On Not Joining The Workers Party

The Workers Party of Britain is obviously the party closest to my views, and it has an MP, elected under its banner. But I have not joined it, and I do not expect to. Proprietor-editing my magazine, which is cooking on gas, and directing my thinktank, which is also bubbling away nicely on the backburner, are at least initially going to be done more easily without a party affiliation.

Being able to slip in that I was not a member of the WPB is already proving useful in making the case for my many points of agreement with it. More profoundly, in the struggle for economic equality, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class, while in the struggle for international peace, the leading role belongs to those who suffer most from its absence, namely the working class and the youth.

Having one MP has entitled the Greens to two Peers. George Galloway once said live on air that he would accept a seat in the House of Lords if I did, although he has said more recently that he would never do so. Now, of course, he would have no need of one. But while it is possible that offers were made to people who were too precious to say yes, as if turning it down would make the whole thing go away, Jeremy Corbyn sent far too few of the Labour and wider Left to the red benches, where they would still have had decades left, so to speak.

One does hope that there will be no such bourgeois squeamishness here, since even one Workers' Peer could be a semipermanent organisational pole for the pro-Brexit and anti-woke Left, the latter aspect of which is already emerging as an important international trend both in academic and in activist circles. Indeed, George's remarkable reach has played no small role in making that so, and there is work to be done to keep it from falling into anti-industrial Malthusianism, of which it does sometimes show signs. The denial of a seat in the Upper House to the Workers Party would be a story in itself, like the denial to George of a place alongside two other one-MP parties in the 2015 General Election debates, as looks likely to be repeated this time, except that one of them is now a no-MP party.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. We have made a start.