What the Connections Convention Needs to Hear

The Socialist Federation is being born. Scotland and Cymru are ahead of England. And the Workers’ Party of Britain is not a comrade.

TL;DR: One hundred and forty people, perhaps more, gather in Sheffield on Saturday for the Connections convention, the most significant left regroupment event since Your Party’s collapse. Four things matter: engaging the newly founded Socialist Federation, which a similarly-sized gathering voted to establish last Sunday; building genuine solidarity with the more politically advanced left formations in Scotland and Cymru rather than treating them as satellites; being clear that the Workers’ Party of Britain is a red-brown formation, not a socialist tendency, and its presence on the fringe programme is a problem, not an expression of pluralism; and joining ACR, Greens Organise, and partners in the Ecosocialist Action Network to build Climate Assemblies, the kind of mass community-rooted work the left has been failing to do.

One hundred and forty people will gather at SADACCA on the Wicker on Saturday. That is not nothing. The Connections convention is a significant attempt to give organisational shape to the energy that spilled out of Your Party’s wreckage. Some things need saying clearly before the day disappears into workshops.

Engage the Socialist Federation.

Last Sunday, a similarly-sized group gathered online over two sessions at the Members’ Charter conference and voted to begin founding a new organisation: the Socialist Federation (Zoom counted 250 people, I didn’t see more than 140 at any one time). Many of them were Your Party members from grassroots branches across England, Scotland, and Cymru/Wales who had lost patience with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and its contempt for the wave of grassroots socialist self-organisation that followed last summer’s 800,000 signups. The Federation is being founded as an interim organisation with a longer-term goal: to rally forces toward a political party with deep socialist principles that actively builds working-class power in communities and workplaces, the kind of party neither Labour nor the Greens can claim to be. A further national conference is planned for 28 June to finalise structure and policy, ahead of an in-person Congress in the Midlands this autumn. Connections attendees and their organisations should be in that process. Saturday is an opportunity to begin.

England is not the whole picture.

The mostly English activist left arriving in Sheffield needs to reckon with something it often ignores: the dynamics in Cymru and Scotland are different, and that difference is not administrative. Cymru’n Codi is building a Welsh socialist politics rooted in the national question. In Scotland, former Your Party Scotland branches and leaders are launching a new organisation, one that draws conclusions from the Your Party experience that the English leadership has refused to draw. These are not peripheral footnotes to the regroupment process. They are among its most politically advanced expressions. Solidarity with those projects means understanding them on their own terms, not as satellites waiting to affiliate to whatever emerges from Sheffield.

Who we do not want to unify with.

A word on the fringe programme. The Workers’ Party of Britain is not a socialist organisation that has made some bad bookings. It is a red-brown formation: campist ideology, consistent political drift toward the nationalist right, and a programme that names itself. When Chris Williamson declined, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, to spurn Nick Griffin’s endorsement of the party, the line was not crossed. It was announced as irrelevant. The systematic co-mobilisation with David Clews of Unity News Network, a Patriotic Alternative conference attendee who helped spread the false Arabic name that incited the 2024 Southport riots, is the consistent practice of a party that has chosen the nationalist right as its recruiting ground. Galloway confirmed it himself in December 2024: the rising tide is with Reform, left populism must compete on its terrain. That is not a tactical error. It is a programme.

Climate assemblies are coming.

Anti-Capitalist Resistance, Greens Organise, and partners in the Ecosocialist Action Network are organising a series of local Climate Assemblies: half-day grassroots meetings where activists and community members come together to share what is working in organising and what is not, to strategise from an ecosocialist starting point. These are exactly the kind of mass-work spaces that former Your Party branches were searching for: community-rooted, action-oriented, not reducible to electoral cycles. They are also a serious opportunity to bring Green Party members into work that is more than canvassing, working alongside socialists in other parties, or none, on something that actually matters to the communities they claim to represent. Birmingham showed what forty people taking that seriously can produce. More assemblies are coming.

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