Since being elected to the Green Party leadership, Zack Polanski has impressed people who want a left-wing alternative to Labour. Most recently, his response to a supposed “jibe” has gone down particularly well:
Polanski has been making an effort to speak to anyone who’ll speak to him (including the Canary).
Recently, Polanski appeared on Pod Save the UK with hosts Nish Kumar and Coco Khan. In the clip in question, Khan notes that Zarah Sultana said she’s in a ‘socialist party’ when asked what the difference between Your Party and the Green Party is. As Sultana and Polanski clearly get along well, we’re sure she wasn’t gunning for the man, and Polanski didn’t come out fighting. Offering a thoughtful response, he said:
Do we shout that we’re a socialist party regularly? No, because I think most people don’t know what that means, and you switch people off. So instead, I talk about lowering bills, about the public ownership of public services, and taxes on multimillionaires and billionaires. These are all socialist policies, and they’re all embedded and deep within the Green Party.
Keir Starmer says that the Labour Party under his leadership all feel a small part of Scunthorpe.Keir Starmer explains that he feels no shame or guilt benefitting personally from gifts from the rich and powerful while insisting on policies of severe austerity causing suffering and death.
In one week more than 700,000 people have signed up to the yourparty.uk website to support Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s initiative to build a new left party. The party doesn’t yet exist, and so there is not yet a membership fee. Nonetheless this figure shows huge enthusiasm for the party. It tops the highest membership in Labour’s history: achieved when Jeremy Corbyn led it. It has reached as many as the current membership of Labour, Tories, Liberals and Reform combined.
A year ago, in the immediate aftermath of the 2024 general election, the Socialist Party pointed out the extremely shallow base of support for Starmer’s Labour, elected by just 9.7 million voters, 20.1% of the electorate, the lowest share for any incoming government since the first ever election fought under universal (male) suffrage in 1918. We drew a contrast with the votes Labour received when Corbyn was leader, pointing particularly to the 12.88 million his anti-austerity manifesto received in 2017.
Unsurprisingly, these basic facts were not being reported in the establishment media at the time because, as we explained, “the capitalist class wants to boost the authority of the incoming Labour government hoping that, despite its very shallow social base, it will still be able to implement a programme in the interests of the elites. They are also desperate to cement the lie that Corbyn’s policies were unpopular. Despite their best efforts, however, this government will be rocked by mass working-class struggles against it, which will also inexorably find a political expression.” (Socialism Today July 2024)
Just 12 months later and the potential power of that political expression has become palpable. Even just the promise of a new party has lifted the confidence of all those suffering pay restraint, cuts to public services and benefits, and watching with horror the unimaginable misery being suffered by Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli state. While our chins have been lifted, those of the capitalist class and their political representatives have dipped. Polls even before a party was announced showed that 18% of people would consider voting for a party led by Corbyn, and that it would come first among young people.
Labour loyalists are desperately beating the drum of ‘vote for us or get Reform’, but it is not working. Too many people can see that, if the workers’ movement supports this Labour government for the rich it will be a gift to Reform, who will be able to falsely pose as the representatives of the ‘little people’. If, on the other hand, a mass workers’ party is built with a fighting, anti-austerity programme, it would cut across Reform. One recent Merlin Strategy poll gave an indication of how – despite all of the slanders of the capitalist press – Reform voters still perceive Corbyn as representing something different to the establishment politicians. It found 67% of them think he is for working people, 64% believe he is honest and principled.
Protesters march with a banner that reads “Popular Front”, during a demonstration in Marseille, southern France, June 15, 2024
HUNDREDS of thousands of people marched against the far right in Paris and other French cities at the weekend.
Trade unionists and supporters of the quickly assembled Popular Front — an alliance of left forces announced on Friday to contest snap elections called by President Emmanuel Macron — chanted “Liberty for all, equality for all, fraternity for all” in a variant of France’s famous revolutionary motto.
Police estimated 250,000 marchers through a rain-swept Paris on Saturday and deployed more than 20,000 officers to watch them. Thousands marched in dozens of other locations, with placards denouncing not just Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally — which leads in polls for the first round of parliamentary elections — but Mr Macron’s anti-refugee legislation. Cries of “Free Palestine” echoed through the streets.
The Popular Front brings together the revolutionary left in Jean-Luc Melenchon’s France Unbowed and the French Communist Party with the Greens and the Socialist Party. Its founding statement calls for “rupture” with the status quo in the first 100 days of government and declares that “the arrival of the National Rally in power is no longer inevitable.”
The National Health Service is under attack as never before. In this feature, a GP from north-west England looks at the effect of a huge government push for privatisation while nurse Claire Job looks at the predatory actions of the pharmaceutical industry.
The NHS watchdog has accused a privately run urgent care centre of putting patients’ health at risk by using receptionists with minimal medical training to assess how unwell arrivals were.
A Care Quality Commission (CQC) report has criticised the operation of the urgent care centre at Croydon hospital in south London, which is run by Virgin Care. CQC inspectors found the centre was in breach of four basic standards of care and have told Virgin Care to outline by next week the remedial action it is taking.
The CQC’s report, based on inspections of the centre last July and September, concluded that “care and treatment was not planned and delivered in a way that was intended to ensure people’s safety and welfare”.
MPs have come to despise 38 Degrees for clogging up their inboxes with emails from constituents. They need to get used to it – because this model of campaigning-by-email-bombardment isn’t going away.
For an organisation only set up in 2009, 38 Degrees has notched up its fair share of victories. It forced the coalition government’s first big U-turn, on the forests sell-off. It called for more free school meals – and Nick Clegg duly announced they were being rolled out for all infants. It raised enough cash to pay for the judicial review which successfully challenged health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s plans to shut down key services at Lewisham hospital.
“It’s not often you can say ‘I took the government to court and won’, but that’s what thousands of 38 Degrees members could say last year,” its executive director David Babbs tells me. We’re seated at a meeting table in the middle of the 38 Degrees office in central London. From here, the small team of around 15 staff coordinate the activities of its 2.2 million members. Compare that to the 193,000 members of the Labour party – and the 130,000 Tory party members – and you get a sense of the scale of the operation.
