The Workers Party of Britain is committed to the trades union movement as the best means of maintaining independent working class resistance to the interests of capital. However, it is deeply dissatisfied with the conduct of trades union bureaucracies and the insistence of many in maintaining support for the corrupted Labour party, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
We endorse the continued struggle by workers within trade unions to disaffiliate from the Labour party. We will continue to support workers struggling for their immediate interests, better wages and conditions. Our track record on this speaks for itself. We have always been first in line to back lawful strike action including those by ambulance workers and transport workers while Labour has equivocated. When workers strike, they never do so lightly.
For these reasons and others, we do not want to see disenchanted workers walking away from their trades union. The best way to achieve this is for trade unions to put their members interests over those of the political fortunes of Labour. We encourage members to remain in, or indeed join, trade unions to agitate for working class interests. We also encourage those in the movement to break the link with the Labour Party. The political independence of the trades union movement, if that is taken to mean their independence from the Labour party, is a step in the right direction, the final act of which will be trade unions who are committed to socialism as a part of a socialist working-class political movement. We do not hide our belief that the greatest block to working class aspirations is not the Conservative Party but the Labour party itself. We supported Jeremy Corbyn insofar as he was able to advance the struggle, but we believe there was an inherent naivety about the determination of foreign powers, business and capitalist interests, through their agents in the Labour party, to destroy any challenge to the established order. Failure was inevitable once compromises were made on key issues like membership of the European Union and the handling of false accusations of antisemitism. Corbynism was unintentionally designed to fail from the very start and ‘capturing the Labour Party for the working class and socialism’ is an inherently futile strategy.
Today, the Labour party is an integrated part of the imperialist State machinery as we have seen in its tolerance for war crimes in Gaza. Its very existence marginalises opposition to attacks on wages at home and war abroad. Labour weakens popular demands for an end to exploitation, for redistribution and for control of State mechanisms that serve foreign powers such as the United States of America and its proxies like NATO. We will continue to expose the nature and crimes of the Labour party both past and present. If elected into office, we will not make self-defeating compromises to maintain weak coalitions dominated by politicians whose only links are to the State and not to the People.
Julie Lowe 