Ahead of the Communist Party’s debate on the new left party, its executive member Stephanie Martin assesses some of its potential strategies.

The intention to launch a new left-wing party announced by Zarah Sultana on 24 July presents interesting possibilities for Scotland. The Communist Party is yet to agree our formal position towards the new party and will debate this at our forthcoming Congress in November. Despite having no official name, structures or policies, well more than half a million people registered their support and willingness to get involved in shaping the new party. Corbyn sketched out its fundamental principles in The Guardian on 29 July: welfare over warfare; the return of key industries to public ownership; stop scapegoating minorities; and liberation for the Palestinian people. The Communist Party can therefore issue some assessments of the potential impact this initiative may yield. For the purposes of this article I will keep these, in the main, within a Scottish context. 

The proposed new left party is symptomatic of a mass disillusionment with traditional British politics. So is the rise of Reform UK, with Hope Not Hate research indicating that people’s frustration with the main parties is one of the major factors driving Reform’s increasing support among working class voters. The new party’s traction among sitting ex-Labour and independent pro-Palestine MPs, similarly disillusioned by the lack of inner party democracy in Labour and its rightward turn, makes this venture markedly different from previous new left party iterations. The emergence of a popular force to the left of Starmer’s Labour could offer an anti-establishment left alternative to Reform UK, as well as potentially assist a left fightback from within the Labour Party itself.

The Scottish Labour Party already diverges from some of the key characteristics of the British Labour Party, voting for instance in favour of the SNP Scottish Government’s mitigation policy against the two-child benefit cap. In addition, the two-party nature of Westminster is less prevalent in the Scottish Parliament, with its proportional representation voting system and the dominance of the SNP in recent decades. Scottish proportional representation could be advantageous for a new left party, if its policies and community organising strategy are informed by class analysis.

So far there have been no significant responses from the trade unions to the new party. Unions affiliated to the Labour Party have been notably silent. The solid base that unions can provide in some major workplaces, and their extra-parliamentary reach into many working class communities, is vital to the success of any mass electoral alternative to Labour, and it remains to be seen how the new party will address this. The failure of most of Corbyn’s previous young followers to join the trade union movement betrayed a weakness that must not be repeated.

The party’s presence in communities must boldly tackle the issues that Reform UK are seizing on, with a strong class analysis of the anti-democratic EU (the lack of which was a significant cause of Corbyn’s leadership failure), immigration, violence towards women and girls, NATO membership, and relations with China. Liberal trends infecting some aspects of the left and trade union policy, particularly in relation to women’s liberation, self ID, and prostitution, must be avoided if the new party is to attract working class voters in Scotland.

Corbyn’s popular base that secured him the Labour Party leadership was primarily related to the growth and activity of Stop the War, CND, and the People’s Assembly. Perhaps the new party will draw on such extra-parliamentary activist groups, including also the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, but the CPB recognises that potential weaknesses can develop when these activists become entangled with parliamentary politics and diverted from their organic community-based campaigning.

The experience of previous electoral initiatives on the left poses another problem that the new party will have to confront: the readiness of ultra-leftist sects to infiltrate broad-based mass movements in order to divide them, pose as a ‘left opposition’ to the leadership, and recruit from those they can influence and mislead. 

On the constitutional question, Corbyn and Sultana may have some difficulty leading forces for and against Scottish independence towards a left vision in Scotland. The extent of their electability here will in part relate to their ability to offer a unifying vision for the whole working class of Britain’s three nations, while defending the right of nations to self-determination. In this they can learn from the experience of the campaign group Radical Options for Scotland in Europe, whose mission is to unify the trade union movement in Scotland, overcoming divisions over the national question and EU membership. Its experience exemplifies the complexities of unifying the left across constitutional lines. The new party will have to get to grips with a post-Brexit left agenda in the context of Scottish constitutional debates. The Corbyn line promoting a second referendum on Brexit proved politically illiterate in 2019. The possibility of any meaningful economic Scottish independence from the EU empire is also unrealistic.

For Communists real independence would mean being free of the shackles of corporate capital which dominates all aspects of our lives, rather than achieving some capitalist constitutional arrangement. The CPB has developed and advocated a progressive federalism model which would sustain the strength of British trade unions and advance local democracy across the nations and regions, without constitutional separation, and while providing protection from the anti-public ownership constitution that the EU mandates its member countries to adopt.

Overall, we do not really know if the new left party has a Scottish strategy, or electoral buy-in yet. During his tenure as Labour leader, Corbyn indicated his willingness to form partnerships with the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Green Party. Perhaps the new party will likewise look to partner up with national lefts in Scotland and Wales as a realistic avenue towards a left-wing British government. In any case, the CPB will do as it always has done, and consider how it can work with socialist and progressive allies to ensure that mass campaigning surges forward, that we combat this Labour government’s antagonism towards the working class and its warmongering policies, and that we present a united front exposing the true class nature of Reform UK while fighting racism.

Stephanie Martin is a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Britain.