Communist Platform supporters Jack Conrad and Yassamine Mather proposed the following motion to the Left Unity National Council meeting in Birmingham on February 20. It was overwhelmingly defeated, having received only their votes. On this basis comrades Conrad and Mather announced the dissolution of Communist Platform and our withdrawal from LU.
The CPGB, and Communist Platform supporters, have always thought that the idea dominant in Left Unity that there was a large political space to the left of Labour for a ‘broad party’ on a broadly left-Labourite platform and organisational principles was illusory. Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in the Labour leadership election blew up this illusion. Under the circumstances, the only possible future for Left Unity would be to build itself as an instrument of Marxist regroupment, on political and organisational principles which represent a clear alternative to Labourism; and to pose in relation to Labour the question of breaking the system of bans and proscriptions, in order to turn the Labour Party into a united front of the whole workers’ movement.
Since Corbyn’s victory a part of Left Unity’s members, including leading comrades, have ‘voted with their feet to leave LU and join Labour ’. Those who remain have been unwilling to address seriously the complete falsification of their perspective by the events in the Labour Party. It has become increasingly clear that they will never be willing to do so. The rejection of our motion by the NC – in the absence of any alternative proposal for serious rethinking – shows this clearly.
We remain of the view that what is needed is the struggle for a real communist party; and that simply joining Labour as Corbyn supporters or “entryism” is not a sufficient perspective. But the idea that Left Unity can hang on and at some point in the future sweep up disillusioned ex-Corbynistas is nonsense. By its refusal to rethink its perspective when its political analysis was flatly falsified, Left Unity has condemned itself to permanent irrelevance.
