Not Your Party, Not Burnham, Not the Greens.

What, then?

Nick Wrack will introduce a discussion on Monday 1 June 2026, at 7:30pm. Click here for the link to join the Zoom discussion.

Your Party is dead. It can play no meaningful role in advancing the cause of socialism.

While Your Party was not a socialist-communist party, but a Corbynite, mildly reformist liberal party, it could nonetheless have become a mass party in which genuine socialist-communist ideas were openly discussed by hundreds of thousands.

That was the only reason for Marxists to participate in it.

Organised socialist groups have now been excluded from Your Party. Only now are official branches being allowed, at such a snail’s pace that most members will have been paying subs for years before they are allowed one in their area.

A stinking pall of asphyxiating bureaucracy hangs over its coffin.

What should Marxists do?

Many thousands of socialists who had joined Your Party or looked hopefully to its development have joined the Greens.

But the Green Party is not a socialist party. It is not a working class party. Its programme is – like Corbynism – a mildly liberal reformist one. It accepts capitalism and does not seek to end it. Like Corbynism, the Greens seek to create a ‘fairer’ capitalism.

They do not understand that all the ills of society – poverty, inequality, climate catastrophe, wars – are created and perpetuated by the exploitation of the working class for profit.

We see now the rise of Reform, with its right-wing programme of further privatisation, de-regulation, anti-immigration xenophobia, mirroring developments across the world. It aims to divide and weaken the working class to make things easier for the further squeezing of the working class to maximise profits.

The vote for Reform is a consequence of decades of deliberate neglect by all the parties in government, which have all followed pro-business, anti-working class policies of privatisation and austerity. Reform voters are looking for something new and different.

Some are now looking back to the Labour Party and hoping that perhaps Andy Burnham can ride in on his white charger and win back the lost Labour voters. Possibly he can. But only for a moment. His programme is fundamentally no different from Starmer’s.

Where Starmer won the leadership of the Labour Party by deceit, making ten pledges which he rapidly abandoned, Burnham aims to win by charm, casual clothing and a Northern accent. That can only take him so far.

Burnham has already pledged to stick to Rachel Reeves’ fiscal rules, meaning more austerity, more poverty and more inequality.

His calls for more ‘public control’ of services is empty. He has no plans to implement democratic public ownership of business and services. He has no plans to abolish the profit system.

In Manchester, his ‘public control’ of the Bee Network bus system has left the buses owned by private companies, which last year provoked strike action from bus workers over pay and conditions. Burnham could only stand and watch. He had no power to increase wages or improve conditions.

His popularity bubble will burst, leaving a wider layer of the disappointed and angry. Where will they go then?

There is a systemic crisis. None of the existing parties have an answer. We need to create a party with socialist answers.

The crisis (which manifests itself in many ways) can only be answered by the ending of the present system. That is why we need to find a way to bring socialists-communists together to create the basis for a new genuine fighting socialist-communist party – one that confronts the ruling capitalist elite and dares to call for its expropriation.

We need production for need, not profit.

We in Talking About Socialism will continue to argue for a fundamental break with capitalism. And we will seek to work with all others who share that aim and who want to build a mass, democratic, working-class socialist-communist party that works for that goal.

Join the discussion!