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The Left’s Big March Backwards
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In this article Chris Rea takes aim at the People’s Assembly for their failure to move on from a ‘lifted from 2019’ anti-austerity program, despite the intervening political lurch towards a bio fascist state and mass grassroots rebellion against it.
The Tories are in Manchester for their annual party conference and so are the People’s Assembly, which has organised a week of protest actions and events including a national demonstration.
The People’s Assembly’s top-level campaign message is ‘Tories Out’. There is nothing wrong with this sentiment on its own terms. But it’s weak as a rallying principle. The Tories are not the ruling class. Rank and file conservatives certainly aren’t. The Conservative government is a regional management group for the Davos controllers. The next Labour government will be the same.
As the last three-and-a-half years have confirmed, whether it’s Tories In, Tories Out, Labour Out, Labour In, the Westminster system is bust and political energy should not be expended upon the established and establishment party political process.
During the covid programme there was not a cigarette paper’s difference between the Westminster parties. Directing fire at the Tories is missing the target but it is consistent with the Left’s position during covid.
‘Boris lied, people died,’ ‘Don’t let the Tories put profit before people,’ and other infantile bromides enabled the Left to pretend to itself that it was sticking it to the bosses and resisting Tory inhumanity by taking an ultra-line on restrictions.
The reality, of course, was that the Left collaborated with the ruling class. Casting the Tories as the reckless villains determined upon underplaying the seriousness of covid in order to protect their profits was crude but effective pantomime.
The People’s Assembly’s events during the four-day conference programme are heavily trade-union focused interleaved with campaign-driven spotlights including ‘climate justice’, Just Stop Oil (the flier asks, is it a misunderstood campaign?), Stand Up To Racism and the anti-war movement. A screening of Oh Jeremy Corbyn: the big lie rounds things off on the Tuesday night.
With the exception of Just Stop Oil which didn’t exist back then, the entire programme could have been lifted from 2019. It’s as if nothing has changed in the intervening period. You wouldn’t know that there had been a global insurrection against biosecurity fascism in the meantime.
That’s because for the Left, nothing has changed.
Many words have been expended on this site and elsewhere excoriating the Left for its failures during the plandemic. It’s a well-mined seam and I don’t want to over-visit it but it’s worth re-stating some of the more egregious examples.
During the covid period, the Left:
- Sat out the biggest popular demonstrations since the Iraq war protests of 2003 and dismissed said protests as being ‘far right’.
- Characterised the truckers’ protest in Canada in the same way.
- Refused to show solidarity with care home workers forced from their jobs for refusing to have the experimental injections.
- Showed no curiosity about the premature deaths of four Black African heads of state who dared to defy the diktats of global medtech fascism.
- Agitated for longer, harder, faster lockdowns.
- Supported the forced muzzling of children and teenagers in schools and colleges.
- Stayed silent on the imposition of digital surveillance systems based on health status.
- Refused to condemn the destruction of businesses and livelihoods.
- Supported financial measures that caused chronic inflation and increased individual dependency on state largesse.
- Said nothing about the immiseration of millions of people in poor countries caused by the shutting down of export markets.
All this being the case, the Left cannot be expected to be campaigning on any of the issues that preoccupy the Freedom Movement. These issues are antithetical to Left thinking, even now. There was a lot of talk in alt-media recently about lockdowns returning to the United States. The talk has ebbed away somewhat but it’s interesting to speculate on what the Left would do if severe restrictions were imposed again in this country. After the ordeal of the last three-and-a-half years, millions of people will tell the government to stick it. Millions of others will comply. But what would the Left do?
I think they would fall for it again. I have seen nothing to suggest that the Left has learned from its mistakes. To be fair, my engagement with the Left is not what it was before March 2020. I’m not involved in any of the groups or parties. I don’t buy the Morning Star anymore. I might be missing something. Perhaps there has been a massive mea culpa. Perhaps a front page of the Socialist Worker announced: ‘Covid: Why we were wrong.’ But I don’t think so. The People’s Assembly protests in Manchester have nothing to say about CBDCs, anti-ULEZ protests, the WHO’s Global Pandemic Treaty, injection injuries and deaths or workers still fighting to get their jobs back after resisting the tyranny of the ‘vaccine’ mandates.It was the same with the Marxism 2023 festival organised by the Socialist Workers Party in June. More than 100 panels, discussions and debates were concerned with the same old comfortable subjects.
There may be a big march on Sunday. But it will be nothing on the scale of the great Freedom Movement marches of 2021. And the political discussions won’t be a patch on the meetings that Real Left has organised, or those organised by Together or the People’s Health Alliance or any of the genuine revolutionary and radical political formations that emerged since March 2020 and which are carrying the fight to a ruling class that the Legacy Left prefers to pretend doesn’t exist.
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