Collective and Transform members on the urgent need for a mass party of the left

Collective’s Pamela Fitzpatrick and Transform’s Anwarul Khan spoke on the panel at the Transform conference 2024 on Saturday 19 October. And they both agreed on the urgency of uniting the left under a mass democratic party of the left, in order to replace the Labour Party and resist the ongoing empowerment of the far right in British politics.

Fitzpatrick was attending as a key organiser within the Collective, which Transform is currently working with in the interest of unifying the left. And speaking about Collective, she said that a group of people had come together a year or so ago, wanting:

a left party based on class – class politics to be the overriding factor

She added:

That doesn’t mean that you’re gonna ignore the issues of racism, sexism, and anything else. But those issues, those single issues, are used to divide us…

It’s got to be a party that is rooted in class and sticks to that.

She also explained that:

The Collective has, over the past year, been meeting weekly to bring the left together. And what the Collective is comprised of are representatives from left groups, people who are already active in their community. And that ranges from established parties, long-established parties, to newer parties, to people who’ve got unstructured groups, so for example independent groups that are springing up in Enfield, Liverpool independents, a whole range of those. In Harrow, we’ve got our independent group.

‘The movement was around before 2015, and it’s still here now’

Fitzpatrick gave an insight into the discussions that people have been having in the Collective, but she was very clear about the urgent need to harness the power of the mass movement of socialists that exists around the country. She said:

some of the people involved feel that perhaps it’s not the time, that we need to build the movement first, that we need to do more community work. But the problem is that most of us have been working in our communities for decades. The movement is there. The movement has been there for decades.

And she insisted that it was this longstanding movement that helped to propel Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party in 2015:

Back in 2015, the movement was there, desperate for some leadership… Now when Jeremy put himself forward to be the leader, the movement was the thing that pushed him into the leadership. If the movement hadn’t been there, he would not have become the leader of the Labour Party…

It’s not the other way round, that Jeremy created the movement. Now the movement hasn’t gone away. It’s there. And it’s desperate for some leadership. And that’s what we need. We need, I’m afraid, ruthless leadership, class-based politics, and a democratic – truly democratic – party.

Transform: ‘we don’t have the luxury of waiting longer’

Fitzpatrick asserted at the Transform Conference:

So for those people who are saying we need to organise more, we need to spend time building a movement, I think they’re not aware – genuinely not aware – of what is going on around us. We don’t have that luxury. Nobody has that time.

And she gave a time frame for building this challenge to Keir Starmer’s hollowed-out Labour Party:

Starmer is absolutely hopeless. And there’s nobody in his cabinet that has any kind of qualities at all… So we need a new party – a new left party that is not gonna take any prisoners, is going to be absolutely saying it as it is, is not gonna bow to the… right-wing media, is not gonna accept allegations against us… We need a party that is ready. And we aim to do that by early next year.

Finally, she emphasised:

We need to be strong, we need to be revolutionary, we need to stop taking this nonsense. It’s too much. No more!

“This feels a bit like 1932”, so we must come together to resist the fall into fascism

Khan, meanwhile, asserted that:

This is the first time in my life, my 40-plus years, that I’ve been a little bit scared… This feels a bit like 1932. And one of the things that I keep saying is that the right are not ‘on the rise’. They have risen. They’re in government. And worst of all, if they fail, there’s another group – Reform. They’re waiting in the wings. They’re in third place…

Reform are genuinely in a position where they might, realistically, get into power.

With this in mind, he addressed left-wingers around the country, asking:

Can we sit together? And can we form a genuinely mass party for the left that’s democratic?… The answer isn’t just ‘yes’. The answer is ‘we must do it’…

Because by 1939, it was too late. The fascists had got into power. And we all know what happened next. So this is not a ‘should we?’. It’s ‘we have to do it’.

So why don’t we have a mass socialist party already? He suggested:

It’s because we don’t sit together often enough. We don’t talk to each other often enough, if at all… We have to find time to stand with each other in solidarity…  We have to build relationships.

He also emphasised that there are many ways for people to act, and that movements on the left need to support each other:

Some want… a party now. Some want a movement. Others are focusing on direct action and citizens’ assemblies… I don’t see why we can’t have all of those things right now. Why can’t we do all of these things in parallel?

For whatever you wanna do, our issue should not be how to… shit on it. It’s not to bring it down and go ‘oh this is not a good idea, maybe not right now’. Our answer should always be ‘how can I help?’

Featured image via the Canary