Phil Hearse: Three Attempts to Forge New Left Parties in Britain
From Jim Sillars’s Scottish Labour Party, To Arthur Scargill’s SLP and Your Party
Editor’s introduction
Phil Hearse writes from inside a history Red Mole readers are now living through. He saw the IMG dissolved into Jim Sillars’s Scottish Labour Party in 1976. He sat in the London aggregate where Julie Donovan briefed Militant on Arthur Scargill’s SLP. He spoke to João Machado at the 1991 World Congress, when Brazilian comrades were openly betting on the PT.
The piece arrives at a moment when the regroupment question is no longer abstract. The Grassroots Left has lost the April CEC vote. Counterfire has walked. The SWP is being purged through a structural clause it cannot survive. The eight hundred thousand who signed up in summer 2025, minus those who have already drifted to the Greens or back into demoralisation, are looking for a formation that can carry both the electoral ambition Corbyn briefly seemed to offer and the democratic culture his apparatus has spent six months suppressing.
The pattern across Hearse’s three British cases is consistent enough to constitute a strategic lesson. The bureaucratic left will destroy a party rather than share leadership with revolutionaries. Revolutionaries who enter such formations without preserving an independent capacity to fight back will not survive the moment when that destruction begins. The bet on broad parties was correct. The bet on dissolution into broad parties was not.
For comrades working on what comes next, on whether Grassroots Left can become a formation in its own right, on whether the Connections convention amounts to more than referee work between existing fragments, on whether People Before Profit’s Irish model can be translated to British conditions, this is not nostalgia. It is a map of how the bet has gone wrong before, and on what terms it might yet go right.
— Red Mole
The article on Duncan’s Substack referencing the experience of Podemos in Spain explains something that has happened in various forms across a series of broad left parties: a shift to the right compared with their initial anti-capitalist promise, combined with organisational hostility to revolutionary currents and perspectives. More: across a series of parties, right-leaning leaderships have been prepared to destroy the party, or at least severely limit its projects, rather than see militant leftists exercise significant influence.
Why then did many revolutionaries bother to get involved in Podemos, Syriza in Greece,[^1 ] Communist Refoundation in Italy or indeed Your Party in Britain? The answer given by Fourth Internationalists, who were often in these parties from their foundation, was that the mass protest movements like Occupy! in the United States or the Indignados in Spain or the repeated general strikes in Greece, which emerged as a result of the post-2008 austerity, would just wear themselves out with repetitive protest actions unless they eventually came to a political conclusion. There were many “horizontalists”, theorised by John Holloway,[^2] who said all concern with governmental or state power leads to bureaucracy and defeat. According to Holloway, against ubiquitous power at every level of society we constantly fight, each day picking ourselves up to fight again, and it might be said against the same enemy, still in power, and quite possibly even stronger. Spontaneism wears itself out.
Against the anti-party views of the horizontalists, Fourth Internationalists attempted to give organisational as well as political perspectives to the mass anti-neoliberal movements that emerged after the 2007–8 financial crash. This meant going beyond repetitive and eventually demoralising protest actions towards an outcome that would at least mean the creation of new mass political formations capable of intervening in elections and struggles at national and local level.
A personal experience. In 2005 my partner’s father died and left her some money, which she decided to use buying a house in rural Portugal. We went out to equip the house, and one evening we watched on TV a parliamentary debate on government workers’ pay. And sure enough, up popped Francisco Louçã, key leader of the Left Bloc, to lead the opposition to the government’s proposal, which he argued meant a real wage cut. Brilliant, and the sort of thing that the British electoral system was designed to prevent, but now probably is being overcome by the Greens on the left and Reform on the right.
In the case of the US Occupy! movement you could say that a directly political force did emerge from it, namely the Bernie Sanders 2015 campaign to become the Democrats’ presidential candidate. This tied into a mass mainly student movement against Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican candidate. But it was by nature a very time-limited campaign. This did not and could not lead to an independent party.
Anybody involved in the workers’ movement or liberation politics will have seen this experience of protest action time and time again in the last twenty years. Example: what happened to Black Lives Matter? Such a protest movement was time-limited by its very nature and could not become something completely at variance with its own united-front, united-action character, on a single issue. A single-issue campaign that posed all the questions of race and power in the United States, but a movement that could not answer these issues in any coherent or united way. Of course not. An answer to those questions goes “from today’s conditions, and today’s consciousness towards the conquest of power.” That needs a revolutionary programme and a party to put it into action.
In Britain, there are three very parallel experiences, although in different situations and with different potentialities. These include the attempt in the mid-1970s by Westminster MP Jim Sillars to create a Scottish Labour Party, independent of and to the left of the official Labour Party. Second, there is the experience of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) created in the wake of the miners’ strike by former miners’ leader Arthur Scargill. And the third is Your Party, which is ongoing, and many would say an ongoing catastrophe.
What happened to Jim Sillars’s attempt to form a Scottish Labour Party? Of all the organisations of the revolutionary and militant left, the IMG in Scotland went for this opportunity, to the extent that most of its members joined Sillars’s party. In 1976 I remember comrades coming back to Birmingham from the IMG national committee, which I was too ill to attend, discussing this with enthusiasm and optimism about what would happen. The IMG would, it was reported, be an important component of this new party, and jokingly it was said that we would all have to learn to “speak Scottish”. IMG leadership meetings would be awash with Scottish accents. What happened then was that Sillars expelled the IMG fraction and other leftists, and in this process collapsed the party’s best chance of recruiting a young and activist core. The formal closure of the party was in 1981 when Sillars joined the SNP. The lesson was pretty clear: bureaucratic leftists will often be prepared to wreck the party they have established, rather than see a left-wing current have control, or even a substantial voice.
The experience of the formation of the Socialist Labour Party by miners’ leader Arthur Scargill is instructive here. Militant Labour, the main legacy party coming out of the split in the Militant Tendency over Labour Party entrism, decided to go all in as far as the SLP was concerned. I remember a London aggregate meeting, attended by about fifty people, in which the London organiser Julie Donovan laid out the perspective very clearly. She said: “We have to understand that our public profile will be part of the SLP. If possible, we will sell the SLP newspaper, and just have Socialism Today, our monthly magazine, to express our viewpoint. We will seek to be represented on leadership bodies, and we will be a significant part of the membership.” The mood was enthusiastic. A single comrade from Uxbridge sounded a warning note: “Be careful,” he said, “Scargill is a Stalinist and will try to knife us.” This was brushed aside in the general enthusiasm for the new party.
A meeting was organised with Scargill, held with Tommy Sheridan heading up the Militant group. According to the Militant representatives, members of the Fourth International Current (FIC)[^3] were at Scargill’s side. Scargill’s offer to Militant was brutal. He said: “You can join as individual members, you have to give us all your property, buildings and printing facilities, you cannot have any of your full-timers as SLP full-timers, and all your dues have to be paid to us.” Aficionados of The Godfather Part II will recognise the style: as Michael Corleone puts it, “Here’s my offer: nothing.” Scargill should have grabbed the Militant offer with both hands. Hundreds of activists would have been added to the rolls. Militant would have negotiated and accepted some pretty galling things to get in, but not Scargill’s humiliating “offer”.
Peter Taaffe was absolutely livid. He was furious on an epic scale. He went up and down the Militant’s large headquarters saying: “We’re not going to be led by the nose again.” I am sure that this was a major factor in Militant battening down the hatches and pulling back on the process of opening out, which had seen the formation of a lesbian and gay fraction and a women’s commission led by Margaret Creear, which had led the process of ideological refoundation that resulted in the Campaign against Domestic Violence. There were also regular articles in the paper about the environmental crisis. This was indeed a very uncompleted revolution that left Taaffe and his closest advisors with sleepless nights. It was uncompleted on the issue of united fronts and the autonomy of liberation movements. Eventually, decades later, it resulted in the charge of “Mandelism” against Taaffe’s opponents in the CWI, the Militant international coordination.
This led to the step backwards in the name change debate, where the proposed name, the Socialist Party, was tied to the explicit adoption of the line “we can build a small mass party on our own.”
And now we have the experience of Your Party, where the group around Jeremy Corbyn, Karie Murphy and Len McCluskey expelled the SWP and other leftists on the eve of the founding conference, on the basis of a constitution which had not even been adopted. If you want to assess the petty-minded vindictiveness of the Corbyn et al. group, you just have to look at the refusal to allow Verso Books to put up their stall (as previously agreed) because of the interview on the New Left Review/Verso website Sidecar with Zarah Sultana, in which she said some very critical things about Corbyn. The stakes involved and the horrific bureaucratic practice of the leading group are eloquently outlined by Mark Serwotka in his speech at the Party We Need event in November 2025.[^5]
The Your Party leadership group has produced a list of proscribed organisations.[^4] Counterfire is not on that list, but the structural clause governing organisations with their own national membership and political discipline drove them out anyway. Astonishing, because John Rees and Lindsey German, the key Counterfire leaders, have worked for a long time with Corbyn in the Stop the War Coalition and with Len McCluskey as well in the People’s Assembly. As they say, there’s no such thing as gratitude in politics.
Even if Your Party (a terrible name, by the way) eventually has 30,000 members, it will be a fraction of what was possible when the formation of the party was announced and 800,000 signed up for more information. It is rumoured that Guardian investigations have shown that thousands of young people who had been planning to join Your Party have decided to join the Greens instead. I rate that as highly likely.
All-out war against the left certainly did not happen in the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) for a couple of decades after the foundation of the party in February 1980. At the 1991 World Congress of the Fourth International, I had a long discussion with João Machado, who was then widely regarded as the leading figure in Socialist Democracy, the pro-Fourth International (FI) tendency inside the PT. I asked him how they posed the question of the Fourth International and the building of a revolutionary party to the new members. He said: “We explain that our party is the PT, we have no other party, and we want to build the PT as a revolutionary, anti-capitalist party.”
I asked him what happens if the PT turns out not to be a revolutionary or militantly anti-capitalist party. He replied: “Look, we have made a bet on the PT turning out as a revolutionary party. If that doesn’t happen, then we’ve lost our bet.” João is a clever and articulate leader. He has no illusions. The FI tendency lost their bet. It is not at all clear to me that they were wrong to make it. The PT experience is one of progressive “capture” of the SD-PT cadres by the local and national state apparatuses, as well as the apparatuses of the PT itself.[^6] I don’t know of a complete account of this process, which led to many SD cadres going outside the PT and helping to form the PSOL (Party of Socialism and Freedom).
The example of the Scottish Socialist Party is different again. It was formed by a merger of the Scottish Socialist Society and Scottish Militant Labour. Scottish Militant were a huge majority.
When a revolutionary tendency forms the majority of the leadership of a new, broader party, there is no point in maintaining an independent revolutionary current. There is no point holding each meeting twice. People just stopped going to Scottish Militant meetings. This was the issue that caused the split with Taaffe and Lynn Walsh, magazine editor and the person Peter Taaffe relied on as far as political elaboration was concerned.
The story of the Tommy Sheridan affair has nothing to do with tactics inside the SSP. It can be understood in all its horrible reality in Alan McCombes’s book Downfall. The SWP played a terrible role in all this, going into the SSP as an organised minority tendency determined to attack the leadership at every turn. It was a big missed opportunity for them. If they had had a more sensible attitude, they could have played a good role in maintaining the organisation, despite the Sheridan affair.
The examples discussed here are very different. A complete discussion would have to include the Socialist Alliance, Respect and Left Unity. But these three all come from the revolutionary left, or fragments of it. They failed for very different reasons. By contrast, the Your Party example should, for completeness, be discussed in the framework of an assessment of Corbynism overall.
Nevertheless, we can conclude, I think, that the dissolution of revolutionary currents inside broad parties is fraught with danger. The left bureaucracy, often including people who are very familiar with being witch-hunted, knows all the brutal manoeuvres necessary to close down democracy. No illusions: they will use every dirty trick in the book against the militant left.
Endnotes
[^1]: The attitude towards broad left parties varied between organisations and between countries. In Greece, most Fourth Internationalists refused to go into Syriza.
[^2]: John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, Pluto Press.
[^3]: The FIC was a micro-faction coming out of the splits in the IMG. Its leader was Brian Heron; other members I remember included the late Caroline Sikorski, Trevor Wongsam, Patrick Sikorski, Bernard Gibbons, Pat Hickey and Colin Meade. Meade went over to anti-Marxist liberalism; Wongsam became a candidate for UKIP in the 2019 Manchester city elections, standing in Ancoats and Beswick. The corollary of the FIC’s assistance to Scargill in excluding Militant was their own expulsion in 1999. Scargill got his Southall satrap, Harpal Brar, a leader of a wing of the Indian Workers’ Association, to move the expulsion of the FIC. There really isn’t any gratitude in politics.
[^4]: Editor’s note. The list voted through by the YP CEC on 12 April 2026 names the SWP, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, the Socialist Party, the CPGB-PCC, the Scottish Socialist Party, the Socialist Equality Party and the Revolutionary Communist Party. Counterfire is not on the named list. The Additional Principle on page three of the governance paper, which extends ineligibility to any organisation operating as a democratic-centralist party with its own national membership structure and political discipline to an external leadership, captured Counterfire anyway, and Counterfire announced its departure from Your Party on the eve of the vote.
[^5]: Editor’s note. Mark Serwotka’s speech at the Party We Need event, November 2025, is available at https://bit.ly/3ORtPVR
[^6] Editor’s note. João Machado's 2012 retrospective on DS and the PT, written for an IIRE seminar in memory of Daniel Bensaid, reaches conclusions that converge with the dissolution thesis of this piece. Machado records Bensaid's 1988 warning that DS's formula "revolutionary party in construction" risked "disarming DS members in relation to the problems the PT would still face," and his own self-criticism that DS members "got used to thinking that there would never be a conflict between their DS (and IV International)-identity and their PT-identity." When the conflict came in 2002–05, three-quarters of DS members chose the PT. See João Machado, The experience of building DS and the PT, from 1979 to the first Lula government, International Viewpoint, May 2012. For the broader political-sociological trajectory of PT capture under Lula and Rousseff, see Dan La Botz, The Brazilian Left, Lula, Rousseff, and the PT Establishment in Power, International Viewpoint, February 2015.
About the author
Phil Hearse came into socialist politics through CND and the Young Communist League, which he joined in 1962 at the age of thirteen and which expelled him a year later for membership of a Trotskyist-led faction. From 1967 he spent twenty-seven years in the British section of the Fourth International, holding leadership positions in the International Marxist Group and in its successor organisations through the splits of the mid-1980s. He led the minority that formed the International Group in 1985, which merged two years later into the International Socialist Group; he edited its newspaper Socialist Outlook. In 1994 he joined Militant Labour, leaving in 1997 with the comrades who founded Socialist Democracy. He played a central role in the 2003 regroupment that brought the Socialist Solidarity Network together with the International Socialist Group to launch Socialist Resistance, the formation that became the Fourth International’s British section and that has since evolved into Anti*Capitalist Resistance, of which Hearse remains an active member.
The IMG dissolution into Sillars’s Scottish Labour Party and the Militant aggregate on Scargill’s SLP described in this article are events Hearse witnessed from inside the room.
At the SWP aggregate at Glasgow Caledonian university in early 2001, which I was present at, the thrust of what the SWP sought to do as the about to be SW Platform was to capture the SSP for its type of politics. This was the bullish charge led by Julie Waterson, one of the SWP Central Committee members, leading the SWP negotiations with the SSP. The previous rivalry with Militant meant the SWP believed it could show itself to be the real revolutionary force and, thus, dominate the SSP. It believed it could show this to be the case by recruiting more members to the SSP (where these new members would be more aligned to SW Platform politics than those of the ISM leadership). Come the split over Sheridan, a conversation with Lindsey German in 2012 in which I argued that the SWP helped Sheridan wreck the SSP, she responded that the SWP Central Committee did not fully know what was going on in Scotland and effectively delegated it decisions on this matter to Waterson and Chris Bambery. Both Waterson and Bambery as Scots were SWP full-timer organisers in Scotland before moving to SWP national HQ in London.
Phil Hearse's account of João Machado in 1991 captures the bet at its most articulate moment, but it had been made publicly a decade earlier. In 1981, the EM TEMPO collective, the journal associated with what would become Democracia Socialista, published O PT e o Partido Revolucionário no Brasil. It is one of the foundational documents of the FI tendency's strategy in the PT and is worth reading alongside Phil's testimony from the 1991 World Congress.
The 1981 document got the form right and the content wrong, which is the pattern I think recurs across the cases Phil discusses. On form: the PT was correctly identified as a historic break from the cycle of small revolutionary groups, the strategy of dual membership rather than dissolution was correctly argued for, and the rejection of stagism in favour of uninterrupted struggle was right. On content: the document underestimated how readily the PT apparatus could absorb its own internal vanguard, overestimated DS's capacity to win the battle for the party's soul, and treated bureaucratisation as a problem of vigilance rather than as a structural pressure that would intensify as the party moved toward government.
By 2002 and the Letter to the Brazilian People, the question was settled. By 2003 DS faced the choice it had spent two decades preparing for and lost the bet, in Machado's own retrospective formulation.
What strikes me, reading the 1981 text now, is that it contains, in embryo, every analytical resource the FI tendency needed to predict its own defeat. It just could not bring itself to apply those resources to itself. That is the harder lesson the British cases also pose: the bet was right to make, the dissolution was wrong to accept, and the difference between the two depends on whether the revolutionary current can criticise its own trajectory in real time.