Why Left Unity?

David Wilson who is now the Left Unity organiser for Islington North reflects on the state of society that has led him to join up.

Our political system is built on massive corruption, obscene wealth in the hands of the 1%, racism at home, wars abroad and the deliberate rape and wastage of the earth’s dwindling resources. This is accompanied by, and necessitates, the steady impoverishment of millions of people as the welfare state is dismantled with ‘shock and awe’ attacks on the health service, jobs, pensions and benefits. The propaganda to cover all this is based on rich people paying rich people to tell middle class people to blame poor people.

Meanwhile, what do we get from the Labour Party? Ed Miliband’s father, Ralph, was right when he said that, “The belief in the effective transformation of the Labour Party into an instrument of socialist policies is the most crippling of all illusions to which socialists in Britain have been prone,” and went on to add, “… On the contrary, what it requires is to begin preparing the ground for the coming into being of an alternative.” His own sons are evidence of how right he was. One, a war criminal and the other ordering Labour MP’s to abstain on the government’s job-seekers bill and telling us that austerity policies would continue under a labour Government.

I am in my 60s and have spent my lifetime being told, “hold your nose and vote Labour.” We need a new political party of the Left to bring together those who wish to defend the welfare state and present an economic alternative to austerity. We need to build the broadest possible resistance to this government and this requires giving voice to those who have felt they had no way of expressing their anger and frustration. Labour Party members who left over the Blair wars and privatisation programmes, those who have not been involved in politics before, but are feeling the effects of the government’s cuts, those who have been involved in left-wing politics, but have retreated into isolation and despair.

Together, we must resist the attacks we’re facing and build a society in which the resources are owned and managed democratically. In other words we should place the Labour Party’s abandoned Clause 4 at the centre of our programme and campaign for its implementation; a “community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few; where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe and where we live together freely, in a spiirt of solidarity, tolerance and respect.”  

This government rules without mandate. They had the support at the last election of one in seven of us and many of those who voted for the Lib Dems didn’t vote for the policies of this government. This means that their attempts to push ahead with austerity against the will of a large proportion of the population will have to rely on force to deal with dissent. Left Unity will have to be a party prepared to stand its ground, offer solidarity to the distressed and fight for a future, without which none of us have a future.

I am supporting Ken Loach in his appeal to set up Left Unity. In his words, “We have to learn to live together, because we are on a planet where the resources are finite. We are using them up at a rate we can’t sustain. We have mass unemployment. We have great poverty in our country and in other countries. We have to work together.”