BRITAIN is heading into further political turmoil and crisis just one year on from the hall-of-mirrors general election which swept Labour to office.

That’s clear from Labour’s abysmal poll ratings — and even more so for Keir Starmer — with the unprecedented situation of the Tories mired at under 20 per cent at the same time. Reform UK has topped every opinion poll since before Easter.

The Labour revolt over PIP disability payments was the product of an enormous popular groundswell and determined campaign led by disabled people. It also forced open fissures among Labour MPs, more of whom privately voice panic at the prospect of electoral oblivion.

Discontent has become more visible. But the contemptuous refusal of the Starmer-Labour operation even to consider renationalising water this week, and instead to falsely claim that you’d have to pay full price for a bankrupt Thames Water, shows the government doubling down in the run-up to a fraught autumn. Raising the state pension age is in the pipeline. And of course the government’s handwringing over the Gaza genocide only makes its participation in it all the more shameful.

This is the immediate context for the debate and various initiatives about how the left should organise. Hanging on in Labour in the hope of another PIP revolt and someone replacing Starmer. Forging ahead with the new left party that Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and others are working towards now. Organising through the Greens in England and Wales. Left-wing economist James Meadway made a case in this paper two weeks ago for joining the Greens.

It hinged upon them holding a leadership contest, with voting next month, and the campaign by left-wing candidate Zack Polanski. (Turnout at the last such election in 2021 was 22 per cent and the winning ticket got 6,273 votes.) So the argument is to join the Greens, swing the vote for Polanski and set about transforming the party along “eco-populist” lines that can connect with working-class people. I want to respond to James’s strategy, and I hope with the same comradely spirit and seriousness with which he addresses the issues facing the left.

First, it is important to situate this strategy to swing an internal party election in the proper context. A lot of discussion about how the left should organise given the collapse of Corbynism and the disaster of the Starmer government severely underestimates the scale of the political upheavals and what is at stake.

It is not a temporary or British-specific moment of crisis. It is across the transatlantic democracies and is about the breakdown of the post-war political system, not only of this or that historic centre-left party.

The British aberration was actually the fact that between 2015 and 2019 an insurgent, popular and left sentiment was expressed through the Labour Party at the same time as its European counterparts slumped.

Decades of the hollowing out of liberal-democratic arrangements have led first to mass alienation of ordinary people from parties and voting, and then to increasing questioning of capitalist democracy itself. The liberal-capitalist consensus is no longer hegemonic. It has disintegrated economically in a world now of trade wars, greater state and big power confrontation, and rising militarism. To which we can add rampant state authoritarianism.

Politically and culturally, liberal-capitalism has proved incapable of challenging reaction and the growth of the radical right and fascism. First Emmanuel Macron and then Joe Biden were supposed to lead the great liberal fightback. Now with Donald Trump back in the White House, the supposedly liberal tech bros who boasted they were with Black Lives Matter five years ago close down their equality, diversity and inclusion departments and promise fealty to Trumpism. This, after telling us for years that they were doing diversity because they “really believe in it and it’s good for business.”

The institutions of the post-war and then neoliberal global orders are splintered. We are in a new epoch. The architecture that allowed parties of the centre-left to operate and to offer a path of progressive governmentalism has gone. Failure to recognise that means pursuing a centre-left political strategy that is anachronistic — out of time. We have to face some hard realities.

There is a global arms race. Nato — including Trump — simultaneously recognises that the West’s war against Russia in Ukraine is lost but drives pell-mell towards more. Talk of actual war with China is normalised. The US has bombed Iran. The European Union is an open force for militarism — more bellicose than any national parliament — and it is largely parties of the fascistic right that are growing. The German government is led by a hard-right Germany-first chancellor. Above all, we are in a time of genocide. Actual genocide. The “international rules-based order” is dead, whatever its morbidities and hypocrisies when alive.

That brings us to the Greens. The Green Party of England and Wales is no different from Green parties across Europe in its basic character. It is a progressive centre-left party. It is wholly focused upon elections — though of course party members will be involved in many other activities. It is highly conventional. And — above all — it is committed to working within the bounds of the state and political system, with some electoral and modest constitutional change.

The Green Party is not a socialist party, though of course it has socialists in it. But that has always been true of the Labour Party, as Tony Benn used to say.

Some friends who argue to join the Greens to tip a leadership election seem to think that the nature of what it is they are joining doesn’t matter — as if it were a blank sheet waiting for political operators to imprint their plan on it.

It is not. It is a party with perhaps 60,000 members, 850 councillors and four MPs. Two of those MPs are standing as a joint leadership ticket. I suspect there will be considerable resonance for their arguments that the leader must be an MP and that johnny-come-latelies cannot be allowed to usurp long-standing party members and office holders.

Those are conventional, conservative, leader-centric and parliamentary arguments. But the Greens are a conventional, parliamentary party.

That is the major problem with what James proposes. Unlucky timing meant his article appeared on the same day as Zarah Sultana left the Labour Party to join a process of forming a radical new formation of the left. The shape of that remains open and the process continues. It won’t do to claim that Polanski “took the initiative” and no-one else has done. There are other initiatives. Labour is worried, as its cynical talk of not splitting the vote shows.

The Green proposition, however, relies on winning the leadership of a very settled centre-left formation and then…? On launching his leadership bid, Polanski said he had been wrong to say in 2018: “I’m a pro-European Jew — it’s increasingly clear that’s two reasons why I couldn’t vote for Labour under Jeremy Corbyn.” We all make mistakes. Sincere apologies should be accepted.

But the main point is that what he said then was and is fully in accord with the Green Party as a party — including a strong streak of opportunism. Incidentally, it is the kind of thing Green politicians in France said of the insurgent radical left figure Jean-Luc Melenchon at exactly the same time. A later Red-Green electoral alliance depended on Melenchon repeatedly rupturing with all the conventions and with the Greens. It did not come from joining them. Those who want a New Popular Front in Britain should take note. As an aside — Melenchon is not a young man but his anti-systemic appeal crosses generations.

These questions — along with the Greens’ support for Nato and refusal directly to call for cuts in arms spending or oppose the Ukraine war — are not trivia or chaff. They go to the heart of what kind of politics we need in the labour and social movements. That is prior to where you organise for them.

There is common ground on most of the left that we are not in the timeframe of 2015-19. Things have changed. But that mustn’t mean pretending that period never happened and refusing to learn from how we were defeated.

One example — Labour’s abandoning of a balanced Brexit position in 2019 sundered much blue-collar working-class support and opened space for Reform. The pro-EU Greens cannot answer that crucial dilemma for the left today. Speculative polling for a new “Jeremy Corbyn Party” shows serious support and gains from the Greens and Lib Dems, but not from the soft periphery of Reform would-be voters. What politics and movements can change that? Class politics of us against them.

There is much more to learn from than just Britain. The left-parliamentary party Syriza formed a government in 2015 off the back of enormous social struggles. Asking questions about its fundamental strategy, its compliance with Nato and the EU, or its opportunist triangulation was deemed sectarian carping in 2010-15 by those who were prepared to suspend strategic discussion about winning socialist change. Syriza capitulated. Its former leader Alexis Tsipras will likely make a comeback this autumn with the prospectus that we are no longer in 2015-19 — things have changed.

Before talk of possible electoral alliances between Red and Green there needs to be some coming to terms with all this. Such an alliance runs Berlin. It refuses to implement a referendum decision to expropriate corporate landlords. The left party, Die Linke, is in the city government. These issues are posed for all of us.

They won’t go away whatever the outcome of the Greens leadership election in England and Wales. Saying we must move on from when they were last raised is a recipe for repeating failure — but having decamped from one vehicle to another. Matters are urgent. But urgency cannot be an excuse for making the same mistakes again and again.