Waltham Forest discusses ‘the streets’ and the ballot box
by Linda Taaffe, Waltham Forest Socialist Party
The packed meeting was optimistic.
Socialist Party members spoke about the opportunity for the new party to fight the cuts by standing in May’s local elections. We have already stood as Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) candidates, independent of the capitalist parties, over decades, on policies that Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana would agree with.
But that was criticised by members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who said it was not the time to go for elections. With Reform banging at the door, what a short-sighted comment! Are we to stand aside and let them in to run our council, as they do now in ten other councils?
Or will these people recommend we vote for the Greens, who are not putting up any real fights against cuts anywhere they are in control, despite their radical-sounding phraseology.
Another said they didn’t want Labour Party Mark 2. We wouldn’t want a Labour Party as it has operated under Tony Blair and Keir Starmer.
But, at its foundation, the Labour Party reflected the policies of the working class and trade unions. In 1918, under the wave of support for the Russian Revolution, Labour adopted the famous Clause 4, calling for mass public ownership. Workers today would welcome a clause like this in the Your Party constitution.
Times have changed. But there are many things we would want to emulate, like the mass involvement of trade unions. We don’t just visit picket lines in solidarity. We want union branches to become political, and campaign to affiliate as a body – not just as individuals – to Your Party.
In order to carry out policies to drastically improve our living standards, we need to be in power. The first line of power is the local council.
Liverpool lessons
In the 1980s, when the Liverpool 47 Labour councillors actually took the lead in the campaign against the massive cuts to an impoverished city by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government, they showed us how to organise a whole city in support of its council.
They consulted regularly with the local District Labour Party and trade union delegates from across the city, sometimes up to 600 representatives. This organisation also called street demonstrations of 50,000, and even a citywide general strike to support the council building 5,000 homes and taking on thousands of new council workers.
When the SWP criticised our election stand, they counterposed it with ‘street campaigns’. But council work and the streets are not separate activities.
We want to stand in the elections next year, so that if the new party gets a majority, it can cap and freeze rents, take over empty houses and offer to the homeless, stop evictions, and vote against any more cuts to our public services, and many other things. We will need to mobilise campaigns to defend those policies.
The Greek Syriza party went from attracting a few votes in elections to becoming the government. It is a real possibility that the same could happen here. For me, it should be unthinkable that Your Party will not stand in elections in 2026, or in the next general election.