Councillor Alan Gibbons is from the Liverpool Community Independents, a constituent part of Transform. He opened the party’s 2024 conference in London. And he warned that Reform will gain from the crisis in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party if a “united socialist organisation” doesn’t step in soon to provide a truly transformative alternative from the left.
Gibbons insisted that “crisis means an opportunity and a danger – and I think that characterises our time”. He explained that many people on the left “will have said things about a year ago that, when the Labour government came in, they would probably have a brief honeymoon period and be plunged into crisis in about 18 months… to two years”. He added:
They were promptly plunged into crisis in 18 days. I don’t think anyone would have foreseen this chaos… When you have a rhetoric of… transformative change and you don’t live up to it, it’s immensely dangerous.
The real crisis is the economy
Gibbons insisted that, when Starmer’s Labour talks about investing, we’ve got to remember that previous governments had already planned a lot of the investment in question. And he asks the question about the investors:
Are they travelling over to meet Keir and Rachel out of the goodness of their hearts, and to say ‘we’re going to give you all these oodles of money’? No. They are about profit extraction. They are making an investment to take billions of pounds of money out of the United Kingdom, out of the pockets of ordinary people.
Few people would have expected the current Labour Party to be quite so accident-prone, especially over something as easily avoidable as Taylor Swift tickets. However, as Gibbons stressed:
it’s not the accident prone element that’s really behind this. It is about an economy that has been unproductive and in decline and in deep crisis, and a party that promises to rectify it but actually only does so from one perspective – and that is the perspective of the employing class. That is the reality of what’s behind this crisis.
‘Reform will gain from Labour if there isn’t an alternative’
Alan Gibbons asserted that:
We need a force that mirrors the frustration of the British people.
In Liverpool, he said, which is a consistently strong area for Labour, Reform had a very strong showing, coming in second in many areas. And he emphasised:
There is the possibility that the likes of Farage could represent a far-right movement that could begin, over time, to challenge for power. Where there are socialist activists, you keep them out… We’ll keep the Farages of this world at bay.
But what happens in those wards where Labour’s got a small majority, doesn’t turn out to clear up your rubbish, doesn’t represent you to fight for your rights, sits and takes the 700 quid a month on the council, and does naff all and hasn’t got a principle to rub together?
What’ll happen in those wards is Reform will gain if there isn’t an alternative. So today, I think, is about that alternative.
Transform, he said, “will be a constituent part” of the alternative:
Today we have to look at how we construct that engine that single-mindedly drives forward so that we’re on every demonstration in solidarity with the people of Gaza, we stand up for working-class people, we stand for the social transformation of society, and we do it with a kind of comradeship and fraternal ability to disagree without ripping each other’s faces off. And that, sadly, has often been absent.
We have to learn from all the fractures of the past, and move towards a united socialist organisation as ruthless in pursuit of our people’s class interests as the Tories and Reform do for their people.
Transform members are ready to step up and do their part. The question now is how to bring even more socialists around the country together to build a powerhouse movement that can bring a meaningful challenge to the red and blue wings of the corporate party, and stop Reform in its tracks.
Keep an eye out for our other coverage from the Transform conference 2024.
