a key part of our work. Transform is at the heart of the Collective, a group of left activists close to Jeremy Corbyn (Peace and Justice), who aim to establish a party of the Left that can pose a credible threat to the Labour Party. We are also meeting up with groups like For the Many, Assemble (the political wing of Just Stop Oil) and OCISA to establish new ways of working together across the country. We are helping to develop local activist hubs like Jamie Driscoll’s Majority in the North East, and the Enfield Community Independents, supporting campaigners to unite to fight in local elections.

2.       Build Transform…

At the same time as working with allies, Transform is building its own brand of progressive, intersectional, democratic, environmentalist and internationalist socialism. We recently held our second conference to great success, and agreed some key policies and showcased our principal speakers. We have local groups where members can meet, learn and organise. We have observer status with the European Left network. We are developing our messaging in social media and linking with left wing news outlets like the Canary. We are increasingly visible at national and local demos, conferences, festivals, and now have a large range of merchandise for members. We are planning a student union campaign and massive improvements to our website, enabling members to interact with each other and get involved in our activities more easily.

3.     Develop activists…

We will continue to develop our online training on campaigning skills for members on topics like organising, canvassing, public speaking and leafleting, first delivered to activists during the General Election campaign earlier this year. We will continue to organise forums for members to learn more about key issues like the Far Right, workers rights and Gaza – and bring members together every month to discuss politics in our well facilitated Transform Talkback sessions (see the link below to sign up to the next one in early December). We have plans to offer a series of webinars for members on topics like intersectionality, feminism, economics, trans rights, and antisemitism. Members can also debate issues on a range of WhatsApp groups.

Transform Strategy Working Group

Victory for Putin, Netanyahu and Musk, more misery for the American people.

Why did Kamala lose ?

Between 2016 and 2020 the number of people voting in the US Presidential election rose by over 20 million. To this day, Trump devotees question whether those votes were legitimate. Of course they were: they were the result of a tremendous campaign to get rid of Trump, which inspired millions of people, particularly the young, to get out and vote. The Left was an important part of this movement. Bernie Sanders ran an extraordinary grassroots campaign which carried him to the brink of the Democratic nomination without support from any big donors. After he conceded defeat, he threw all his weight behind Biden, and in the main his supporters gritted their teeth and campaigned to get Biden elected.

There were many reasons why this movement crumbled, and couldn’t be pieced back together in 2024. Most Americans have been squeezed by rising prices, they don’t feel any better off, and they don’t feel that government is on their side. There’s a weariness, a disillusionment, which makes them less inclined to vote Democrat again this time round.

Trump only increased his vote by a small amount in 2024: he could have been defeated. But the Democrats didn’t exactly help themselves. The decision to anoint the ageing Biden as candidate showed how out of tune they were with the public mood. Replacing him with Harris was too little, too late: not having an actual contest made her look like an establishment candidate. On top of this, Harris’s pitch was cautious and conservative. During the last Trump administration, she visited immigration detention centres to speak to mothers whose children had been taken away from them. But now she was presenting herself as being tough on immigration, and campaigning alongside lifelong Republican Liz Cheney.

Trump would probably have won even if the Gaza genocide had never happened. But there is no doubt that both Biden and Harris were seriously damaged by their complicity. Large numbers of Muslims, young people, and leftists voted for candidates like Jill Stein, or didn’t vote at all.  

Trump mark 2

Trump mark 2 will be fundamentally different from Trump mark 1. When he was elected President in 2016 he didn’t have much of an agenda beyond “building the wall”, and a hostility towards Washington politics. Trump’s behaviour, and some of his more radical policies, alienated parts of the Republican Party, and there was opposition to him even among some of the senior party figures whom Trump appointed to office.

The Republican Party is now fervently and overwhelmingly behind Trump. Trump can afford to appoint to office people who are uncritically loyal to him, and ready to carry out the more extreme parts of his agenda. And this time, he has a very full and far-reaching plan of things that he wants to do.

Some of you will have heard about Project 2025. Compiled by the Heritage Foundation, this is a radical and frightening right wing policy programme which is closely aligned with Trump’s personal politics. Not all of it will see the light of day – for instance abolishing the Department of Education is unlikely to be achievable – but these ideas will be in the forefront of Trump’s mind, and other key figures in his administration.

Things that we are likely to see: an assault on forms of teaching disapproved of by Christian fundamentalist groups; mass repeal of climate policies and withdrawal from all international climate agreements; attempts at mass deportations of immigrant communities. The Supreme Court will continue to roll back hard-won rights on abortion, gay marriage and trans healthcare while legitimising every attack by Trump on American democracy. The January 6 rioters will be freed from their jail cells, and fascists will be allowed to do their worst without reprisal. Anti-Trump protest activity will be labeled anti-American or antisemitic, and persecuted. Thousands of public employees will be sacked, while key posts across the public sector are hurriedly filled with Trump loyalists.

The economy: can Trump deliver ?

Millions of low-income Americans voted for Trump believing that he would improve their living standards and reduce crime. Can he deliver ?

Deporting immigrants will do neither of these things. Trump’s repeated claims that immigrants were responsible for a wave of crime were simply racist lies – there’s no evidence for this at all. Mass deportations will cost billions, they’ll require a huge increase in the enforcement workforce, and they’ll be fought at every step of the way by defence campaigns, by lawsuits, and by states not cooperating. To the extent to which they succeed, they’ll damage the economy, by creating labour shortages and reducing tax income.

Trump is also proposing huge increases in trade tariffs: 60% on goods from China and 10 to 50% on goods from everywhere else. He claims that the tariffs will pay for themselves by boosting local business and creating new jobs. Most economists however say that tariffs on anything like this scale would create shortages of goods and drive up inflation, so it’s unlikely that Americans will end up feeling any better off.

Markets love stability – but Trump and partner-in-crime Elon Musk are intent on creating chaos. Appointing unqualified and unsuitable people to high office is all about putting two fingers up at the Washington establishment and waging factional wars. Trump’s also on a collision course with the Chair of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell, and the threat of interference with the independence of the Federal Reserve is causing market jitters. He’s worried that if his policies increase inflation, the Fed will raise interest rates. He’d like to force the Fed to keep interest rates low.

Politics after Trump

Trump’s victory was a big moment of triumph for Vladimir Putin. And despite the Democratic Party’s consistent support for Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu also welcomed Trump’s return to the Presidency with open arms.

The result is a boost for Nigel Farage, for Marine Le Pen, and for far right and fascist movements the world over. It will give confidence to every racist, every homophobe, every transphobe. And it will affect the national conversation in countries like the UK, by pushing our media platforms to give increasing amounts of space and credibility to points of view that a few years ago would have been dismissed as far right extremism. Our job is to ensure that these viewpoints are challenged at every turn. To do this though, we’ll need to build a mass movement, and the Left will need its own party.  

European Left Forum

Doug Thorpe, International Officer for Transform:

“I attended the 8th European Forum of Left, Green and Progressive Forces in Budapest from 8-10 November 2024 as a delegate from the Transform Party. The forum was held in Hungary in solidarity with Hungarian leftists facing Victor Orban’s far-right government. The organisers claimed 115 groups from the left, Greens, campaigns NGOs and trade unions were represented.

At the conclusion of the Forum a Declaration was issued which had been drafted before the event in consultation with European Left Party members, and which was fine-tuned as a result of the contributions at the forum.

The main themes underpinning the Forum were Peace, the rise of the Far-Right, resisting Austerity, and how Unity on the Left can be built. At the Left Unity Plenary David Ronne from the Danish Red-Green Alliance made a powerful appeal for unity – ‘We should not fuck shit up, the important thing is to keep parties together because, once a party has split it does not come back, it does not heal, it is so hard to glue these parts back together’.

This was in the context of a year in which the European Left (EL – of which Transform is an Observer Party) has seen several member parties leave to create a new European grouping. The Executive of the EL recognises the danger and is proposing dialogue with other left forces with the aim of creating a broader left unity. As Walter Baier (President of the EL) said: ‘We not only have Trump, but the most right leaning European Commission & Parliament for decades and that requires an effective united left. For this we need dialogue, convergence and common action.’

As is often the case, much of the benefit of such conferences is not the official sessions, but the opportunity to meet and talk to, and make links with a wide range of socialists from across Europe. Sometimes those links are close to home as well, I had some long conversations with the delegates from the Democratic Left in Scotland about the prospects for the left and radical independence movement in Scotland and how this relates to the left in England which we agreed to follow up.”

By-election watch

Transform members have been campaigning for two independent candidates who are both standing in London council by-elections on November 28th.

Jackson Caines is standing in Junction Ward in Islington, where he’s been joined on the campaign trail by his local MP, Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn has also now given his endorsement to Khalid Sadur, who’s standing in Jubilee Ward in Enfield.

What’s given strength and credibility to these campaigns is that both candidates have been openly selected by local people’s assemblies and by left groups collaborating. If you can help with canvassing over the next week, please get in touch via Jackson’s website or the Enfield Community Action Group website.

Colchester Action for Palestine

Transform co-hosted an event in Colchester last week on the history of Palestine and the Middle East.

Our correspondent Solma Ahmed reports that “Tobie Glenny delivered a sweeping overview of the region’s complex past, beginning well before the Ottoman Empire and tracing through colonial and imperial influences, finally arriving at the creation of Israel.

Naomi Wimborne Idrissi then delved into the present-day realities, exploring the motivations behind Herzl’s vision for Israel, which was originally intended as a haven for impoverished European Jews, and sharing her perspective as an anti-Zionist Jew on the ongoing situation.”

Next National Demo for Palestine

The next National Demonstration for Palestine is on 30th November. To meet up with other Transform members and supporters there, join this WhatsApp group.

If you are interested in organising our presence for this and any other events, please contact Mandy Parry on mandyparrytraining@gmail.com or WhatsApp 07811101740.

Transform Speaks !

Outraged at another Trump presidency? Can’t take any more of Starmer? Horrified at Gaza? Enjoying Bluesky? Our Transform Talksback sessions are there get you connecting with like-minded comrades with a glass of your favourite tipple in hand. They are hosted by someone whose sole role will be to create the opportunity for as many people to speak as possible within the time we have.

Book the date now: the next Talksback is on Friday 6th December at 6.30pm. The Zoom registration link if you need it is here.

We want to hear from you

Don’t be shy ! We’re always happy to receive your questions, comments and editorial suggestions. Please keep sending them through to info@transformpolitics.uk, marking your email for the attention of the Newsletter Team.

In solidarity,

Transform Newsletter Team

The Left must act now

The stakes just got higher

A few highlights from our social media this week: