TORY jockeying for the top job takes place as 15,000 ambulance workers start balloting for pay strikes and the National Association of Head Teachers warns nine in 10 schools could run out of money by the start of the next school year.

We have ongoing national disputes across mail, rail and telecoms, a national higher education ballot result due tomorrow, ballots spreading across the health and education sectors.

This empowered, confident movement increasingly has the profile and reach to influence national policy.

That is the message workers can deliver with the biggest possible turnout for next weekend’s November 5 demonstration organised by the People’s Assembly, a rally combining core industrial demands (cut profits, not wages) with linked political ones such as nationalisations.

A debate has arisen on the left between those keen to press the case for an immediate general election and those pointing out the deeply reactionary character of the current Labour leadership and the folly of trusting it to resolve this crisis in working-class people’s favour.

But a general election is a key democratic demand right now. 

This is not primarily because the Tory Party is planning its second internal coronation in a row without going to the people. It is because the current government clearly lacks popular support or legitimacy: it has reneged on the promises of investment and levelling up made in 2019, it has made choices to prioritise the markets and the rich that are causing extreme suffering, and it is continuing an extraordinarily wide-ranging assault on democratic rights for which it has no mandate.

Public campaigning to put these choices to the people should focus on this nightmarish picture and the need to do something about it. The process itself can build understanding of the anti-democratic character of the British state and the need to hold elected politicians to account, insights that would be as key to confronting a Labour government as a Conservative one.

For that is what the labour movement would need to do — confront any incoming government, whatever the result of an election.

The last morning of last week’s TUC Congress saw a riotous strike rally at which union leaders warned in the starkest terms what is at stake if workers lose the industrial struggles currently raging. 

The mood was completely different in the hall later when Keir Starmer emphatically distanced himself from strikes, saying it was not his job to support striking workers. Yet he was assured from the top table he had “the support of the whole trade union movement.”

Decisions since, including the blocking of a Milton Keynes councillor who rose to prominence as a strike leader at TGI Friday’s from standing as an MP, confirm Starmer’s deep hostility to organised labour.

That is not a reason to ignore what is happening at Westminster, but to put the labour movement at the heart of the campaign for democratic change.

An election cycle dominated by strikes could itself be radicalising, with polls showing majority support for striking workers which is only likely to grow as the strikes spread across more sectors and people in every community get to know people involved.

The Tories have very strong motives for avoiding an election and there is no guarantee demanding one will bring it about. But failing to do so risks widening the divorce between Westminster politics and industrial militancy and reduces pressure on MPs and councils (Labour and otherwise) to reckon with the strike wave.

Elements in the unions prepared to settle for Starmer’s measly and duplicitous offers need challenging. “Tories Out” demands do not mean suspending criticism of his internal witch-hunt or failing to challenge Labour candidates about it. 

But neither should we feel that who sits at Westminster is irrelevant to us and sit out the political crisis rocking Parliament. It is a time to intensify the struggle on all fronts.