When we launched our Campaign for a Mass Workers’ Party about two years ago, some comrades were sceptical. But we said no! There’s a yawning vacuum in British politics: the vacuum left by the half a million people who poured into the Labour Party to support Jeremy Corbyn; the mass rallies during the 2017 election campaign; the four million extra Labour voters in the 2017 election; the recent wave of public sector strikes; the mass protests against the Gaza genocide… The scientists say nature abhors a vacuum; well, so does politics. That’s where the 800,000-plus aspiring members of the new party come from: more than those of all the other parties put together.

So what shape should the new party take?

1. We are a working-class party: not just a random gathering of well-meaning free-wheelers, like the Greens or the Lib Dems. Still today, according to statistical surveys, 60% of the population consider themselves working-class: just the same, incidentally, as in 1983, before Thatcher had destroyed the factories, shipyards, steel works and coal mines. Today teachers, university lecturers, nurses, doctors, lawyers and civil servants have been forced into industrial action alongside railway workers. Not one of their unions is affiliated to the Labour Party. Sooner or later, like the trade unions 125 years ago, they will need a political voice. Where will they turn? To Starmer’s Labour Party? Where else but to our party? Meanwhile, rank-and-file activists organised in Labour-affiliated unions, will be asking: why are we paying affiliation fees to this crypto-Tory government? The Bakers’ Union has shown the way; now UNITE is moving in the same direction.
2. So our party must welcome the affiliation of trade unions. But that does not mean conniving in the old union-boss gangster tactics: the block vote wielded by unaccountable bureaucrats. Members’ votes must be allocated proportionately and democratically, to reflect the balance of opinions of the rank and file.
3. Next, our members must have open access to the data. No one has the right to squirrel away the information in secret vaults. How else can we recruit a mass membership and establish thriving branches open to all?
4. Now we need a fully democratic founding conference with an exclusive mandate to determine every aspect of the party’s identity: its name, its leadership, its structure, its constitution, its policies and its manifesto. No individual, no exclusive clique or cabal can be allowed to misappropriate those rights.
5. And we need fully democratic accountability. The conference must be composed of delegates directly elected by the party’s activists. The nonsensical proposal of “sortition” is quite explicitly the diametrical opposite of democracy. It means the arbitrary selection of delegates to ensure a bogus balance, giving fair representation to everyone: including those members who don’t attend branch meetings, haven’t engaged in reasoned debate, don’t hold strong opinions of their own. That would mean a conference wide open to manipulation. We are not afraid of strong opinion and robust debate; that’s the only conceivable way of reaching the right conclusions.
6. Finally, we must insist on the constant right of recall over all those elected to office and a strict commitment from all of them only to accept remuneration equivalent to a skilled workers’ wage, with any surplus donated back to the party.

But above all we need to act NOW! Let me quote from the revolutionary poet Bertolt Brecht. The Buddha tells his disciples a parable:

Lately I saw a house. It was burning. The flame
Licked at its roof. I went up close and observed
That there were people still inside. I entered the doorway and called
Out to them that the roof was ablaze, so exhorting them
To leave at once. But those people
Seemed in no hurry. One of them,
While the heat was already scorching his eyebrows,
Asked me what it was like outside, whether there was
Another house for them, and more of this kind. Without answering
I went out again. These people here, I thought,
Must burn to death before they stop asking questions…
And truly friends,
Whoever does not yet feel such heat in the floor that he’ll gladly
Exchange it for any other, rather than stay, to that man
I have nothing to say.”

And Brecht adds:

We too believe that to those
Who in face of the rising bomber squadrons of Capital go on asking too long
How we propose to do this, and how we envisage that,
And what will become of their savings and Sunday trousers after a revolution
We have nothing much to say.

So too, comrades, with us. We too have been cursed with too many distractions: do we really need a party? and what should we call ourselves? and how should we pick our delegates? And so-and-so treated me so rudely… endless procrastination, dithering, pontificating, temporising, squabbling.

Comrades! A genocidal holocaust is taking place in front of our eyes. The planet is burning. Wars and civil wars are raging. Governments are openly preparing for a third world war. Troops have occupied American cities; migrants are snatched off the streets. A dark cloud has descended across Europe, with the AfD in Germany, the National Rally in France, and Reform in Britain all hovering, poised to snuff out the last remaining chinks of light. Last week a huge fascist mob strutted through London. If we don’t act decisively now, then we will soon find ourselves debating our differences in a concentration camp. We have been warned! History will not forgive those who stand in our way.