Four Hypotheses Before the Connections Conference Agenda Is Set

Postscripts: After the local elections; On Falkirk For All

TL;DR. The Connections Network convenes its first ‘Where Next for the Left’ convention at SADACCA in Sheffield on 6 June. The agenda is not yet set. Four hypotheses worth putting on the table before it is: the period is authoritarian consolidation rather than polycrisis; the working class is acting in itself but not for itself; the mass left vehicle question is the Greens question; the defensive fronts of trans, disability, migrant and protest rights are one project. Together they point to one strategic move: organise grassroots defence against authoritarian consolidation, through local cross-front formations, with Lenin’s discipline of strike together, march separately.

The Connections Network has called the first of a series of conventions at SADACCA in Sheffield on 6 June under the banner ‘Where Next for the Left’. The framing is honest about the moment: amazing energy on the left despite everything, the desire to get together and be heard, workshops alongside discussion, openness to comrades across Your Party, the recognised parties, and the local independent groups. The speakers are listed as to be announced. The agenda has not yet been named. The space is open.

That openness is itself the question worth taking seriously. A first convention in a series of conventions does not need to produce a programme. It does not need to anoint a leadership or unify the formations. What it needs to produce is the framework for the conversations that follow: a shared understanding of where we are, and the working hypotheses that the next year of organising will test against experience. Most of the left has been doing the first. Few groupings have been doing the second. What follows are four hypotheses worth putting on the table.

Where we are

The shared description does not need rehearsing at length. Labour is collapsing, Reform is leading the polls, the Mandelson revelations and the Robbins sacking have left Starmer’s grip uncertain. Reform-controlled councils have begun abolishing equality posts. Tommy Robinson’s protests and the Restore Britain split with Rupert Lowe are reshaping the right. The Greens under Polanski have surged from 68,000 members at the start of his leadership to over 200,000, and won their first parliamentary by-election in Gorton and Denton with Hannah Spencer, the local plumber, defeating both Reform and Labour. Your Party collapsed before reaching first base. The Scottish Executive resigned en masse in April. Palestine remains the largest sustained political mobilisation in Britain in decades. The strike wave under Mick Lynch and Sharon Graham produced the most important class moment of the period.

This is the inventory. It is not in dispute. The work the convention can do is what comes next.

Hypothesis one: the conjuncture is authoritarian consolidation

The polycrisis frame is descriptive. It does not say what kind of moment this is. The hypothesis worth testing is that Britain is entering a period of authoritarian consolidation, with Reform as the likely vehicle of formal power and Labour as the housebroken managerial party drifting rightward in pursuit of the Reform vote. The architecture of the consolidation is already visible: the Strikes Act, the criminalisation of protest, the proscription of Palestine Action, the Palantir contracts, the cuts to disability benefits, the threats to the Equality Act, the hostile environment as labour discipline. The relevant historical comparison is not Weimar. It is closer to the right-Bonapartist moments where the bourgeoisie outsourced repression to a parliamentary movement that flattered its prejudices while leaving its property intact.

The hypothesis owes a debt to the work Phil Hearse, Neil Faulkner and others in ACR did on creeping fascism, which named the trajectory before it had a settled vocabulary in British analysis. The hypothesis here inherits rather than replaces it. Creeping fascism described the authoritarian project in its norm-erosion phase, when the populist right was still mainly extra-parliamentary and the work was the slow degradation of democratic constraints. Right-Bonapartist consolidation describes what comes next: the project entering parliamentary politics through a vehicle the bourgeoisie can back, with the architecture of repression built by the Tory governments under Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, extended rather than rolled back by Labour, and now waiting for Reform to inherit. The categories are sequential rather than competing. Faulkner’s early death has meant the mature application of his framework to British conditions has had to be done by others.

If the hypothesis holds, the left’s tasks change. Defensive fronts become connected rather than separate. The relationship to a Labour government becomes one of opposition rather than pressure. The rhythm of the work shifts from longer-horizon party-building toward the immediate organising of resistance to specific architectures of repression.

Hypothesis two: the class is acting in itself, not for itself

The strike wave of 2022 to 2025 was the most important class moment in decades. RMT, CWU, NHS, teachers, university workers. Lynch and Graham proved that the absence of class confidence was never the actual constraint. The constraint was leadership willing to test the proposition. The wave has receded but its lessons have not been integrated.

The hypothesis worth testing is that the British working class is currently acting in itself but not for itself: it is moving as workers, in the workplaces, against employers, when permitted by leadership. It is not yet acting politically as a class. If the hypothesis holds, the left’s task is not to call the class into being. It is to articulate politically what the class has already done industrially. The Labour Party concluded the unions had become a problem. The far left mostly produced solidarity statements at picket lines and moved on. Neither response treated the strike wave as the central political fact it was.

Hypothesis three: the mass vehicle question is the Greens question

Whatever any of us thought we were building when Your Party launched, the actual mass left vehicle of 2026 is the Green Party. Over 200,000 members and growing. An ecopopulist strategy under Polanski that has pulled significant sections of the post-Corbyn left and the Muslim vote. A parliamentary breakthrough in Gorton and Denton. Rhetorical leadership of a kind socialist groupings have been claiming for themselves for decades.

The hypothesis worth testing is that the strategic question for the convention is not how to build an alternative mass left vehicle. The Greens are already that vehicle, however reluctantly we acknowledge it. They are also a vehicle with limits. As an electoralist party focused on parliament and local government, the Greens will suffer the same dynamics that the Labour left and Labour itself have suffered historically: policies that lead into conflict with British capital, without revolutionary politics to win those conflicts, capitulation under organised capitalist pressure and the demands of being a ‘sensible’ party of government. The pattern has played out in Germany and Ireland. It is already visible in local government in Bristol and Brighton, where Green administrations have operated with little difference from Labour ones on austerity budgets and cuts. The strategic question is what the relationship between revolutionary ecosocialism and the Polanski Greens should be in light of this likely trajectory. Critical engagement, electoral alliances, internal organising, principled distance: each of these is a position. None of them is automatic. The convention can argue with the hypothesis, but it cannot pretend the question is not on the table without losing the year that follows.

Hypothesis four: the defensive fronts are one project

Trans rights, disability rights, migrant rights, the right to protest: these have been treated as separate fronts by a left that lacks the analytical equipment to see them as a single project. The hypothesis worth testing is that they are one project whose theorists are the gender-critical movement and the right-populist parties, and whose enforcement infrastructure is the Labour government. The PIP cuts and the work capability changes, the Cass Review, the criminalisation of Palestine solidarity, the hostile environment: the same architectures of repression are being applied across all four. The authoritarian project requires the production of unrecognised subjects. Trans people who are not women. Disabled people who are not workers. Migrants who are not residents. Protesters who are not citizens. The unifying framework is the recognition that defending the recognition of each is the same political task. The historical British formulation ‘jobs, homes, services, not racism’, carried through the anti-fascist tradition and revived by Stand Up to Racism, is the closest existing slogan that links the material to the defensive, though it does not yet name the breadth of what the current authoritarian project includes. The left has barely caught up with what its enemies already understand.

What the analysis points toward

Four hypotheses, taken together, point in the same direction: organise grassroots defence against authoritarian consolidation. The slogan announces the strategic stance. The method follows: local formations that organise the active layer of activists across the defensive fronts, engage at branch level with the Greens, the Independent Alliance MPs, and the unions where they are present, and provide the political articulation space the strike wave did not produce on its own. The discipline is Lenin’s: strike together, march separately. Unity in action against specific architectures of repression, programmatic independence maintained throughout. What the older FI tradition called the broad vanguard, what the convention’s own framing calls ‘comrades doing the work in our communities’, is the same layer named in different registers, and the work is to organise it.

Each hypothesis argues for the same shape from a different angle. Authoritarian consolidation requires connected defence at the local level, not only national campaigns that send delegations and write letters. A class acting in itself becomes a class acting for itself only when there is political space at the local level where the strike committee, the Palestine group, the housing campaign, the trans rights work, and the disabled people’s network can encounter each other as parts of a single project. Engagement with the Greens is meaningful at the branch and constituency level, where the active layer of organisers is increasingly to be found and where the question of what kind of left politics they will hear is being decided in branch meetings now. Connecting the defensive fronts is itself a local task: nobody connects at the national level; the connections are made or not made in the same town, the same trades council, the same Saturday demonstration.

This is not a left pole in the Greens specifically, although that is one tactic available within the broader strategy. The recommendation is one level up: build the local formations, and let engagement with the Greens be one mode of their work rather than the defining commitment. The local formation is the unit where the layer of activists is actually accessible, where Green branch members are also Palestine activists are also union stewards are also trans rights organisers, and where the connections happen as a matter of practical organising rather than as a theoretical claim about how fronts ought to relate.

Local cross-front formations of this kind are not a new idea. The All Lewisham Campaign Against Racism and Fascism that organised the cross-community mobilisation defeating the National Front march at Lewisham in August 1977 was one. The miners’ support groups of 1984 and 1985, twinning mining communities with women’s groups, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, students, churches, and trades councils across the country, were another. Liverpool’s rate-capping struggle in the mid-1980s, where the city council, the Trades Council, the District Labour Party, and the community organisations operated as a single political formation for a sustained period, was a third. The contemporary attempts that approach the form have struggled. Coalition of Resistance, launched by Tony Benn and Tariq Ali in 2010 with local branches, folded when the initial austerity moment receded. The People’s Assembly Against Austerity and Stand Up to Racism still operate branches in most cities, with the limitations that come from sect-aligned national leaderships. ACORN and Living Rent operate across more fronts than their housing brief suggests but remain anchored to one. Local Palestine coalitions since late 2023 have taken on cross-front work in some places and not in others.

The argument is not that the form is novel. It is that the form has been attempted repeatedly in Britain and has consistently failed to sustain, and that this period’s analysis points toward it again under conditions that may make it possible: the defensive fronts have proliferated to the point where single-issue framing is harder to maintain, the mass formation work has moved to the Greens, the Palestine generation has organised without the old factional histories, and the strike wave has produced a layer of newly-experienced organisers who know what worked. Whether those conditions are enough is what the convention’s project will test in practice. The work is beyond the capacity of any single organisation. It has to be done with whichever comrades are present locally, drawing on the Greens, the Independent Alliance constituencies, the Palestine coalitions, the trades councils, the renters unions, and the disabled people’s networks. The contribution of any single grouping, however principled, is to be part of this work, not to lead it everywhere.

Before the agenda is set

What the convention could agree, if it agreed nothing else, is that the work of the next twelve months is the construction or strengthening of these formations in towns and cities across the country, with the explicit task of operating across the defensive fronts and engaging strategically with the Greens, the Independent Alliance, and the unions where they are present. That is a task the existing organisations can support without dissolving. That is also a task the existing organisations have repeatedly failed to make their priority.

The Spanish lesson from Podemos is worth carrying into the room. The Anticapitalistas spent their limited capital winning democratic procedural fights inside the party while the leadership filled the programmatic vacuum with whatever polling consultants suggested would work. By the time the procedural fights were lost, the programme had been settled by people who treated it as marketing copy. Procedural victories without programmatic content deliver a party the left does not want. The British far left has been making the same mistake in slower motion across multiple regroupment vehicles, including the most recent.

The four hypotheses are not enough. There are others worth putting on the table: what the rise of the far right requires by way of counter-architectures rather than only counter-arguments, what the disintegration of the climate movement after the Just Stop Oil exit means for the next ecosocialist intervention, what the Scottish question demands after the YP collapse, what kinds of organisational forms can carry analytical work between conventions rather than only at them. A working hypothesis is not the same as a settled position. None of these commits the convention to a programme. They commit it to a set of questions worth answering together.

The agenda has not been set. That is precisely the moment when those of us who know what we hope the convention will do should say it before the speakers are confirmed, before the workshops are titled, before the room is committed to one mode rather than another. What we bring on the day determines what the day produces. There will be other conventions if this one does not work. There will not be many.

Postscript 1: after the local elections

The local elections of 7 May were counted while this article was already in draft. The results test several of the hypotheses against fresh evidence and partially revise the picture.

Hypothesis one is confirmed in seat numbers rather than only in polling. Reform’s gains, concentrated in post-industrial towns and traditionally Labour areas, with Labour suffering heavy losses, is the right-Bonapartist consolidation arriving on the council floor. The architecture the Tory governments built and Labour extended is now coming under the control of councillors who will use it. Sharon Graham’s pre-election warning that Labour could be decimated turns out to have read the moment correctly.

Hypothesis three is more complicated than the article suggested. The Greens advanced, but in a specific demographic pattern: graduate, urban, younger, with substantial Muslim electorates, particularly in London boroughs like Camden, Hackney, Lewisham and Lambeth. The support was geographically concentrated rather than broadly distributed. In the post-industrial towns where Reform broke through, the Greens were not the alternative. The framing of the Greens as ‘the mass left vehicle’ needs qualification: they are the mass left vehicle for one specific demographic, not for the working class as a whole. Two layers are being organised by two different political projects. The Greens have one. The other does not yet have a vehicle, and Reform is filling the space.

The other left fragments confirm the wager about the alternative-vehicle strategy. TUSC stood 289 candidates across 64 councils and produced no headline-grabbing breakthroughs. The disciplined sectarian candidacy at scale did not convert into mass support in conditions where Reform occupies the anti-system space. The Workers Party performed better than TUSC in specific Muslim-majority areas where Gaza has fractured Labour loyalties, which is uncomfortable: Galloway’s politics are not what most of the convention will want to advance, but his organisation converted Gaza-driven disillusionment into results where the broader left did not. Independent and Your Party-backed candidates also won in urban areas with large Muslim populations, which suggests the same vote is finding multiple vehicles rather than consolidating into one.

The Workers Party result speaks to a sharper question the article has not yet engaged. Was the July 2025 moment a missed opportunity for a unified party-for-power, suppressed by those who wanted something lesser, or was it demand for somewhere to land that was always going to disperse into multiple vehicles given the consciousness of the people signing up? The 7 May results do not settle the dispute. They do show that the demand for non-Labour electoral expression was real, has found multiple homes, and is not currently consolidating into anything resembling a single vehicle. Whether a different intent in 2025 could have produced a different outcome in 2026 is an empirical claim that cannot be tested. What can be tested is what the convention does now with the dispersed reality.

What the night produced is fragmentation on the left into at least three vehicles operating in different demographic spaces, while Reform consolidated the working-class anti-establishment vote nationally. The strategic question for the convention is sharper than the article posed it. The Greens question is real but partial. The Independent Alliance and Your Party-backed candidacies are a parallel question. The Workers Party question is uncomfortable but cannot be ignored. The TUSC question is essentially settled.

The local cross-front formations the article calls for now have additional terrain to navigate. They will need to engage not only with the Greens but with the Independent Alliance, with the candidates running outside the party-political vehicles entirely, and with the wider question of how the working-class Reform-voting layer can be organised by anyone other than Reform. That last question is the one the convention will least want to face and the one the next year of organising will most demand answers to. The framework holds. The work is harder than the article allowed for. The temptation to retreat into a Greens-only orientation should be resisted on the basis of the data rather than embraced on it.

Postscript 2: Falkirk For All

A reader’s comment, after the article was published, named Falkirk For All as one of the type of defensive formations the article describes. The recognition deserves engagement.

Falkirk For All is a community formation founded in 2024 in response to the rising anti-migrant mobilisations around the Cladhan Hotel in Falkirk, where asylum seekers have been housed. Its members have organised counter-demonstrations against far-right protests, accompanied asylum seekers safely home from the mosque during Ramadan when the threat from local mobilisations made the journey unsafe, and publicly contested the redirection of local frustrations about housing, healthcare, and economic decline onto refugees rather than onto the governments and policies producing the conditions. The formation has faced harassment and intimidation. It has been written about by Le Monde in the context of Reform UK’s capitalisation on Scottish anti-migrant tensions, and by Counterfire and Socialist Worker among British left publications. Reform’s gains in the Scottish elections of 7 May make the political stakes of its work sharper rather than reduced.

The formation is exactly the kind of work the article was reaching for when it called for local cross-front formations. The connection between anti-racism, migrant solidarity, anti-fascism, and community defence is not theoretical in Falkirk. It is the practical content of what the same comrades are doing on the same streets in response to the same far-right mobilisations and the same parliamentary capture that is producing the wider authoritarian project. The historical precedents named earlier in the article, the All Lewisham Campaign Against Racism and Fascism in 1977 and the miners’ support groups of 1984-85, emerged from comparable conditions: a specific threat in a specific place, comrades from multiple political traditions pulling together because leaving the targeted community to face the threat alone was not an option. Falkirk For All is one of the contemporary versions of the form.

The formation is small, recent, and under pressure. Treating it as the model rather than as one significant example would be both inaccurate and unfair to the organisers doing the work. What can be said is that the analytical category the article was developing is recognisable in current British practice, that organisers in Falkirk are doing the connected-fronts work the article was calling for, and that the convention’s wider audience should know about formations like this rather than reaching only for the historical references the article named. The work is happening. The framework names it. The recovery is for the comrades who are already doing what the article describes, and for the comrades who could be doing it in their own towns once they recognise it as the form the period requires.