Labour’s electoral defeat has set off a new race for leader, and a fervent debate about how the party should regain electoral success. But if the next leader wants to build long standing success for the Labour movement, they should look beyond Parliament.
Forget Tony Blair: if Labour want to build long-term success for socialism while regaining the trust of the working class the party should look to Tom Mann – a trade unionist from the party’s birth who believed that unions and co-operatives, not parliamentary seats, were the path to a socialist economy. Going forward, the party should seek to nurture a movement based around its unions, a new co-operative economy, and fighting hyper-individualism with community action. Not only will this do more to advance our economy towards socialism than any social democrat could achieve in five years, it could also re-instil the love of the labour movement and socialism among the working class.
The UK’s trade union movement has been in terminal decline since the 1980s, and our co-operative economy – businesses owned and managed by workers and customers – lags behind other developed nations. These are factors that should greatly concern the labour movement, and yet they don’t. Corbyn may have moved the party to the left, but the project remained obsessed with statecraft.
