Tickets for the Socialist Equality Party’s public meetings are available on Eventbrite. If you would like to organise a meeting in your city, contact the SEP.
Your Party, launched as the left-wing answer to Keir Starmer’s Labour government, has delivered a crushing failure.
From an initial 800,000 expressions of interest, its membership has sunk into the low thousands; it was equal parts unable and unwilling to stand a significant number of candidates in the local elections; its parliamentary leader Jeremy Corbyn refuses even to adopt the title of a “Your Party MP”; there is a real question over whether it survives a full year.
This result was produced by the anti-socialist politics of the leadership around Corbyn, to which every faction of Your Party subordinated itself.
The Socialist Equality Party stands alone in having warned of and opposed these consequences from the very beginning. Our first major statement on the initiative declared:
We will not be advocates of and apologists for ‘Your Party’. It is not ours… Our aim is to ensure that the working class does not spend its energies in a demoralising campaign for a party which will lead them to betrayal and defeat, to ensure that illusions in Corbynite reformism are dispelled as quickly as possible in preparation for the revolutionary class battles ahead.
Having published glowing write-ups of Your Party, after doing the same for Corbyn’s equally miserable leadership of the Labour Party, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) are now acting to ensure no lessons are drawn from this latest betrayal.
Corbyn is still put forward as an ally—summed up by his invitation to the SWP’s Marxism Festival 2026. The RCP, in particular, is championing Green Party leader Zack Polanski as a successor, even as he makes clear his subservience to the bond markets and NATO.
The Socialist Equality Party’s message to workers and students is that it is time to break out of this cycle of betrayals.
More than a decade of potential political preparation has been lost by the working class since Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015. As Britain and the world plunged deeper into crisis—from austerity and the COVID-19 pandemic to the climate crisis and global war—Corbyn sat on and sabotaged mounting left-wing opposition, putting Starmer in the saddle. Now Polanski is lining up to play the same role with the prospective replacement Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham.
If the working class does not rapidly develop a socialist leadership, then the ultimate beneficiary will be Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and the far-right. Karl Marx coined the phrase that history repeats itself “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Today we can add, the third time as catastrophe.
What the Socialist Equality Party said
The Socialist Equality Party’s consistent opposition to Corbyn is aimed at forging a genuinely socialist leadership and overcoming the brake placed on the class struggle by the Corbynites.
Our approach is based on a Marxist analysis not only of the Labour Party but of the fundamental features of contemporary globalised capitalism that underpinned the full transformation of Labour into a second Tory Party, rendering any return to national reformist strategies for improving the social conditions of the working class impossible.
This had been verified internationally by the experiences of Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) in Greece and Podemos in Spain, whose left-wing rhetoric immediately gave way to implementing the dictates of finance capital and imperialism once in power. Corbyn played the same role as Leader of the Opposition to the Tories.
When Your Party was founded on the same Corbynite, pseudo-reformist politics—devoid of any reference to “capitalism”, “expropriation” and “socialist revolution”—the SEP responded:
The right-wing transformation and collapse of Labour and all the social democratic parties was not the result of bad leaders, but of shifts in world capitalism which rendered national reformism obsolete.
Globalisation, declining rates of profit and the massive, cancerous growth of financial speculation mean that meaningful social reform can no longer be reconciled with a defence of the profit system. The order of the day for world capitalism is trade and military war for the control of essential resources and markets and class war at home to impose the brutal levels of exploitation and destruction of essential services to make this global conflict possible.
Fighting back demands the independent political mobilisation of the working class, freed from the dead hand of the “left” representatives of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy, in a struggle against capitalism and for socialism.
We said later that what had been written of Your Party stood “word-for-word for the Greens”. Polanski had taken up “Corbyn’s mantle as Britain’s left-wing figurehead. But the same politics will play out no differently under his stewardship than the former Labour leader’s.”
The SEP is the revolutionary opposition to this politics of repeated defeat. We are a section of the international Trotskyist movement founded in 1938 to combat the Stalinist betrayal of world socialist revolution and to resolve what Leon Trotsky identified as the decisive question of our epoch: “the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”
The way forward for the working class in a time of war and reaction
We do not have all the time in the world to solve this crisis. Capitalism poses an existential threat to humanity; its essential contradictions—between globally socialised production and private ownership and the nation state system—are driving the eruption of war, inequality, climate collapse and far-right politics.
Hundreds of thousands have been killed in the war in Ukraine, sacrificed in the name of the NATO-imperialist campaign against Russia and Vladimir Putin’s reactionary response. The combined impact of this war and the imperialist assault on Iran have sent energy and food prices skyrocketing, throwing millions into hardship or outright starvation. The genocide of the Palestinians continues.
Arms manufacturers, fossil fuel and big tech companies are making new fortunes out of this slaughter. The profits from war represent just a fraction of the obscene levels of wealth being piled up by the super-rich oligarchy. The richest 0.001 percent own as much wealth as half of humanity; Elon Musk is set to become the world’s first trillionaire within weeks.
Musk embodies the connection between the oligarchy and the rise of the far-right and authoritarianism. Democracy, even of the flimsiest kind, cannot co-exist with such extreme levels of social inequality. The scapegoating of migrants and racialised minorities, the use of counter-terror legislation against pro-Palestinian protesters, will expand into dictatorial crackdowns against the entire working class.
The only possible and realistic way of addressing these disasters is through the expropriation of the oligarchy—the transfer of its assets into public ownership—and the replacement of warmongering capitalist states with genuinely democratic forms of workers’ power. This is the revolutionary programme with which the SEP and our sister parties fight to infuse the growing mass struggles all around the world.
Nothing is more important now than for the working class, especially its younger generations, to seriously discuss these political questions. The urgency of the dangers cannot be turned into an excuse for leaping hopefully into the arms of the next vaguely left-talking movement. It is necessary to understand the lessons of the past to go forward.
We call on all workers and students who see the need for an internationalist socialist party of the working class to attend our meeting and participate in the discussion. Read our Statement of Principles and contact the Socialist Equality Party about becoming a member today.
LONDON
Sunday, July 12, 2.00 pm
Hargrave Hall Community Centre
Hargrave Road, Archway, Islington, N19 5SP
(3-minute walk from Archway tube station on the Northern Line, or 3-minutes from the bus stop at Archway Station, Junction Road)
Tickets available here.
SHEFFIELD
Sunday, July 19, 3.00 pm
Showroom Cinema, Room 5
15 Paternoster Row
Sheffield, S1 2BX (Opposite Sheffield train station)
Tickets available here.
MANCHESTER
Tuesday, July 28, 6.30 pm
Friends’ Meeting House, Room G1
6 Mount Street, Manchester M2 5NS
Tickets available here.
GLASGOW
Sunday, August 2, 2.00 pm
Premier Inn, Meeting Room 7 (Glassford)
187 George Street, Glasgow, G1 1YU
Tickets available here: