The SWP’s Twenty-Four Year Detour: Why January’s Conference Must End the CPB Embrace

The Bricklayers and the Architects: The SWP's Twin Crises Share a Common Root

Dec 29, 2025

The Socialist Workers Party conference of January 9-11, 2026 will witness something unprecedented in forty years: the central leaders (currently Alex Callinicos, Charlie Kimber, Weyman Bennett, and Mark Thomas) all departing the Central Committee. The official explanation invokes accountability for the 2013 rape cover-up. The timing, twelve years late, suggests other calculations: Dave Renton’s book arriving in July, SWP members seeking positions in Your Party, the accumulated weight of a reputation that renders every nomination contestable.

But the 2013 crisis, catastrophic as it was, is not the only reckoning the SWP has deferred. There is another, longer, and in some ways more consequential: the party’s twenty-four year partnership with the Communist Party of Britain, a partnership that has systematically subordinated rank-and-file organization to coalition management, shop-floor militancy to electoral positioning, and internationalist principle to campist accommodation.

The departure of the old guard creates a rare opening. The International Socialist Tendency has haemorrhaged sections and credibility. Socialist Alternative in Australia, an organization with IST roots, has maintained permanent observer status with the Fourth International since 2013 and has broken decisively with the SWP’s “proxy war” framework on Ukraine. The union movement is shifting: major unions now affiliate to the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign while the SWP remains tethered to Stop the War. The question is whether the incoming leadership will use this moment to reassess the strategic orientation that produced the isolation, or whether they will preserve the method while sacrificing only the personnel.

The evidence, so far, points toward the latter.

I. The Partnership (2001-2025)

The founding of Stop the War Coalition in September 2001 codified a pattern that would define SWP practice for a generation. The steering committee included representatives of the SWP and the Communist Party of Britain from day one. Andrew Murray, CPB member, became StWC chair. The coalition mobilized millions against the Iraq war. It also established a template: broad fronts managed from above, political demands calibrated to the lowest common denominator, rank-and-file participation channelled into set-piece demonstrations rather than sustained workplace organization.

This was not accidental. The CPB’s strategic framework, “Britain’s Road to Socialism,” has always prioritized alliance-building with the Labour left over independent working-class organization. The SWP, for all its Trotskyist self-identification, adapted to this framework in practice. The People’s Assembly Against Austerity (2013), Left Leave (2016), the ongoing StWC leadership: each reproduced the same structure. Coalition management with Stalinists became the default mode.

The consequences for union work were predictable. The SWP could back winning candidates: Andrea Egan in Unison, various left slates in other unions. What it could not do was build the independent rank-and-file organization that its own tradition theoretically demanded.

The 2001 alliance had roots. In 1999, the Socialist Party in Ireland (which has developed more positively) critiqued the pattern precisely: in 1996, the SWP had shifted from “all officials are bureaucrats” to encouraging members to run for full-time posts, while still denouncing others’ use of positions as “bureaucratic.” Electoral positioning was replacing shop-floor rooting.

II. The Ukraine Fracture

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 exposed the political bankruptcy of this orientation to the trade unions. The SWP’s response, developed theoretically by Callinicos, characterized the war as a “proxy conflict” between NATO and Russia, an “inter-imperialist” struggle in which Ukraine’s national resistance was subordinate to great-power rivalry.

This framework produced an impossible position. Callinicos acknowledged Ukraine’s right to self-defence while opposing the practical means (arms) by which that defence could be conducted. The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign called this “disingenuous.” The inconsistency was not accidental but structural: the SWP’s campist orientation, developed through two decades of CPB partnership, could not accommodate a struggle that pitted a former Soviet republic against Russian imperialism.

The union consequences were immediate. The UCU, where Sean Vernell (SWP) had moved a StWC-aligned motion in 2023, decisively overturned that position in 2024, affiliating to the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign. PCS, ASLEF, NUM, and GMB followed. The SWP found itself marginalized precisely where it had historically claimed strength: the organized working class.

The PCB3 discussion of trade union work inadvertently reveals the conceptual bankruptcy. Under "Understanding unions and their leaders," the CC reproduces Cliff's formula about the bureaucracy being "basically conservative" while simultaneously celebrating positioning work for union elections. Ralph Darlington's Marxism 2025 talk is cited approvingly for noting that unions "are a reflection of the imbalance of power between labour and capital." True enough. But the strategic conclusion drawn: "We want SWP comrades to be active in their union and to fight for leadership within it": reproduces the very substitutionism the rank-and-file tradition was meant to overcome.

III. The International Divergence

The IST’s fragmentation is not new. The American ISO was expelled in 2001 and collapsed in 2019 over its own sexual assault cover-up. But the Australian case is more instructive.

Socialist Alternative emerged from the IST tradition through a split from the old ISO. Since 2013, it has maintained permanent status with the Fourth International. On Ukraine, SA has entirely broken with the SWP framework. They characterize the Ukrainian struggle as a legitimate “war for liberation” against foreign occupation, citing Lenin’s 1916 argument that those who support self-determination but oppose the right to fight against occupation are effectively supporting annexation.

SA supports Ukraine’s right to receive military aid. Their argument: democratic control over society is impossible when a foreign power dominates a country. IST-aligned groups have attacked this as “chauvinist pro-imperialist.” SA counters that socialists cannot simultaneously call for NATO’s dismantlement and the denial of arms to a nation fighting for its existence.

This matters because it demonstrates that IST-origin organizations can break from the mother section and find alternative international homes. The path exists. The question is whether anyone in the SWP will take it.

IV. The Your Party Test

The emergence of Your Party, Jeremy Corbyn’s new formation, has forced the SWP into an uncomfortable position. The party wants to work within YP; its members were expelled from the founding conference under rules targeting “national political party” membership. Samira Ali was physically removed by security. The SUTR stall was dismantled.

Yet the SWP’s National Secretary Lewis Nielsen has articulated precisely the danger the party faces. He warns that Your Party risks adopting the “worst of Labour Party culture,” where members become “foot soldiers” for elections rather than active participants in struggle. He insists YP MPs must “stand on the picket line with workers on strike.” The irony is acute. Nielsen diagnoses a disease the SWP has itself contracted through twenty-four years of CPB partnership.

The CC's assessment in PCB3 is inadvertently damning: "There has to be an end to the politics of a Labour Party Mark 2 and the bureaucratic fear of radical measures. YP needs to take a qualitative democratic leap to trust its members." The critique of YP’s bureaucratic tendencies applies with equal force to the StWC model the SWP helped build. The SWP has spent twenty-four years in coalition with the CPB. Its own front organizations: StWC, SUTR, the People's Assembly: reproduce precisely the structures it now criticizes in Your Party. When the CC writes that "the coterie around Jeremy Corbyn" is "modelled on the failed essentials of a century of reformist practice," they describe their own method.

Coalition management, electoral positioning, demonstrations as substitute for organization: these are not YP innovations but the SWP’s own established practice.

V. How to save the IS Tradition

The incoming Central Committee includes Andy Brammer (Palestine activism, arms export expertise), Samira Ali (Stand Up to Racism), Judy Cox (women’s liberation theory), and Alan Kenny (NHS strikes). They are action-oriented rather than theory-oriented. They are not tainted by direct involvement in the 2013 Disputes Committee proceedings.

But there is no indication of a theoretical break with the strategic orientation that produced the party’s isolation and the IST’s international decay. What would such a break require?

First, repudiation of the “proxy war” framework. Ukraine is not a pawn in inter-imperialist rivalry but a nation exercising its right to self-defence against colonial conquest. The SWP’s own tradition, correctly applied, demands support for that resistance including the right to obtain arms from any source.
Second, distance from StWC leadership. The coalition’s current form, dominated by Counterfire and the CPB, functions as left cover for a “robber’s peace” that would freeze Russian territorial gains. The SWP cannot simultaneously claim internationalist credentials and remain tethered to this project.
Third, commitment to rank-and-file organization independent of electoral machines. The party cannot critique YP’s “foot soldier” culture while reproducing it in its own union work. This means rebuilding shop-floor organization, not merely positioning candidates for NEC elections.
Fourth, serious engagement with the international fragments of the IST tradition. Socialist Alternative in Australia has found a path: FI observer status, clear position on Ukraine, independence from the SWP’s theoretical rigidity. Are there comrades in Britain prepared to learn from this example?

VI. The Prognosis

The SWP will survive the January conference. It has survived worse. The question is whether survival is enough.

The 2013 crisis destroyed the party’s campus recruitment pipeline. An estimated 95% of student membership was lost. The Ukraine crisis has marginalized the party in the unions. The CPB partnership has deformed its relationship to rank-and-file organization. The leadership transition addresses none of these structural problems.

The old guard are departing. The strategic orientation they embodied is not. The SWP is attempting to sanitize its image while preserving its method. This is exactly backward. The individuals were symptoms. The twenty-four year detour into Stalinist embrace was the disease.

Whether the incoming leadership recognizes this, or whether they will continue down the path that has led to isolation and irrelevance, is the question the January conference must answer. The evidence, so far, suggests they will choose continuity. The IST tradition, in Britain at least, appears destined to learn nothing and forget nothing.

But the conference has not yet convened. Comrades can still speak. The debate is not foreclosed. And somewhere in the SWP’s remaining membership, there may be those who recognize that the choice is not between the old guard and their successors, but between a method that has failed and the possibility, however remote, of genuine renewal.

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