A New Hope? The Road to the Liverpool Convention
Incidentals in Liverpool
What Sort of Party?’
‘Not Invented Here’?
Soft Leninism: an Argument of Trotskyists
World-Changing Leninists, But Not Here
Back to the Liverpool Convention
Things I’d Have Liked To Say
The Wider World
A New Hope? The Road to the Liverpool Convention
I must confess to having been entirely idle in the 2019 election, doing no more than cast my own postal vote. After Parliament had rejected every viable option, I assumed a win for the Abominable Boris. Brexit At Any Price
Labour could earlier have demanded a new referendum, on the grounds that the European Union was not going to let Britain quit and keep the benefits. They had worked out that many would follow, with Poland probably first. But Corbyn trusted Starmer to manage it, and we got a disaster for us. (But ‘Poxit’ seems unlikely.)
I assumed all three Coventry seats were safe, and was dead wrong. Both Zarah Sultana and Taiwo Owatemi got far fewer votes in 2019 than the white male MPs who had gone before.
What I did afterwards was do a detailed analysis. Labour mostly lost votes where there had been a strong showing for Brexit. Corbyn should have fought against being replaced, but was too nice about it.
By 2024, I had joined George Galloway’s Workers Party. Many good features, but standing against Zarah was absurd, even though by then her seat and Taiwo Owatemi’s were safe. Anyway I was doing long-term political analysis. I was not hugely surprised that most Labour MPs functioned as individuals seeking to rise into well-paid jobs. Be valued by the more progressive business interests as people who would look after business first, but be moderately radical on social matters.
Meantime we waited for Corbyn to split from a dismal Labour Party that had already rejected him. And waited. When Zarah Sultana took the initiative, I was with her regardless. But glad to see that Corbyn and some others followed her lead.
When I applied for the random selection for the Founding Convention, I hardly expected that I would get through. But since I did, I went there with hope.
Europeans and in particular Britons were recent upstarts from crudity and relative poverty. Western Europe escaped both the Mongols and Timur because it hadn’t that many riches compared to the advanced civilisations of West Asia, or of South Asia and East Asia beyond. So my ancestors were greedy enough to make vast sea voyages that usually killed more than half the crew. Brutal enough to have a slave system that kept slaves as permanent inferiors, after the genuine positive of entirely removing the categories of ‘slave’ and also often of ‘serf’ for those seen as ‘our people’. Racism can certainly be encouraged by elites, but don’t miss its real and dangerous roots in normal human thinking. It can often be a twisted version of wider alterism or fear of the other.
Rapidly rising from a low status, Western Europe was willing to accept sciences that produced unwelcome facts like a moving Earth and an Earth vastly older than the Hebrew Scripture allowed. A vision of humanity as recent and rising, in geological terms. Hindu and Buddhist visions supposed that humans had always been around and always living in cities with familiar technology, plus a few magic powers. Plato discarded insights from Hesiod of an historic change that included iron replacing bronze, also more-or-less recorded in Homer.
If modern industry had many negatives, it also made possible the better lives we’ve been developing in the 20th century. And a steady advance of radical ideas, with ideas of the normal moving in directions that were once seen as impossible. (See https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/998-from-labour-affairs/the-french-revolution-and-its-unstable-politics/against-globalisation/the-left-redefined-the-normal/).
Western Europe was progressing nicely until Brezhnev made a hash of moving the Soviet Union upwards from Stalin’s crude but extraordinarily successful building of power. At least one path was possible: the road taken by Deng after Mao and never denying Mao’s merits. Sadly, Brezhnev chose to crush viable alternatives in 1968 with a group of mostly-Slovak reformers in controlling Czechoslovakia (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/very-old-issues-images/magazine-001-to-010/magazine-007-july-1988-2/the-1968-invasion-of-czechoslovakia-doomed-the-soviet-union/). I’ve not forgiven the leftists who defended ‘actually existing socialism’, right up until it became actually non-existent, at least as an example the West might cherish. A lot of it actually survived, but most leftists are also reluctant to accept China as suitable to take over the role the Soviet example once offered.
And I will also do it with a recognition that China is a highly authoritarian system. The night is safe for women because rapists are often executed. This may be news to you: you don’t get people sounding off about the human rights of rapists, though lots of people should be if they were sincere about their stated principles. I have always rated all International Law as unrealistic: it would be excellent if it actually existed but the chance of it doing so has receded strongly since the 1970s, with the USA the main offender.
It would be nice if someone did a survey of British views on China hanging rapists. I’m sure we’d not want it here, but I also suspect more men than women would be in favour.
Incidentals in Liverpool
With these thoughts I made my way to Liverpool, living through some train disruption. And arriving in foul weather – cold and rainy. Seeing homeless people out in it, but I’d got used to that from all over. Just remembering a lost time when only aging unhealthy drunks were actually homeless. When people in ordinary jobs could either rent decently or own their own homes. I’m working on possible electoral slogans: Long ago but not at all far away, most ordinary young adults could buy a home of their own without their parents helping. (https://electoralslogansfortheworkerspartyincoventr.quora.com/.) Ideas Your Party might also use.
And stopping for snacks, I became aware of shops that just don’t take cash. I soon saw the logic, of course. A cashless shop is safe from cash grabs, and also employee theft of cash. Not likely to attract armed raiders unless they sell stuff like jewellery or fine garments.
I also got my first clear view of another US import: ‘Black Friday’ as a shopping day to replace Boxing Day, when shop staff often now prefer their own day of rest. Nothing I felt like buying.
Reflecting that I was one of very few members of the Workers Party – I met no others. I was also in the curious position of getting e-mails from the Labour Party offering prize draws and soliciting funds: almost I viewed these as ‘soliciting for immoral purposes’. And I was also part-way through the process of being expelled – I was accurately accused of having promoted ‘Your Party’. I was not going to just quit: I felt they had left me, and the chance of a partial recovery existed and still exists. Still, Your Party seemed the best prospect.
I walked through the rain with hope in my heart, as they say, though sadly I was mostly alone. I got to the river, and was duly impressed by the docks. Didn’t bother with Beatles stuff: I liked it but was never exactly a fan.
What Sort of Party?’
I got to the venue, and was impressed by how well everything was set up. And how it was New Politics: we the attendees were what counted. The ‘platform’ was mostly to serve the individual members speaking to motions, with a vast on-line audience beyond. But some important speakers as well.
First, of course, was Jeremy Corbyn. His opening speech explained he had found no manual on establishing a political party. My thought was he naturally had not looked at the Leninist example. This was very coherent: among other things the cosmopolitan agents of the Comintern invented Chinese Communism, even though it needed Mao to properly adapt it. Somehow made it a force second only to the Kuomintang, which also got whatever effectiveness it ever had under Comintern guidance. Contrast this with the Republic of India, where I think there was negligible impact in many of the most significant regions in a very regionalised Hindu tradition. Three substantial regional parties that emerged, but the one in West Bengal has fallen greatly.
When talking about political struggle, we should note how often it achieves nothing. Which brings me neatly to my next topic.
‘Not Invented Here’?
My life in paid employment was as a computer analyst. I did once work on and improve a useful hospital medicine stock-control system, but most was in financial services. From that world, I knew about ‘not invented here’ attitudes. Useful ideas are rejected because they are seen as intrusive. A mistrust of people who ‘are not us’.
All of this away from strong political views. Found among people who’d seem same to outsiders. The Wiki sums up what I already knew:
“The reasons for not wanting to use the work of others are varied, but can include a desire to support a local economy instead of paying royalties to a foreign license-holder, fear of patent infringement, lack of understanding of the foreign work, an unwillingness to acknowledge or value the work of others, jealousy, belief perseverance, or forming part of a wider turf war. As a social phenomenon, this tendency can manifest itself as an unwillingness to adopt an idea or product because it originates from another culture, a form of tribalism and/or an inadequate effort in choosing the right approach for the business.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here.)
In politics there can be better reasons. Harder to maintain an open mind, but I’ll try,
Soft Leninism: an Argument of Trotskyists
Liverpool city authorities seem to view street names as a wonderful secret that must not be spoken of too often. I kept having trouble figuring where on the map I was. But I finally knew I was on the right track when I saw the scattering of Trotskyist vendors selling remarkably similar skimpy tabloid newspapers. Much of a muchness to an outsider, yet at odds with each other. Lacking the viciousness of a Murder of Crows, but it would be fair to group them as an Argument of Trotskyists.
1925 could sensibly count as the moment when Trotskyists stopped being an alternative that the mainstream might be won over to. Became a rival organisation that denied the mainstream any right to impose its majority views upon them. Called them traitors and enemies.
Thinking about history, I note the contrast to Mao. Mao quietly stayed within private debate among leaders, when the Central Committee displaced him and bungled away the Liberated Area he had painfully created.
He waited and he won, which Trotsky was too vain to try. Lenin’s testament had hoped that Stalin and Trotsky might work together, correctly calling them the two most talented among his followers. Sadly, it failed to happen.
Don’t forget that Trotsky had denounced Lenin’s authoritarian ideas of Party Building, until he realised in 1917 that it might become real authority on a global scale. Empowered by Lenin, he told rival lifelong socialists to ‘lie quietly in the dustbin of history’, until he slumped there in turn.
Then came fascism. Rosa Luxemburg had said socialism or barbarism, but fascism tried having both, along with a racism that had accepted Jews as Superior Persons in the original Italian version. A formidable foe, unlike the malignant jokes that are modern fascism.
In fighting Nazism, the mainstream Communists were the main force. The meticulous figures kept by the Germans show that more than half of the crucial casualties of the formidable German Army were on the Eastern Front. (https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams/Nazi-Germany-Was-Defeated-in-Russia.) But meantime Trotskyists fantasised about Revolutionary Defeatism at a time when it was senseless.
From this viewpoint, I keep an open mind about the exclusion from the Convention of some members of the Socialist Workers Party. I fear that their main idea was to have just a grander version of a variety of politics that has repeatedly failed.
World-Changing Leninists, But Not Here
Mainstream Leninism created many of the things we value in the modern world. But ruthlessness and intolerance were absolutely part of it. Begun by Lenin, with much foreshadowing in Marx and Engels.
The dream of a single socialist World State is no longer realistic, and maybe wasn’t such a great idea in any case. The Soviet Union exhausted itself trying to keep it alive, while also damaging it by being too much Russian Nationalist. But don’t forget that Leonid Brezhnev counted as a Ukrainian by the definition that the Western media have declared sacred, without attempting to be logical about it. Pogroms against Jews were also much more Ukrainian than Russian, and the current war began as a civil war when people content to be loosely Ukrainian would not accept anti-Russian feelings as a requirement for being allowed to live on the Sacred Soil of Ukraine. Never mind that what became the eastern half of Soviet Ukraine was wholly the product of Moscow’s armies defeating the Ottoman Empire. Conquering those flourishing slave-raiders against Slavonic peoples, the Crimean Tartars.
The Ottomans also had a massive slave network exploiting Black Africans in East Africa. But did at least allow some slaves to rise very high.
In the modern world, the Soviet Union in its later decades failed, mostly by its own errors. China remains Leninist, but also knows that it has to work with a Global South full of many different viewpoints. Increasingly religious, with both Islam and Hinduism becoming less tolerant. With even Buddhism showing that it has variants that are both violent and intolerant.
Mainstream Leninism was able for a time to flourish in such a world. Trotskyism never did manage it. Checking my assumptions against whatever Grok might find, I was broadly confirmed. But I learned of some unexpectedly strong Trotskyists who had dominated the docks of Saigon in the 1930s. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotskyism_in_Vietnam). They were among a range of rival fighters for Vietnamese independence and dignity that were wiped out by Ho Chi Mihn’s communists in a brief power-vacuum in 1945 after the Japanese surrendered.
If this surprises you, you have entirely failed to understand what Leninism is all about. Why we have a better world because of it, but it is entirely irrelevant to us. And why it was central to the successful outcome of Vietnam’s American War.
Back to the Liverpool Convention
I liked the mix that emerged. Including a speaker from the Workers’ Party of Belgium. And from the German Die Linke, though I rate the rival Sahra Wagenknecht movement as far better. The Socialist Party (Netherlands), who had a remarkable evolution from Maoism towards what they call democratic socialism, were not present.
To my mind, ‘Democratic Socialism’ rests entirely on the state machine and the ruling class being willing to allow socialists some real progress. Elsewhere, Leninism is the only real left-wing option, and can sometimes succeed. And if you imagine it was ever otherwise in China, I’ve done a detailed study to correct this. (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/why-chinas-blue-republic-achived-nothing/.)
It was decided that the name remains Your Party. We are socialist, with the working class is at the heart of a wider social alliance. Leadership is collective, rather than a chosen leader or two sharing. Dual membership is allowed with approved parties: a list will be decided but Greens were mentioned. There will also be support for selected non-party candidates in the May 2026 local elections. Membership is confined to mainland Britain, but Wales and Scotland will have regional bodies to decide issues including electoral alliances.
“You can see more details and percentage votes at https://www.yourparty.uk/results/. And watch the entire day-long sessions at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-755kRtHWdw and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb_iQQVTDiE.”
Things I’d Have Liked To Say
There was loose talk about helping free ‘the Irish people’, Actually there have always been two Irish nations, with Ulster Protestants not wanting to be swamped. My politics largely began in what was then the British and Irish Communist Organisation. We never run ourselves on Leninist lines, but did imagine that this would come later with a mature organisation. But evolved differently, somewhat as the Dutch ex-Maoists did, but with a sad failure of trying to become electoral in the Irish Republic. In Britain and Ireland, elections are the way: but only if you ignore the question of whether the Ulster Protestants have a right to go their own way. And to also treat their Roman Catholic minority as unwanted and powerless.
I never really got to know a remarkable activist called Dennis Dennehy. One of the things he wrote was meeting a lorry driver who accepted that there were two Irish nations, but felt that one of them had to go. And that has been the actual policy of what began as the Provisional IRA. In line with IRA traditions it had Sinn Fein as a dependency. It had strict paramilitary discipline, including executions, and had evolved independently from the Irish Republican Brotherhood, but in parallel with Leninism.
The methods that work when you are never going to be allowed to win through elections, in fact.
The IRA chose also to shut itself down a few years back, reckoning that the Ulster Protestant identity is collapsing. But also the militant Protestants are capable of a lot more violence. Sinn Fein moves slowly and shares power for now.
I’d have liked to downplay the danger of ‘Reform’. It has one third of the voters, but among young people it has few. Mostly the hooligan dregs, who actually damage its real power. And I find it impossible to believe that MPs in the Labour and Tory parties are going to let their many and separate brilliant careers be cut short by the oddities of First Past the Post. Recent polls predict a massive majority for ‘Reform’ if traditions are maintained.
And being in Liverpool jogged an old memory. A banal song from 1969, made famous in 1972 by ‘Little Jimmy Osmond’, now a man in his 60s. My rather waspish version was:
I’ll be your loathsome liver in Liverpool, / And I’ll blight anything you try.
I’ve got no more, but it would be nice if someone worked on it. Made it relevant to some regional struggle by attributing it to deserving foes.
The Wider World
While all this was going on, yet another man close to Zelensky caught for corruption. I assume this is Trump using the US political machine to push the green goblin into conceding more or less the 28 points, including the vital amnesty. Which will also kill the blatant injustice of the warrant on Putin. (See https://gwydionmadawc.com/my-blogs/ukraine-the-current-conflict/ for why I don’t believe the story that billionaire media barons have got many leftists believing.)
My suspicion is there may be a wider agreement that Russian and Chinese inaction over Gaza is traded for liberation from Russia-hating Ukraine of those willing to fight and die to not be ruled by such. Plus Oblasts making a bridge that disliked the policy but had not tried fighting before 2022. There was incidentally an insider collaboration further west in Kherson, which maybe was not shared by enough of the people and the Russian army withdrew across the river. Probably also why Putin does not want to take over Russia-orientated but cosmopolitical Odessa. Maybe as ruled by Kiev, it will be able to rebuild links eastward.
More upsettingly, Trump looks to do a blockade of Venezuela, further squeezing its economy. Possibly borrowing from what Beijing is suspected of planning for Taiwan. Not an invasion, getting your foot-soldiers killed in a costly war that is probably unwinnable in Venezuela. Risk just the air and navy people, who come home to nice safe living quarters and for whom the danger is part of what makes the job interesting.
This is the dangerous world into which Your Party is emerging. I’d have preferred it to be called ‘Labour Renewal’, but hopefully it will be that in practice.
Copyright ©Gwydion M. Williams
1st December
Labour Affairs 