THE WELSH nationalist victory in the Caerphilly Senedd by-election last week was a slap in the face for Starmer and his band. Plaid Cymru won the seat in the Welsh parliament with 47 per cent of the vote in a town which had been a Labour stronghold for over a hundred years. Labour came a poor third behind the Faragist Reform platform that has become a beacon for disaffected Welsh Tories whose numbers have soared since Kemi Badenoch won the Tory leadership race in November 2024.

This isn’t surprising. Labour’s support has collapsed all over the country. Workers are abandoning Labour in their droves. Some are turning to Reform lured by Nigel Farage’s glib tongue into believing that asylum seekers and immigrants are the source of all our woes and that the only way out of the economic crisis we are in is to totally embrace the cut-throat capitalist system of the United States. Others turn to the Welsh and Scottish nationalists or look to the Liberal-Democrats, Greens and the Corbynistas for answers.

Reform now tops the list in the opinion polls way ahead of Labour and the Tories – whose old dominance is now being seriously challenged by the Lib-Dems and the Greens.

But mid-term opinion polls can be misleading – particularly in these volatile times. The Tories could easily make a comeback if they dumped Badenoch and returned to the traditions of their bullish racist and anti-union past that Farage now promotes to his own advantage. But it’s not so for Labour.

Hundreds of thousands of supporters have been driven out of Labour’s ranks. They’re not going to come back in a hurry – and they never will as long as Starmer and the old Blairite has-beens he surrounds himself with remain in charge. And though there’s murmurs in union circles and Labour’s back-benches no one is, so far, prepared to step forward to challenge Starmer. Least of all Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, that some of the dissidents say is the only man who can restore their standing in time for the next election.

Burnham is, of course, a good campaigner on the street – unlike Starmer whose arrogant and remote attitude to working people reflects the loathsome policies of austerity and oppression that are the hall-mark of his administration today.

Burnham, or maybe others in his camp, may move against Starmer next year. But the fight-back against austerity can’t rely on the whims of ambitious Labour politicians or the legion of union bureaucrats that dominate our labour movement.

Despite public quarrels at the top Jeremy Corbyn’s new political party has enthused hundreds of thousands who flocked to his banner when he was leader of the Labour Party. Whether they can build an alternative left platform, in tandem with the progressive elements still in the Labour Party only time will tell.

But the mass movement in solidarity with the Palestinians has shown the way. The anti-war movement is back on the streets and the apologists for imperialism and Zionism are on the defensive – smears, common abuse and police oppression are now the only arguments they’ve got left.

Millions of people scrabble to earn a living just to keep a roof over their heads. A tiny elite live lives beyond the reach and often beyond the imagination of most workers. Socialism can end this. Only through socialism can the will of the masses, the overwhelming majority of the people, be carried out. Only socialism and mass democracy – not the sham democracy of the bourgeoisie or the myths of the social democrats, can end the class system and free working people from their slavery. Our argument – for socialism must be put back on the workers’ agenda.