What is Socialism in England in the early 2020s Part One - The Communicipal Angle.

I follow on Twitter an account that provides access to a socialist podcast in England where among the issues recently discussed was the question of why people became socialists. Interestingly several comrades commented on the influence of Jeremy Corbyn on their endorsement of and subsequent promotion of socialism. I think it is fair to say that an interest in socialism was awakened within wider British society and in England in particular during the Corbynista years from 2015-to-2019. 

Having sparked thoughts after hearing some of the podcast and also reading comrades' blogs posted on Twitter I came to the conclusion that why I am a socialist is intrinsically bound up with what I think socialism is, and for me this is the real question the English left should be asking ourselves.

I strongly supported Jeremy Corbyn-but of course the odds were always stacked against him. He was systematically undermined by his own party and certain elected and/or appointed actors of outside sponsors to do their bidding and who paid them well for their duplicity.

Looking back now, the greatest achievement of Jeremy Corbyn - besides mobilising a great deal of support for the left in general - was to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that anything even resembling real democracy was impossible inside the Palace of Westminster, and the parliamentary road to socialism is an absolute dead end. 

The corporate structure of the House of Commons itself precludes any divergence from the liberal path. For this reason Britain has been a Janus-faced-duel headed liberal one-party state since the ruling elite finally acceded to demands for the vote for all British adults aged 21 plus in 1928 (reduced to 18 in 1970).

Representative democracy in the UK of the sort we know today is then only 93 years old.

Since 1930 Britain has been governed by successive liberal coalition governments without exception. First we had the so-called National Government coalition of 1930-39 - followed by the wartime coalition led by Churchill of 1940-45; this consensus was followed by the welfare state post-war consensus-sometimes called Butskellism after the surnames of successive Tory & Labour Chancellors of the Exchequer  Conservative R. A. Butler (1951-5) and for Labour, Hugh Gaitskell (1950-1) from 1945-until the early 1970s; this pact was succeeded by the monetarist Thatcherite/Blair coalition 1979-onwards but that consensus has now morphed into the neoliberal (globalist) coalition.

This is how Britain's unwritten constitution shapes the way coalitions are put together. Consensus government without any nasty shocks from the lower orders is guaranteed by the very structure of the institution itself, including First Past the Post voting within gerrymandered borders & widespread electoral fraud.  

The Liberal Party of Lloyd George did not - as is often said - implode and to wither on the vine - so much as become part of every other party contending for state power-Conservatives, Nationalists and Labour alike are all liberal parties.

So given this thumbnail sketch of how I see the current state of play am I despondent for socialism in England in the future? 

My answer is definitely not. There isn't room in this short piece to go into any detail as to all the reasons why not, but I hope to explore some of those issues in future posts.

I first identified with socialism myself when I was around 13 years of age-which is when I discovered CND and marched with them in the mid-1960s - Ban the Bomb, the Committee of 100, Aldermaston Marches - and the anti-Vietnam War movement - all of that drew me in. I have never missed a major antiwar demo since then, nor any other major political cause from the Poll Tax to the current Kill the Bill campaign.

My family - a studiously apolitical working class family from east Birmingham with a tradition of working on the railway or rail related industries. For my parents politics was not something we should ever talk about in polite company, or at any time for that matter-because of its propensity to cause division and bad feeling.

My first union membership was when I was about 19 years old, I joined the National Union of Railwaymen (as was) - into which brotherhood I had to be formally sworn-in during what seemed at the time, a masonic-like induction that felt rather odd to me, taking place in wood paneled rooms above a Birmingham Co-op shop one Friday evening after the shop closed.

Working as a mostly freight guard on British Rail which was a closed shop in those days, train staff had to be in the NUR, footplate staff (drivers and what were known then as second-men-or assistant drivers) could choose and usually did choose to be in ASLEF, but you had to be in a union to work on BR in those days, a handful of train drivers were in the NUR.

I was a member of one union, or another, throughout most of my working life (except when I worked abroad for a few years in the late 70s) and I remain so as a retired member of Unite today.

During my time as National Union of Public Employees (now Unison) in various roles including hospital branch secretary, steward and social services convenor, in the late 1980s and early 90s I was elected by my union branch to be their delegate to our union national conferences.

It was at NUPE conference in 1990 that I first came into contact with Jeremy Corbyn, an MP our union sponsored, as we also did Clare Short. I have followed his career since then and have attended numerous meetings, marches, events and demos where Jeremy has spoken over the past 30 odd years. I became a paid-up supporter of  the Labour Party in 2015 and voted for Jeremy (twice) for the leadership. 

     This is me moving a motion on proportional voting at NUPE National Conference 1991 in Scarborough.

Throughout his campaign and subsequent Labour Party leadership I promoted him and gave Jeremy as much support as I possibly could on various media including Twitter and one-time regular correspondent frequently read out by George Galloway on MOATS radio show-when it was still on Talk Radio. 

I fought for Corbynism in ways Corbyn himself would never have fought. I have no regrets about that - Corbynism in my view was never just about Jeremy Corbyn or his embattled political career. 

It was always about democracy and social justice at home and abroad, but there was absolutely no chance of Jeremy Corbyn leading a UK socialist government - however, we fought the good fight and every minute of it was-for me at least-well worth the effort. 

At the end of that heady upsurge that was the Corbynista rising I'm left with a few thoughts about how things currently are in post-Covid Austerity England, in Brexit Britain right now and how things could very well be much different in the future. 

In this post-digital information age I think we have to reassess all the impediments and the new opportunities to take, what is after all, a very strong tradition in England's social and economic history - since the 14th century at least - proto-socialism into the 21st century extinction rebellion and join up the dots for active resistance in the midst of a global pandemic, social tragedy, corporate hooliganism, industrial scale political corruption and historically wrong decision making from the political centre.

Every MP in Westminster takes an oath of allegiance to an effectively defunct monarchy before they can take their seat in the Commons and that is, in essence what defeated Jeremy Corbyn-with help from outside forces with whom we can make no further accommodation and must take on and confront wherever and whenever they try to subvert the course of  history. Corbynism could not survive the neoliberal foundations of so-called parliamentary democracy purposefully designed to thwart the democratic aspirations of the majority of the people, the many not the few.

The creaking system that is Britain's dysfunctional status quo - of which the British Parliament is itself a near obsolete relic - excludes all socialist heretics like Jeremy Corbyn from having any real political power. The corruption at the very heart of Westminster excludes all would-be ideological untouchables totally except as symbols of working class engagement with the system, if only vicariously so.

For me now, the key areas of action for those of us on the political left in England are as follows.

• Build a sustainable Brexit free of corporate interference, secret courts and other external forces incompatible with democracy at home or abroad.
  
• Prioritise the ecosocialist agenda which is not only consistent with Extinction Rebellion aims but also as it happens, United Nations Sustainability Goals for 2030.
• Campaign for a National Assembly for England - an English Parliament of the Regions - probably situated in the Midlands for geographical accessibility to the widest number of people and for many other reasons too I think.
• Campaign for electoral reform-proportional voting from age 16+ as part of the system change agenda consistent with English home rule and democratic sovereignty of the people.
  
• Endorse and facilitate multicultural and multi-ethnic participation in all democratic processes and forums while opening up opportunities for participation for all marginalised groups including the non-voting majority to broaden the franchise more inclusively.
• Work collaboratively locally and internationally for global system change and the ecosocialist global reset.
• Participate and promote mutual engagement with international organisations representing a recognition that system change is a priority for the entire human race and indeed many other species.

Socialism in England during the 2020s must stop re-inventing the wheel and abandon divisive factionalism and sectarian discord, which has been in part made obsolete anyway, by the absence of a vanguard party in this Information Age industrial revolution currently in progress.

The binary choice remains that of ecosocialism or barbarism. The world currently remains in the grip of the latter - so let's change it for the sake of future generations and in honour of those past generations whose fight we take up yet again!

We may think this is a bad time to be alive - but it is our time so let's use it to save the world from the rape of capitalism.

I can't think of any better reason or higher calling for human consciousness than that - as we face the climate crisis and the socio-economic strife that now threatens our very existence on earth, not to mention corporate greenwashing further fanning the flames of social instability in the midst of a monumental systems collapse. I'm looking for system change like every socialist campaigner before me.

 

These are some of the reasons why I'm a socialist in 2021.