This May Day, workers in Britain march into the second year of a Labour government that has allowed rents and prices to erode real wages, and cut support for the sick and disabled to fund record increases in military spending.
The Starmer government has run itself into the ground mired in scandal, corruption and contempt for its own base. But none of the alternatives on offer represents a break with the system producing the crisis. Reform UK is being groomed as the next instrument of austerity, with racist scapegoating to absorb working-class anger. The Greens are being positioned as a safety valve for liberal and progressive voters.
Fight racism and fascism
Behind Reform’s parliamentary advance, fascist street forces around Tommy Robinson grow in confidence. The Labour government legitimises their demands by criminalising refugees, expanding police powers, and prosecuting Palestine demonstrators as terrorists. Against the liberal anti-racism promoted by the SWP and the trade union leaders in the ‘Together Alliance’, we fight for a workers’ united front with class demands: no platform for fascists, against all immigration controls, organised self-defence against racist and police violence.
Internationalism
Internationally, the same crisis appears in starker form. The United States, Britain and the European powers continue to bankroll Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its assault on Lebanon. Trump is haggling with Putin over the carve-up of Ukraine while waging war on Iran and tightening the blockade of Cuba. Eclipsed at the negotiating table, the European powers have launched the largest rearmament drive since the Cold War.
Sections of the left look to Russia and China as a counterweight to Washington, refusing to recognise them as imperialist powers competing for markets, resources and spheres of influence. We reject this campism. We unconditionally defend Palestine against Zionist genocide, Lebanon and Iran against Western and Israeli aggression, and Ukraine against Russian invasion — independent of every bourgeois government and reactionary leadership.
A workers’ programme
A new generation has taken to the streets — for Palestine, against the cost-of-living crisis, against the racist right. Resident doctors, transport workers and educators have shown the will to fight. What is missing is a leadership equal to the task.
The cost-of-living catastrophe is intensifying as the war on Iran sends energy and food prices spiralling once again. Rearmament drains the public purse that should fund wages, housing and the NHS. Defending working-class living standards at home and ending the imperialist wars abroad that intensify the crisis are not two struggles but one. They demand a united front of the trade unions and the workers’ movement, fighting for an emergency programme of action: a sliding scale of wages and benefits indexed to real prices, expropriation of the energy giants and banks under workers’ control, and the cancellation of the war budget.
The experience of ‘Your Party’ has shown that the reformist labour and union bureaucracy cannot be dependend on to fight for workers’ interests.
Workers need our own party — rooted in the workplaces, schools, and estates, fighting to make the rich pay for their crisis: full rights for migrants, scrapping the anti-union laws, an end to arms sales to Israel, public ownership under workers’ control; and for a workers’ government answerable to the working class, not the markets.
- Stop arming Israel
- Make the rich pay for their crisis
- For a revolutionary workers’ party — for a new International
- Workers of the world, unite!
