The adoption of a no-cuts budgets policy by the Your Party founding conference is a significant step forward. It reflects the pressure of activists and commits the party to defiance against austerity, whether it stands candidates for council seats or not.
This contrasts with the Greens who, even under their ‘left’ leader Zack Polanski, have ruled out any such policy. It lays the basis for addressing the crises of homelessness, housing shortages, youth services and council-provided social care.
However, it is a big step from a pledge in a manifesto to winning a majority for implementing it. The history of councils, like Liverpool and Lambeth, in the 1980s teaches us that defiance within the council chamber alone is, at best, a recipe for martyrdom, not victory.
Since the 1984 Rates Act a government can declare any unbalanced, i.e. deficit budget illegal, triggering surcharges lifetime disqualifications and a Whitehall takeover by commissioners, who will implement the cuts.
The left Labour Councils of those days were defeated because the struggle remained confined to the Town Hall. The councillors did not call for strike action, occupations and mass direct action, coordinated with ongoing struggles by unions and service users. In short they failed to mobilise the decisive power of the working class, because they saw their ‘power’ fundamentally in terms of winning the next election.
Therefore, a No Cuts declaration of intent can only be the start of the fight. Your Party councillors must not just vote against cuts, but help organise a workers’ audit to expose the crying needs of their borough, town or city.
This can become the basis of a budget that residents can see the justice of and be willing to fight for. The scale of the rundown of services, council housing and jobs over the past decades can be revealed, alongside exposure of those who have benefitted from the sell-off of council property and privatisation of services.
If elected, Your Party councillors must use this platform not for dignified protest, but as a rallying point to build local popular assemblies, uniting council workers, tenants, community groups, and trade union delegates. Here we can organise to resist and reverse local and national austerity.
Our manifestos must openly state that implementing this budget means a direct, illegal clash with central government, explicitly appealing to the working class to defend their councillors with demonstrations, direct action, occupations of services targeted for closure, and crucially, strike action.
Fight the power
Central government alone has the means to mobilise the resources to pay for many of these services by taxing wealth and profits. This raises the need for a struggle at a national level to force the government to pay up, or face a rising tide of council rebellions.
This is what distinguishes a revolutionary transitional approach from that of left reformists. The reformists seek to limit the battle to the legalistic terrain of the council chamber or, in the case of the Socialist Party, to raid council reserves.
Clever accounting tricks did not, however, save Liverpool from cuts in the end. But Your Party branches can, by becoming organising centres of the class struggle.
This is how we can distinguish ourselves from the Green Party’s managed decline of services and Reform’s fake anti-establishment credentials. We can demonstrate that the fight against austerity can be started by campaigning for the election of socialist councillors, but won in the workplaces, estates, and streets, transforming a defensive battle over budgets into a wider offensive against the Labour government.
Will Your Party remain a left pressure group on the Labour and trade union bureaucracy? Or can it be transformed into a party of struggle? By facing the issue of illegality and state repression, it reveals an inevitable choice — break the law or break the poor.
