Open Letter to the Socialist Party for its "Campaign for a New Workers' Party" conference, 19 March 2006.

Dear comrades: YES, WE NEED a new workers' party - a party rooted in working-class struggles; speaking up for the working class in politics; organising, and recognised by, at least a large section of the working-class activists in the unions and communities; providing a democratic and open framework to debate, develop, and promote socialist ideas.

From wanting a new workers' party to establishing one is, however, a long road. Essentially, it is the road that Marxists in Britain have been struggling to travel for over 120 years now.

Any serious socialist group wants to build a new workers' party. Everything we do - recruiting, publishing, agitating, educating, organising - is geared to that end. "Campaign for a new workers' party" is not some special initiative or tactic. It is simply what we are. The Alliance for Workers' Liberty is a "campaign for a new workers' party". The Socialist Party is another.

Can we do more towards the aim of a new workers' party than the regular day-to-day work of agitating, educating, and organising for working-class politics? Are there special steps forward we can make? That the 19 March conference could decide on?

Yes, there are. Where a number of different socialist and working-class organisations all want to create a workers' voice in politics, bringing them together in a flexible but united structure can increase their impact, and bring us a whole jump nearer establishing a proper workers' party.

In Britain today, that means two things: uniting as many of the socialist groups as possible, as extensively as possible; and rallying the trade unions dissatisfied with Blair-Brown.

Today's conference could mark a big step forward by deciding on four campaigns:

1. Work in the Labour-affiliated unions to push them to assert themselves politically in the Labour structures (pass motions for working-class causes, fight for their implementation, oppose Blair-Brown as leader, de-sponsor MPs who flout labour-movement principles, etc.)

2. Work to get more unions to affiliate to the Labour Representation Committee, and those already affiliated to step up their active involvement.

3. Join together with other socialist organisations in day-to-day street campaigning on issues where we have agreement (e.g. state pensions); seek to expand that joint activity wherever new issues present the possibility, and accompany it with joint discussions and forums.

4. Join together with other socialists to promote union-backed working-class socialist candidates in selected areas against Blair-Brownite New Labour candidates plainly alien to the labour movement.

AWL values our joint work with the Socialist Party, the Alliance for Green Socialism, the Socialist Unity Network, and the reconstituted Socialist Alliance in the Socialist Green Unity Coalition, which stood 30 candidates in the 2005 general election and will stand some dozens in the 2006 local government elections. We want to see the Socialist Green Unity Coalition move forward to do non-electoral united campaigning, too, and as a start we have proposed a joint campaign on state pensions - for a big increase, for index-linking to earnings, and for no increase in the pension age.

We also welcomed and tried to build on the Socialist Alliance of 2001-3 as a step for left unity. We regret that the Socialist Party withdrew from that Alliance in December 2001. If the SP had stayed in - or even if it had participated in the Alliance more fully when it was in - then the SWP would have more difficulty trashing it, as they did in their turn to George Galloway and the "Respect" alliance from early 2003. We would be in a better position now to win over SWP members to the idea of uniting with working-class socialists rather with shady opportunist MPs and Islamic fundamentalists.

At present, bulking out the Socialist Green Unity Coalition is the best way to expand left unity. We urge the Socialist Party to turn in that direction.

Even with the best progress, however, the Socialist Green Unity Coalition will still be something much smaller than a real workers' party. The decisive force is the tens of thousands of trade-union activists who abhor Blair but at present see no convincing new political way to go.

Whatever theoretical analyses and diagnoses have been made in the past, it is clear now that a battle is developing within the Labour Party between its "New Labour" leadership - with their off-the-books loans from millionaires, their links with people like Silvio Berlusconi, and their think-tanks - and its trade-union base. The latest Labour MPs' revolt over Blair-Brown's plans for schools shows a growing rift. Although Blair and Brown are no different politically from Kennedy or Campbell, plainly the Labour Party is still something different from a Liberal-Democratic Party where switching policy to favour banning public-service strikes, or privatise the Post Office, causes no fundamental conflict.

At the September 2005 Labour Party conference the unions defeated Blair and Brown on pensions, the health service, council housing, anti-union laws, and keeping the Post Office public.

Then the New Labour leaders said they would ignore the conference decisions, and the union leaders did nothing. New Labour has followed with the proposal from Industry Minister Alan Johnson to cut the unions' vote in the Labour Party from 50% to 15%.

New political forces are built through struggle, not through withdrawal. The working-class interest can be asserted in politics through pushing the unions to continue the fight started in September 2005 - not by voluntarily walking away from it.

Whether the left is strong enough, and rank-and-file confidence and combativity sufficient, to push the unions into a fight, we do not know. We do know that if the left and the rank and file are not strong enough, then the idea of an easy short-cut by way of surfing on today's widespread working-class disillusion with politics in general is a false one.

A campaign to make the unions fight politically already exists, in the Labour Representation Committee set up in 2004. It has four unions affiliated - the FBU, the RMT, and the Labour-affiliated CWU (post and telecom union) and Bakers. It has also received support from the leaders of the leftish unions not affiliated to the Labour Party, Jeremy Dear of the NUJ, Paul Mackney of NATFHE, and Mark Serwotka of PCS.

The LRC is as yet weak. In large part that is because the left is weak in the working class. There is no magic way round that, outside building up organisation, confidence, and awareness at rank-and-file level. For sure, disaffiliation is not a magic way round.

To support the LRC is not necessarily at all to accept the theory that the Labour Party can be smoothly "reclaimed", or to ignore the big changes that Blair has made in Labour structures, putting heavy lids on internal democracy and squeezing almost all political life out of the Constituency Labour Parties. Alan Johnson's move to cut the union vote from 50% to 15% indicates that if a significant body of unions does start a serious political fight, then the Blair-Brown team will choose to split (maybe linking up with the Lib Dems) rather than submit. But that split - coming from a fight rather than individual left-wing unions peeling off one by one in disgust - would, at the opposite pole to Blair and Brown, produce the beginnings of a real new workers' party, based on the more combative unions.

Unfortunately, up to now the Socialist Party has promoted a different policy in the union, arguing for them to disaffiliate, or in Unison to vote against having a political fund at all. The implicit assumption is that if the unions can be disaffiliated, one by one, then that will make it easier to regroup them later in a new workers' party.The assumption is untrue. A lot of white-collar unions are not affiliated to the Labour Party. They are generally less, not more, political and combative than the Labour-affiliated unions. Since the Fire Brigades Union disaffiliated voluntarily, and the rail union RMT was expelled by the Labour leadership, they have become less, not more, active politically.

We welcome your initiative to organise discussions around building a new workers' party. We urge you to recognise that your disaffiliation policy is an outdated one, based on over-hasty and over-optimistic calculations in the 1990s, and adopt a more combative policy in line with today's realities.

In solidarity,

Workers' Liberty