The SWP and its "crisis of leadership"

There is a crisis of leadership in the Socialist Workers Party. Its leading body, the Central Committee (CC), described itself, even before January’s purge of its four most experienced members, as having “changed in recent years … it is a younger, less experienced body, and carries less political weight within the party than it once did, while also being somewhat more hands-on in directing the day-to-day operation of the party.” Maybe as a result, the SWP now seems to be thrashing around for a clear political direction: clinging to its key front, Stand Up to Racism, and looking to the milieu around Palestine solidarity, but without a clear perspective beyond “build the SWP”.

Attempts at building continuity in its leadership as its older generation that fell away have been hollowed out. The fallout from the disintegration of Respect in 2007 led to the group around Lindsey German and John Rees, which became Counterfire, leaving in 2009. The 2011-3 scandal over the SWP leadership’s use of the “party machine” to sideline charges against Martin Smith, national secretary and then a CC member, led to a big outflow of experienced members as well as younger ones. (And, of course, Smith himself eventually withdrew too).

By 2014, a much-reduced leadership had emerged round Alex Callinicos, long prominent, though mostly as a polished writer-up of ideas initiated by others, and “loyalist” organisers. The implosion of the SWP’s student work after 2013 limited recruitment. Some of the younger leaders who have emerged since came in as the children of aged SWP members, not as youngsters first attracted by campus activity.

Meanwhile, the SWP tried to put the 2013 crisis to rest. In April 2024, it finally issued an apology, admitting that it had failed the women who brought complaints.

Later that year, Amy Leather, a leading defender of Smith in 2011-3, stepped down from the CC. Charlie Kimber stood down as editor ofSocialist Worker, though he remained on the CC. None of that was publicly linked to 2013.

In the first pre-conference bulletin (PB) of October 2025, a largely unchanged CC slate was announced, with the remaining veterans of 2011-3 still in place. (In the SWP, each new CC is elected via a slate proposed by the outgoing CC. Workers’ Liberty has never had anything like that). Then PB3 in December announced that the four veterans, including Callinicos, would stand down from the CC to mark a break with the events of 2013.

It is hardly a clean break, because Alex Callinicos continues to write a regular Socialist Worker column which is, in effect, the SW “editorial” for thinking readers, the official “editorial” usually being just an exercise in rah-rah. And we don’t know whether it happened because Callinicos had just got old and tired, or because some person or group was pushing to take his place as the “theorist”.

Floundering

In any case it has left the SWP with a hollowed-out leadership, and floundering. At the January 2025 conference, the SWP launched the perspective that became Summit of Resistance/We Demand Change (WDC). In its own words, the SWP wanted to become “hegemonic on the radical left”. WDC was launched with a “Summit of Resistance” in London in March 2025, co-hosted with Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project.

The “summit” drew 2,000 people. But from the start the purpose of the exercise was unclear. The SWP first suggested it could launch an electoral front, then retreated. It announced that similar Summits of Resistance would be held across the country, but few appeared. It promised a “day of rage” when disability cuts came, but WDC actually organised nothing specific against those specific cuts. (That was left to Labour MPs and CLPs and disabled campaigners, who in the end pushed Starmer back).

When Corbyn was bounced by Zarah Sultana into announcing Your Party in July 2025, WDC was put into cold storage. But the SWP was no clearer about Your Party. In some areas it launched its own Your Party-supporting rallies, in competition with other “proto-branches”. Elsewhere it joined “proto-branches” more ecumenically. In many places it did little. The SWP had members expelled by the YP “office”, amidst great publicity, but made no effort to unite the YP left against the exclusions. Its YP activity quietly faded away.

The SWP limits written debate (except inside the CC, maybe? but no-one knows) to a three-month pre-conference period and three PBs. Even that debate lacks structure. There are motions, but then conference “commissions” absorb disagreement into vague formulations to be voted on. The SWP claims it has three months of debate, a decision, and then a period of testing the line in practice. In reality, the pre-conference period functions more like a sounding board: criticisms are registered, softened, and absorbed, rather than debated and clarified.

Labour movement

In the run-up to the January 2026 conference, leading SWP trade unionists Jess Edwards and Sean Vernell argued that workplace work had been deprioritised and poorly thought through; that opportunities around Palestine solidarity, anti-racism, and rep-level organisation were not receiving sufficient attention; and urged We Demand Change be revived as a focus for “welfare not warfare” agitation.

Workers’ Liberty disagrees with the politics of Edwards and Vernell. But at least they were thinking about how to develop a political fight inside the labour movement.

Edwards and Vernell gained no clear debate. The post-conference document records commissions duly endorsed by conference, but not a worked-out strategy. It declares an “urgent need for a left electoral challenge to Labour” and, even in January 2026, still looks to Your Party under “collective leadership, including both Corbyn and Sultana”. (By the time the document was published, the SWP had already, de facto, recognised that perspective was fantasy).

In the section of the post-conference document on “Turning the tide”, the SWP states that racism is the glue holding together the far right and motivating many of its voters. But its answer is that “this requires an anti-racist response” and that “our challenge is to present the anti-racist and anti-fascist movement as part of a viable alternative”. But how does that undo the glue? And how does a “love is back” Together Alliance march become a viable political alternative?

Workers’ Liberty argues that trade unions should organise their own anti-racist and internationalist work — drawing workers into activity through union structures, strengthening the rank and file, transforming the labour movement, and relating those outside the unions to it through labour-movement campaigns — instead of outsourcing it to NGO-like “fronts”. It is not that the SWP rejects that idea; it is rather that it seems incapable of debating it.

Since the collapse of any realistic hope that Your Party would become the electoral umbrella the SWP wanted, its politics have dissipated further. In Gorton and Denton it called for a Green vote as a holding position for the socialist Your Party it still hoped would emerge. When the Corbyn clique finally shot that fox, the SWP had no plan B.

In Makerfield (where the Greens had only a paper candidate) the SWP would not call for a Labour vote, the only vote that could stop Reform. Instead it said that many Burnham voters were an audience the anti-racist movement could tap into. And what was proposed? A picnic and Love Music Hate Racism events.

“Build the SWP” is the old reliable slogan, but much of the necessary infrastructure even for that — paper sales, street stalls, well-advertised public meetings, educationals — is in decay. Very often SWPers appear in public more as fix-it people for this or that “broad campaign” or front, or as trade-union functionaries, rather than as political socialists.

The old leadership machine has gone. The new one is thinner, less experienced, and more dependent on fronts whose only purpose is to funnel potential recruits towards the SWP, and which do not even serve that purpose. The result is not SWP hegemony on the left, or even, it seems, real SWP CC intellectual “hegemony” in the SWP. It is drift.