Learn the lessons of the Corbyn project: break the link with Labour!

Editor’s note: This resolution was passed by our party’s ninth congress in October 2021. However, developments since that time have led the party to overturn that decision and to withdraw our members’ efforts from the Workers party project, which we believe has failed in its stated aim of becoming a truly broad movement within which communists could work openly, transforming itself into a left-social-democratic vehicle for bourgeois parliamentarism and anticommunism. Our stance towards the Labour party in particular and social democracy in general remains unchanged.

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In light of the experience of the last three years, this congress reaffirms our party’s long-held position on the Labour party, which has once again been furnished with ample proof by life.

Congress notes that when, through a combination of naivety and arrogance on the part of the parliamentary Labour party (PLP), Jeremy Corbyn was permitted to stand as a candidate in Labour’s leadership election, and when he went on to win the position (to his opponents’ surprise as well as his own), our party stood virtually alone in pointing out that no matter who was installed as leader; no matter how ‘left-wing’ that person was perceived to be, the Labour party could never be a force for socialism, and socialism could never be achieved through Britain’s parliamentary system.

Congress notes that events have confirmed our view that the PLP and the party’s central office together run the Labour party in the interests of imperialism, and that the party’s ‘grandees’ are enemies of socialism to a man. Similarly confirmed has been our belief that the party machinery would not allow anyone who suggested even a modest step in the direction of socialism to remain as leader.

Congress further notes that when Mr Corbyn came under attack, as it was to be expected he would, he failed to defend a single one of his professed ‘lifelong’ or ‘socialist’ beliefs. From leaving the European Union to refusing to play a role in imperialist wars or committing to unilateral nuclear disarmament, Corbyn ditched both ideals and close comrades in order to keep an unusable position within a party unbreakably welded to imperialism. The party machinery deliberately destroyed its own leader’s chance of winning two elections, having no compunction in thereby also betraying its working-class voters, in order to get rid of Corbyn and to try to get Britain back into the EU financiers’ club.

This congress believes that Jeremy Corbyn is now yesterday’s man. While he himself continues to argue that the Labour party is a suitable vehicle for advancing workers towards socialism (whatever that word means to him), many thousands of those who previously believed in him and flocked to Labour’s banner to campaign for him are now flocking back out – in most cases, a little wiser.

Congress notes that many of those wiser people have helped to form the Workers Party of Britain (WPB) in order to engage in the many daily struggles that are needed to defend and advance the interests of workers at home and abroad. It is our honour as a genuine communist party to work alongside the serious and honest people who are the members of the WPB at all levels.

This congress resolves that our members will continue to openly work inside the WPB: to help grow its branches, to participate in its campaigns, and to do everything in our power to help it build meaningful connections with the working class.

Congress further resolves to do everything in its power to support the WPB’s mission to break the link between the Labour party and the mass of the poor workers – at the polls, in the trade unions, and in every fighting organisation of the working class.