My journey from left-leaning trade unionist to full-blown revolutionary was a long and winding one, with many ups and downs, as well as a few dead ends, but the period since late 2019 marked the most revelatory and revolutionising leg of my trip.
I joined the trade union movement in 1989 when I became a member of the National Union of Railwaymen, now known as the RMT. I became gradually more involved in trade unionism in my early twenties and was elected as a representative of the RMT in 1996. I took part in industrial action and other forms of protest during that time, as well as representing members individually and collectively at local and functional levels.
It was also in 1989 that I first became a member of the Labour Party. The NUR, the union I had just joined, was affiliated to that party at the time and coming from a Labour-voting family, I thought that it made perfect sense to join the party then led by Neil Kinnock, now known as Baron Kinnock of Bedwelty. Whilst I did not become active in the party (my father was active in the local party), I remained a member throughout Labour’s disastrous General Election defeat in 1992, the tenure of John Smith and then the leadership of Tony Blair, whose rebranding of the party to ‘New Labour’ found him and his party being endorsed by the Rupert Murdoch media empire. It also found Labour continuing its pursuit of professional and managerial voters at the expense of policies which could be considered ‘progressive’.
With Labour’s landslide General Election victory against a tired, clueless and rudderless Conservative party in 1997, a new generation of people, who had never seen a Labour Government in their lives, were able to see first-hand exactly what Labour could achieve when they were given the reigns of power. We saw rampant privatisation, the closure of thousands of NHS hospital beds and imperialist wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. I left the party within months of them winning power when they reneged on a policy pledge not to privatise London Underground.
I remained outside the Labour Party for some eighteen years. I didn’t even bother to vote, so convinced was I that there was nothing materially different between the Conservative and Labour parties. However, I remained interested in politics and in 2014 stood for the rather clunkily-named Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) in 2014 in Tower Hamlets, then later joined the small Left Unity party, which was formed in response to an appeal by the filmmaker Ken Loach for a genuine alternative to the Labour Party. Left Unity wasn’t that and wasn’t ever going to be that. In fact, its later actions in spurning alliances with other leftist organisations belies the ‘Unity’ part of their title.
In 2015, by which time I was a national officer in the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA), I chaired an Executive Committee meeting where we were to nominate a candidate for Labour Party leader. Ed Miliband, who was installed as Labour leader through the power of the trade union movement, had resigned following a dismal defeat in the 2015 General Election. The defeat was as completely unsurprising, given Miliband’s ineptitude as a leader and how the ‘New Labour’ brand of free-market liberalism continued to pervade every level of the party, most notably at the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) level: The Labour MPs themselves.
A candidate, who had been nominated at the last minute following a concerted lobbying campaign of Labour MPs by rank and file party members and trade unionists, was unwittingly and arguably reluctantly elevated from backbench obscurity to Labour leader. The candidate was the MP for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn. My union had given him the nomination and he had made a very strong pitch for the leadership role when he spoke to our executive. I was personally extremely impressed by his deep knowledge of issues including Palestine and transport and had long been an admirer of Mr Corbyn, based on his principled positions against imperialist war (though I would now argue he had a limited grasp of what imperialism was) being waged by the leadership of his party.
Corbyn’s election campaign turned into a roadshow. Thousands of people would congregate at every public meeting he held, sometimes in huge numbers outside of packed-out venues. I recall one event near London’s Kings Cross area where he held a public meeting in a nearby venue and then held another one straight afterwards on the back of a fire engine for everybody who was unable to get into the original meeting. Corbyn was becoming a phenomenon – he was talking to people who had become disenfranchised from the political system about transforming the country and he was looking like the outstanding favourite to win the leadership.
I was entitled to vote even though I was not a full member of the party. I had an affiliate membership, which I was able to get for £3 on account of me being a member of a Labour-affiliated trade union. So I voted, and I voted for Corbyn. I refused to vote for a Deputy Leader owing the list of candidates being such a bunch of irredeemable scumbags that I couldn’t bring myself to vote for any of them. on 12th September 2015, The Labour Party convened a special meeting to announce the winner of the leadership and deputy leadership. I couldn’t give a stuff about who was Deputy Leader – I wanted to see Corbyn win.
And win he did. Emphatically. In fact, he garnered more votes than his three leadership rivals put together. This was despite a long-running and concerted campaign, from within and without the Labour Party, to hamstring Corbyn’s campaign on the basis that he would make the Labour Party unelectable. It was those same elements who would spend the next four years undermining Corbyn, confecting accusations against him and his supporters and who actively worked to sabotage the Labour Party’s General Election campaigns in 2017 and 2019.
Corbyn’s own shortfalls came sharply into view in the following four years or so. He was exposed in the Brexit vote in 2016. Corbyn, a Eurosceptic of the Tony Benn, Peter Shore and Barbara Castle tradition, limply campaigned for Remain in accordance with Labour Party policy. During the campaign, it was difficult to discern who was less enthusiastic about the position that they had been kiboshed into supporting: Corbyn or his political opponent, David Cameron (now Lord Cameron), another noted Eurosceptic, albeit for distinctly different reasons to Corbyn.
When the electorate voted to leave the European Union by 52% to 48% in June 2016, the ruling class and its adjuncts (including the Labour Party and the trade union movement) had a complete meltdown – David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, stood up in the House of Commons to effectively call for a do-over of the referendum, presumably until the correct result was achieved. The meltdown included the senior levels of the Labour Party, who organised the ‘Chicken Coup’ against Corbyn, a synchronised and stage-managed mass resignation of shadow cabinet ministers intended to force Corbyn to resign. It failed, as did the vote of no confidence in Corbyn which was carried by 172 votes to 40.
A second leadership contest in just twelve months saw Corbyn re-elected as leader with a bigger mandate based on a bigger turnout. Yet Corbyn failed to use this mandate to his advantage. He continued to foolishly believe that the Labour Party was a ‘broad church’ and that his former enemies could be brought back into the fold, put aside their differences and work for the greater good. Corbyn either forgot or ignored the first rule of bourgeois politics: Destroy your enemies. It was those enemies, including one Sir Keir Starmer, who returned to the fold and destroyed the Corbyn Project.
It was in September 2019, when I was a delegate of my trade union at Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, that I realised that Project Corbyn was dead. Sir Keir Starmer, then Shadow Brexit Secretary, stood at the lecture and pronounced that Labour would back a second referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. I remember two things vividly from that speech: The first was the delegates around me rising to their feet and clapping like circus seals at Starmer’s proclamation (including some of my own union’s delegation). The other was my comrade and I, both of whom were closely politically aligned and had both voted for Brexit, looking at each other and sharing the cold realisation that Labour had just committed electoral hari-kari.
And so it proved. Having betrayed the electorate on Brexit, Labour saw its worst General Election performance since 1935. Corbyn announced that he would be standing down as leader of the Labour Party but would remain in place until a new leader was elected. It was in early 2020 that I left the Labour Party, disillusioned and deeply demoralised. I then found myself drawn to a new political project which was led by George Galloway – the Workers Party of Britain. Claiming to ‘build a new working class politics’, the party had a simple ten-point plan and a leader who I had admired since seeing his now legendary performance at the US Senate hearing in 2005. I decided to join them in early 2020.
It was at around this time that the Covid pandemic hit the shores of Britain. We were plunged into lockdowns and restricted from travelling, working and associating. However, I watched Galloway’s weekly party broadcasts every week and it also gave me a chance to do quite a lot of reading. One book which I read at that time, which I have recommended to anyone that would listen to me since, was ‘Labour: A Party Fit for Imperialism’ by Robert Clough.
The book, which was a forensic examination of the party’s foundation and history all the way up to 2015, changed completely and permanently my view of what the Labour Party is and what it was created to achieve. The Labour Party was formed as a party of imperialism by the labour aristocracy (the privileged sections of the working class who actually benefitted from imperialism) and middle class organisations including the Fabians to act as a roadblock to the working class winning socialism in this country.
I took my political enlightenment with me into my work for the Workers Party. I built relationships with people from all over the country and was part of the sizeable group of party members and activists who campaigned for Galloway in the Batley and Spen by-election in 2021. I became the secretary of the party’s trade union group and was part of a team of comrades who ran a very successful trade union event in Birmingham in September 2021. At the time, it seemed to me like the party was serious about becoming a real force for delivering socialism in this country. I had made the case for the Workers Party to become the ‘vanguard’ party that could lead the working class into full contestation with the ruling class. But some things had begun to trouble me.
One of the many reasons which led me to join the Workers Party in early 2020 was its aim to destroy the Labour Party. My experience of the Labour Party during my second stint as a member from 2015 to 2020 left me in no doubt that the Labour Party was a malevolent force and needed to be destroyed. Yet some of the rhetoric from the Workers Party, particularly during the Batley and Spen by-election campaign, whereby the party was claiming to be what ‘Labour used to be’, made me wonder whether the party really was a socialist party if it sought only to be a pastiche of a Labour Party from days gone by.
I found this to be deeply unsettling and which, as I said earlier, is an ahistorical and wholly incorrect assertion of what the Labour Party was and is. The Labour Party that Galloway yearns to return to never existed: It has always been an anti-communist party of imperialism that has acted against the interests of the working class, both here and abroad. Galloway also said that he was running in order to help overthrow Sir Keir Starmer. Personally, I wasn’t in the least bit interested in overthrowing Starmer, I wanted Labour to be completely destroyed and frankly whichever stuffed shirt was in charge of that wretched party of imperialism wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference.
The mythology of the Labour Party is one of a party founded by the trade unions to fight for the interests of the working class. The reality is of a party whose history is soaked in the blood of the peoples of Malaya, Korea, Kenya, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, who helped to found NATO, who in thirteen years of Government between 1997 and 2010 did not repeal a single anti-trade union law and who, in the period of 1945-51, nationalised some 20% of the economy and founded the National Health Service, not as an act of benevolence, but because the rabidly imperialist and anti-communist Labour Government knew that they had to make concessions to a working class who had returned from fighting World War II and were determined not to be handed the despair and poverty that their previous generation were doomed to by David Lloyd George and were inspired by the success of the world’s first workers’ state, the Soviet Union, in vanquishing fascism.
In short, the Workers Party of Britain was positioning itself as a replacement for the Labour Party. I decided to leave the Workers Party in early 2023. Since then, I have worked as part of the Class Consciousness Project, writing articles on subjects including trade unionism, housing and even darts. The Middle Aged Revolutionary is a new project which I hope will continue to build on the work I did with my comrades in the Class Consciousness Project. I hope that you find my work interesting and useful.
The Middle Aged Revolutionary, May 2024
The Middle Aged Revolutionary 