David Cameron has launched a highly personal attack on Jeremy Corbyn by saying that his mother would expect the Labour leader to wear a proper suit, do up his tie and sing the national anthem.

The prime minister made the remarks after a Labour MP shouted out in the Commons chamber that Mary Cameron should be asked about the NHS after she signed a petition opposing cuts to children’s centres.

The prime minister replied: “Ask my mother? I think I know what my mother would say. I think she’d look across the dispatch box and she’d say: put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem.”

Corbyn immediately hit back and cited his late mother, Naomi, a peace campaigner. He said: “Talking of motherly advice, my late mother would have said: ‘stand up for the principle of a health service free at the point of use’ because that is what she dedicated her life to, as did many people of her generation.”

The prime minister’s comments marked a new low in his attacks on Corbyn. Until now the prime minister has focused on what he regards as the folly of the Labour leader’s political beliefs, ranging from his support for unilateral nuclear disarmament to his equivocal response to questions about what the security forces should do in the event of a Bataclan-style attack in Britain.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/24/david-cameron-launches-personal-attack-on-jeremy-corbyns-appearance

This time, the main target was not Labour leader Corbyn but his right-hand man Seumas Milne (full disclosure: Milne has been a close friend of mine since the 1970s), the Labour Party’s director of communications and strategy.

The top line was – in the mouth of Sir Richard Dearlove, the disgraced former head of the British Iraq-War security services – that unless Corbyn ditched Milne, neither the US nor other “allied” countries would share information with the UK under a Corbyn premiership, which would thereby be rendered impossible. The implication was that the Privy Council would advise the Queen to select someone else instead of the winner of the election!

Milne – it was claimed over several thousand words in the paper – has effectively been a former Soviet and now Russian surrogate since the 1970s. Moreover, he is linked to “terrorist groups” which are themselves – in the words of the article – said to be Russian surrogates.

To call this fervid doesn’t do fever any justice. In 50 years of following British journalism (and many years writing a column for the Mail on Sunday), I have never seen more hallucinogenic ravings make it into print anywhere.

Milne is a scholar, a brilliant Oxford-trained intellectual who before serving nearly 30 years as an associate editor of the Guardian, worked for the BBC’s Andrew Neil at the Economist. He is the author of bestselling books that are still in print after three decades. His father, Alasdair Milne, was the director-general of the BBC. According to today’s newspaper though, Milne has been in the service (presumably unpaid as no Moscow gold is alleged) of the Kremlin since Oxford University, from Brezhnev through Andropov, Chernenko, Gorbachev and Putin. As allegations go, that’s a big one.

It is all, of course, arrant nonsense. And I speak as someone with close knowledge of his activities, beliefs and even travel plans throughout the decades in question. The writer David Rose, who made public (and several private) apologies for previous far more deadly flights of fancy in the run-up to the Iraq War. But such a track record merely enhances his employability with the Mail, known as the Forger’s Gazette since it was the sewer of choice for the security-services-fabricated ‘Zinoviev Letter’ that brought down the first Labour government nearly a century ago. The forgery is now acknowledged in the Official History of Dearlove’s own service.

That intelligence service – with its credibility in tatters after the Iraq-War fiasco – has now licensed its former head to try to kill the electoral chances of the Labour opposition. This illustrates that it has learned nothing about democracy in the past 100 years, or that it imagines the rest of us have forgotten what we knew.

Effectively, Richard Dearlove set out in the newspaper the conditions under which British Intelligence would tolerate a Corbyn Labour government in a way which they refused to tolerate the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald. It represents a very British coup.

Somehow it all recalled the words of Lady Astor dining at the Savoy when she was told the election results in 1945. “I’m afraid m’lady,” the maitre d’ told her, “Winston is out, it’s a Labour landslide.”

“A Labour landslide,” shouted her ladyship, “the country will never stand for it!”

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    By Dave Hill, Zhao Dingqi

Zhao Dingqi: You have been a member of the British Labour Party since 1961 and have long been involved in political activities and parliamentary elections as a member of the party, but you left 2004. Why did you choose to leave the party at that time? What do you think of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” and his “Third Way”?

Dave Hill: Yes, I was a Labour Party member for a long time, since my sixteenth birthday in 1961. I was a member between 1961 and 2004. In the 1960s and before then, the Labour Party was widely viewed among the populace and in the media as the party of the working class, the party that fought for social justice and redistribution of wealth and income. It was a classic social democratic party.

I was from/part of a working-class family—my dad was a carpenter; my mum a factory worker, dressmaking; and my two brothers, carpenters. After my parents’ divorce, when I was 13 or 14 we became poor, a poor, single-parent family: my mum and us three teenage boys.

For most of the twentieth century voting patterns in Western Europe were strongly related to social class. So, in the UK, most, but not all, working class families voted Labour.1 As a Labour Party activist from the age of 16, I fought many elections for Labour: two Parliamentary elections, one European Parliamentary election, and many municipal/Council elections. As for my theoretical and ideological trajectory, through the 1960s and ’70s I was a left social democrat, a “Tribunite,” interested in and influenced by Marxism, but not yet a Marxist.2

However, by the early 1980s—influenced by Marxist comrades and the milieu within my local Labour Party (it was pretty much controlled by the “Militant” tendency in the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s) and by Margaret Thatcher and her clear, procapitalist, class consciousness and policies (mass privatization and the weakening of trade union rights), I became a Marxist.3 I was a Marxist within the Labour Party, though not a member of any organized Marxist “entryist” group within Labour, which was, as I said, the major working-class party in Britain.4

In the early 1980s, I was leader of a group of nineteen Labour councilors on the East Sussex County Council.5 On the council Labour Group of Councilors, the two comrades who repeatedly, determinedly stood up for the working class were the two comrades who were members of Militant. Although I was never a member of Militant, I read Militant (the newspaper) and its successors for fifty years.6 I worked with them and admired their class-conscious policies such as “a Workers’ MP [Member of Parliament] on a Worker’s Wage”; indeed, that is the basis on which I fought the Parliamentary elections of 2010 and 2015. I very much supported Militant policies of nationalization of companies, with compensation to be paid only on the basis of proven need. The wealthy owners, major shareholders of privatized industries had “milked” those formerly private industries and grown fat on their profits for long enough at the expense of workers. So, I was quite happy with—and still support—that policy of expropriation with compensation paid only on the basis of “proven need.”

To return to the two Militant comrade councilors, I admired their zeal and commitment. For example, Militant members were prominent in supporting the coalminers in the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985, collecting money for the Miners’ Support fund and having coal miners who were picketing the local Shoreham Power Station and docks—harbor—stay over/lodge in their houses in Brighton.7

Members of Militant were expelled from the Labour Party in 1982 and in the years following.8Now, forty years later, I still work politically with some of the same comrades who were expelled or suspended from the Labour Party in the 1980s. We work together in the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) campaigning for socialist/Marxist candidates in municipal and national—Parliamentary—elections.9 In fact, I stood for Parliament for TUSC in 2010 and 2015 in my home city of Brighton and Hove and, a number of times, as recently as 2023, in local city council (that is, municipal) elections.10

I am currently involved in trying to bring together Marxists and left social democrats in United Front electoral formations, active in TUSC, in the Campaign for a Mass Workers’ Party (CMWP), local (Brighton) United Front campaigns, WhatsApp groups. Most recently, I was one of the organizers of the general election campaign for a socialist pro-Gaza ceasefire for Tanushka Marah, an anti-austerity candidate in my city, working with comrades from various small Marxist parties plus activists from campaigns such as Stop the War, Sussex Defend the National Health Service, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and other smaller informal groupings of socialists and activists—as well as many individuals never before involved in campaigning.

Incidentally, I am also involved—minimally—in Greek revolutionary Marxist politics. I am a member of the Central Athens branch of OKDE-Spartakos, part of the wider revolutionary Marxist coalition, Antarsya.11 I work in Greece regularly and give talks there at trade union and Marxist political groups, as well as academic groups and conferences.

So, why did I wait so long before leaving the Labour Party? Good question!

With the election of right-wing (in Labour Party terms), public schoolboy, pro-United States Blair, as Labour Party Leader in 1994 and his adopting the label of “New Labour,” the Labour Party was clearly moving in a more and more right-wing direction.12 Of course, it has always been a social democratic party—that is, a party devoted to managing capitalism, rather than replacing it. And the Labour Party leadership and most Labour MPs have always been pro-NATO and pro-American. The Labour Party was always a party with socialists and Marxists and Trotskyists and Communists in it; there have always been a number of socialist MPs in the Parliamentary Labour Party.13 But it was always a gradualist, Fabian Society-type social democratic party that would distribute largesse in times of plenty, and take away that largesse in times of capitalist crisis. 14

The actual issue over which I resigned was the Iraq War and the lies told by Blair and his Press Advisor Alistair Campbell, over the nonexistent “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which they claimed were held by Saddam Hussein. In the first Gulf War in 2003, the mass annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis was sickening—eight hundred thousand were killed, including in the carpet bombings of retreating Iraqi troops. Two million of us marched in London against the Iraq War in February 2003, the biggest ever demonstration in London.15

Blair’s “buddiness,” personally and politically, with U.S. President George W. Bush felt revolting, especially given the horrors of the Iraq War. Blair’s wars were not restricted to Iraq, the United Kingsom also participated in the U.S. wars on Serbia and Afghanistan for example, in compliant lockstep with the United State. UK governments have always been a loyal, even slavish, follower and participant in U.S. foreign Policy (with one partial exception: Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson refused in the 1960s to send British troops to Vietnam, even though he provided other support to the United States). There was huge opposition to the U.S. war on Vietnam in the 1960s, much like there is in 2023–2024 current huge opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, funded and armed by the United States and armed by the United Kingdom, Germany, and other NATO states. Since autumn 2023, there have been regular, huge pro-ceasefire, pro-Palestinian marches in London and other cities.16

Despite around 70 percent of the British public opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza and calling for a ceasefire, both major parties—as in the United States—are vehement in their support of the Israeli government and its war on Gaza.

I was sick of the Labour Party’s wholehearted adoption of U.S. imperialist, deadly foreign policy, as well as Blair’s “New Labour” neoliberal policies. He enthusiastically acquiesced in Thatcher’s trade union reforms, privatizations; indeed, he extended privatization through the Private Finance Initiative. Blair was not only in government, but he was also actually in power. He could have done so much to reverse Thatcherism—to reverse privatizations, to abolish Thatcher’s anti-trade union legislation. But he did not. Truly, Margaret Thatcher spoke when she described her greatest achievement as “New Labour.”

I had always been on the left of the Labour Party, even as a teenage schoolboy. At the age of 16 I had organized my first ever public protest/demonstration. It was against the United States over the Cuban Missile Crisis.

As for New Labour and the theoretical justification for New Labour as the “Third Way,” socialists and Marxists like me thought it was many steps too far in embracing capitalism. The Third Way clearly a rejection of the idea that the Labour Party would ever bring about socialism (to repeat, this is a description used in the United Kingdom to describe left social democracy). Blairism and the Third Way resulted in opening up the National Health Service (NHS) to more privatization, and restrictions on local government spending led to the Private Finance Initiative scheme, which encouraged private companies to build public services such as schools and hospitals, with the companies taking large profits from the public purse.17

One of Blair’s first actions as Party Leader was to remove Clause Four of the Labour Party constitution, which stated an aim of the Labour Party: “to secure for workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their labor.” It was printed on my Labour Party card every year through the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, until Blair secured its removal in 1995—a clear signal that the Labour Party no longer had even a rhetorical commitment to socialism.18

Concerning the Labour Party, I want to make a theoretical point here, about “Reform or Revolution,” to quote the title of Rosa Luxemburg’s famous pamphlet of 1900. For Luxemburg, reform and revolution had never been opposites: they complemented each other. But she stressed that the aim must be to reach beyond the existing social order. The same with Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, who in The Communist Manifesto call on Communists to fight for “the momentary interests of the working class,” but also the (communist) future.19

I want to emphasize here that social democratic parties and politicians are reformist—and that applies as well to the “Left” social democrat parties, with their proclaimed “socialism.”

They do not want to go beyond reforms into what Marx described as socialism, the stage before communism. The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and Podemos in Spain, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and Syriza in Greece, O Bloco Esquerda in Portugal, Die Linke in Germany, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the majority of the Labour Party membership in the United Kingdom, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States, Jen-Luc Mélenchon and La France Insoumise in France do not want and have never wanted to replace capitalism. They just want to manage it better, to regulate it, to reform it—to make it work better, with more “social justice,” and with what V. I. Lenin called “trade union demands” for increasing the social, individual wage, collective wages of workers, with “better management of capitalism” understood to mean the more equitable distribution of surplus value.

For reformists, the struggle is over the distribution of surplus value. In What Is To Be Done?, Lenin characterizes this as a trade-unionist struggle.20 For Communists and for revolutionary Marxists, the struggle more broadly is over ownership of the means of production.21 That is a key point.

So, my critique of the Labour Party, whether in its Blairite New Labour/ current Starmerite Labour incarnation or in Corbyn’s left social democratic Labour, is that they are reformist and opposed to going further into socialism.22

ZD: In 2015, 66-year-old Corbyn was elected as the new leader of the Labour Party, beating three other candidates and winning nearly 60 percent of the vote. After Corbyn was elected as the leader of the Labour Party, you chose to return to the Labour Party. In your opinion, what were the reasons for Corbyn’s election at that time? Why did you choose to return to the Labour Party?

DH: Corbyn’s election as Leader of the Labour Party was an accident; a mistake, as far the most Labour MPs were concerned. The Labour MPs—they were the ones who could nominate an MP to be party leader—assumed that the left (left social democrat) candidate for the party leadership would get trounced, hugely defeated, when the party membership had the vote, the choice between the various candidates nominated by Labour MPs. They were so wrong! And they were so horrified at the election by party members of Corbyn as Labour Party leader. Horrified!

I was one of literally—literally—many hundreds of thousands who joined, or (as in my case, re-joined) Labour once Corbyn became a duly nominated candidate for the Labour Party leadership in the Labour Party leadership election of 2015. At that time, only Labour MPs could nominate a fellow MP to be party leader, with the mass membership of the party doing the voting for leader, selecting from those who had been duly nominated by MPs. This was new; in previous decades, the Leader of the Labour Party had been elected solely by Labour MPs, or by a system in which the membership did not, until 2015, have the sole vote.

With Corbyn being the new leader of the Labour Party, membership jumped from 190,000 in May 2015 to 515,000 in July 2016.23 It became the biggest political party in Europe. With such rampant enthusiasm and almost delirious hope, Corbyn was met at hundreds of meetings and demonstrations with crowds singing “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” He was treated—and still is by many—like a rock star, or, more aptly, as a savior—the savior of the hopes of socialism (by which, to repeat, most people in the United Kingdom mean left social democracy, not the Marxist concept of socialism as a stage before communism).

Corbyn was a long-time critic of NATO and the United States and a major contributor in speeches to the Stop the War Coalition, long-time anti-apartheid and antiracism activist. He was in some ways, almost a saintly figure—a principled, incorruptible, visionary in terms of equality, anti-imperialism and anticolonialism. He was the archetypal left social democrat. To repeat, he was, however, never a Marxist or Communist. He was, in the 2019–2024 parliament, one of the around thirty-two Labour MPs (out of around two hundred Labour MPs) who were on the left, members of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs. I should add that most of these “socialist” MPs would not describe themselves as communist or Marxist, other than perhaps a couple of them.

After all the disappointments with Blairism and The Third Way—which angered so many—to have a “left” candidate for party leadership was almost like “manna from heaven.”

Left-wing activist groups sprang up within the Labour Party, such as Momentum (whatever its subsequent dubious role re Corbyn’s defenestration). Following Corbyn’s election as Labour Leader in 2015, Momentum was set up as a left-wing, “socialist,” pressure group within the party.24 It soon reached 40,000 members.

For the first time for perhaps decades, there were large-scale left activist meetings, and even “educationals.” I became a member of Momentum (one of many thousands of Marxists who did so) went to Momentum meetings in my city. The meetings were full of young people eager and desperate to learn (and in some cases, teach about and discuss) workers’ rights, developing socialist policy, encouraging a “bottom-up” democratic party where leadership had to be responsive to the membership, saving the NHS, class law, organizing inside the Labour Party for Socialism, and the nefarious role of the capitalist media.

We actually had Marxist discussion groups organized by Momentum and for comrades within the Labour Party. At the very local (ward) level—a typical ward has around six thousand voters—attendance at Labour Party meetings expanded considerably. My own ward, where I was political education officer when Corbyn was leader—had meetings of up to fifty members. Prior to Corbyn, the typical attendance was a third of that. For a time, the meetings were very feisty and argumentative between Corbyn supporters (“Corbynistas”) and the old right wing of the Labour Party. This was the case up and down the country: fierce factional battles.25

After the disappointments (for the Left) of Blairism, “the Third Way,” and despair at the new “shiny suited and booted’ Blairite MPs, and party apparatchiks at local and national level, to have the massive influx of new young workers and students, and the return of older socialist comrades with decades of experience—it was thrilling, it was exciting. Unlike the Blairites, the left was never (to quote Peter Mandelson, one of Blair’s closest aides) “extremely relaxed about the filthy rich.” The Left of the Labour Party believes in redistribution and good public services, in “Regulation Capitalism.” I’ll repeat that: regulating capitalism—but not replacing it.

ZD:  After Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, what attacks did the right-wing forces inside and outside the Labor Party make against him? What political activities did you carry out within the Labour Party?

DH: The right wing of the Labour Party (and most of the Labour MPs were on the right wing of the Labour Party) were “gobsmacked.” They were absolutely horrified, dumbfounded, and disbelieving, as captured on television the night that the election results rolled in, when Corbyn’s Labour Party came so close to winning the 2017 general election on a left-wing policy platform. They were in shock, and disbelief. They believed their own propaganda, that left-wing policies and Corbyn in particular, personifying these policies, were unpopular, dead, relics of a bygone age.26 Corbyn’s 2017 general election manifesto was more left-wing than any Labour Party general election manifesto since 1945, even more so than the 1983 manifesto.27 It called for renationalization of the railways, gas, water, and electricity industries; increased trade union rights; increased taxation of the rich; and scrapping student tuition fees—a return to free university tuition.28

Accusing Corbyn of being a socialist, a communist, “a friend of Hamas and the IRA [Irish Republican Army],” or an agent for the Czech Secret Service clearly did not work in discrediting him. So began one of the most shameful and dishonest media campaigns of the modern era in Britain—casting Corbyn as antisemitic. Of course, media lies and campaigns against the left against anything that threatens the power and privilege of the capitalist class that they represent are nothing new. The campaign against Tony Benn, leader of the left MPs within the Labour Party through the 1970s until 1981, and against Michael Foot, left-wing Labour Leader between 1980 and 1983, were both personalized and relentless. Those (billionaires) who own the press control the press!

For day after day, week after week, year after year, the mass media and the right-wing and the very many pro-Zionists within the Labour Party (members of the “Labour Friends of Israel”) in Parliament, many Labour MPs—both Jewish and non-Jewish, smeared Corbyn as an antisemite; as anti-Jewish.29

They also smeared his supporters. This major campaign of vilification was directed at Corbyn, but has also been directed at socialist members of the Labour Party, including, bizarrely enough, many Jewish Labour Party members, with socialists and pro-Palestinian comrades and activists being accused of being extremists, as “the enemy within.” The expulsions and the witch-hunt against, for example pro-Palestinian, anti-state of Israel, anti-Israeli genocide comrades continue. It really was, and continues to be, a systematic McCarthyite campaign. These smears and daily media attacks on Corbyn were successful enough to cost the Corbyn-led Labour Party votes at the 2019 general election in Britain, It was enough to stop the United Kingdom having a left-wing prime minister—under whom, incidentally, Brexit would have been much softer and less confrontational with the European Union.

As another example of media disinformation, Corbyn’s 2017 election result is cast as an electoral disaster for Labour. In fact, the Labour vote in that election, following Corbyn’s winning the Labour Party leadership election, increased by 10 percent over the 2015 general election result.30 His Labour Party won more votes in the 2017 general election (12.9 million votes) and the 2019 general election (10.3 million votes) and the than did Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in the July 2024 general election (9.7 million votes). However, Starmer achieved a huge majority in the House of Commons because the right wing and far-right votes were split between the Conservative Party and the noisily anti-immigrant, anti-liberal party, Reform.

As for my own local activities while in the Labour Party between 2016 and 2019, I joined in campaigning, leafleting, and making speeches at strike and other public meetings, taking part in many meetings and demonstrations, and joining Labour Against the Witch-Hunt, a group seeking to oppose the witch-hunt of socialists and Marxists and other within the Labour Party.

When the right-wing bureaucracy of the Labour Party began suspending many local constituency Labour Parties—stopping them from functioning, or selecting council/municipal or parliamentary election candidates instead of allowing the local party members to select their candidate, and investigating, suspending, and expelling thousands of members who were opposing the witch-hunting of Corbyn, some comrades set up the Labour in Exile Network, which I also joined. They subsequently merged as the Socialist Labour Network.31

At a very local level, of the dozen or so socialist (left-wing social democrat) and Marxist members of my own branch of the Labour Party, all but four have been suspended from, expelled, or have resigned from the Labour Party). At a national level, a number of Labour MPs have also been suspended from the Labour Party. As one recent example of the ludicrous, dangerous, and effective means of removing left-wing Labour MPs is the case of Kate Osamor, who was suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party in January 2024 over comments about Israel, pointing out that what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza is genocide.32 With around forty thousand Palestinians in Gaza slaughtered in seven months by the Israeli government, it is hard to disagree with calling it a genocide.

Her reference to genocide in Gaza drew huge criticism, with the Board of Deputies of British Jews, one of Britain’s leading Zionist organizations, issuing a statement saying it “unreservedly condemn[s] the attempts by Kate Osamor to link the Holocaust to the current situation in Gaza.” The Jewish Labour Movement also condemned the “inappropriate and offensive” remarks. These two organizations, together with Labour Friends of Israel, wield absolutely enormous influence in the media and within both major political parties. These organizations have led attacks on socialists, academics, students, and performers whom they accuse of being anti-Zionist. They regularly persuade venues from hosting pro-Palestinian, pro-ceasefire meetings—regularly. It happens all the time.

One of the greatest successes of the Zionists in Britain, in the media and in the Labour Party, has been the widespread adoption of the International Holocaust Memorial Association’s definition of antisemitism. It appears to conflate anti-Zionism and criticism of the State of Israel with antisemitism.33

Note that here I am criticizing Zionists, not Jews. Many of my comrades are Jewish anti-Zionists. Zionism is a recent creation, dating primarily from the late nineteenth century, from the works of Theodor Herzl. It is a racist, ethnoreligious supremacist creed.34

ZD: What is the current state of the workers’ and socialist movements in Britain? What difficulties and resistance do they face?

DH: In Britain since the Conservatives returned to power in 2019 (they won the 2010, 2015, and 2017 general elections as well, governing in alliance with the Liberal Democrats 2010–2015 and alone following the 2015 and 2017 general elections), there has been and is now a resurgence of mass-strike action and mass action by trade unions at national and at local levels. Doctors, nurses, communications workers/postal service workers, teachers, and railway workers are among many who have gone on strike. The strike wave, wave of workers’ actions is unprecedented in recent decades.35

There is very good reason for this! There has been a savage intensification of class war—class war from above. For tens of millions in Britain, there is a cost-of-living crisis—prices of energy, food, have increased far more than workers’ incomes. There has been a savage cut in the standard of living of the poorest in Britain. Four million people in the United Kingdom are now living in poverty. There are around one million children experiencing destitution—their families unable to afford to properly feed, clothe, or clean them, or keep them warm.36Millions more live in difficulty, daily made very aware of their loss of spending power and slump in living standards. Living in poverty, by definition, means unable to afford one or more of the following: sufficient food, sufficient heating, or adequate clothing. There has been an explosion of extreme poverty, an explosion of what we should term “a social counterrevolution” against the wages and conditions of millions of workers. There has been a huge transfer of wealth from the poor and other strata of the working class to the rich, to the billionaires and multimillionaires.

This makes me very angry indeed. I thought that the poverty I experienced as a teenager, and saw as a young schoolteacher, had diminished. In my own case, in the 1950s and early ’60s I received free school meals, municipal vouchers for my school vests and underpants, rarely had new clothes, and never had my own pair of football boots—I was not bad at football. Every week, I had to go to the lost property office at school to borrow a pair of football boots, different pair every week. Sometimes they fitted, sometimes they did not. As an inner-city schoolteacher, I never forget knocking on the door of one of my 12-year-old pupils to see why they were not coming to school, and the mother coming to the door and saying, “Ah, Mr. Hill. I know why you are here. But it’s OK, Linda will be coming to school next week. We get ‘the Social’ [social security benefit check] through on Friday, so we can buy her a pair of plimsolls [shoes].”37

I thought those days, of poverty, of kids not having shoes, were over. But they are not. They are back with a vengeance. Not as “an act of nature,” but as an act of deliberate government policy, making the poor pay for the crisis.

The capitalist class and their Conservative Party representatives—the Conservative government and MPs—live in a privileged world or their own, a world in which they are enriching themselves through tax breaks, finance policy, and corruption. In terms of corruption, they reward their friends and donors to the Conservative Party with honors, knighthoods, membership of the House of Lords, medals, and “fast-track” contracts for Covid equipment. There is the case of Baroness Michelle Mone and her husband, friends of those in high places (Tories), who took £60 million by overcharging for personal protective equipment during the COVID pandemic.38

The rich have stuffed their own pockets, aided by their representatives in government by picking the pockets of the poor. I think those profiteers, those sharks, those entitled and well-connected racketeers should be put on trial. If found guilty, they should be punished and imprisoned for fraud, corruption, and “picking the pockets of the poor.” The famous quote from Marx in Capital is: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is…at the same time, accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery…at the opposite pole.”39

On a theoretical point, rarely has it been so obvious in the last century that the capitalist state is, as Marx put it, “the executive committee of the ruling class.”40 In the postwar decades, in what some call “les trentes glorieuses” (the thirty glorious years) after the end of the Second World War, the state—in particular, social democratic and Labour parties in Western Europe and North America, Australia, and New Zealand, could afford to disburse “goodies,” to engage in increased protective (for labor) regulations for workers, and some redistribution of wealth and income. They were responding to the increased strength of working-class organizations and consciousness partly resulting from the role of organized labor during the Second World War. These reforms were not a “gift.” They were fought for, in particular by trade unions and the trade union movement.

The Tories and capitalist governments throughout the West are, to greater or lesser degrees, guilty of what Engels called “social murder”: of conscious cruelty; of punishing the poor; of, over a long period, cutting the value of various social and welfare benefits. Examples include the two-child policy.

So many things are now becoming clear, brutally clear that “key workers” are cleaners, porters, care workers, supermarket workers, and delivery drivers. These are now regarded widely as essential workers—not the billionaire tax exiles, the company bosses dismissing workers, the financial profiteers, or the hedge fund investors.

This crisis is absolute proof that it is the labor power of workers that drive the economy, not the braying captains and “giants” of industry. Without workers, they are nothing. As one of the posters in France from the 1968 uprising put it: “the boss needs you. You don’t need the boss” (“Le patron a besoin de vous. Vous n’avez pas besoin de lui”). We are seeing a greater awareness that, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, “Our epoch…has simplified the class antagonisms into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”41 This is the objective analysis of Marxism. For increasing numbers, it is now, crucially, the subjective awareness and understanding of class society, capitalism, and of the labor-capital relation.

To return to your question, “What is the current state of the workers’ and socialist movements in Britain? What difficulties and resistance do they face?”:

As for the state of the workers’ and socialist movement in the Labour Party, it is crushed—inside the Labour Party, that is. The resistance they face is expulsion from the party by the party bureaucracy acting on behalf of the party leadership. As I said earlier, hundreds of thousands of leftists (left social democrats/Corbynites) and Marxists have left the party.

At parliamentary level, the right-wing juggernaut within the Labour Party deselected (sacked) popular left-wing Labour MPs such as Faiza Shaheen and, in my city, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, and imposed Starmerite parliamentary candidates in their place at very short notice, and with no local party membership involvement.

But in the wider society, the current state of the workers’ and socialist movements in Britain is a bit like a powder keg, an explosion waiting to go off, with mass anger, mass marches, and mass disgust with, in particular, the Conservative Party and government, as expressed in the huge decline in Conservative Party votes, from 14 million in 2019 to 6.8 million in 2024. Will this disgust, this anger, be dampened? Will it be controlled by new, repressive legislation? Will it result only in passivity and attended on by small groups of communists and Marxists? This is possible. Will it develop into disappointment and anger at the incoming Labour government? We do not know. It is more likely than not. But we know what we communists and Marxists must do our historic task.

The project of any Marxists and left social democrats now is the creation of a new mass workers’ party bringing together trade unions and organized trade unionists; radical supporters of social movements such as the pro-Palestinian, environmentalist, and Black Lives Matter movements; and Marxists and communists in a United Front.42 Within that (hopefully mass movement and party), we must work for Marxism and communism as an organized grouping and as an organized revolutionary group.

ZD: Britain is one of the origin places of global neoliberalism. What have been the effects of the neoliberal policies pursued by the British bourgeois parties since Thatcher? What are the consequences for the lives of the working class?

DH: I have written extensively about this; for example, a multi-country analysis and commentary I coordinated for the International Labour Organization, which I extended, through collaborative writing, into four books. The impacts of neoliberalism have been one of the main foci of my writing and of the academic journal that I edit, The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies.43

The impact of neoliberalism, since Thatcherism of the 1980s, has been government austerity and local government austerity, immiseration, impoverishment, and the pauperization of millions. I have already commented on this pauperization and immiseration.

What is notable is not just the impact of Thatcherism on individuals—millions of individuals—but on shared and public spaces and facilities, including public and municipal services: cuts to and closures of libraries, swimming pools, services to the disabled, youth clubs, and the care and upkeep of municipal parks and gardens.

Local government is no stranger to budget cuts—austerity has shrunk town hall spending by approximately 40 percent over the past twelve years. A decade of cuts has reduced local authorities’ ability to deal with key long-term issues, from child protection to an aging society. This is also true of local government services such as social work for child protection, mental health support, children’s homes, adult social care (Council Day Centers and, for the elderly, Old People’s Homes), youth clubs, repairs to council housing, building new council housing, paying for temporary housing accommodation for the homeless.44 I could go on.

The cuts and austerity also apply to what has been described as the nearest thing the British have to a religion—the NHS. This has deteriorated markedly in the last few years. For example, one in seven people in the United Kingdom. are waiting for NHS medical treatment.45

At the local and national levels, the Labour Party has bought into and adopted Thatcherite neoliberal policies. At national level, Starmer was newly elected in the July 4, 2024, general election as a Labour prime minister, but there is very little enthusiasm for him or for Labour. He (and Labour) will win the next election by default. He is promising very little, and is offering not even a center-left, classic social democrat program or vision. The Labour Party is now so clearly the alternative party of capital, another conservative party, a Tweedeldum to the Conservatives’ Tweedledee, like the Democrats and Republicans in the United States. We on the left despise Starmer—despise him as a class traitor, as a stooge of Capital, and as a pliant tool of the UK and U.S. “Secret State.” My comrade Roger Silverman talks of the duopoly of the twin-headed Tory/Starmerite dictatorship.”46

I’m involved locally in the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition campaign against the £33 million of cuts in the Brighton and Hove City Council budget for the year April 2024–April 2025., which would come on top of the year (on year, on year, on year) of cuts to local government funding from the national government.

What party, then, is in power in Brighton? It is the Labour Party! They loyally, if with sad faces and wringing their hands—which they say are tied—carry out the diktats of capital.

I want now to make some political and theoretical points about capitalism, class, and immiseration.

When I make speeches on strikers’ picket lines and rallies or demonstrations, I place the immediate cuts to a service, or an attack on workers’ rights and pay, within the global context of neoliberal capitalism. Many—most—speakers at these rallies do not. They speak from a reformist perspective. They do not link the immediate issue with Marxist analysis of capitalism, class conflict, or the declining rate of profit. Some do, but very few. Most speakers are particularistic and coming from a liberal or left social democratic background, unaware of Marxism other than through the skewed lens of the capitalist media. Even many left speakers just restrict themselves to denouncing the latest cuts and putting forward perfectly rational alternatives or reasons why the cuts should not be made.

The better informed comrades, who are aware of/within the Marxist and Communist tradition, rely on news outlets such as the Morning Star (close to the Communist Party of Britain), Counterfire (run by the Socialist Workers Party [SWP] split-off called Counterfire), The Socialist (run by the Socialist Party), Socialist Worker (run by the SWP), Socialist Alternative(run by Socialist Alternative, a splinter group from the Socialist Party), The Communist (run by the new Revolutionary Communist Party, formed in 2024 as a continuation of Socialist Appeal), The World Socialist Website (run by the Socialist Equality Party), and specifically online magazines such as The Canary and Squawkbox, plus U.S.-based online publications such as Counterpunch and Truthout.

But they—the boss class, the capitalist class—are not listening.

Of course, numbers of speakers are members of, or have come through Marxist organizations such as the Communist Party of Britain; SWP and its split-offs such as Counterfire, Revolutionary Socialism21), or the Socialist Party (SP), the latter with its own split-offs such as Socialist Alternative and International Standpoint, and other, smaller groups do have a Marxist analysis. There is permanent Marxist analysis in the ubiquitous newspapers the SP and the SWP bring to demonstrations, such as Socialist Worker, The Socialist, and, more recently, Socialist Alternative, ever present at political rallies and meetings, large or small.

But at many rallies, such as anti-austerity, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, and pro-Palestine demonstrations, most—virtually all—speakers do not express openly Marxist or communist analysis. So, while the level of anger against specific cuts in services (such as a particular school being closed) and against the genocide and Israeli land-grab in Gaza are very strong, the current level of political, class, or Marxist analysis is not.

I see my task, my political task, and the task of my comrades—such those in as the Campaign for a Mass Workers’ Party and Socialist Labour Network (and, in Greece, OKDE-Spartakos)—is to develop class-consciousness; to transform mass consciousness from an objective class position, the position of being in a similar type of job (wage labor) as millions of others, into subjective class position, a position in which workers are aware of and understand that they are members of the working class and that we live in a capitalist society in which there is a permanent struggle between the capitalist class and the working class.

This is, of course, classic Marxism, to develop what Antonio Gramsci called “good sense,” as opposed to “common sense”; to enable workers to change from their objective class position—that is they are, economically, workers, selling their labor power—to a subjectiveappreciation and understanding of their class position in a class-divided and exploitative capitalist society.47 The classic task of communists and revolutionary Marxists is to assist, enable, guide, and lead to that subjective consciousness, to class consciousness, and to the activist agency that goes with it.48 After all, philosophers have only interpreted the world. Our task is to actively change it.49

ZD: “Brexit” is a “black swan event” that has shocked the world. How did the left wing in Britain evaluate Brexit? How did it affect the economy, society, and working class in Britain?

DH: The Marxist left in Britain was split over the Brexit vote. I actually voted “Lexit,” that is, for a “Left Brexit,” one that was not racist/xenophobic or wanting to restore “glories” of “British history,” empire, and sovereignty. That was the Conservative vision, the vision of the Brexit Party—of a United Kingdom free from the regulatory mechanisms of the European Union in terms of workers’ rights, health, food standards, and human rights, harkening back to a nationalistic world of “Rule Britannia.” No, instead, we in Lexit wanted to exit the European Union because it is an essentially authoritarian neoliberal bankers’ setup. Look at the way it treated Greece. The Troika, that is, the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, enforced awful austerity on Greece after the 2015 Greek referendum treachery by Alexis Tsipras. As I have said before, I am involved, in a very minor way, in Greek politics—I go there to give academic lectures, but also to speak to Marxist political and trade union groups including, in 2014, the annual national conference of the Greek secondary (high school) teachers’ union. There, I was involved in what I regard as a prerevolutionary situation, being teargassed, together with comrades in OKDE-Spartakos and Antarsya, by Greek riot police while protesting against austerity with comrades in Syntagma Square, Athens, in the hot summer of 2011. I had an apartment Athens at them time for the spring semester to teach at the main university there.

So, Lexit was supported by many Marxist organizations in Britain. I stood in 2009 as a Lexit candidate for the Southeast of England, for the No2EU Yes to Democracy campaign backed by the Communist Party of Britain, SP, and by the Railway Workers and Seafarers Trade Union (RMT), the leader of which at the time, Bob Crow, was close to the Communist Party of Britain.

As far as the impact of Brexit: Brexit has made most people poorer. There is now widespread disenchantment with Brexit. Many feel that they were fooled by the pro-Brexit propaganda campaign, fooled into believing that it would lead to more money for the NHS. For those who were, or who are anti-immigrant, they feel fooled by the claims that Brexit would lead to a reduction in immigration. People are not better off. People feel worse off, the NHS is crumbling, and immigration has increased, not decreased.50

It is now, in 2024, widely recognized that Brexit was a mistake. For those who voted Brexit for racist, anti-immigrant reasons (a major part of the Brexit Party’s election campaign, further magnified by much of the right-wing media), the result has not even led to a decline in legal or illegal immigration.

ZD: You are a Marxist educator who has long analyzed the capitalist education system from a Marxist perspective. In your opinion, what are the problems of the current Western education system? What impact has neoliberalism had on the Western education system?

DH: So how does, and how has, the neoliberal capitalist system—ideology translated into policy—impacted on the school system in Britain?51 There are very pronounced similarities between U.S. UK, and, indeed global, education policies. The neoliberalization of education is global, as is the accompanying conservatization.52

In England, Thatcher’s (1979–1990) policies, continued by her Conservative successor (John Major, 1990–1997) and intensified by the Blair (1997–2007) and Gordon Brown (2007–2010) “New Labour” governments, as well as Conservative governments since 2010 (the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition of 2010–2015), have to a large extent destroyed the (already flawed) system of all-ability, mixed social class, state comprehensive schools in England and Wales.

From my childhood and until the late 1980s, 93 percent of schools in England and Wales were run by the local state. They were run and controlled by local education authorities, which, as part of local County Council or Unitary Authority Councils, were democratically elected. The state system ran side by side with a private school system catering for 7 percent of the population. You had to pay for private schooling. So only people with money—people with wealth or a high income, or both, could afford to send their children there—mainly the capitalist (upper class) and upper-middle class (the higher paid managerial and professional strata of the working class).

In Britain, around 7 percent of the children in the country have privilege, or at least privileged education bought for them in private schools—and it is not cheap. Typical fees for nonresidents, non-boarders, are around £12,000 per annum. Alpesh Maisuria has shown that the annual costs for a child at Eton (the most famous private school in England) are £76,000 a year.53 That is more than I have ever even earned in a year as a full professor, and four times as much as the minimum wage in Britain, which is £11.44 per hour, equivalent to £364.72 per week for a thirty-five-hour work week, or £20,822.90 per annum.

Then came Thatcher, Major, and all, with their policies to destroy left-wing and liberal democratic (child-centered) ideology in schools and schools’ relative autonomy. There was no national curriculum before 1988, and we teachers (I was a schoolteacher from 1967 to 1973) could very substantially design our own courses and lessons. Then in they came with neoliberal marketization; competition; semiprivatization; and a tightening of their grip on schools, teachers, and universities; and the attempt to create an uncritical workforce for the hierarchically tiered and differentially rewarded labor market.

I will pick out six aspects of neoliberal and neoconservative schooling: social class differentiation and reproduction, control of schools, funding of schools and teachers, the curriculum, surveillance, and managerialism.

First, we have social class. Western education systems have become increasingly differentiated in terms of social class. The differences in England and Wales are now starker than before the Education Reform Act of 1988 and ] subsequent legislation.

In the competitive market system of schooling in England, where schools are ranked on published “league tables” of SATs and the sixteen-plus exam of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) attainments, “rich” schools have gotten richer, and so called “sink schools” have sunk further. Those schools become more “middle class,” and low-performing schools more “working class.” Private, expensive schools, with their smaller class sizes, better facilities in general, and resulting higher exam pass rates, remain for the rich in a system of social apartheid.54

The attainment map (of results for SATS and GCSEs) in Britain mirrors the social class map. For example, the map of social deprivation—more specifically, the map showing the percentage of students receiving free school meals (which I received as a school student) varies from school to school, from local education authority (or “school district” in U.S. parlance) from virtually zero percent to schools where most—a majority—of students are poor enough to qualify for and receive free school meals. In Britain, around a quarter of school students receive these meals, that is, 2.1 million pupils.

These different types of schooling serve to reproduce existing social class inequality and preparation for the hierarchically tiered and rewarded labor market. Only 4 percent of students at Russell Group universities (the twenty-four elite universities in England and Wales) provided free school meals, yet nearly a quarter of children in England and Wales qualify. They are the poorest strata of the working class. That is social class reproduction. Of course, not all the sons and daughters of the upper class go to university and subsequently take up jobs with high social status, a high degree of power over others, and a high income—but most do. In the economic and social relations of production, they are the top dogs. They win. They win money and they win power. Others, the bulk of the working class—especially the unskilled, semiskilled, and skilled strata of the working class—lose.

Second, privatization and semiprivatization: much of state schooling has become semiprivatized and not subject to democratic oversight or control. Who controls, or “owns,” schools? Academies are a set of schools with greater autonomy over admissions, the curriculum, teachers’ pay, the school workforce skill mix, and the budget. These schools are taxpayer funded but outside the control of the democratically elected and accountable local education authority. The U.S. equivalent of “academies” are charter schools.

This is outrageous. State schools, that is, schools that continue to be funded with public money, are handed over to businesses—secondhand car dealers, carpet manufacturers, religious organizations, and Tory Party donors—to run, to manage, to control, to decide on curriculum, ethos, and staffing. Moreover, it is not just a few schools. A majority of high schools in England (where the students are between 11 and either 16 or 18 years old) and many primary schools (schools for 5- to 11-year-olds) are handed over to these businesspeople. Many of them—for example, the head teacher, the chief executive of a particular chain of academies—pay themselves enormous salaries, for some, more than the prime minister. That is public money that should be being spent on teachers, support staff, teaching equipment, and school trips.55

Third, funding: State schooling and other sectors of education have become more underfunded. Like all public sector services, workers’ pay has been cut, along with funding for books and support staff such as teaching assistants. Funding per pupil in state schools has also been cut back.56

Fourth, the curriculum: the curriculum of state schools has become narrow, uncreative, and increasingly nationalistic and conservative. I have written quite a lot on this the conservatization and deradicalizing and control of the schools’ curriculum, and about how Thatcher herself became involved—personally—in the design of the (new) National Curriculum for schools when the Education Reform Act of 1988 was being discussed. For example, she herself edited, amended, deleted sections of the (already conservative) advisers for the science and geography curricula.57 The Thatcher and, subsequently, Major, Conservative governments also brought teacher education—preparation for teaching—curricula under strict control, pretty much removing of sociology and politics from the curriculum. Incidentally, they also got rid of radical lecturers in those subjects, such as me. There were many “redundancies.”58

Fifth, surveillance: schoolteachers—and university teachers—are under greater surveillance and control, and suffer more denigration. A feature of neoliberal capitalist discourse (and resulting policy) on education is that it is the teachers who are blamed for low attainment/exam rates and absences from school, rather than the high-stakes testing, the competitive education system itself, and its structural discrimination against the working class and ethnic minorities.59

Finally, managerialism: the system of managerial control has become New Public Managerialist, that is, authoritarian rather than collegiate. This importation of private managerial styles into the public sector, such as the management style and culture of schools, colleges, and universities, is now overwhelmingly authoritarian, with top-down control from head teacher, and university principals being given a far higher salary and more power than used to be the case when I was a teaching, before the Thatcher-era so-called reforms.60 At one of the  elementary schools I spent time teaching in the mid-1980s, the staff, including the head teacher, would sit in a circle and discuss curriculum matters and vote on, for example, which reading scheme to adopt. There is no such circle time today.

That is quite a list of problems, specifically in England and Wales but also globally, regarding the impact of neoliberalization and neoconservatization of schooling across the Western world. Aspects and effects such as low teacher pay, the degrading and intensification of teachers’ work lives and working conditions, the resulting burnout among teachers, the censorship or removal from the curriculum of “radical” or “socialist” books in some U.S. states, poor quality equipment and buildings, pupil/school student disenchantment with “Basics Education” (for working-class kids) are reported regularly by teacher trade unions such as the National Education Union in England and Wales, and by diverse magazines, newspapers, socialist websites, and academic journals, such as Forum for Promoting 3–19 Comprehensive Education, the Guardian newspaper, the World Socialist Website, The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, WorkPlace: A Journal for Academic Labour, and Cultural Logic—A Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice. There is for school students (though not for those in elite private schools) a relentless concentration on exams, on a slimmed down “basics” curriculum with fewer and fewer students studying art, music, drama, and sport.

As Marxists, we must not only deconstruct, but must also develop and suggest guidelines to reconstruct. That is, we must suggest socialist and Marxist education policies.

Broadly speaking, there are three major perspectives, policy directions, regarding formal education—education to conform, education to reform, and education to transform. Conservatives want an education for conformity, (“centrist”) social democrats want to reform education (to make it a bit fairer, more meritocratic, with some positive discrimination on behalf of working-class kids and ethnic minority groups). Meanwhile more left democratic socialists/left social democrats also want to reform education to remake it, but much fairer, with pronounced positive discrimination to help so-called underachieving groups.

The role of organic Marxist public intellectuals is crucial. Marxist public intellectuals—such as the “political” shop steward or union organizer; the member of a socialist/Marxist party or group; the teacher, the teacher educator, or the youth worker; the community activist; the food bank organizer—intellectualize and explain social, political, cultural, and economic matters from the standpoint of what, as I mentioned earlier, what Gramsci termed “good sense,” from a class-conscious perspective, or, to refer to a classical Marxist injunction from The Communist Manifesto, that the key political task facing communists is “the formation of the proletariat into a class,” that is, a “class for itself,” a class aware of itself as a class in the capital-labor relation.

This is our role and our potential importance as Marxists and communists: the pedagogical importance of party, organization, leaflets, newspapers, booklets, books, and social media.

Here, as well as in the classroom, in conversation, and in rhetorical speeches, we carry out the roles of socialist analysis, of revolutionary pedagogy; of connecting the here and now of a pro-Palestinian or an Extinction Rebellion march or demonstration, a rent strike, a pro-immigrant rally, an anti-austerity march, a picket line of a zero-hours contract employer, or an occupation of a tax avoiding multinational company owned shop. Here is essential Marxist pedagogy.

Marxists are necessary in leading and developing changes in consciousness, a change in class consciousness, and in playing a contributory role organizing to replace capitalism. At the level of education, revolutionary Marxists—that is to say, Marxists who wish to replace capitalism with socialism—want an education critical of capitalism. This would be an education for social, political, and economic transformation Into a socialist economy and society. My own writing, much of which is online, is from a revolutionary Marxist and a classical Marxist perspective. I, along with other comrades, of course, argue for a Marxist education policy.61

ZD: In recent years, along with the intensification of the crisis of capitalism, a wave of right-wing populism has arisen globally, such as former U.S. President Donald Trump, France’s National Front Party, and the Alternative for Germany. Do right-wing populist parties or political forces exist in the United Kingdom? What political activities have they carried out and what impact have they had?

DH: There is no need for a new xenophobic, nationalist, antiliberal, anti-immigrant, far-right party in England. We already have one. It is called the Conservative Party. It is, in 2024, edging closer and closer to the more overtly racist and xenophobic and authoritarian politics of the Reform Party (in effect, the successor to the UK Independence Party) and the Brexit Party. Reform, led by Nigel Farage, received over four million votes in the 2024 general election, returning five MPs. Reform is a party with links to far—right groups and policies throughout Europe, and to Donald Trump. But then, leading Conservative MPs in the 2019–2024 Parliament, such as Liz Truss (prime minister for thirty-seven days), Suella Braverman, Kemi Badenoch, and many other leading Conservative MPs are clearly very happy with such xenophobic “culture war,” “anti-woke” (that is, antiliberal on social and sexual matters), and Islamophobic speeches. For example, Braverman, who had served as Home Secretary (the UK term for Minister of the Interior) in 2022 and 2023, attacked “Cultural Marxism,” claiming that, in Britain, the Islamists, extremists, and antisemites are in charge.62

Other than its commitment to elections—and even here, the Conservative government is making it harder to actually cast a ballot by insisting on photo identification for voters—there are striking similarities between the policies and rhetoric of today’s Conservative Party and the fascist National Front of the 1970s and ’80s. The recent inflammatory rhetoric by Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his parliamentary and media cheerleaders about “Stop the Boats” (referring to the small boats carrying immigrants from northern France across the English Channel to England) and about transporting “illegal” immigrants to Rwanda, as well as criticisms of Muslims in Britain and the marches and  demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza, are simply the most recent of violent government rhetoric and policies of the last decade at least. Examples include the Empire Windrush scandal: the government vans in British cities inviting the public to report illegal immigrants, promoted by the then Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, creating a “hostile environment” for immigrants.

Regarding trade union and workers’ rights, the Conservative government has built on Thatcherite restrictions by undermining the right to strike and passing legislation demanding that even during a strike the unions must provide “minimum service levels.” The law stipulates that when workers in certain sectors lawfully vote to strike, they can be forced to attend work—and sacked if they do not comply.63 This rather defeats the purpose of a strike. This new anti-union law affects one in five workers.

The more right-wing populist party is Reform, and its most prominent member—a regular guest on British television shows and a darling of the (right-wing) media—is Farage, former leader of the Brexit Party, and a friend and admirer of Trump. He and his party are ferociously anti-trade union and, equally ferociously, anti-immigrant. There is very little difference between Reform and Farage and perhaps a majority of Conservative MPs. The difference between the Reform Party and the Conservative Party is that the Conservative Party in Parliament contained. In the 2019–2024 parliament, there were around one hundred so-called “One Nation” MPs, described by the media as “centrist.” There is repeated chatter in the media about Farage rejoining the Conservative Party and becoming its next leader. Indeed, a recent deputy chair of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson, has recently defected to the Reform Party. He expects other Conservative MPs to join him. There is to-ing and fro-ing of candidates and members from between the Conservative Party and Reform.

In answer to your question, “What political activities have right-wing populist parties and forces carried out and what impact have they had?”: They have been in government—the Conservative government. While right-wing populists such as, now, Javier Milei in Argentina, and, formerly, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, speedily laid waste to social, environmental, and labor protections and regulations. In the United Kingdom, this has taken place over a longer period of time. Brexit was and is their dream. To leave the European Union and to get rid of all EU legislation, all regulatory environmental, health, social, labor, and judicial regulations emanating from the European Union. A bonfire of all EU regulations is still the dream of those in the Conservative Party further to the right than Sunak, people such as Truss, who had hoped to once again become leader of the Conservative Party; Kemi Badenoch; and what are called “the five families” on the right of the Conservative Party. Recently (January/February 2024), they were joined by a group led by the disastrous Truss, the Popular Conservatives.64

Altogether, these very right-wing, “small state,” “tax-cutting” (mainly for the wealthy), “benefits-cutting: MPs numbered around 100 out of the 348 Conservative MPs in Parliament from 2019 to 2024.

Popular the Conservatives certainly are not. The Conservative Party’s result in the 2024 general election was their worst in two centuries; their worst since the Conservative Party was founded in 1834.

This does not betoken an enthusiasm for Labour. There is hostility to both major parties. Between them, Conservative and Labour secured their lowest joint total of votes, the lowest combined party share for the paries since 1945. Voter turnout was at under 60 percent, the lowest since 2001.

ZD: China and its rise have increasingly become the focus of world attention and discussion. In the West, what are the respective evaluations of China by the left, center, and right? How do you evaluate these views?

DH: I will address these in order: What do these different views, perspectives, and evaluations say? First, I will discuss the right; second, the Critical Left; and third, the Supportive Left.

 The Right in the West

From the right and the center, there is hostility. There is a combination of ignorance—silence—about the gains made within China and globally by the People’s Republic of China and the Communist Party of China (CPC). Not only is there ignorance and hostility, there is also an often expressed fear of China’s economic and growing military strength.

The U.S. “War on Terror” was replaced in 2011 by a “Pivot to Asia,” with China as the demonized “global enemy.” Hillary Clinton, for example, in 2011 proclaimed that the twenty-first century will be “America’s Pacific Century.” The United States surrounds China (and Russia) with military bases, armadas of floating bases, and “treaty” control of small states (such as Tuvalu, to take one example). China has not surrounded the United States with military bases. There are no Chinese warships off the coast of New York, no Chinese bases or nuclear missiles in Cuba or Nicaragua.

There is a lack of knowledge. Western Media tend to publish stories about what they describe as “human rights abuses”—for example, in Szechuan with reference to the Uighurs, and in Hong Kong, with reference to what it calls the “pro-democracy” demonstrators. These are the predominant analyses by the imperialist-capitalist leadership, governments, and media of the United States and its allies and client states, both conservative and neoliberalized social democratic parties. They view China as a dictatorial and authoritarian, a global threat. They criticize its policies regarding its friendship with Russia and claim its Belt and Road Initiative is exploitative.

To summarize, the right and the right of center in the West view China as a geopolitical, military, and diplomatic rival. With the rivalry, there are attempts to develop an anti-China hysteria and witch-hunt, constituting an intensification of hostility toward China. Relations are seen in zero-sum terms, rather than complementarity. The Western media and government view is that if one side wins, the other side must lose. There are also occasional and minor rhetorical pleas for more economic cooperation made by some sections of capital and their representatives.

Less publicized, China (and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics) are seen as a threat to the largely laissez-faire Anglo-Saxon economic and fiscal model of capitalism that is enriching the superrich and immiserating and pauperizing the working class. Any downturns or problems in the Chinese economy are gleefully trumpeted and repeated by the Western media, while immiseration under Western capitalism is very largely ignored or downplayed.

The United States and its allies try to destroy any socialistic, redistributive alternative. There is the sixty-year economic blockade of Cuba with its semisocialist, semicommunist economy; the attempted overthrow of the Hugo Chávez-Nicolás Maduro government of Venezuela; the destruction and mass murder of many pursuing redistributionist, welfare, and state control/nationalization models of socialism or socialist democracy—one of the most notable being the overthrow of the Salvador Allende government in 1973 by Augusto Pinochet aided by the CIA. Another infamous example is the mass slaughter of one million communists in Indonesia after the U.S.-sponsored Suharto putsch in 1965–1966.

Again, less publicized, China is seen as a threat to Anglo-Saxon ideological political representational model of capitalism (and Western capitalism) in its political form of electoralist, bourgeois parliamentary democracy, “representative democracy.”

As I say, this is far less publicized—and hypocritical, given the U.S. support for far-right, fascist, and dictatorial regimes and counterrevolutions. U.S. governments are happy with state corporatist and other dictatorial, laissez-faire, anti-working class, and anti-trade union models such as that in Chile (under Pinochet) and during dictatorships in Argentina in 1964–1985, 1973–1990, and 1976–1983, which suppressed “bourgeois democracy.”

The U.S.-Europe alliance of NATO acts as a self-righteous hegemon, justifying its bombings and billions of dollars spent on subversion in self-righteous terms of democracy and libertywhile profiting through its military-industrial complex and its “rebuilding” of countries it has destroyed.

The fetish of bourgeois parliamentary democracy is hugely embedded within Western populations, even where the choice at elections is so clearly, now, in these crises of Western capitalism since 2008 and since COVID, a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee—a pair of almost identical glove puppets, between Joe Biden and Trump, both completely controlled by capitalist oligarchs, or the Conservatives and the Labour Party in Britain.

In Britain, both major parties accept “fiscal responsibility”; that is, a continuation of austerity. Both accept and back U.S. military and diplomatic global power. Incidentally both accept, support, and are complicit in the mass murder of over forty thousand Palestinians in Gaza while, hypocritically, calling for more food aid there, meaning U.S. food aid to a Palestinian population that is being massacred at the very same time by U.S. bombs and arms.

To repeat what I said earlier about reform and revolution, there are some differences between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, between conservative and social democratic/labor parties. As Marxists we accept and indeed work for the reforms sometimes discussed and implemented by social democratic and labor parties. But the differences between parties in the bourgeois parliamentary systems of the West, and those between parties and coalitions, are within strict limits favorable to the capitalist class. Those limits show long-term austerity under Western capitalism for the working class.

The Left in the West

Attitudes towards China on the left in the West (comprising North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand) are split between two groups, types of response, and types of evaluation. First=, those welcoming social, economic, and diplomatic advances in China, but who are critical of various aspects. Second, Western communist/Marxist theorists such as myself and political organizations, who are broadly supportive of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and associated developments such as China’s Global Civilization Initiative.

The “Critical” Left

First on the left, there are Western Marxist and socialist groups who recognize the gains made by the CPC in reducing poverty and in its building global infrastructures via the Belt and Road and other initiatives, but which have various critiques of and concerns about Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. This group includes theorists such as Thomas Piketty and Richard Wolff.65 Piketty, for example, is full of praise for China’s economic growth—and, importantly, the immense increase in per capita income and huge increase in living standards for the people of China. But he is worried about increasing levels of inequality. The same goes for Wolff, who writes of “a stalled transition” to a postcapitalist society in China.

Political parties on the Marxist and Trotskyist Left, such as the SWP and SP typically criticize China as state capitalist. These Marxists point to the Soviet Union under Stalinism, where the state took the position of the capitalist class, directed by the party.66 SP, for example, in common with other Marxist parties in Britain such as the SWP, Anti-Capitalist Resistance/ Fourth International, and Socialist Appeal (now recently renamed the Revolutionary Communist Party), calls for democratic control and management of the economy and the renationalization of elements of the privatized economy.67

The “Supportive” Left

 Second on the left, Western communist and Marxist theorists such as myself and political organizations broadly supportive of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and associated developments, such as China’s Global Civilization Initiative. This includes organizations/parties such as the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) and its daily communist newspaper, The Morning Star.

In some sections of the organized Marxist and Communist left in the United Kingdom and United States, there is support for the achievements of the CCP in recent decades, for example, the CPGB (Marxist-Leninist), New Communist Party, and the CPB. But these are very small (unlike in France and Italy, the UK has never had a mass Communist Party). The New Communist Party and the CPGB (Marxist-Leninist) are absolutely tiny; the CPB is larger, and more influential. Its paper, The Morning Star, has some hundreds of members, but probably totaling less than a thousand.  The Morning Star is read by tens of thousands of left activists. Including me. Some of these Marxist parties have influence on some trade unions, for example, the CPB has some influence in the RMT.

In the United States, the Party of Socialism and Liberation (PSL) is very supportive of the Chinese road to communism and its current stage, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.

Many Western and global Marxist intellectuals applaud China’s road to socialism, including renowned Marxist scholar Vijay Prashad. Prashad notes that since 1949, the Chinese people have gone through a lot of ups and downs—and, he argues, in all the ups and downs, the goal has always been to establish socialism.68

There is a debate, globally and within China, of course, as in any leadership body.69

We who give support to Socialism with Chinese Characteristics recognize and are not uncritical, but we also recognize and applaud in particular the following eight achievements:

1. The astonishingly successful fight against poverty: lifting of 770 million people out of poverty and the effective governance which had led this.
2. The immense economic growth in China that has benefitted the Chinese people: stunning economic development, social transformation, and improved social and public services as well as increased life expectancy and infant mortality rates—life itself!
3. The Belt and Road Initiative: whereby China builds bridges and hospitals and roads, while United States/NATO bombs them.
4. Associated initiatives from China: calling for global cooperation and noninterference, seeking “a pivot to peace” as opposed to permanent war, and working towards combating climate change.
5. The drawing back under President Xi Jinping from some excesses of “billionaire capitalism” and his anti-corruption campaigns at national and local level (very different from the promotion of lobbying, corruption, flagrant and open and exhibitionistic self-enrichment by the West’s 0.1 percent, who are “the masters of the universe”): In the West, we see immiseration and impoverishment on a scale not seen for one hundred years, with intensification of the extraction of surplus value from the labor power of workers accompanied by mass destitution.
6. The ethical morality of community well-being and community consciousness of China’s ideology. This is taught throughout the ideological state apparatuses of schools, universities, and media, as opposed to the selfish antagonistic anti-human, egotistical, ultra-individualism of the West.
7. The key role of party, program, and leadership in leading China ands controlling ultracapitalist/individualist and anti-worker tendencies and ego-enrichment, characterized by attempts at encouraging internal party debate.
8. Finally, and hugely importantly for Western Communists and Western anticapitalist Revolutionary Marxists such as myself, the hope that Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is a stage on the path to the communism that Karl Marx described in his writing, for example in Grundrisse and in The German Ideology, where the root of real individualism, freedom, and emancipation—as opposed to the fake one that is constantly preached in bourgeois ideology—is a situation where all of our needs are taken care of through collective action, so that we only have to work six hours a day, and we can use the rest of the time, our humanity, exactly as we please.70

ZD: How do you see China’s role and function in the current world?

DH: I am not sure. Any governing party, any government, incorporates a variety of perspectives, beliefs, policies, and hopes. Clearly, as a Marxist—as a communist—I want to see China progress over time from a socialist into a communist society, and not into a more and more capitalist, more unequal society. I want to see a society and economy where there are not such huge differences between the richest and the poorest; in other words, there should be controls on the wealth and the power of the billionaire and multimillionaire class. If this were so, it could have enormous impact on world populations and on leftist parties, their memberships, and their supporters.

That is for the future. In Marxist terms, I am a communist working for a transition from socialism to communism. So, what is China’s role and function in the current world?

Currently it is a model of a great power that does not seek to bomb its rivals into submission. It is a model that seeks global cooperation rather than great power conflict. It is a model for taking millions out of poverty, as opposed to pushing millions into poverty.

We recognize that socialism in China is a work in progress with tremendous accomplishments. The hope of anticapitalist revolutionary classical Marxists such as myself is that in China, and globally, capitalism will be replaced by socialism, and then communism.

This may take many decades or longer, and there will be ups and downs. Progress will sometimes be stalled, and at other times advance notably. There will be struggles and contradictions. There is no blueprint, or even a “redprint.” But there is a direction, and there are theoretical tools to analyze the directions—Marxist theory, which is developing not static. In this global development, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics will play a major role. It is a major hope for humanity.

We affirm and welcome the undoubted economic, social, technological, and diplomatic successes of the leadership and policies of President Xi and the CCP, both within China and globally and express our hopes about the egalitarian social, economic and political development and future of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and its development into communism.

https://mronline.org/2024/09/11/neoliberalism-and-the-socialist-movement-in-britain-from-the-third-road-to-jeremy-corbyn-and-brexit/

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