THE failure to act on the two-child benefit cap, the cuts to winter fuel payments, the muted response to the genocide in Gaza, increases in military expenditure — these and many more failures ensured that the recent electoral results for Labour were a disaster.

They also ensured that the call for an electoral left alternative to the Labour Party would become more insistent. The reason is that unlike the recent history of such calls, which tend to be in response to a reactionary shift by the Labour Party, or at least its leadership — think the invasion of Iraq — we now have to deal with an even more reactionary response to Labour’s rightward shuffle: the Reform Party.

Here is the formidable Claudia Webbe writing in this paper after the elections: “...the results were grim, not because of the losses of Labour and the Tories, whose political bankruptcy was rightly punished, but because that political bankruptcy has gifted such a surge to the extreme right... we are where we are and the sole encouragement of last week is that it made the need for left politics clearer than ever, for those willing to look. We need a new left political party.”

In Scotland an article appeared in Scottish Left Review taking a similar position. It took the form of a letter signed by a range of left individuals, some of them well known trade unionists, though all of those were in a personal capacity.

Describing the current political situation as unique, the title set out the main objective of the article: “Scotland needs a working-class left alternative.”    

While the Labour Party was not explicitly discussed, with the exception of a vitriolic and legitimate attack on the Starmer/Reeves agenda thus far, the article argues: “Effective mobilisation, organising and campaigning from below is most important to win change, but we agree with those who would also like to see a genuine radical alternative at the ballot box.”

And to give the hope of a new left formation some serious heft, Jeremy Corbyn MP said at a meeting in Huddersfield on May 10: “A lot of us are working very hard, supporting each other as independents. This whole cause is coming together so that by next year’s local elections, long before that, we’re going to have something in place that is very clear, that everyone will want to be part of and support.”

So, is it new party time? The left is indebted to the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) for the detailed analysis of the electoral performance of left candidates since 2011.

This May its work is all the more important because it allows us to try to assess how explicitly socialist and left-wing candidates performed, in many cases against ultra-right opposition, in the mayoral and local elections in parts of England. The answer is... not well.

Of the 5.2 million votes cast, TUSC reckons that just 27,147, considerably less than 1 per cent, went to anti-austerity, anti-war candidates with seven of them elected.  

TUSC notes that the vote for independents was not inconsiderable, some 306,000 (6 per cent) but that the vast bulk of these were “right-wing or localist” candidates.

The report also highlights the limitations of the “Independent” label: “In a context of the deep alienation from establishment politics already described, the word “Independent” is not unattractive. But it did not have a qualitatively different effect for those candidates, who gained perhaps a two or three percentage share of the vote more.

“That includes those candidates who used the newly registered TUSC description ‘Independent Trade Union and Socialist Candidate.’”

Commenting on what all this might mean for the creation of new left party, TUSC recognises the impact of the genocide in Gaza especially in constituencies with a large Muslim population in the election of the “Independents” in the 2024 general election.

It concedes, however, that despite the continued hostility to what is happening in Palestine “the task remains to mobilise organised working-class forces with an authority amongst other sections of our class – which means, critically, the trade unions – to create a new, mass workers’ party that can provide a real alternative to capitalism in the interests of us all.”

But is winning trade union support for an electoral alternative to Labour really enough?

Surely winning working-class trade unionists to socialism, so that trade union leaderships are driven by their members to use the organisational power of the unions in a transformatory way, is much more important.

Unions themselves badly need a democratic reawakening.  

All unions suffer from lack of participation by rank-and-file members. Take the three largest unions in Britain, all of them affiliated to the Labour Party. Sharon Graham became general secretary of Unite on the votes of less than 4 per cent of the membership, Gary Smith, general secretary of GMB around 5 per cent and Christina McAnea, general secretary of Unison just over 5 per cent.

An active, progressive trade union base in these unions could have seen the Labour leadership, under pressure from the big three, take an entirely different approach to welfare, to defence spending and to the genocide in Gaza.

As it is, an increase in defence spending is something that both GMB and Unite welcomed. And despite some recent criticism on the winter fuel allowance cut, Unison’s McAnea greeted the election of Starmer as Prime Minister with: “Labour’s historic victory promises real change for public services. Unlike many previous prime ministers, Keir Starmer isn’t a career politician.” Really?

Many large trade union affiliates, at the moment, are more of an impediment to left advance, even in the Labour Party, than an engine for socialist change.

Creating another party, by itself, will not change that. If we could build a powerful socialist movement through the unions and in communities that movement would find the path of least resistance to wash away obstacles to left advance, and that route is the existing institutions and organisations created by the generations of socialist activists who went before us. That includes the Labour Party.

“We believe then, that it should be our special aim to make Socialists... we are no less sure that before any definite Socialist action can be attempted, it must be backed up by a great body of intelligent opinion — the opinion of a great mass of people who are already Socialists.” William Morris, 1890.