Leicester is a poor working-class city which has turned out solid electoral majorities for the Labour Party for decades. At the 2019 local elections, 98% of all electoral seats went to Labour, but this time around just 57% of seats went to the careerists wearing the red rosettes.
Leicester therefore bucked a national trend that witnessed a significant swing towards Labour. But it is critical to note that the underlying reasons for Labour’s failures in Leicester apply equally well to the national Labour Party.
Labour did well (outside of Leicester at least) primarily because the working-class have had enough of the Tories, and those people who care to vote understand that although Labour is useless, it is better to vote for them, or other smaller parties, than for the current batch of lying murderers’ intent on ruining our country.
The unique problem facing Leicester is that some of the deep-seated problems afflicting the entire Labour Party have over the recent period been clearly exposed to many of their already reluctant supporters.
So, what are Labour’s problems? Well, for a start Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is not democratic, and it is a party that primarily exists to represent the needs of big business and capitalism.
In Leicester such anti-worker tendencies have been prominently advertised to the electorate over the past year, and to cite just four examples of Labour’s failings we can see that:
- Labour intensified anti-democratic witch hunts against the few remaining socialists within their party.
- Labour attempted to impose workplace parking charges upon thousands of families – an attempt that failed after a massive campaign led by local trade unionists.
- Labour utterly failed to offer any form of meaningful strategy for uniting the working-class and overcoming racist divisions in our city that had been stoked by the forces of the far-right.
- And finally, the anti-democratic City Mayor who rules Leicester failed to accept that his authoritarian rule was deeply unpopular with ordinary people and even with the elected members of his own council.*
It is for these reasons and many more that it is critical that a new political party run by and for the working-class is launched. Such a party could then help lead the fight for the type of democratic and socialist politics that can unite the entire British working-class behind a political program that will begin to significantly improve and not degrade the lives of ordinary people.
Footnote
*Articles that relate to Labour’s failings in Leicester include:
- “Labour Party Members in the East Midlands “that sit on their hands and allow injustice to pass them by are an equal to the oppressor” states the Fire Brigades Union”
- “Successful Union Campaign Scraps Leicester’s Workplace Parking Levy”
- “The Contributing Role of Far-Right Hindu Politics to the Ongoing Disorder in Leicester”
- “The Labour Rebellion Against Leicester’s Mayoral System”
Thoughts of a Leicester Socialist 