WHEN Rishi Sunak appointed his ethics adviser to investigate the affairs of Nadhim Zahawi it was with the task of effecting the necessary defenestration of the former Chancellor.

The nonsense about the late discovery of breaches in the ministerial code does not bear examination. The key facts were known weeks ago. Zahawi'’s eventual sacking, far from revealing the hidden inner man of steel behind Sunak'’s expensive smile, shows just how vacillating the premier is and how he is in thrall to his fractious back benches, disloyal Cabinet and Neanderthal party members.

According to the latest opinion poll, just 16 per cent of the British population think that Conservative Party ministers are more interested in serving the public than in personal advancement. The wider significance of Nadhim Zahawi'’s fall is not that he is an exception but that, in the higher reaches of the Conservative Party, he is taken as typical.

Labour’s lead over the Tories is now settled into double figures and although this will prove very difficult to overcome, doing so is not unprecedented. Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’'s radical 2017 manifesto  successfully overcame a 20 per cent lag and came close to winning. Indeed, as John McDonnell said at the time, if the campaign had run for a week or so more, we would have had the most radical Labour government ever.

Labour lagged then because an unremittingly hostile media and a traitorous parliamentary party had done their best to derail the Corbyn leadership. It was only when the attractive power of Labour'’s manifesto came into play that opinion changed everywhere — except in Westminster Labour.

In the absence of a programmatic challenge to the Tory narrative even the present Labour lead could melt away if the media take up the Tory assault on the moral character of Starmer.



Nevertheless, sensible money is now on a Labour victory when the election comes no later than 18 months away. This is a long time in politics but Labour is favoured not because of any radically dramatic or attractive power that can be found in Keir Starmer’'s policy pronouncements — rather the opposite. 

Starmer and the official Labour strategy is grounded in the pessimistic perspective that governments lose elections rather than oppositions winning them. Starmer’'s best chance is because, finally, he has the confidence of the ruling class. At least a section of it is convinced that under him Labour is no threat.

Buried in the subconsciousness of the Labour right – and deep in the DNA of Westminster Labour – is the fear that a popular rise in class consciousness, if reflected in the election of a Labour government because voters desire and expect radical change, would disrupt their personal accommodations with capital.

That many working people desire and will work for a Labour victory over the Conservatives is a given. It is in this margin of political space that hopes exist that even a right-wing Labour victory will provide for improvements in living standards, social security, health, jobs, infrastructure, investment, and capital investment in productive industry.

In parallel with this narrative – internalised and against experience and reason – there is, among millions of working people and most especially in the minds of trade unionists and Labour activists, the beginnings of a more realistic investigation into the prospects of profound change rather than mere reforms.

This arises necessarily from the expectation that a Starmer government will present no systemic threat to the power, profits and privileges of our ruling class. The presence of Starmer and his austerian shadow chancellor at Davos is a reminder that where these people are not yet part of the Establishment they earnestly desire to be so.

It is important for the labour movement to pay attention to environmental campaigners of all stripes who have raised the issue of our planet’'s very survival as a hospitable place for humans to live on.

The left is more accustomed to thinking through the relationship between class, consciousness and political consciousness as the route to socialist advance than we are in taking account of the critical environmental issue. 

Where climate activists assert it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism, we must assert – with compelling  arguments – that only the working class derives no profit or advantage from despoiling the planet and that working-class political power is the key to a sustainable life.

In the political imagination of the left the party question is becoming paramount.

The anti-fascist partisan Italian Communist leader Armando Cossuta, at the end of a long political career and amid the ruins of Italy’'s communist movement, speculated that the failure to overcome the split in the labour movement occasioned by the first world war was a mistake. The failure of the Social Democratic leadership to adhere to the principle set out by the Socialist International, that workers in uniform should not fight each other, was the cause of that division.

However, history took a different turn and we have to make a judgement about which models of political organisation are most useful if our critical goal goes beyond reforms.

If we accept that the winning, construction and defence of working-class power and the history of actually existing socialism presents as many theoretical and practical problems as it does solutions, then we need to think outside the box.

A precondition of a successful revolutionary challenge is that the ruling class must be unable to rule in the old way. Can we see the embryo of this in today'’s situation in that, increasingly, the working class is unwilling to be ruled in the old way? Were there hints of this 'insubordination' in the Brexit vote?

Wage struggles – even on the present scale – are not necessarily even the precursor of a revolutionary consciousness but can we see in every picket and strike ballot an assertion of distinct working-class rights independent of other classes in society?

If, objectively, we presently fall short of constructing a hegemonic party of the working class – one eventually both able and willing to challenge for power – what must be changed?

Interestingly, it is a section of the US new left that seems sensitive to this problem. Firstly in challenging the 'shrill, moralistic, but ultimately apolitical debates' within the left there. 

“They tend to be about language, individual identity, body language, consumption habits, and the like,” asserted Vivel Chibber in Jacobin'’s Our Road to Power. 

The disturbingly fractious elements of this currently appearing on the British left were elegantly dissected a few days ago by Lindsey German in her weekly posting.

Jacobin makes the compelling point that “all the putative alternatives coming out of the left since the 1960s – the multi-tendency organisations, the horizontalists, the anarchists and their affinity groups, the movement of movements – have been able to mobilise for a time, but they have had little success in sustaining movements, much less achieving real material gains.”

For the self-confessed middle-class left on both sides of the Atlantic it is axiomatic that the 20th-century experience of  'actually existing socialism' and that of the 21st-century socialist states be rejected.

While they fantasise about a Nordic-type socialism the 'democratic socialists' inside and outside of the US Democratic Party reject the Leninist party model but recognise that “...no other model has come anywhere as close to being politically effective.”

Both the US Jacobin and its British acquisition the revamped Tribune magazine – alongside a great deal of valuable material – play with a kind of Bolshevism chic. But appropriating the visual style and iconography of past revolutionary movements is indulgent unless it is accompanied by an understanding that defending working-class political power is a different and more difficult task than winning it and deserves no less solidarity.

Big social movements and especially revolutionary shifts of power from one class to another sweep up in their wake all kinds of people and social forces. 

Lenin argued:  “Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.”

The same is true of counter-revolution. We can understand something of the so-called  'colour revolutions' sponsored by imperialism today with Lenin’'s reflection on reactions to the Irish rebellion. Bear in mind that Labour MPs greeted the execution of James Connolly with cheers.

“Only those who imagine that in one place an army will line up and say, ‘We are for socialism’ and in another place another army will say, ‘We are for imperialism’ and believe that this will be the social revolution, only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic opinion could vilify the Irish Rebellion (Easter Day Rebellion) by calling it a ‘putsch’.”

It is frivolous to call for the the left to abandon Labour. With or without an electoral system that allowed an effective electoral challenge from the left of Labour the effect of such a challenge is always to strengthen the Labour left. The history of Tribune itself shows it was most in tune with the working-class movement when the left as a whole had a common project.

But if the fight against the right is conducted exclusively inside Labour, the best result is the departure of an element of the right. And in this connection the eventual consequence of the 1980's SDP breakaway was the accession of Blair and New Labour.

The most positive thing about our present pay battles are the political and organisational consequences that flow from them. Most especially welcome is the sense that this capitalist system cannot guarantee job security, a living wage, a secure home, peace and a planet in which we can live in harmony with nature.

Qatar-gate update
Today the European Parliament is set to lift the parliamentary immunity of Socialist and Democrats MEPs Andrea Cozzolino and Marc Tarabella. The parliament'’s legal committee voted 23 to none to recommend suspension.

The lawyer for imprisoned Greek MEP Eva Kaili says Pier Antonio Panzeri – allegedly the mastermind behind the bribery scandal rocking the EU'’s Socialists and Democrats group and the International Trade Union Confederation – will, as part of his plea deal, name more people including MEPs from France, Italy and Germany.