How the SWP Became What It Rejected

The Socialist Workers Party, Counterfire, and the institutionalisation of the British left's permanent retreat

TL;DR: On 13 September 2025, a Tommy Robinson rally of up to 150,000 outnumbered the SUTR counter-protest by twenty-two to one. The SWP’s response was to found the Together Alliance: a non-membership, no-local-branches platform of celebrities and general secretaries. This article argues that Together Alliance is structurally identical to the People’s Assembly — the Counterfire project the SWP spent 2013–2015 correctly criticising. The SWP’s own journal named the mechanism precisely in 2014: tying the movement to the trade union bureaucracy leaves it ‘ill-positioned’ to stand against that bureaucracy when it acts as a barrier to action. Twelve years later, the SWP built the same structure. The People’s Assembly is now a listed affiliate of Together Alliance. The Birmingham bin strike, entering its second year without meaningful cross-union solidarity, is the industrial mirror of the same failure. The long-run destination of this trajectory is the Communist Party of Britain: an organisation whose public existence is entirely mediated through front structures it cannot control, and whose political independence has been evacuated in the name of keeping celebrities and general secretaries on the platform.

‘We have not yet replicated at a local level the weight of support that exists at the top of the movement.’ — SWP Pre-Conference Bulletin 3, December 2025

I. The march that wasn’t

On 28 March 2026, the Together Alliance will march through London. Sir Lenny Henry. Steve Coogan. Paloma Faith. Kevin Courtney on the platform, introducing Mark Serwotka, who will introduce someone from the TUC. The speeches will be good. The crowd will be several thousand. And the far right, watching from Telegram, will do the arithmetic.

Meanwhile, in Birmingham, bin workers will enter their second year on strike. Injunctions are still in force. Agency scabs are still collecting waste. Unite has cut its Labour affiliation by 40 per cent, a gesture so theatrically radical it almost obscures the fact that the workers on the picket line have received meaningful solidarity from precisely none of the unions whose general secretaries will share a platform in London that afternoon.

Place these two facts side by side. This is the strategic situation of the British revolutionary left in 2026.

II. The verdict of 13 September

The ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally on 13 September 2025 was not a surprise. It was a reckoning. Between 110,000 and 150,000 people, organised by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, filled the streets from Big Ben across Westminster Bridge to Waterloo station. The counter-protest — no, the counter-protest is the wrong term; call it what it was, a kettle — assembled some five thousand people at Russell Square, penned in by police, with no impact whatsoever on the visibility or operations of the far-right rally.

Twenty-two to one. That is not a ratio. That is a verdict.

For fifteen years, Stand Up To Racism has built its model on a particular theory of political change: accumulate enough general secretaries and celebrities on a platform, stage sufficient national set-pieces, and the numerical weight of ‘respectable society’ will deter the fascists. The theory was always questionable. September 13 demolished it entirely. The far right did not read the statements signed by the PCS general secretary. They marched. And they outnumbered the response by a factor of twenty-two.

What was the SWP’s organisational response? Not an emergency conference of shop stewards. Not a call for Trades Councils to convene local defence committees. Not a demand that union branches build the physical capacity to contest the street. The response was to found the Together Alliance, a ‘Love, Hope and Unity’ platform explicitly structured as a non-membership organisation with no local branches by design, its contact lists flowing to a central London office managed by former general secretaries.

The form of the response reveals the limits of the politics. A revolutionary organisation reads September 13 and concludes: we need deeper roots. A bureaucratically dependent organisation reads September 13 and concludes: we need a bigger platform.

III. The Counterfire trap

Here is the irony that should stop every SWP member cold. The Together Alliance is, structurally and politically, the People’s Assembly. This piece builds on Red Mole’s earlier analysis of Together Alliance, but advances a sharper systemic argument: the problem is not this campaign’s tactics but a decade-long structural logic.

The People’s Assembly was a Counterfire project. It was built by John Rees and Lindsey German, who had resigned from the SWP in 2010 — along with Chris Nineham and others — over strategic disagreements about the relationship between revolutionary organisation and broad-front politics. Chris Bambery, citing 32 years of membership, followed. They left voluntarily; the SWP did not expel them. The distinction matters. This was not a purge of an unwanted tendency but a strategic rupture between people who had run the organisation together.

And the SWP knew it was wrong. They said so, in public, at the time.

While the SWP participated in the PA, their contemporary critiques accurately identified the structural flaws now evident in the Together Alliance.

Charlie Kimber, writing in Socialist Review in June 2013, called the PA ‘welcome’ while naming the mechanism of its failure: ‘there is a tendency for the anti-austerity front to be reduced to platitudes and generalities so as not to upset those union leaders who have shied away from a fight.’ The subtitle of the piece captured the argument precisely: the PA was welcome, but the movement needed to ‘address the role of trade union leaders and the Labour Party’ if it was to build something capable of breaking the government.

The SWP’s response in 2013 was not only to voice this critique but to run an explicit alternative: Unite the Resistance, a rank-and-file network focused on building industrial action capacity and voicing criticism of union leaders where necessary. That is a revolutionary organisation behaving like one: participating in the broad front while maintaining an independent structure oriented toward rank-and-file power. Paul Blackledge provided the theoretical framework in International Socialism 141 (2014), naming the Counterfire connection directly: ‘the People’s Assembly, launched by comrades around Counterfire, has effectively tried to tie the anti-austerity movement to the left bureaucracy of the trade union movement generally and to McCluskey more specifically in a way that has left them ill-positioned to stand against McCluskey when he acts as a barrier to action.’ The SWP, in its own journal, identified the mechanism precisely. Twelve years later it built the same structure and called it a response to fascism.

The SWP was right. The People’s Assembly substituted the discursive power of a general-secretary-and-celebrity coalition for the mobilising power of an organised rank and file. It could fill a hall in Westminster. It could not stop a single austerity cut.

Now count the similarities. The Together Alliance: celebrities listed before any union structures in the founding statement. Kevin Courtney, former NEU Joint General Secretary. Mark Serwotka, former PCS General Secretary. A ‘conscious strategic decision’ not to build a membership organisation or local branches. Contact lists centralised in London. The SWP’s own Pre-Conference Bulletin 3, December 2025, conceding what the organisation will not quite say aloud: ‘We have not yet replicated at a local level the weight of support that exists at the top of the movement.’

But the most damning fact is not the structural resemblance. It is this: the People’s Assembly is a constituent affiliate of the Together Alliance. It appears on the full signatory list, alongside the Morning Star, Stop the War Coalition, and — near the bottom, in the general scramble of organisations — the Socialist Workers Party itself. The SWP did not merely follow Counterfire into the same model. It signed up to a platform on which Counterfire’s flagship project is listed as a co-organiser. The organisation that in 2013 was correctly criticising the People’s Assembly for bureaucratic substitutionalism is now, in 2026, a named affiliate of it.

The SWP spent 2013 to 2015 making this critique of Counterfire. Then it followed Counterfire into the same cul-de-sac, twelve years later, under greater pressure, with fewer resources, and less independent political capacity. The People’s Assembly had at least attempted local branches. Together Alliance decided in advance not to bother. And rather than supersede the People’s Assembly, Together has absorbed it.

This is not a repetition of history as farce. It is more interesting than that: it is a revolutionary organisation, diminished by a decade of crisis, discovering that its own critique of opportunism was correct — and implementing it anyway, because it no longer has the independent capacity to do otherwise.

IV. The 2013 crisis and the grammar of dependency

To understand why, you need to understand what happened to the SWP in 2013.

The Delta affair, the subsequent resignations, the faction fights, the exodus — see The Reckoning That Wasn’t for the full account — haemorrhaged members and credibility at a moment when the British left was politically in motion. The numbers are disputed, but the trajectory is not. The SWP that entered the 2010s was a significantly larger, more rooted organisation than the one that emerged from it.

What remained of public visibility, after the crisis, was largely Stand Up To Racism. SUTR continued to function. It continued to draw union backing and parliamentary support. It continued to stage demonstrations. And the SWP, diminished, found itself increasingly dependent on SUTR’s public profile in a way that quietly inverted the proper relationship between a revolutionary party and its united fronts.

The united front is a tactic: a temporary, limited alliance with other forces, maintained on the basis of the revolutionary organisation’s political independence, for specific objectives around which broader unity is both possible and necessary. The front is an instrument the party deploys. When the party’s own public existence becomes structurally dependent on the front’s profile, the instrument has become the master. The revolutionary content is gradually evacuated. Not in a single decision, but through accumulated dependency.

This inversion does not happen because of bad intentions or weak individuals. It happens because of organizational form. A party that must function as a disciplined unit within a broad coalition, moving its weight as a single instrument at the leadership's direction, requires concentrated authority to operate at all. Concentrated authority means that the mass of members functions through discipline and correct lines rather than through independent political formation. Members who cannot evaluate strategic decisions independently, because the organizational form has not developed that capacity in them, cannot resist strategic errors when they accumulate. The front structures then become impossible to exit: not because the leadership has decided to stay, but because the membership no longer possesses the theoretical tools to see the alternative clearly, let alone to force it through the internal democracy the organisation formally maintains. This is the mechanism the CPB followed, incrementally, across a decade. It is the mechanism the SWP has been following since 2013. The Together Alliance is not a new decision. It is the current expression of an organizational logic that was set in motion when Respect required a command structure, and that has been compounding ever since.

V. Birmingham: the industrial mirror

The bin strike proves the argument in the industrial register, where the SWP’s failure cannot be attributed to the particular pressures of anti-fascist coalition-building.

Unite members in Birmingham walked out on 11 March 2025. They are still out. The dispute is about pay and role devaluation: the council, under Majid Mahmood, implementing a ‘new and improved waste service’ that Unite says will cost hundreds of workers significant income. The government backed the council. The courts issued injunctions. Agency labour continued to collect waste. And the strike, now in its second year, has not been broken — but it has not been won either.

Unions whose general secretaries have shared platforms at SUTR and Together Alliance rallies — the NEU, the BMA, the FBU — have spoken at pickets. They have not mobilised their members. No serious cross-union solidarity action has materialised. Unite Left, the SWP-aligned caucus within the union, has functioned as a lobbying caucus for the leadership rather than an alternative power centre capable of building the kind of mass solidarity that could actually end the dispute.

Sharon Graham’s decision to cut Unite’s Labour Party affiliation by 40 per cent was, without question, a significant political signal. It was not a strategic breakthrough. The bin workers remain on strike. The injunctions remain in force. The signal was sent from the top of the union to the top of the Labour Party, by an Executive that scheduled formal membership consultation for a later date. This is rank-and-file strategy as managed dissent: a performative rupture at the leadership level that masks the absence of any real transfer of power to the workers fighting the dispute.

The SWP’s own PCB documents — and Red Mole’s forensic account of the SWP’s industrial collapse — describe a party that is ‘consistently assisted by the Central Committee’ in its Birmingham work, that has brought a striking bin worker to the Marxism festival, that has sold papers on high-street stalls. These are not nothing. But the SWP thinks is ‘simply too small to have a decisive influence on the tactics and outcome of what remains a dispute led by union officials from the top.’ Their own assessment. The question the assessment raises is whether the strategy of working ‘with and against the bureaucracy’ through the front structures has contributed to that smallness.

VI. The grammar of both errors

The historical comparator is instructive precisely because it shows that there are two ways to fail, not one.

In 1921, Amadeo Bordiga was leading the Communist Party of Italy. The Arditi del Popolo had emerged spontaneously: a mass anti-fascist movement uniting workers, socialists, anarchists, and veterans, successfully repelling fascist punitive expeditions in Parma and elsewhere. Bordiga forbade communists from joining on the grounds that the Arditi had been ‘started on the initiative of officers connected with bourgeois-democratic groups’ and was therefore politically impure. The PCI would instead build its own communist squads, in competition with the mass movement.

Trotsky and Lenin were scathing. By isolating the most politically disciplined element of the working class from a genuine mass movement because that movement’s initial leadership was reformist, Bordiga ensured the defeat of both. The united front requires that revolutionaries take a leading role in the actual mass movement, even when — especially when — its initial leadership is not revolutionary.

Bordiga’s error: sectarian purity. Refusal to engage with the actually-existing movement.

The Together Alliance’s error: the opposite. Not refusal to engage, but dissolution into engagement. The united front, Trotsky insisted, requires that revolutionaries ‘always reserve the right to lead the struggle to the end’ and never ‘become dissolved’ in the front itself. Political independence within the alliance is not optional; it is what makes the alliance useful. A front that cannot name the Labour government’s complicity in state racism for fear of embarrassing Stella Creasy — a Starmer loyalist who signed the Together founding statement — has already surrendered the thing that gives the united front its revolutionary content.

Bordiga substituted the party for the movement. Together Alliance substitutes the front for the party. The results are symmetrical.

VII. What the united front actually requires

The Bradford 12 were acquitted in 1982. Twelve young men, most of them Asian, charged with conspiracy to make petrol bombs after defending their Manningham community from National Front violence. Their defence was straightforward: self-defence is no offence. The police had not protected them. No celebrity platform had protected them. They had built local intelligence networks, they knew who the NF organisers were, and they acted.

Anti-fascism in the tradition of Cable Street 1936 and Lewisham 1977 was built on this understanding. The state will not protect working-class communities from fascist violence. General secretaries signing statements will not protect them. What protects them is organised, disciplined, locally-rooted collective action: the shop steward who knows every workplace in the constituency, the Trades Council that has real relationships with communities, the branch that has been meeting for years before the fascists arrive.

The Together Alliance signatory list does include roughly nineteen Trades Councils: Manchester, Leeds, Tower Hamlets, Lincoln, Leicester, Barnsley, Newcastle, and others. This looks, at first glance, like local rootedness. It is not. An affiliation to a non-membership organisation with no local branches and no mobilising obligations is a statement of sympathy, not a commitment to action. There is no mechanism in Together’s structure by which a Trades Council affiliation produces a stewarding roster, a rapid-response network, or a local defence committee. The Trades Councils are listed. The shop steward committees are not. That distinction is everything.

An affiliation without obligation is bureaucratic decoration. By its own constitutional design, Together cannot convert that decoration into power. No local branches means no local roots means no local intelligence means no capacity to mobilise in the forty-eight hours between a far-right announcement and a far-right march. By the time Kevin Courtney has convened a call with the general secretaries, the Telegram channels have already organised the stewarding.

What the united front actually requires is the opposite of what Together has built: Trades Council-led local defence committees with genuine rank-and-file accountability; shop-steward conferences to build cross-union solidarity that reaches actual workers rather than stopping at the general secretary level; the explicit, public naming of Labour’s ‘hostile environment’ continuation as a driver of far-right growth, regardless of which alliance members that naming inconveniences; and an organisational capacity that exists before the crisis, not one that is assembled in response to it.

None of this requires abandoning the principle of the united front. It requires understanding what the united front is: a tactic of the revolutionary party, not a substitute for it.

VIII. After the march

The far right will do the arithmetic again. They did not need a celebrity platform in 2025. They needed Telegram and organisation and the patience to build for eighteen months. They have already begun building for the next mobilisation.

The question for the SWP — and for everyone on the revolutionary left watching this unfold — is not whether the Together Alliance should be boycotted or denounced. It is a sharper question: at what point does participating in a structure that systematically substitutes visibility for power become an obstacle to building the things that could actually work? At what point does ‘working with and against the bureaucracy’ become, in practice, just working with it?

The SWP correctly diagnosed the People’s Assembly’s failure in 2013. They named the mechanism: the front tied its fortunes to the union bureaucracy, displaced rank-and-file initiative, and delivered ritual protest without mobilising capacity. They were right. Twelve years later, under greater pressure, they built the same structure and called it a response to a crisis their previous structure had failed to prevent.

This is not a polemic about bad intentions. The SWP comrades in Birmingham, on the picket lines, building SUTR branches in Scotland, are doing real work under difficult conditions. The critique is structural, not personal. An organisation can have good comrades and bad strategy. It can diagnose its opponents’ errors precisely and replicate them anyway, because the conditions that produced the opportunism have not been addressed.

The institutionalisation of defeat is not a sudden event. It is a process. The CPB did not decide one morning to trade Morning Star access for revolutionary independence. The SWP did not decide one morning that fronts were preferable to party-building. These things happen incrementally, through a thousand reasonable-seeming decisions, each justified by the immediate pressure of the situation. By the time the pattern is visible, it is also deeply embedded.

The standard response to this analysis, and it will come, is that the alternative is sectarian isolation: a purer, smaller SWP denouncing the fronts from the outside while the fascists march unopposed. This is a false choice, and understanding why it is false is the most important thing the history of the revolutionary left can tell us in 2026. Bordiga's Communist Party of Italy made precisely the sectarian error in 1921: forbidding communists from joining the Arditi del Popolo, the mass spontaneous anti-fascist movement, because its initial leadership included bourgeois-democratic officers and anarchists. The PCI would build its own communist squads instead. Trotsky was scathing. By isolating the most politically disciplined element of the working class from the actual mass movement because that movement was not yet revolutionary in leadership, Bordiga ensured the defeat of both. The workers lost to Mussolini. In 2025, the British counter-movement lost to Tommy Robinson by twenty-two to one. Two different errors, two different decades, symmetrical results. The answer to the Together Alliance's failure is not Bordiga. It is the organizational form that makes the choice between these two poles unnecessary: a party whose members have sufficient theoretical formation to participate in the united front, win influence within it, name the bureaucratic barriers to action without destroying the coalition, and maintain independent capacity when the front's limits have been reached. Neither dissolved into the front nor retreating from it. Holding the tension. That is what the SWP could do in 2013 when it ran Unite the Resistance alongside the People's Assembly. It is what the SWP cannot do in 2026, not because the comrades are less capable, but because the organizational form that made it possible has been eroded by a decade of the logic it is now completing.

September 13, 2025 made the pattern visible. The response to September 13 made it structural. What happens next — whether the 28 March demonstration produces anything beyond a photograph — will determine whether the pattern becomes permanent.

The bin workers in Birmingham will still be on the picket line on 29 March. The question is whether anyone who was on the platform the day before will have done anything to help them win.

Notes

1. SWP Pre-Conference Bulletin 3 (PCB3), December 2025. Available internally.

2. Figures from CBS News, PBS NewsHour, The Guardian live blog, 13 September 2025. The Wikipedia entry on the 2025 British anti-immigration protests compiles the main sources.

3. Together Alliance founding statement and signatory list at togetheralliance.org.uk, accessed March 2026. The non-membership, no-local-branches decision is confirmed in Socialist Party analysis: ‘Together – or a union-led fight against racism and the far right?’, socialistparty.org.uk, 10 December 2025.

4. Charlie Kimber, ‘People’s Assembly: what can it deliver?’, Socialist Review 381, June 2013, socialistworker.co.uk. Direct quote: ‘there is a tendency for the anti-austerity front to be reduced to platitudes and generalities so as not to upset those union leaders who have shied away from a fight.’ Mark L Thomas, ‘Campaigners join Nottingham People’s Assembly’, Socialist Worker Issue 2354, 21 May 2013. Direct quote: ‘no discussion in the closing session about how we can campaign for union leaders to turn opposition to austerity into effective action, including strikes.’ On Unite the Resistance: see Kimber, ibid. Paul Blackledge, ‘Once more on left reformism: a reply to Ed Rooksby’, International Socialism 141, Winter 2014, isj.org.uk. The Counterfire attribution and the direct quote used in the text are from footnote 23 of that article: ‘the People’s Assembly, launched by comrades around Counterfire, has effectively tried to tie the anti-austerity movement to the left bureaucracy of the trade union movement generally and to McCluskey more specifically in a way that has left them ill-positioned to stand against McCluskey when he acts as a barrier to action.’

5. On the Birmingham bin strike: Birmingham City Council, ‘Industrial action in the waste service – one year on from start of all-out strike’, March 2026. Unite announcement on Labour affiliation cut: unitetheunion.org, March 2026.

6. The Arditi del Popolo analysis draws on Tom Behan, The Resistible Rise of Benito Mussolini (Bookmarks, 2003), and on Héctor Sierra, ‘Revolutionaries, hegemony and the united front’, International Socialism 187, July 2025 — an SWP piece that provides the Trotsky citations used here and makes the Bordiga comparison from a rather different political position.

7. Trotsky citations: ‘On the United Front’ (1922), in The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. 2 (New Park, 1974); ‘What Next?’ (1932), in Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front (Bookmarks, 1989).