Why I Won’t Share a Platform with Chris Williamson
The WPB mobilises with neo-nazis and won't spurn a BNP endorsement
TL;DR: I was invited to speak at a Republic YP fringe meeting at the Connections Network convention in Sheffield on 6 June, to discuss the experience of building Your Party Scotland. I won’t be speaking alongside Chris Williamson at the Republic YP fringe. What I found when I researched him explains why — and raises a question the Connections convention itself needs to answer.
I want to be clear about what Connections is trying to do, because I support it. The initiative brings together the socialist and green left to examine why Your Party has failed to build a serious challenge to Reform UK — here is Red Mole’s analysis of the strategic questions it needs to address. That failure is real and consequential, and the fact that people are trying to have the conversation in a room together rather than on social media is worth something. I may well attend.
I won’t be speaking alongside Chris Williamson.
On 2 May, a small gathering assembled outside the Ukrainian Embassy at 60 Holland Park in west London. The event was titled ‘In Memory of Those Killed in the Odessa Massacre.’ The promotional material, circulated on social media, described the dead as ‘martyred by Ukrainian neo-Nazis.’ Three speakers appeared on the bill: Hoz Shafiei of the Workers Party of Britain‘s National Members Council; Jesse Winney, listed as UK coordinator of the World Youth Festival Russia — the event initiated by presidential decree and personally opened and closed by Putin, already announced for a return in 2026; and Chris Williamson, former Labour MP and deputy leader of the Workers Party of Britain.
The event was co-promoted by David Clews’s Unity News Network. The Workers Party posted their own photograph of the gathering: approximately fifteen people on the pavement outside the embassy, Russian tricolours prominent among the flags. Searchlight Magazine has documented Clews’s record in detail: he spoke at Patriotic Alternative conferences in 2022 and 2023, describes himself as ‘a race realist,’ endorses the white genocide conspiracy theory, and told the pan-European far-right group Europa Terra Nostra that the Western world was ‘totally conquered and riddled with this Bolshevik/Cultural Marxist cancer.’ He was among those who helped incite the 2024 anti-Muslim riots after the Southport murders by spreading a false Arabic-sounding name for the alleged killer and inviting viewers to ‘Play guess the religion anyone?’
This is not the first time the Workers Party and UNN have shared a platform. Searchlight documents a pattern running from a No2NATO event in May 2023 through Glasgow rallies in 2024 to this month’s embassy demonstration. When challenged on the relationship with UNN, Galloway called the magazine ‘dodgy liberals.’ When Williamson was asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about Nick Griffin’s endorsement of the party during the 2024 Rochdale by-election — Griffin having stated that Galloway ‘understands the position of working-class white Britons on immigration’ — Williamson said he would not ‘spurn endorsements.’ Presenter Mishal Husain told him he could distance himself from Griffin right then; he declined.
The bitter irony
A word on the Odesa framing, because precision matters here. In March 2025 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Ukraine violated the right to life by failing to prevent the 2014 Trade Union House fire, to stop the violence after it broke out, and to conduct an effective investigation. The court also found that Russian disinformation campaigns had fuelled the violence and that distortion of the events subsequently became a tool of Russian propaganda. The event’s promotional language — ‘martyred by Ukrainian neo-Nazis’ — goes well beyond what the ECHR found. The fire resulted from a chaotic exchange of Molotov cocktails between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian demonstrators; some of the latter had taken refuge in the building. Red Mole has examined the forensic and documentary record at length: Why Stop the War and No2NATO lie about the 2014 deaths at Odesa. The Kremlin narrative is not a more militant version of the ECHR finding. It is a different claim entirely.
Williamson was billed to speak at an event promoting that narrative, co-organised with a neo-nazi-aligned network, three weeks before he was due to speak at a fringe meeting about the left’s failure to challenge the nationalist right.
Wagenknecht’s British Sibling
The Workers Party of Britain describes itself as socialist. The description requires scrutiny. The party’s positions include a crackdown on mass migration; opposition to transgender rights, which Galloway has publicly described as ‘transmania’; rejection of net-zero targets, dismissed as ‘green hysteria’; hard anti-NATO alignment with explicit advocacy for BRICS orientation; and a position on the Russia-Ukraine war that has consistently blamed the invasion on NATO expansion while refusing to criticise Putin. Set these positions alongside the platforms of Reform UK, the Alternative für Deutschland, and Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. The overlaps are not coincidental. They are the programme.
Galloway’s own explanation of that programme, offered in a December 2024 interview and subsequently cited approvingly in an address to the WPB’s own Political Committee, is worth quoting directly. ‘The rising tide is with Reform,’ he said. ‘Right populism is looking unstoppable for this period. We have to develop a left populism that competes against it in a language that the mass of the people can understand and relate to.’ This is not a left party that has wandered into bad politics. It is a party that has chosen, consciously, to compete with Reform on Reform’s terrain.
Which makes the Republic YP fringe booking something other than an unfortunate choice of speaker. Steve Freeman, who is organising the Republic YP fringe at Connections, addressed the Workers Party’s Political Committee in November 2025. He proposed that the WPB be included ‘in the process of forming this new party from the start,’ explicitly endorsed the left populist approach as the correct strategic direction, cited Galloway’s framing approvingly, and called for ‘further discussions’ between the organisations. The person booking Williamson for the Connections fringe is the same person who told the WPB’s Political Committee that their politics are basically right and that they should be partners in building what comes next. Williamson’s presence is not a random booking. It is the next step in a documented political relationship.
Freeman describes this kind of engagement as a united front: limited common demands, no vetting of broader politics, march separately strike together. The formulation deserves to be taken seriously, because it has a precise meaning in the Marxist tradition from which it derives. A united front is unity of action between working-class organisations while maintaining full political independence. The critical word is organisations: bodies rooted in the labour movement and capable of independent political criticism of their partners. The Workers Party of Britain is not that. What Republic YP has offered the WPB is not a united front; it is a popular front, a cross-class bloc that sets aside political independence as the price of coalition. The historical record of popular fronts is that the working-class organisations bear the weight of the alliance while the bourgeois and populist partners define its limits. Freeman’s own article goes further still: it advocates including the WPB ‘in the process of forming this new party from the start.’ That is not a tactical alliance on specific demands. It is a programmatic convergence.
The Onion Party
The WPB did not arrive at its current politics accidentally. It arrived by a particular organisational route, and understanding that route matters for anyone who wants to avoid repeating it.
The party is what sociologist Manuel Cervera-Marzal, writing about LFI in France, called an ‘onion party’: power concentrated in concentric circles around a charismatic leader, the militant base at the periphery disconnected from decision-making, internal democracy replaced by digital consultation on texts drafted from the centre. When the WPB’s leadership faced internal challenge in 2022, the dissidents were expelled as a ‘Fifth Column’ — the language comes from the party’s own Electoral Commission accounts for that year. There is no congress, no delegate structure, no institutionalised mechanism by which the base can correct the leadership’s direction. The organisational form guarantees the ideological drift. A party that cannot course-correct from within will not course-correct from without.
Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht began as a left split from Die Linke promising to recover working-class voters lost to the AfD. Within two years it was forming regional coalition governments with the CDU, haemorrhaging its programmatic content, and watching its own leadership face accusations of running precisely the centralised, unaccountable personal vehicle that Wagenknecht had spent years criticising in others. The AfD did not absorb BSW. BSW absorbed BSW. The scratch became gangrene by accumulated daily logic, not by crossing a bright line.
Left populism
Left populism — the tradition the socialist and green left is most likely to draw on when thinking about how to challenge Reform — has its own version of this problem. The Laclau and Mouffe framework replaces the working class as the primary political subject with ‘the people’: a cross-class collective identity federated around shared grievance. The appeal is real. But once you have dissolved class into people, the border between your ‘people’ and the nationalist right’s ‘people’ becomes a matter of rhetorical emphasis rather than structural analysis. LFI points its people upward at the oligarchy. The WPB points its people sideways at migrants, trans people, and the cultural left. Both claim to speak for the forgotten working class. The difference is not metaphysical; it is political, and it requires rigorous democratic defence at every level of the organisation.
The WPB has neither the rigour nor the democracy.
The Left must defend its clarity
The question the Connections convention needs to answer is: what distinguishes the left’s account of working-class abandonment from the nationalist right’s account of the same phenomenon? It has a serious answer, one involving political economy, solidarity, and internationalism. Developing it requires arguing clearly and defending it against alternatives.
Sharing a platform with a party that co-promotes events with neo-nazi-aligned networks, echoes Kremlin narratives on Odesa, and declined to distance itself from a BNP endorsement does not help develop that argument. It blurs it at the moment when clarity is the only thing the left has to offer.
I hope the convention on 6 June at SADACCA is productive. I hope the fringe meeting is useful to everyone who attends.
I just won’t be speaking there.
Duncan Chapel edits Red Mole, a journal of socialist analysis in the Fourth International tradition.
Thanks for this Duncan. It really helps clarify the issues