Collective action
The Left in Britain needs annual conferences to assemble an electoral alliance
Since the election, reports have circulated about Collective, an organisation set up at arms-length from Corbyn by his close associates.
This summer, Collective endorsed a slate of left candidates at short notice – the election was expected to take place in winter.
Road Bloc has argued that the road to socialism in Britain runs through a parliamentary majority committed to a left wing programme and the establishment of a democratic republic through a constituent assembly.
To this end, a left bloc strategy is needed: challenging the right wing of Labour, defending its left wing from attacks from the right, and allowing the workers’ movement to have independent representation from that which is cultivated and funded by the ruling class to block progress.
Collective isn’t going to become the new party in the short term but it could end up as an enduring electoral alliance for that purpose.
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The electoral blockage
Without a change in the voting system for the UK parliament, most organised and class-conscious workers in most of the country will continue to orient towards the Labour Party as the path of least resistance. They will try to shore up its left wing against its right and push the party as a whole to the left with pressure at its margins rather than make a clean break.
Creating a united challenge to the Labour Right in the form of a new mass party, one which aims to replace Labour as the main workers’ party if it continues to be led by the Labour Right, starts with an alliance of the left. The risk of another Tory government is real and it affects the confidence of workers who might otherwise take an independent position from the Labour Right. Our strategy has to be sensitive to this fact.
The best that can be achieved in altering the politics of this state, barring unexpected events, is a united left slate of candidates for the next UK general election. This will mean the broad left endorsing candidates who are standing for re-election.
The expectation we should have of Collective is that these comrades include others on the left in future meetings on an official basis, formalising and growing the alliance which it created for the 2024 general election. This could be done by allowing parties to affiliate to a coordinating committee.
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Opening up
The problem with continuing on an informal basis is that invitation and attendance becomes a matter of private ownership and control.
This private ownership is acceptable for taking initiative – it’s an inevitability, in fact – but enduring cooperation requires an explicit political basis.
And the common ownership and formalisation of alliances can’t continue to be a matter concerning small numbers of people, it has to be an enduring process that could potentially snowball.
A process of opening up comes with costs and risks but there’s no reason why Collective should not plan to hold annual motions-based delegate conferences starting in October 2025 at the latest.
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Conference call
There is a good reason to hold a delegate conference in terms of media representation in UK national politics.
If the Collective conference followed the annual conferences of Labour and the Greens, perhaps taking place over a weekend, then a sense of momentum could be generated. This would depend upon the diverse representation of organisations being carried over from the informal meetings and broadened even further.
The actual business of a founding conference would be minimal but integral to its public presentation. It would allow a majority to openly coalesce around an electoral strategy and enable the minority to express their dissent constructively.
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The balance of forces
A majority favouring an electoral alliance and a left-reformist common programme – allowing affiliated organisations to express their own views beyond this basic text – might include current participants. Added to this pole, if invited to participate and willing to get involved, would be a number of other small parties.
If the doors were thrown wide open to the left, a delegate conference would hear from a minority favouring the immediate creation of a unified party with a revolutionary programme.
It can be assumed that if allowed in and willing to take part, this minority might include a number of even smaller organisations, keen to press for their own conception of a party and programme suited to the working class.
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Founding conference fight
What would be the point of going through the motions like this?
At present, each organisation within the potential alliance is in a minority, imagining that it can go to the masses on its own and perhaps absorb all rivals along the way. With electoral work, this dream very quickly runs into reality. Cooperation is needed. Some have been trying to proceed in this manner previously, of course, before and alongside Collective: such as TUSC and Transform.
There would be advantages for all involved in a new and open unity process, should they be grasped in advance. The dignity of each organisation being represented as a component part of the process is one thing.
For a pro-alliance majority, it would deliver the kind of electoral front which they either want or are willing to give critical support.
For a pro-‘party now’ minority, it would offer the opportunity to make their case for the kind of programme and party which is needed by the working class.
It is better that this is done openly than a consensus emerge from behind closed doors with no public debates between rival organisations.
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Putting on a show
On day one, victory of the majority could still be a victory for the minority, particularly if the majority are set on maintaining the alliance over successive elections. Though their motions and amendments would be defeated for the most part, and their minimal representation on the executive committee might mean they are not in the driving seat of the alliance, the minority could use a continued intervention to reach a wider group of workers over time.
The majority would no doubt use its victory on the evening of the first day to express to the media – not only our media outlets but those of the bourgeoisie – that this new alliance is undertaking an electoral intervention, a degree of unity has been achieved.
On the second day, the majority could hold keynote speeches of the collective leadership, making the case for cooperation at a local level.
Instead of viewing the diversity of the left as a barrier to advancing, the leading figures and organisations of the alliance could embrace the chaos, using the spectacle of a big meeting of the left to gain attention.
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Practical considerations
More important than the media spectacle, there will need to be a plan in place for the May 2026 elections. This round of elections involves contests for the Welsh Senedd and Scottish Parliament, the London boroughs, Birmingham, and metropolitan local authorities elsewhere.
It will serve as a mid-term test for the Labour government – these are all areas in which the Labour vote should hold up if the party is delivering for its base. A report recently published by the Starmerite group Labour Together on this summer's election notes that 2026 is a deadline set by many voters for the new government to bring the change it had promised, after which it may be judged to be failing.
And this is a set of elections in which the Greens will be hoping to make significant gains. If the reds aren’t organised, there’s little incentive for the Greens to negotiate. This matters because the Greens have done deals at a local level with socialists to stand down candidates in reciprocal arrangements. If this can be done in elections to local councils, there’s no reason it can’t be done for parliamentary elections. There is an organised left within the Greens, after all.
Without coherence on the left, the main beneficiary of disillusioned class-conscious Labour voters in England will be the Greens, in Scotland it may be a revived SNP, and in Wales it could be a mix of the Greens and nationalists.
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Next steps?
The approach of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, re-elected as an independent after being purged by Starmer, is correct.
He is not rushing into the formation of a new party but developing a model of community organisation by holding regular assemblies in his constituency. In parliament, he is coordinating with the other leftwing independent MPs as the Independent Alliance – and with the new Green MPs and his comrades who are still sitting as Labour MPs.
Much will depend on whether any unions break with Labour’s leadership to such an extent that they join a new electoral formation. An obvious strategy of union leaders might be to attempt an initiative akin to We Deserve Better, perhaps called something like ‘The Union Vote’ – a seat-by-seat list of recommendations to trade unionists.
But there is no need for the broad left to wait for the MPs or the unions to challenge the right-wing Labour government before getting started with electoral coalition-building.
An annual motions-based delegate conference has to be the starting point.