From Elsewhere: The middle class Left versus ordinary Britons
I grew up around the political Left, not so much in a family of Leftists as some have done, but in a community where people holding leftist views of various sorts, supporting trade unionism and believing in worker solidarity was not unusual. The Left as I saw it back then was clearly on the side of working class Britons.
The representatives of the Left back then whether it be in elected Labour Party politics or in trade unions or in other organisations came from the working class, spoke the language of the working class and put Britain’s working class first. Yes there were doctrinaire and ideological leftists around such as those who supported the British Communist Party and as teenager I encountered at least two secondary school teachers who were ex-1968 Paris student protestors, such people have always existed. However from what I can remember such individuals did not represent the majority of those on the Left. The majority of the leftists that came into my life back then were dock workers, industrial workers, transport workers and those working in healthcare. The Left back then were also not too hot on the idea of mass migration because they knew enough about economics to know that flooding an area or an industry with migrants pulls down wages because of the greater availability of migrant labour who might be willing to take a lower wage than a British person.
Unfortunately the Left today is not like the Left of yesteryear. Despite all its faults the old Left did at least centre the interests of working class Britons. That’s not the case today. The British Left, such as it is, is devoid of mass working class member ship or support and the movers and shakers within it are more likely to be highly paid public sector management types than someone working in a factory or driving a lorry or mopping up blood from a hospital ward floor. Because of that shift in the make up of British leftism it has become divorced from the needs and interests of the British working class. Your trade union representative or Labour MP or other leftist factotum is today going to be more interested in open borders, allowing men in women’s spaces, pandering to the ‘religion of peace’ and cracking down on freedom of speech.
Yesterday’s leftist would have shunned child abusers and rapists as they would have known that it might be their child or wife or their comrade’s child or wife who could be the next victim of such beasts. Sadly today’s middle class leftist is more likely to make excuses for such individuals instead of standing with their victims. It’s why today’s Leftists turn out to protest against local people up in arms about the housing of dangerous dinghy invaders in their towns and cities and who put their children in mortal danger.
One of the leftist groups that is more powerful, more deranged and more dangerous than many ordinary people might realise is the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The SWP are not any sort of socialist group that respects the idea of democracy, they are hard core Marxist/Trotskyite revolutionaries that would not shy away from the idea of violence if that was what they thought would bring about the ‘revolution’. The SWP and their various front groups have supported some of the worst causes out there and they include Islamic extremism, hatred of Israel and Jews, open borders and much more. Recently SWP supporters and SWP front groups such as Stand Up To Racism (SUTR) have been smearing concerned parents worried about migrant caused sex crime as ‘far right’. Yes, the SWP/SUTR are now defending foreign nonces and not those who are worried about such criminals.
I’m not the only person who has noticed this issue with the Socialist Workers Party and its various front groups. Others have also seen how the SWP and SWP fronts latch onto any and all vaguely leftist causes and take them over. Even some of those people who are way way more to the political Left than I am these days try to keep the SWP at arms length. Sometimes this distancing from the SWP is because of the propensity of the SWP to take over and hollow out campaigns. Others are quite rightly upset about how the SWP has not exactly protected its female members from predation by senior SWP operatives in the past such as we saw in the ‘Comrade Delta’ case where an SWP high up was accused of sexually assaulting a female SWP member but this accusation was dealt with internally by the SWP and not referred out to the police.
From what I’ve seen of the SWP over the years at demos and observing how they organise and the causes that they support I’d say that if you are one of the dwindling number of working class leftists out there then I’d say that the SWP should be avoided. In my view one of the most counterproductive things that you can do if you have a working class centred cause that you want backing for is to climb into political bed with the SWP.
Dr Lisa Mckenzie the self described working class academic is another individual who his quite rightly hostile to the SWP. Whilst I may not agree with all her politics and disagree with her assessment of Mr Tommy Robinson in her otherwise excellent piece for Spiked Magazine, she’s correct about how the SWP is a menace to the causes that it proports to back. For the record my own view of Mr Robinson is that he’s correctly identified many of the problems that afflict the United Kingdom at the moment, especially those problems related to Islam. He’s not perfect but then who is, but he’s not the racialist bogeyman that many on the Left lazily paint him as.
However Dr Mckenzie is 100% correct in her assessment of the Socialist Workers Party and their front groups. They really have as she says in the Spiked article, started to be being seen by working class Britons as at worst as nonces themselves and at best nonce protectors. Dr Mckenzie does have the measure of the SWP and it’s that they are posh radicals with almost zero connection to the working classes and working class concerns.
Dr Mckenzie said:
The SWP is now a menace to the cause it claims to represent. There are still those of us trying to build a political movement out of class solidarity, yet by branding people such as those Epping protesters as ‘far right’, the SWP drives well-meaning, working-class people into the arms of Tommy Robinson and his ilk. The SWP is dominated by privileged Londoners, and it shows. It arrives, uninvited, to working-class areas armed with placards declaring ‘Refugees Are Welcome Here’ – ignoring the fact that it is the Home Office that has imposed asylum hotels on these towns. It is neither the choice of residents nor the refugees themselves to live there. The policy of housing migrants in the poorest parts of the country could hardly be more of a two-fingered salute to the working classes – and still the left insists on adding insult to injury.
Dr Mckenzie is spot on about the SWP. The SWP are middle class idiots who cosplay as members of the working classes and those who are genuinely working class can see that very clearly. We know that they don’t have our interests at heart, we know that we don’t do the same jobs as them and nor to they suffer the same problems as the rest of us do. They take over campaigns such as those against the genuine neo-Nazis who existed in the late 70’s and early 80’s and ruin these campaigns by imposing their own view and their own people on them backed up by the SWP’s considerable fiscal and organisational resources. I’ve seen this happen way back then with those opposed to the neo-Nazi National Front and the British Movement groups and more recently with the opposition to the 2003 Iraq War. On both these occasions I saw the SWP and their front groups whether it was the Anti Nazi League or the Stop The War Coalition destroy much of the goodwill behind these causes by taking them over and ruining them.
Like I said earlier my politics such as they are now are probably radically different from what they were when I was younger and different from those of Dr Mckenzie. However she’s correct about the damage these idiots who sneer at the working classes and their concerns do to campaigns and to the working classes themselves. Anyone who is involved in community or grass roots politics and especially those who are only just getting into this field should learn all about the SWP and learn to shun them at every single opportunity. The SWP have picked their side and it’s not you, it’s not your community, it’s not your nation and it’s certainly not your children or their security.
Links
The ‘Comrade Delta’ case discussed from a leftist point of view
https://thenorwichradical.com/2024/05/31/socialist-workers-party-explainer-comrade-delta
Dr Lisa Mckenzie’s article on the dangers posed by the SWP
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/25/in-epping-its-the-left-vs-the-people