AN unavoidable consequence of Keir Starmer’s evisceration of the left in the Labour Party, with an authoritarian brutality unprecedented in the party’s history, is the resurrection of ideas of forming a new party of socialists.

That is a well-trodden road. The novelty today lies not only in the undemocratic atrocities of the Starmer regime — the vetoes, proscriptions, purging and blocking — but the background of the great groundswell of support for radical policies of the Corbyn years. That is a movement now looking for a home.

Does this make a new socialist party viable? There is a heavy legacy of failure to overcome.

Let’s do a quick recap of such efforts since the dawn of New Labour: first up was the Socialist Labour Party (SLP). It was launched in 1995 in protest against Tony Blair’s decision to scrap clause four of the party’s constitution, the one committing it to common ownership of the means of production.

Despite being led by Arthur Scargill, the greatest trade union leader of his time, the SLP secured little traction. Most workers were more interested in ending the Tories’ 18-year rule of misery than they were in clause four.

In a development that was to bedevil nearly all left-of-Labour initiatives, the SLP was infested by ultra-left factions. One Trotskyist group purged the next, until the last one standing was in turn done in by Maoists, duly expelled in their turn. Then there was almost no-one left.

Next there was the Socialist Alliance, an electoral front for far-left groups, including the two largest, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Socialist Party. It generated some enthusiasm but not so many votes and was destabilised by the fact that the SWP had more members than the others aggregated.

The “war on terror” provided the coup de grace, since the position taken by the various groups in the alliance ranged from proclaiming “victory to the Taliban” through to prioritising attacking Islamism. The SWP, central to the Stop the War Coalition, left the rest behind.

More successful for a period was the Scottish Socialist Party, which thanks to a charismatic leader in Tommy Sheridan and a PR electoral system secured several seats in the Scottish Parliament. It fell apart in a baroque story involving Sheridan, a sex club in Manchester and allegations of perjury. It has not recovered.

Respect provides the temporary exception to the rule. It benefited from the leadership of an experienced politician in George Galloway, a peerless platform orator expelled from Labour by Tony Blair in revenge for his anti-war campaigning. It also drew considerable strength from its organic connection to the mass anti-war movement, among Muslim communities especially.

Galloway won re-election to Parliament under the Respect banner in 2005, and other constituencies were only narrowly missed, while a number of local councillors were elected, particularly in London’s East End. It was the best left-of-Labour electoral performance since the high days of the Communist Party in the 1940s.

Respect fell apart in another painful dispute turning on different strategies on the part of Galloway and his supporters and the SWP, its two main components. A misallocated cheque was also involved.

It enjoyed a brief second coming when Galloway sensationally won the Bradford West by-election in 2012, but this came to little, its second going triggered by an unedifying argument over Julian Assange’s alleged sexual conduct. Bradford West returned to Labour in 2015.

Left Unity was launched in 2013 to provide Britain with the sort of party then prospering elsewhere in Europe — Podemos in Spain, Die Linke in Germany and above all Syriza in Greece, before its epic betrayals. This was not the first time that the British left has tried to transpose experiences from abroad without success.

The Socialist Party has flogged a scarcely breathing horse dubbed the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (Tusc) for some years, with a pause during the period of Corbyn’s Labour leadership. It is still in the field attracting derisory votes, but has lost the affiliation of the RMT union.

Also extant is the Workers Party, a 2019 joint venture of Galloway and the Maoists last seen besetting Scargill in the SLP 20 years previously.  

Galloway polled well in the Batley by-election in 2021, but has since been abandoned by the Maoists in what must count as the least surprising split in a story replete with them. It seems borderline moribund and its pitch — “for the workers, not the wokers” — is borderline Daily Express.

Can any general lessons be drawn from this sorry narrative? First, all these projects lacked the roots and social weight required to overcome their lack of parliamentary representation at the outset.  

They assumed that the frustrations of active socialists reflected objective changes in working-class sentiment. They over-relied on a single personality, a single faction or a volatile combination of them.

More fundamentally, they sought that long-promised but never-visited political land lying between social democracy and Marxism-Leninism, between reform and revolution. In that sense, the multiple failures represent aspects of the contemporary crisis of social democracy.

The main parties of the centre-left seldom propose the serious transformation of society any longer. This creates obvious space for those on the left who do without necessarily giving them the wherewithal.  

The twin issues of agency — how can the working class so reconstitute itself as to embody a social alternative; and method — how can the transition to socialism be effected a century after the October Revolution, a century in which the peaceful road has never yet led to socialism; remain unresolved.

Still, Corbynism has awakened a political hunger which is clearly going unsatiated. Simply raining on a new party parade is insufficient. The idea, floated in these pages, of some alliance of independent socialist candidates coming together is interesting. It avoids overegging the pudding at present.

There are already various such potential candidates, from Jeremy Corbyn to Jamie Driscoll, and any number of councillors. They are being driven out from Labour, rather than having proactively split. Labour’s right seem to be almost daring the left to make a move, so provocative is their behaviour.

Yet any new party seems most unlikely to attract the united backing of the trade unions. The vote against disaffiliation from Labour at the Unite conference is just the latest evidence of this.

That is not to say that trade unions any longer define the nature of the Labour Party. That is perhaps a 20th century reading of the issue as the changes wrought by New Labour have never been unwrought and unions’ own purchase on society has diminished. But they do provide social ballast not obviously accessible elsewhere.

These are perennial questions still begging an answer. It is not likely they will be addressed adequately ahead of the next election.  

It may be that the experience of Starmer in power, a continuation of neoliberal authoritarianism, allied to growing working-class militancy and the still-fresh memories of insurgent Corbynism will generate the required momentum (no pun) to make a new effort at socialist organisation sustainable.

The debate will surely develop. If one principle alone should inform it, it should be that it is more important to change the world tomorrow than make ourselves feel better today. There is no virtue in sugar-rush socialism.