The task is to rebuild Britain

On May Day we assess and take stock of the political situation in Britain and the world, to plan working class activity over the months and years ahead, and to think too about our goal.

Do we aim only to survive, to carry on as we have done for decades and even centuries? Or to think of something more ambitious, to turn from perpetual defence to asserting control, to enshrining that control in working-class rule, that is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

It’s not parliament

When we talk about politics, we do not mean the activities that go on in the Houses of Parliament and Whitehall, nor do we mean the recent local elections in some parts of the country. Elections have been cancelled due to devolution we never asked for, and more have mayors we never wanted.

Universal suffrage in this country is less than 100 years old. But what difference has it made? We are now in an epoch where the working class, by which Marxists mean everyone who sells their labour power to live, is the great majority of the population. Politics is in the workplace and pub, and wherever workers gather.

‘On the big political questions of the day – on Brexit, for example – MPs showed themselves to be resolutely opposed to the popular vote…’

On the big political questions of the day – on Brexit, for example – MPs showed themselves to be resolutely opposed to the popular vote. They did everything they could to obstruct and frustrate it. Most of them would be delighted to sell the country back to Brussels. If politics was parliament, we would still be in the EU. 

Starmer wants to pose as the leader of a European alliance and promises to send British soldiers to die in the Ukraine or Crimea. Preparation for conscription is evident in a research paper written for MPs. US nuclear weapons are back on British soil, at USAF Lakenheath in East Anglia.

We stopped the EU’s idea of a European army, only to have it reintroduced by the back door. A security pact is planned that requires Britain to sign up to the founding values of the EU and to subordinate our own national security and defence interests to those of the EU. 

At the UK-EU Summit on 19 May Starmer was expected to give way to the demand for changes to fisheries arrangements, extending the time when EU countries’ fleets will pillage our fishing grounds by 12 years. [He did]. He has also undermined immigration rules with a so-called youth experience programme.

On trade too, the politicians in Westminster are able to allow incompatible beliefs to co-exist in their heads. On the one hand that free trade is an unquestionable good. And on the other, that we should ally ourselves with a European power and trading bloc built entirely on tariffs and barriers to trade.

Steel

Steel is a prime example; it is fundamental to industry. Steel workers forced the saving of British Steel at Scunthorpe from its Chinese owners. Scunthorpe produces the virgin steel needed in construction and rail. But the coking coal needed to keep the two blast furnaces going has had to be brought from the US and Australia.

One of the first actions of the newly elected Labour government last year was to withdraw support for the proposed Woodhouse colliery in Whitehaven in Cumbria. Yet it could supply coking coal, used in steelmaking, from beneath the Irish Sea for at least 25 years.

‘Does Ed Miliband hate coal even more than Margaret Thatcher did?’

Does Ed Miliband hate coal even more than Margaret Thatcher did? The Chinese build their infrastructure exclusively with domestically produced steel. In the USA the proportion of domestically produced steel used in industry has varied from 70 per cent to 90 per cent. US governments since the 1970s have used import duties to protect the industry.

And what do we do? We put a carbon tax on steel, which according to the industry body UK Steel will cost the industry more than £150 million a year. Tata Steel was allowed to shut down blast furnaces at Port Talbot – why was that permitted?

It is not enough to place a carbon tax on imported steel. Unite, GMB and Community, the chief unions organising steelworkers, have set out plans for the future of the industry. These have far more weight than the government’s Steel Council, which is charged with producing a strategy, but on which sit representatives of British Steel, that is to say the Chinese- and Indian-owned Tata.

Spain and Portugal proudly boasted they had put all their energy eggs in the renewables basket. But then the entire Iberian Peninsula was blacked out in May, at a time when renewables were providing most of Spain’s electricity.

Reality is now dawning in Britain. Sizewell C is going ahead and the government is expected to agree to a fleet of small modular nuclear reactors. Miliband is having to eat his words as sales of electric vehicles are stalling, and the government has had to postpone the ban on the sale of petrol and diesel vans, intended for 2030, to 2035.

But there is a long way to go. The closure of Grangemouth in Scotland, for example, in spite of determined resistance by workers in the industry and the local community, is another attack on self-sufficiency in energy production.

One plan is to turn Grangemouth into a fuel import terminal. How can this make sense? Instead of extracting our own oil, we will pay another country for theirs and pay someone else to ship it here.

Health

The British Medical Association’s Resident Doctors conference met recently. Resident Doctors – hospital doctors in training posts, Foundation Doctors, SHOs, registrars and senior registrars – have a fight on their hands to defend their professional skills.

A role of physician associate has been introduced, which employers find tempting to substitute for doctors. The BMA has collected over 600 reports of serious concerns, including examples of cases when physician associates worked beyond their remit and competence, leading to harm to patients.

The BMA has recently launched a campaign to give British medical graduates priority when applying for speciality training and a motion demanding this was passed by over two-thirds. The NHS notoriously preferred to import doctors and nurses from overseas, from countries that could ill afford to lose their skills. Bad for aspiring medical professionals in Britain and bad for those countries raided for their skilled workers.

Doctors with qualifications from medical schools abroad are popular with employers not least because they tend not to take industrial action. They fill up the training posts, leaving graduates of British medical schools unemployed, at a time when we have a shortage of doctors and a backlog of 76 million treatments.

As well as calling for prioritisation of British medical graduates, the BMA has joined the medical Royal Colleges in demanding an expansion of training posts.

Division and devolution

The division of British workers is catnip to capitalism. And that’s why it’s fostered in many ways: attempting to split Scottish, English and Welsh workers from one another; or by nurturing a seemingly endless list of special interests within our class, dividing every way you can imagine, by race, sex, sexual orientation. But class quickly returns despite attempts to drive it out. 

The reception of the Supreme Court ruling on transgender issues has been one of relief that finally biological, material reality has been recognised. Indeed, the working class that lives by working with and transforming nature is of necessity materialist. Fantasies disappear when exposed to daylight.

Vietnam

Our party does not usually make a song and dance about anniversaries. However, this year there is one anniversary that has lessons for us and which we should mark. On 30 April the Vietnamese celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the event they call the Liberation of the South and National Reunification, when Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, fell.

It was decades ago but it’s worth remembering because the Vietnamese had a long fight to liberate their country from the French, the Japanese, even the British who helped restore French colonial rule at the end of the Second World War.

A long guerrilla campaign culminated in a resounding defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, but imperialism imposed partition on North and South Vietnam, the latter governed, with US support, by a series of corrupt and vicious regimes.

Covert US support became open. It tried, in the words of General Curtis Le May, to bomb Vietnam back to the stone age. But by 1973 the US, at that time fancying itself as the world’s leading political and military power, was defeated. It was forced to withdraw all troops by the Paris Peace Accords. So, the final reunification in 1975 was welcomed worldwide.

What did it mean for us? Ho Chi Minh, who led his country’s revolution but did not live to see that victory, said that the only true internationalism is to make revolution in your own country.

‘We don’t tell British workers what to do, still less do we issue advice to those in other countries on how to conduct their struggles…’

Nowadays US power does not look so impressive: two wars in Iraq failed to achieve their purpose; war on Libya turned the country into a hotbed of competing jihadist gangs; and twenty years in Afghanistan ended in an evacuation as ignominious as that of Saigon. That cost Britain the deaths of 457 soldiers and many mutilated during our shameful intervention. 

Many of us take too much interest in what goes on in the USA, as if it matters. Some British newspapers fill their pages with US politics, and comment on their elections as if we had votes in them. If we’ve learnt anything, it’s that to rely on politicians abroad or at home is folly.

Of and for the working class

Finally, some words about the CPBML. We are the only British party that is of and for the working-class. Since 1968 we have forged our own style: it consists of honesty and materialist thought and analysis. We deal with the world as it is, not as it ought to be. We all study and think, every member. We all work to apply the line. And you may think this a little thing, but it says something about our approach to democracy, that our meetings, perhaps uniquely among British organisations, start and finish on time.

We don’t tell British workers what to do, still less do we issue advice to those in other countries on how to conduct their struggles; but we know Britain, and we will take no lessons from those overseas on how we should proceed. 

We do say, to every worker, that capitalism has failed and if you want to move beyond that failure and harness the energy and thought of our class and country to make something better, then you must join the party, bring your experience, your knowledge and your will to change the world.

Long live May Day! It’s up to us!

• This article is an edited extract from the speech given at our May Day 2025 meeting in London.