Thomas Scripps, 28, is the assistant national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party in the United Kingdom. Scripps joined the SEP in 2012, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. Over the past decade, he has written hundreds of articles for the World Socialist Web Site and delivered speeches and lectures across the UK and Europe.
Behind this escalating government crisis lay the demands of Britain’s ruling elite that Labour massively escalate its offensive against the working class to tackle rising public debts and create the necessary conditions for imperialism to pursue an agenda of trade and military war.
With the class struggle suppressed and Labour in power, opportunity has been given to the far-right to scapegoat migrants for the deep social grievances of the working class.
Keir Starmer owes his “landslide” victory entirely to the hatred of the Tories, the thoroughly undemocratic first-past-the-post system, and the fact that widespread left-wing sentiment has found no organised socialist expression.
Starmer’s paragraph on Thatcher also praises how Tony Blair “reimagined a stale, outdated Labour Party into one that could seize the optimism of the late 90s”.
Millions of workers and youth see the need for a new party to challenge Labour. But this requires a revolutionary socialist and internationalist programme, not a Labour Party Mark II.
The referendum was a critical experience for the international working class, with enormous political lessons that are of burning relevance in the present political situation.
Fighting back demands the independent political mobilisation of the working class, freed from the dead hand of the “left” representatives of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy, in a struggle against capitalism and for socialism.
Sultana and Corbyn cleave to the politics of the golden mean, a fair social contract which can be struck in Parliament while avoiding a struggle between classes.
At this critical juncture, it is urgently necessary to unite the fight against war with the struggle to free Julian Assange.
The UK High Court is greenlighting a prosecution, in open defiance of the American constitution and international law, of a journalist for exposing monstrous criminal wrongdoing by the US government and military.
Plots of imperialist violence and assassination, once organised through accomplices, kept closely under wraps and strenuously denied, are now carried out in ever more open fashion.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been subjected to more than a decade of vicious uninterrupted persecution by the imperialist powers. He is currently in London’s Belmarsh maximum-security prison, fighting extradition to the US.
Today the toll of the pandemic is viewed by leading figures in the ruling elite as a supposedly natural “check” on sections of the population considered a drain on profits.
Sabisky’s resignation is meaningless and all the questions now being raised in the media about “vetting processes” are irrelevant.
We are posting today the speech by International Youth and Students for Social Equality member Thomas Scripps at a June 9 public meeting in Cambridge, England on the eugenicist Noah Carl and the far right in academia.
It’s time to return to the revolutionary politics of Marx, Engels,
Lenin and Trotsky—and turn to the Fourth International, led today by the International Committee and represented in the UK by the SEP.
Our world movement sees our campaigns in the European elections, the American presidential election and the British general election as linked fronts in a single global offensive for socialism.
The Labour Party has been careening to the right for decades; nothing has halted it, including the election and five years of leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, who only served to confirm the total impotence of what passes for the party’s left.
The following lecture was delivered by Tom Peters, a leading member of the Socialist Equality Group of New Zealand, and Thomas Scripps, a leading member of the Socialist Equality Party (UK), to the SEP (US) International Summer School, held between July 30 and August 4, 2023.
The British ruling class is deepening its offensive against the working class because they are highly conscious that this social force can and increasingly must oppose their wars abroad.
The International Committee of the Fourth International bases its response to the NATO-Russia conflict on the understanding that the same conditions which give rise to war give rise to social revolution, bringing the international working class onto the field of battle.
