This was first published in 2004, after years of debate about how to respond to the Blairite coup within Labour from the mid-1990s; and to electoral challenges to New Labour. A new intro puts it in the context of subsequent developments. Appendices reproduce AWL’s perspectives from 2010-11 and 2025 in detail. Starmer’s Labour has tacked to the right repeatedly, and faces increased electoral challenges from the left. Much has changed, yet parallels remain. Agree or disagree — read and debate it.
"The Trade Union Movement, New Labour, and Working-Class Representation" is a 2003-4 polemic against those who said that high-Blairite New Labour was not essentially different from Old Labour, plus a 2025 introduction. "Corbynism: what went wrong?" discusses how the Corbyn surge developed and how it crashed. "Debate on the unions and the Labour Party" is a 2009 discussion of whether the 2003-4 approach was then becoming outdated, plus a 2025 afterword.
Starmer’s Labour has tacked to the right repeatedly before and since the 2024 General Election.
Labour, since the trade unions founded it in 1900, was always a treacherous “bourgeois workers’ party”.
But the Blairite coup from the mid-1990s, raising the leadership high above the rest of the party and shrivelling the channels by which members and unions could exert pressure on them and fight for working class politics, qualitatively changed that. The leader’s office and clique, for all practical purposes, were now the party.
This pamphlet was first published in 2004, after five years of debate. Then, as now, we maintained our “epochal” struggle for the unions to fight Labour’s leadership within the Labour structures, through to a split as needed, and to founding a new working class trade union-based party. We simultaneously favoured immediate limited initiatives of supporting, where practicable, soundly based left wing or labour-movement electoral challenges to Labour in power.
This pamphlet’s new introduction puts the earlier debates into the context of subsequent developments. 2010 saw Labour replaced by a Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, and Ed Miliband elected as Labour’s leader following Brown’s resignation. This reprint includes our “perspectives” resolution from 2010 – a comprehensive assessment since 2004 of the developing situation, a decade and a half since the Blairite coup.
Corbyn was elected Labour’s new leader following the 2015 election defeat — for four years. This brought an influx of new and reinvigorated members, left wing policies, and the Labour right’s renewed offensive against Corbyn and the Labour left. Yet parallels remain between now and two decades ago. Any slight improvements in Party democracy under Corbyn left the fundamental results of the Blairite coup in place. Starmer’s new “New Labour” echoes Blairite policies. New or resurgent left electoral challenges seek to challenge Labour.
With a new introduction, there is much in this pamphlet for activists serious about the fight for independent working-class politics. Agree or disagree – read and debate it.
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