Enough is enough, TUC demonstration, October 2022, Manchester. Workers need to do more than delegate politics to others. Photo Workers.
Parliamentary elections, we have consistently said, change nothing. And despite all the froth around the local elections in May, they too will change nothing fundamental in Britain.
The elections to the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament do have the potential to bring comfort, or otherwise, to the petty politicians whose only object is to damage the unity of the nation.
But as we say in this issue (see page 12), Britain needs a new direction. It certainly won’t get it from the contending political parties. All of them are committed to the management of decline – or in the case of the Greens, to embracing the destruction of industry.
If that wasn’t bad enough, it is increasingly clear that none of them actually has a clue about how decline is to be managed, never mind reversed.
Compare the policies of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, and there’s barely a hair’s breadth between them. Labour, historically the standard bearer of social democracy, offers nothing, not even a passably coherent philosophy.
Labour has two clear aims: re-incorporation of Britain into the European Union, though it avoids spelling this out clearly; and an increase in defence spending. The Liberal Democrats vary only in publicly professing their devotion to the EU.
Reform UK says it wants British sovereignty in all spheres, but it is also committed to global free trade and the World Trade Organization. And global free trade is the enemy of sovereignty.
The bald fact is that social democracy, the idea of making advances under capitalism, is dead as far as the parliamentary political parties are concerned. They argue only about the pace of decline.
Yet social democracy, that walking corpse, has not disappeared. It is still alive and well in a section of the working class – the majority, perhaps – who cling on to the idea that things can get better if only the right people are in power.
Here is the great irony of British politics. The working class is the only section of society that wants progress, yet time and time again it delegates the management of the country to a bunch of charlatans who think progress is an idea whose time has gone.
This attitude was epitomised by the TUC campaign three or four years ago under the banner of “We Demand Better” – now echoed in the equally banal “Scotland Demands Better” slogan. (It is as if none of them watched W1A, the BBC comedy of ten years earlier.)
The very word “better” sums up the supposed ambitions of social democracy. But Britain doesn’t need “better”, it needs change. Revolutionary change. And it won’t get it until workers accept that nothing will change until the working class stops delegating politics to establishment politicians and takes responsibility for running Britain.