Transform Newsletter 2 July 2025

 6th July 2025

Welcome to issue 26 of the Transform Newsletter. We are all Palestine Action.

Who speaks for us ?

Palestine Action are branded a terrorist group. We’re told that the organisation will be proscribed, and its members jailed. They are not terrorists. They’re a peaceful protest group who are willing to break the law and risk arrest because they feel a greater moral obligation to prevent war crimes and genocide.

Where are the voices in the media calling this out as an authoritarian attack on its political opponents by a government complicit in war crimes ?

Who speaks for us ?

Politicians queue up to condemn the words of a punk artist. The media dutifully report these condemnations, without giving any context – like the two minute speech by Bob Vylan before he began his chanting, and the sense of moral outrage among many Glastonbury artists and festival goers over the actions of the Israeli state and the IDF in Gaza.

Who speaks for us ?

Israel launches a massive aerial bombardment of Iran. Our elected politicians spout nonsense about Israel’s right to defend itself. Not a single broadcaster challenges them, pointing out that Israel is the nuclear power, and Israel is the aggressor, not Iran.

Who speaks for us ?

The leaders of NATO countries have committed to increasing defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. Keir Starmer has announced that the UK government is purchasing 12 F-35A fighter jets capable of delivering tactical nuclear weapons at a cost of over £1 billion. To justify this enormous spending increase, they’re whipping up fear about hypothetical threats to national security.

The fact is, this is nothing to do with “defence”: for the last 80 years British arms have been used exclusively in foreign and imperialist conflicts, and that’s likely to remain the case in the foreseeable future.

The hike in spending is a kick in teeth to every person at risk of losing their PIPs, every child in poverty as a result of austerity, every pensioner struggling to find the money to heat their home. But these voices aren’t being heard right now.

Who speaks for us ?

We at Transform are doing what we can. Those of you who follow us on social media will know that we fearlessly stand up for striking workers, for pensioners in poverty, for women, for trans people, for asylum seekers, and of course for the long-suffering Palestinian people. Our reach though is limited. We don’t have power to change the national narrative.

This is why Transform has been in discussions with others on the left about creating a new party which can become that voice for the voiceless. This is happening, and it’s expected that an announcement will be made within weeks rather than months. There’s been a few rumours floating around over it, which is understandable, but the big questions are more what should its aims should be and what it can achieve.

We can make history

Last week, a 33 year old socialist Zohran Mamdani won a sensational victory in the Democratic Primary for Mayor of New York City. This was a campaign that started out on a shoestring and was built on hope. He campaigned on freezing rents, building affordable housing and universal childcare. He promised to take on corporate greed. He spoke out fearlessly for Palestine. And equally significantly, he vowed to defend immigrants and refugees, and to defend trans people, from the attacks of the Trump administration.

The victory was achieved by inspiring thousands of ordinary people to volunteer for his campaign.

What’s to stop us from doing what Mamdani achieved ? Labour support has collapsed in its heartlands. As entrenched loyalties have become fragmented, old adages such as ‘you can’t split the Labour vote’ no longer carry the weight that they once did. In this Newsletter we publish reports from Liverpool and the Black Country where the prospect of a new party has brought people from different political backgrounds together and galvanised the left.

The situation on the ground varies a lot between different cities and regions, but with this caveat, yes: we too can make history. We can win victories here if we take to heart the real lesson of the Mamdani campaign: one man can offer a vision, but it takes a movement of thousands of people united in common cause to defeat the parties of the millionaires and big business.

Labour’s Shameful Bill

The Welfare Bill passed yesterday by the House of Commons looks very different from Liz Kendall’s original Bill. This is a humiliation for Keir Starmer. Changes to PIP have been shelved, at least for the time being. Rachel Reeves has been left with a big hole in her budget plans. And the concessions, along with the fact that 49 Labour MPs still voted against the Bill, make Starmer look weak.

Make no mistake: it was the determined campaigning of disabled people and their allies that forced the government to pause billions of pounds in proposed cuts. This was not granted – it was won.

What we are left with though is a shambles. A bill chaotically put together, backed by unwritten promises from the UK government, and disabled people are left not knowing what it will mean for them. The fight does not end here.

And of course there have been no apologies from those in charge of the Labour Party. To them we say, we see you. You may sing The Red Flag at your annual Conference, but that doesn’t mean a thing when you’re willing to push for savage cuts to disability benefits, and to threaten with sanctions any of your  MPs who were considering voting against your shameful Bill.

Helen Collins of Crips Against Cuts spoke to the Newsletter before the government pressed the pause button on the changes to PIP:

“The two-tier benefit system is nothing short of discriminatory, and disabled people will not stand for it. Splitting support into ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ categories only deepens inequality and causes real harm. It sends a clear message: our value is assessed  on the same arbitrary tick boxes that leave us oppressed , and those are grounds to deny our rights.

Over 14 million people in the UK live with a disability, yet government policies continue to divide us. The new system deliberately separates those deemed ‘most severely disabled’ from others, creating barriers to accessing essential financial support. This isn’t fairness — it’s structural exclusion, which is still violence, and still feeds into a neoliberal idea of ‘high vs low functioning ‘ labels to deny either support or autonomy.

Data from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reveals that nearly half (48%) of people in poverty in the UK either live with a disability or share a household with someone who does. This is a direct result of policies that marginalise disabled people and restrict access to vital benefits. Rather than closing these gaps, the two-tier system widens them.

Let’s be clear: we reject any so-called ‘concessions’ that are not protective but divisive.  No one’s basic rights should depend on arbitrary assessments or narrow definitions of disability. Every disabled person deserves dignity, financial security, and equal access to support — without being pitted against one another. This is a class issue and everybody’s fight, and we need to stay focused  in challenging it, and not be pacified or distracted.”

“We’re not asking anyone for pity”

What does dignity mean for people with seen or unseen additional needs ? Check out this opinion piece by Transform’s Equalities Officer Dawn Sanders, recently posted on the Transform website.

Streeting’s plan for the NHS

The long awaited 10 Year Health Plan is about to be released. When it is, don’t bother reading the headlines or listening to the speeches. Instead, seek out information as to what the Plan actually includes.

One person who has already seen the draft Plan is Alistair McLellan, editor of the Health Service Journal. He reports that

ICBs will be told to strengthen their provider market by using competition where appropriate, as well as more robust contracting.

Specifically, the plan says ICBs should seek to procure “neighbourhood health services” from a wide range of NHS and non-NHS providers. The government itself will seek to increase healthcare in deprived areas by seeking greater private sector involvement.

ICBs are told to make more difficult calls to stop paying for services which offer poor quality or value.

The Times reports on a harebrained productivity scheme:

Under the plans, patients would be contacted a few weeks after their treatment and asked if it was good enough for the hospital to receive full payment. If patients say no, about 10 per cent of “standard payment rates” will be diverted to a local “improvement fund”. Initial pilots will be targeted at services with a record of poor care before the model is expanded around the country next year.

Maternity services are likely to be among the first to test tying payments to patient feedback.

The paper quotes the Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation: “None of our members have raised this idea with us as a way of improving care and, to our knowledge, no other healthcare system internationally adopts this model currently,”

In entirely unrelated news, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has bagged £58,000 of office support from private health sources since the General Election.

Liverpool

Report by Linda Wall

The rally, organised by Merseyside’s four Independent groups, surpassed expectations. The hall was packed out with over 500 people: those who’d come as individuals alongside the different strands of the socialist left, all united in their support for Palestine, and the desire for a new left party.

Corbyn spoke, and confirmed his absolute commitment to the new party project. A few people tried to get a chant going of ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’, but this is no rerun of 2015-19. Good though it is to have Corbyn involved, this time it’s more about the movement than the man.

So many campaigns were represented in the hall, and there was such a spirit of solidarity. We heard from a Scouse Palestinian activist. We

heard about Karen Fletcher, who’d flown from Liverpool to Cairo a couple of days earlier to join the Global March on Gaza. Felicity Dowling spoke on the fight to defend Liverpool Women’s Hospital. Speakers from the Birmingham bin strike and the Livv Housing strike got tremendous ovations. We heard about the Veolia campaign in Garston, about the Crips Against Cuts campaign, and trans rights.

In all but name, the rally was a soft launch for the new party in Liverpool. Liverpool Community Independents have followed it up with a further meeting, attended by 50 people, to thrash out ideas for a local manifesto and to start the process of getting candidates in place for the all-out local elections in 2027.

The rally has injected into people new hope, and new life. There’ve been stories of those who came to listen, and left as converts. It’s visibly boosted attendance at the weekly Palestine marches, and has sparked the formation of a new organising group in the Wirral.

The Black Country Party

Thanks to Pete Lowe, leader of the Black Country Party, for this contribution.

It took me 41 years to reach the heartbreaking conclusion that the political party that I had devoted most of my life to was no longer representing the interests of the people that I believe needed support.

I had joined the Labour Party at the age of 15, became active and organised not because of the writings of Marx or Lenin, but by the words of Benn and the actions of Thatcher. I joined because I saw the need, during the days of the Miners Strike and Section 28, that for working class people to change society we needed to be part of a collective movement of change.

For the next 41 years I campaigned for a Kinnock government, a Smith, Blair, Miliband, Corbyn or Starmer government with equal measure. Whilst Corbyn was the only leader that I actually voted for who won, I recognised that Labour was the most likely to bring about progressive change.

This changed earlier this year. By this point I was the Labour Leader of Dudley Council and leader of the opposition in a hung council chamber. The Tory Council proposed, and passed with Lib Dem support, a sweeping budget of £42m cuts. As Labour leader I was direct in my condemnation of these cuts, and the heavy impact they would have on the most disadvantaged in our community. Within weeks the Labour Government, without warning or democratic engagement, proposed £5 billion in welfare cuts. I warned the party, appealed to them, that I could not in all conscience attack the Tories in Dudley and not be consistent and call out the government for doing the same. Austerity is Austerity, irrespective of the colour rosette it wears.

The party’s response was a wall of silence. Whilst members of the Labour Group accepted, and indeed sympathised (and largely agreed) with my position, the regional party ignored my pleas for a rethink.

As a consequence I left the Labour Party at the end of March. The following day, three councillors joined me. Together with an expelled councillor and one who’d resigned a few weeks before, we established the Dudley DIGGERS, our aim to ‘Turn the World Upside Down’. People before Party & Principles before Power became our message.

Within weeks it became clear that, should we wish to be a voice for our communities, we needed more than just a group of councillors, we needed a political party, local, community led.

We established an interim community executive and developed a constitution and manifesto ready for submission to the electoral commission.

We concluded that our aims should be simple and straightforward, a proud Anti-Austerity, Anti-Cuts Party that would unashamedly represent working class People and be community-led. We became active in local campaigns and placed motions before the council to overturn elements of the Tory budget around dementia services and keeping our leisure centres open and under council control. Both campaigns were community led, gained 3,000 signatures each leading to members of the campaign addressing full council, and both our motions won.

On 22nd June we had our first event as The Black Country Party. We deliberately arranged this in one of our deprived wards where apathy in politics is rife. Rather than a rally, we had a ‘Community Family Day’ with face painting, buskers, local community groups having stalls and a bouncy castle. Councillors and members engaged in informal discussions about how we could assist in their community and how we could influence real change. The reaction was beyond our wildest dreams, hundreds of people turned up, we sold out of t-shirts, mugs, gave out hundreds of stickers and recruited three people to the Black Country Party, one of whom had never voted or believed that politics could change things.

In just three weeks we’ve grown from nothing to 1,200 followers on Facebook and our membership in Dudley is larger than the Greens or Lib Dems. We have plans to stand candidates in 2026, not just in the wards we are defending but in several other wards where we can demonstrate the appetite within the community. We have meetings arranged with local Trade Unions, both those currently affiliated to Labour and those not affiliated.

We have a website and have our launch event on 25th July. Again we will be attempting something different, a mixture of song, spoken word and art, intermingled with radical politics that we hope will transform our community. Feel free to join us at Rebel HQ, Katie Fitzgeralds Stourbridge, 6pm till late!

Transform Podcast

The 4th podcast in our current series is on Repression of Dissent. Listen to it here.

Our panel is joined by a very interesting range of guests. Dr Larch Maxey has just spent 9 months in prison. He was one of a group of JSO protestors who occupied tunnels dug under the road leading to the Navigator Oil Terminal in Thurrock, Essex. Heather Rawling was penalised under new rules brought in by Leicester City Council, ostensibly to tackle anti-social behaviour. The PSPO bans stalls and loud hailers in the city centre, which campaigners say is an attack on the right to protest. Afzal Syed speaks about political repression in Bangladesh, and Cassie Bellingham sheds a great deal of light on how authoritarian leaders are able to manufacture consent for repressive measures.

The guests also debate a range of topics, from the question of whether the Suffragettes were really a non-violent movement, to the merits of Citizens Assemblies.

Transform Members News

The next Transform members meeting is earmarked for Wednesday 16 July at 7pm. Transform members should have received an email on 30th June with the meeting link.

Would you like to be part of the planning team for Transform’s annual Conference, which is due to take place towards the end of the year ? We’re looking for members with a range of different skills and experience. Please send all expressions of interest to info@transformpolitics.uk.

Calendar of events

Friday 4 July: Breaking the Two Party Nightmare

Ilford, East London. Conversation between Leanne Mohamad, Jeremy Corbyn & Andrew Feinstein

Saturday 5 July: Leicester Assembly of Resistance

Community Assembly

Weds 9 July: Act Now, Change Forever

Mass lobby of MPs for climate action

Weds 9 July: Support Birmingham Bin Strikers

Event organised by Manchester TUC at the Mechanics Institute

Saturday 12 July: Durham Miners Gala

Friday 18 – Sunday 20 July: Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival

Next Newsletter

The next Newsletter is scheduled for 23rd July. Do you have any events coming up that you’d like us to announce ? Please send all your event announcements, reports, and photos to us at info@transformpolitics.uk, marked for the attention of the Newsletter team.

In solidarity,

Transform Newsletter Team