The Workers Party national members council met over the weekend 9 – 10 November in Birmingham. The council discussed a number of resolutions, the most significant of which is the call for a Special Congress over the weekend of 8 – 9 February 2025.
The Congress is expected to approve plans to increase the size of the National Members Council to 100 members, and increase the number of Deputy Leaders from three to five.
According to the resolution “the Congress is necessitated by the need to expand our national democratic body to reflect the growth in our membership and capabilities.”
Leadership Programme continues…
A leadership Programme event on the Sunday was held with branch activists and party secretaries, and focused on the professional development of our speaking and presenting abilities, developing skills to use in public speaking and campaigning.
Our party takes seriously the education and training of its members. We are lucky enough to have seriously talented people with a wide range of experiences outside of politics. Whilst many political movements think it is enough to learn some formula’s by rote, the Workers welcomes challenging political discussion, believes in the importance of a thorough understanding and application of principles to developing situations and encourages members to express our politics in their own words, avoiding the dead hand of armchair theorists and their suffocating political expertise from dominating the character of the party agitation.
Mick Stott, member of the leadership programme
Issan Ghazni, chair of Nottingham Workers Party gives his views…
Linda who recently stood for the Workers Party in Crawley…
Deputy Leader Chris Williams summed up the day…
Political Developments
As well as arrangements for the Congress the council heard a political report from party leader George Galloway. It noted the US election result was spectacular, with a defeat for the Centrists, as they like to call themselves. Given the collapse of the German government the very next day, it seems to indicate a crisis for “Centralism” and a victory for “National populism”, if such terms can be applied. The NMC agreed that while nobody could be happy with Donald Trump being the president of the United States, we were all entitled to be ecstatically happy that Kamala Harris is not. She would have guaranteed a doubling down of the war in the East and the crisis in the Levant and Persian Gulf.
On Ukraine it seems the Russians are in no hurry to fold and call a halt, now the Ukrainians say that 20 percent of their forces have deserted and millions have left the country. Ukraine is completely bankrupt. The ill-fated battle of the Bulge move into Kursk has proved predictably to be a disaster. 25,000 Ukrainian soldiers are now in a fix, and it is not inconceivable that the Ukrainian lines could collapse, that the whole of the Donbass will be captured almost without a fight.
It all leaves the European governments up the creek without a paddle, particularly the German government, which has now collapsed and new elections are pending. As for Britain, it too will be exposed by the change of policy sure to emanate from the USA under Trump. The conditions required for peace in Ukraine and the reasonable demands of the Russians in this regard give the peace movement much work to do, and organisations like No 2 Nato play a leading role in this work in Britain. The peace movement must appreciate the necessity of a government in Kiev that is not composed of racists and fascists, understand that the neutrality of Ukraine is necessary for peace with Nato out of Ukraine, Ukraine out of Nato. The lifting of all economic and other sanctions against Russia is a necessary prelude to the peace negotiations we all hope for.
The extraordinary ham-fistedness of Keir Starmer’s intervention in the US election will come back to haunt him in a very big way. Labour officially sent a hundred-strong cadre to go and work for Kamala Harris. Officially, full-time salaried ranking Labour officials organized this and lost. Lammy and others, Lammy and Rayner in particular, have said things about Trump that are extremely colourful. The foreign secretary of Britain is on record calling the president of the United States a Nazi and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s really very difficult to climb back from this situation. Trump remembers slights given by property developers or New York City councilmen, and he gets his revenge on them. So he’s quite likely to seek revenge on Labour, and again, that must be grounds for a hallelujah.