Groucho Marxism

The UK Green Party has just pulled off a stunning by-election victory in the Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton. The Greens’ Hannah Spencer becomes the new MP, with Reform in second place and Labour pushed into third. Billed by the press as a three-horse race, in the end the result wasn’t even close: the Greens secured 41% of the vote, way ahead of Reform (29%) and Labour (25%). This a remarkable result for several reasons. The Greens had never won more than 10% of the vote in a parliamentary by-election before. Labour had not lost an election in the Gorton and Denton constituency since 1931. Meanwhile, the Conservatives lost their deposit with just 2% of the vote, their worst ever by-election result.

It is only the second time that neither Labour nor the Conservatives have been one of the top two parties in a by-election contest, with the first time being the Rochdale by-election in 2024. With the two parties languishing  at 20% or less in the polls, the Conservative-Labour duopoly that has dominated post-war British politics looks to be over. The Conservatives have been unable to fend off the challenge from Reform, and now Labour’s traditional position as the main party on left of British politics seems to have been lost to the Greens. Keir Starmer’s tenure as prime minister will surely soon be over too. I suspect they are only keeping him on for now so that they can make him the fall guy for Labour’s local election results in May, which will almost certainly be catastrophic.

This result once again raises a question that many of us on the left have been grappling with recently, namely: should we throw in our lot with the Green Party? Indeed, many on the left have done just that already. And honestly, I don’t blame them. Zack Polanski’s leadership has transformed the Greens’ fortunes and turned them into a genuine electoral force. It should of course be pointed out that he has been given a huge helping hand in this by Starmer’s disastrous leadership of the Labour party. Still, Polanski and the Greens deserve a lot of credit. Compare and contrast with Your Party, the UK’s nascent socialist party, which has taken months to get off the ground and been mired with endless bickering and infighting.

However, there is good reason for us socialists to be circumspect about the Greens. In particular, they are a reformist party that is wedded to the existing capitalist system. This creates a contradiction as they supposedly stand on an environmentalist platform, but capitalism is fundamentally inimical to environmentalism. It is clear that the Green Party will not bring about a revolution and as such does not post any real threat to the ruling class. We can see this borne out in the way that Polanski has been given a relatively easy ride by the media (although that might change following this by-election result). Still, you might argue, does this really matter? After all, most socialists supported Labour under Jeremy Corbyn even though it was then also a reformist party.

The reason it matters, I think, is that there is a danger that the Greens absorb the huge latent demand there is for a genuine left-wing party then don’t do anything with it. We have already seen a glimpse of this with Green councillors in Sheffield refusing to back a no-cuts budget (see my recent blog post on this for more details). You get the impression that the Greens are more concerned with respectability than they are with bringing about genuine transformative change. This is obviously a problem as transformative change is what this country so desperately needs. Moreover, if people join the Greens expecting such change, and none comes about, this will inevitably lead to voter disillusionment and apathy.

So if we shouldn’t throw our lot in with the Greens, who should we throw it in with? The obvious answer is Your Party. As already mentioned, this party has not got off to the most auspicious start. They have at least managed to elect a leader now, namely Jeremy Corbyn. I was slightly disappointed by this as I was hoping that Zara Sultana would get the job, but hopefully it will at least put an end to the infighting. It is also quite satisfying, not to mention quite funny, to see Corbyn back as leader of a political party after everything the establishment did to try and get rid of him. Given the obvious machinations that have been going on behind the scenes in Your Party, however, I am not optimistic about its prospects of becoming a major transformational force in British politics.

The problem that the Green Party and Your Party have in common is that they are both being controlled from the top down. As such, they can never be truly democratic and can therefore never by truly socialist. Rather than backing one of these established parties, I think we should focus our efforts on building our own party which is controlled from the bottom up. One party that is being built in this way is the Socialist Party (formerly Militant), of which I am a member. It is only by building a party which is controlled from the bottom up that we can create a truly democratic, socialist party that puts people before profits and can genuinely transform our society.