What’s the point of the Socialist Campaign Group?

The future of the Labour Left in the UK parliament

Is the Socialist Campaign Group useless? Many former Labour members, enthused by the time that the SCG led the parliamentary party, will express that opinion.

The frustration is that, for the most part, SCG MPs keep their heads down and don’t take up an open and public fight against Starmerism in the same way the Labour Right did against Corbynism. In response to their candidate not winning the 2020 leadership contest, younger SCG members even remained in the shadow cabinet. Since then, they have all either been sacked or quit in protest at the policy positions of Starmer.

But the SCG could be at the core of a new mass workers’ party, perhaps formed as early as in the course of the next parliament should the unions break with Labour in the event of electoral reform being introduced, or – perhaps most likely – they will form part of a left bloc of MPs able to articulate elements of a left-wing programme and vote against policies of austerity, privatisation and war.

Why don’t they kick up a fuss?

It must have been obvious to the older heads in the SCG that Starmer was not a continuity candidate. His leadership pledges have now been deleted from his website, but for many years they remained online as a reminder of what he had said to Labour’s membership to get elected.

It has to be recalled that Britain’s ruling class has a preferred form of legislature and it isn’t a parliament elected by universal suffrage: the bourgeoisie would much rather have an appointed body like the House of Lords. Their preferred model of organisation is the capitalist firm in which equity invested determines voting power.

For Britain’s ruling class – and those who do their bidding in the labour movement – democratic processes are unfortunate concessions which have to be circumvented as much as possible rather than an integral part of how social should function.

A parliamentary delegation held to account solely by organised workers is an intolerable situation for the ruling class. Even if Labour’s programme merely involves deals between Labour politicians and trade union leaders to introduce reforms which would leave in place the constitutional order.

Usually, this concession to the masses is overcome by the ruling class having their own faction in control of Labour Party, its right wing. The leading Labour Right members depend upon the bourgeoisie for their advancement after parliament, local government, or working for the party’s bureaucracy – seats in the Lords, consultancies, directorships, book deals, and so on.

But the ideas of “moderate Labouism” do exist separately and spontaneously at the base of the party, arising from reformist consciousness and reinforced in advertising-funded and corporate-controlled media outlets. This is why it is not necessary (most of the time) for the Labour Right to operate as an open faction at every level of the party, undertaking political education in its tradition and endorsing candidates on that explicit basis against the left.

Members of the SCG are acutely conscious of this. They saw what happened to the Militant tendency MPs who were purged on grounds which the Labour Right could have used against the Tribune group at its height in the 50s and 60s. (The Tribunites operated as an effective faction in parliament, with collective discipline. A ‘party-within-a-party’ much as the Militant tendency was but without an explicitly revolutionary programme or international affiliations.)

And the SCG went through the Corbyn years in leading positions in the party, sitting on the front benches with the prospect of occupying ministerial office. They experienced the unprecedented establishment backlash to a leftwing Labour leadership. And they have seen the former leader purged from the parliamentary party by Starmer.

So what kind of faction is this?

To join the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs, you have to be a Labour MP in the first place. It thus functions as a parliamentary caucus, it is a faction without an extra-parliamentary membership which can have any influence over its agenda – and this existence without collective discipline from below has prevented Labour Left members collectively determining how to deal with Starmerism.

The SCG does not have local branches, does not make endorsements in the selection of council or parliamentary selections, and its public statements are not always signed by all of its members.

But that is not to say it is useless to the broader workers’ movement. SCG MPs are the most assertive and reliable defenders of the trade unions and the left-wing programme which most unions have adopted on progressive taxation, public ownership, a state-led investment strategy, and opposition to austerity.

Many members of the SCG go further than economism and argue for democratic demands that the unions raise, such as for electoral reform to give proportional representation to voters' preferences in parliament.

The major blunder of the Labour Left when it was in control of the party between 2015-2020 was the failure to re-introduce “mandatory re-selection” (rebranded during this period as “open selection”). This would have created an automatic selection contest for each Labour candidate during a parliamentary term, putting pressure on Labour MPs to stick with the party’s programme and its election manifesto.

Understanding why they (and the left trade union leaders) ducked this battle involves a leap from viewing them as completely self-interested to having a more nuanced take on the incentives at work and not writing off in advance the prospect of cooperation to advance the goals of the broader workers’ movement.

Raynerism

Many who have left the party in disgust at Starmer’s abandonment of a left-wing programme – and are vocal about it – will tell you that they believe at most the SCG should quit the party and stand against Labour in the general election or, at the very least, be vocal about their opposition as a bloc.

But there is another reason for the SCG not taking this course of action. It isn’t just that there is currently a lack of strong union interest in a new mass workers’ party and an inhibiting factor in the absence of a proportional voting system which would allow a new party to sustain the Labour Left MPs…

Unlike every other member of the shadow cabinet, deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner cannot be sacked by Starmer. It is possible that he has not purged the SCG MPs all in one go (as it is reported that he was privately advised to by Tony Blair at the World Economic Forum in Davos, of all places) because this would lead to an immediate showdown with affiliated unions, risking party finances even further ahead of a general election.

In this respect, the SCG is in the vanguard of the affiliated trade unions, which have through the “New Deal for Workers” negotiated a package of reforms to be implemented in the first hundred days of a new Labour government. This is Rayner’s policy agenda and her power within the party comes with the fact that she’s the highest ranking representative of the broader workers’ movement.

Instead of purging the whole Left faction in parliament, the Labour Right has gone with salami slices, suspending the whip from Labour MPs on a case-by-case basis. On matters of Atlanticism, Labour’s loyalty to the British state’s vassal status to the American empire, the Right has been particularly eager to enforce discipline.

It seems likely that the private strategy of the SCG is to remain in place to act as the Praetorian guard in the event there is a leftish Labour leader in future, and until then act as the guard of proletarian interests in the Labour Party by being willing to defy the rightwing leadership and vote for progressive policies in parliament.

What does any of this have to do with socialism?

Isn’t Labour a social democratic party? Isn’t it reformist, revisionist, and fit for imperialism? Yes, it is all of these things. But it remains a bourgeois workers’ party affiliated to trade unions and attracting the support of class conscious workers, even if only as a lesser evil than the Tories. And the modest reforms to employment rights contained within the New Deal for Workers would be a step forward, practically and symbolically, if implemented.

Socialism is best understood as a transition period in which the political rule of the capitalist class has been overthrown by and for the working class and its allies. It follows from this that for socialism to endure, the working class cannot be excluded from exercising political power. The form of state that the working class requires is a democratic republic in which people are free to organise and hold representatives to account.

Breaking the political power of the state-monopoly capitalist class which rules Britain will involve the formation of a broad democratic anti-monopoly alliance of millions, centred around the organised working class in its unions, co-operatives, and parties.

If Britain is to embark on the road to socialism, there will have to be a legislative majority which can be directed against the interests of the state-monopoly capitalist class in upholding the old regime. For a left government to survive efforts at counterrevolution, there will have to be a constituent assembly to re-establish state power on the basis of a democratic republic. Labour will either have to be eclipsed by a new mass workers’ party, or it will have to be transformed under a left leadership, if the working class is to take power.

The SCG doesn’t have a programme outlining this perspective, but many of its members do gesture towards it. And its co-thinkers among ordinary party members organised in Momentum certainly have a much more coherent assessment of what is meant by socialism.

We cannot write off the SCG MPs or those who remain part of the Labour Left. In challenging the Labour Right electorally, those on the left including the CPB and TUSC have taken the correct approach of not standing against the Labour Left MPs.

This approach needs to be maintained as it demonstrates to the labour movement that these challenges are principled, having a programmatic origin, and do not foreclose future co-operation on this principled basis.