PART ONE of this article gave a brief account of how the left won the leadership of the Labour Party but not the support of significant sections of the working class. This part considers potential drivers for radical change and how we might move forward. 

Central to much of the argument in support of a new workers’ party is the notion that it is the vehicle itself — the Labour Party — that is the problem — if we just started from the beginning and rebuilt it, we could indeed build a party capable of delivering socialism. 

It is therefore necessary, the argument continues, that the trade unions should disaffiliate and use their resources to build this new left enterprise.

This argument shows a weak understanding of Labour Party history. The Labour Party we have is the Labour Party that the trade unions built, from its inception. 

For many decades the trade union influence prevented the party shifting left. The idea of the unions as a force for moderation in the Labour Party is central to the work of Lewis Minkin. 

He argued that for over 80 years in the Labour Party, trade union “restraint has been the central characteristic” of the Labour Party-trade union relationship, not only self-restraint on union demands, but unions using their institutional power in the Labour Party to restrain the left. 

And in case you believe that 21st-century trade unions have moved to political terrain that is comfortably on the left, it is worth looking at the motion proposed by GMB and supported by Unite calling for increased defence spending that was passed by TUC Congress last October. 

It was a direct refutation of the motion passed in 2017 that argued for an arms diversification strategy and clearly reflected a move towards support for the bellicose stance of Nato, a position of course enthusiastically embraced by Keir Starmer. 

The GMB supported the recent motion to prevent Jeremy Corbyn standing in Islington North and Unison only managed to abstain.

Further, trade union density remains low (the percentage of employees who are a trade union member fell in 2021 to 23.1 per cent) and engagement in trade unions by trade unionists problematic, with general secretaries often elected by a tiny proportion of the membership. 

It is true that that the “modernisation” of the Labour Party which Neil Kinnock began and Tony Blair intensified, raised questions about the benefits of “moderation” for trade unions and their members, or even whether remaining in the Labour Party helped or inhibited trade unions’ objectives, but the belief that freed from the Labour Party the unions will revert to a prelapsarian state of socialist purity ignores the fundamental purpose of unions and the electorally driven, political pragmatism they have shown in their relationship with the Labour Party.

Advocates for a new workers’ party also argue that many of those who have left the Labour Party, post-Corbyn, have no political home. 

No doubt many are now to be found in the Peace & Justice organisation Jeremy and his supporters set up. Furthermore, the industrial and community-based responses to Tory attacks have led to industrial action and community resistance to the increases in the price of energy. 

At the same conference that passed the motion on increased defence expenditure, RMT general secretary Mick Lynch argued for “community action coupled with industrial action. We’ve got to get people on the streets in support of industrial action, in support of public ownership and in support of public services and redistribution of wealth.”

Out of such joint community/industrial struggles we have seen the emergence of Enough is Enough, alongside existing groups like the People’s Assembly. 

Isn’t it possible that, with or without the trade unions — but usually the argument assumes their presence — it would be possible to build a new left political party? 

Firstly, it has to be noted, that the more successful the industrial action is, the more employers are compelled to settle, the faster trade union focus will shift from community solidarity to the workplace, exactly as we would expect. 

And although there has been an impressive number of events organised by Enough is Enough and other more locally based groups like Power to the People in Glasgow, as yet, no coherent mass-based movement that could become a mass political party has emerged.

Indeed, the difficulties in creating such a coherent movement are enormous. A quick consideration of some of the immediate issues facing the left will illustrate this point. 

The war in Ukraine has produced very different responses from leading individuals on the left and, as we have seen, split the TUC on defence spending. 

The attitude of the left to the EU also remains contentious. Even although ultra-Remainers like Starmer appear to have accepted the Brexit vote, the war in Ukraine has allowed leaders of Western imperialism the opportunity to generate a whirlpool that is dragging more and more European countries — sometimes their leftist parties with them — into its cold war centre, where the EU is now working cheek by jowl with Nato. 

So, on issues like Ukraine and the EU a new workers’ party would probably find consensus impossible, as it would on Scottish independence or gender self-recognition.  

At best it might manage workable compromises, but fragile compromises — and that is before thorny questions of structures, constitutions and rules are considered. 

The Labour Party has survived, until now at any rate, because electoralism functions as glue that holds entirely disparate ideological positions in the same organisation because that organisation can deliver seats in the Westminster Parliament, the devolved parliaments and council chambers, an arrangement supported by its affiliated unions, as we have seen. 

Without that focus a “big tent” socialist party would find it difficult to hold its constituent parts together and if it simply adopts the strategy of an electoral alliance it is in danger of becoming the very thing it was created to oppose. 

In other words, the argument about creating a new workers’ party misses an important point. The working class is not yet convinced about socialism. It is unsurprising therefore that this is reflected in the main institutions of the working class in Britain. 

The left needs to take a long-term view. We abandon the Labour Party at our peril, not because it is a vehicle for socialism, but because it has the potential for becoming that vehicle, in partnership with social and industrial movements. 

There is no other institution which has the potential to win mass working-class support for radical change, from a working class that has yet to be convinced of the socialist project. 

And there is nothing which prevents socialists from working in the Labour Party and working in the wider trade union and community-based movements. Indeed, that should be our strategy. 

We need to build up the socialist left in the institutions and organisations that seek to change society through direct industrial and community action. 

But we can also encourage activists from these fields into political activity in the Labour Party. That way we can begin to use the electoral success of the Labour Party to change our councils, devolved institutions and ultimately Westminster.

In all these areas, instant solutions are not available, and it is important that we sustain or where we need to, build organisations that will help us work through the theoretical and practical problems of building socialism as well as offering what socialists in previous generations called “fellowship” — networks that create socialist safe spaces to think and then to act. 

Replying to those who said it was no possible to build socialism and be part of the Labour Party, ILP MP Jimmy Maxton said: “If you can’t ride two horses, you shouldn’t be in the circus.”