By Mark Buckley
The founding conference of Your Party indicated that there are fundamental questions of orientation that need to be resolved by the new party. The principal options, as outlined by leading protagonists, are the choice between an explicitly anti-capitalist party, which must aim for the overthrow of capitalism, versus a party of left social democracy, which advocates reforms that it intends to carry out.
The latter option is most clearly represented by Jeremy Corbyn. For objective reasons, it is the only viable one if Your Party is to become and sustain itself as a mass party. An explicitly anti-capitalist party in Britain at present would rapidly become consigned to the margins of British politics, with no significant impact on national politics. There is currently no significant electoral support in Britain for such a programme,
The objective situation is as follows. A mass party requires the support of a section of the masses. There is no section of the mass of the population in Britain which is prepared for the struggle to overthrow capitalism. It would be delusional to believe otherwise.
At the same time, because of the trajectory of the Starmer leadership of the Labour Party, there is a vacuum on the left of the political spectrum in this country which was formerly occupied by Labour. That is the space that Your Party could successfully occupy, based on the general political orientation of Corbyn.
Anyone wishing Your Party to succeed, who believes that a national alternative is needed to Starmer/Badenoch/Farage and their diet of war, austerity and racism, should support Corbyn’s left social democratic orientation for Your Party.
Words matter
In a country like Britain, with its long history of imperialism, the political culture remains underdeveloped. There has never been a mass socialist party, unlike even in fellow imperialist powers such as France and Germany, and no mass communist party either.
Therefore, many socialists have tended to congregate inside the Labour party, the ‘general confederation of the labour movement’, as Lenin described it. While Labour sometimes (grudgingly) accepts socialists in its ranks, overwhelmingly these socialists fight for left social democratic reforms. They have little or no connection to communism or to revolutionary politics.
Anti-capitalism is a different matter from left social democracy, as it requires the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state. A party describing itself as anti-capitalist should be clear on the capitalist state, on its mechanisms and alliances, and it should seek to lead a struggle for state power.
No part of Your Party is trying to prepare such a struggle. There is a very good reason for this. Anti-capitalism does not correspond to the current outlook of any section of the masses, not even the most left-wing sections. This has been shown repeatedly in the best method of testing the political temperature of the population – in elections.
Britains’ history of anti-capitalist parties
Numerous parties describing themselves as anti-capitalist have stood in British elections over the past period. The table below shows their performance in the last several elections.
Anti-capitalist parties in recent British Geneal Elections*
| Election | Parties standing** | Names | Combined Vote | Seats Won |
| 2024 | 5 | TUSC Socialist LP CPB WRP Scottish SP | 22,300 | 0 |
| 2019 | 0 | N/a | N/a | 0 |
| 2017 | 1 | Socialist LP | 1,200 | 0 |
| 2015 | TUSC Socialist LP Communist | 38,800 | 0 |
*Results in Ireland have been excluded, as it is not in Britain
** Parties gaining fewer than 1,000 votes have been disregarded
Source: House of Commons Library, https://electionresults.parliament.uk/political-parties
These recent general elections conform to the general pattern of British politics over many decades. Although the conditions for the population in the 1920s and 1930s were bad by British standards, in the period prior to and after World War II there was only one and then two Communist Party MPs elected. The leftward shift in Britain following the defeat of fascism was significantly less radical than elsewhere in Europe.
More recently, a small force to the left of Labour has been elected in parliamentary by-elections, notably George Galloway, when he was clearly on the left. But he was not elected on an anti-capitalist programme, but on an anti-war left social democratic agenda.
A party with a national voice and a national impact requires sustained electoral success at general elections. The history of anti-capitalist parties in Britain has been extremely weak electorally, including in the recent period. There is nothing in current situation which suggests that has changed for the better.
The example of France
In France a left social democratic party and a self-declared anti-capitalist party have both stood in elections this past decade of so – La France Insoumise (LFI) and its anti-capitalist rival, the Nouvelle Partie Anticapitaliste (NPA). The former emerged out of the established Socialist Party, while the latter is largely an agglomeration of pre-existing leftist parties.
The differing levels of electoral support for then is decisive, irrespective of any, or all, of the differences critics may have with either party on the questions of their programme and tactics. Mélenchon, the leader of LFI, has become the main leader of the left in France. He narrowly lost out to Le Pen for second place in the 2022 Presidential election and polled over 7.7 million votes. He currently polls in the mid- to low-teens. The NPA secured less than 0.3 million votes in 2022 and was obliged to join the LFI-led NUPES coalition for Assembly elections, and polls at around 3%.
The current situation in Britain
Like the French Socialist Party, the Labour Party under Starmer has embraced Trump, war, austerity and racism. It promotes increasingly authoritarian policies and has just imposed its second austerity Budget.
Corbyn, as Labour leader, demonstrated clearly in 2017 and 2019 there is mass support for a left social democratic manifesto, securing 12.9 million and 10.3 million votes respectively in those two general elections. (Starmer only secured 9.7million vote in 2024, but won more seats, overwhelmingly due to the collapse in Tory support and Farage’s party Reform running against the Tories in most seats – unlike in 2019, when Farage stood down more than 300 Brexit Party candidates to ensure Boris Johnson could defeat Corbyn.)
Starmer, moving Labour’s agenda so far to the right, has created a vacancy on the political spectrum – a social democratic space. Your Party should try to take up this space and fight for genuine reforms: cutting back the military budget to pre-Trump levels and refusing to participate in his military adventures, rejecting austerity, replacing it with investment and ending subsidies for the banks and the arms’ manufacturers to pay for public services, rejecting racist and Islamophobic policies and rhetoric, and arguing for equality and acting to implement it in all areas of social policy. On the electoral front, such a left-led social democratic party would offer a real challenge to Reform UK, not pander to it as Starmer does. This type of left social democratic perspective could win over a section of the masses in the current period and, because of that, have an impact in the struggle against the right wing policy consensus of the other parties.
Socialists do not reject reforms. On the contrary, they should be the best fighters for them. Everything that improves both the material conditions and the militancy of the working class and oppressed should be fought for.
Britain is not in a revolutionary crisis, or even a pre-revolutionary one. It would be delusional to believe otherwise. Only Corbyn’s left social democratic perspective offers a genuine way forward for Your Party.
Image: Jeremy Corbyn giving a speech at the inaugural conference of Your Party; Photo by G-13114; licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.; image cropped.