POLLS show big majorities back unions striking to win higher pay for their members.

Polls show too that people agree with the political demands being raised by union-led mass campaigns, for immediate intervention to bring down prices and for public ownership of energy.

The contradiction between astronomical profits on one hand and abject poverty on the other is too sharp for a miserably triangulating Labour Party, whose leader’s 1990s pieties about “backing business” simply alert ordinary people to the fact that he is not on their side.

The new union militancy is necessarily independent of British institutional politics. 

The speed and ferocity with which Keir Starmer turned on the Labour left, seeking to obliterate all traces of the Corbyn years, has compounded a feeling that was crystallising anyway in the wake of Labour’s 2019 defeat, that the trade union movement had to fight and win its own battles rather than running constantly with “begging bowls to Westminster,” in Unite leader Sharon Graham’s phrase.

It’s doubly important, then, that the left does not fall into the trap that proved so deadly to the Corbyn project — lining up behind one or other faction of the ruling class rather than asserting its own independent, class-conscious voice.

The ongoing row provoked by former BBC journalist Emily Maitlis’s sharp attack on her ex-employer — she accuses the public broadcaster’s political coverage of being shaped by an “active agent of the Tory Party” — has prompted a wave of support for the former Newsnight presenter.

No wonder. Leftwingers who have been pointing to BBC bias for years are glad to have it confirmed by an insider. And her criticisms have weight. 

The BBC’s director-general has stood for public office for the Conservatives. Its chairman has donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to the Tories. Increasingly shameless Conservative governments have had less and less compunction about appointing tribal party loyalists to police BBC “impartiality.”

Yet cheering on Maitlis has echoes of the disastrous subordination of the socialist Corbyn movement to the liberal and pro-status quo Remain campaign, which steadily stripped Labour of its radical appeal. 

Indeed, Maitlis seeks to reopen those wounds, attacking the BBC for obscuring the overwhelming “expert” consensus behind Remain.

The political divide across much of the West has become one between “experts” or technocrats — generally utterly loyal to a neoliberal status quo — and an angry, resentful nationalism. 

In Britain this characterised much of the Brexit debate but the same fault lines are clearly visible in France and Italy.

Victory for either of these tendencies is, in practice, defeat for the working class. This is the real danger in the liberal left tendency to dismiss anyone opposed to “expert” opinion as irrational and probably a dupe of sinister forces.

Remember that the “experts” Maitlis says were so unanimous about the dangers of Brexit (and there were plenty who were not, not least the Guardian’s own economics editor Larry Elliott) are the same “experts” who say workers should forgo a pay rise to bring down inflation. 

The same who preach wage restraint in every crisis but cannot see a case for profit restraint when profit margins are through the roof and actually driving inflation.

The storm engulfing Britain was not invoked by populist leaders, or because we ignored the “experts,” or by Brexit.

It is a crisis in the rate of profit. It is affecting the whole of Europe and much of the rest of the world besides.

Liberal misdirection drove the last serious left project in Britain onto the rocks. A newly confident working-class movement should keep its distance from both sides of a dispute on how best to keep the capitalist ship afloat and the capitalist ruling class on top.

Our task is to replace that class and for that we need our own voice — and our own, independent and socialist media.