First delivered to the April meeting of the YCL Central Committee, Tuesday 22nd April, 2025:
One of the most significant moments in recent political economy is Trump’s tariffs and their consequences. The United States has engaged in economic offenses before – the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1926 and the Nixon Shock of 1971. Although, the difference in this instance is that the United States is now bargaining from a position of significantly less power than they possessed in the 20th century – with the world now trending in a multipolar direction outside of the west.
Commentators have rightly identified that this is the act of a dying empire lashing out during its slow crumble. Although for Britain, this means that we have a severe risk of further penetration of US capital into our economy due to a trade deal with the United States becoming an increasing reality. This is especially prescient due to Rachel Reeves’ plan for the deregulation of finance in the City of London. As a result, this is an example of the potential volatility of capitalism and neoliberalism. Private equity and hedge funds have taken increasingly dangerous risks with fictitious capital in their borrowing and taking on debt. Furthermore, this deregulation leaves room for fund managers having an increasingly large influence on electoral campaigns as well. The neoliberal orthodoxy of the Labour government is set to continue – which will lead to the material conditions of Britain to trend further in favour for the rise of Reform UK.
In the upcoming local elections in England, Reform are projected to make significant gains- with the party potentially replacing the Tories as the most dominant force on the right in some projections. Additionally, Reform have taken advantage of the Labour government’s industrial inaction and have demonstrated that they are to the left of Labour industrially in their rhetoric. For example, Richard Tice and Nigel Farage called for the nationalisation of British Steel prior to the emergency parliamentary session. Nigel Farage posed with GMB literature outside of the furnaces in Scunthorpe.
It is a clever political manoeuvre, but the reality of Reform can be exposed by a knowledge of political economy. Reform is a Thatcherite party – therefore their rhetoric on manufacturing in Britain is at odds with their neoliberal economic ideology. Their desire for a strong British market requires an expensive, strong pound whereas a strong manufacturing base in Britain might necessitate the lowering of the value of the pound. This contradiction also exposes that nationalisation isn’t a solution in itself. Standing on nationalisation without a coherent vision of how the country’s economy will work in tandem with it is not the path to any progressive or left wing government. Indeed, Britain’s Road to Socialism rightly identifies that state ownership on behalf of the capitalist class involves compensation to the previous private owners, contracts for the private sector and little to no involvement of the workers themselves.
Furthermore, in the same vein as Unite’s Sharon Graham – Reform are in favour of nationalisation under the premise of continuing the cold war with China. Any rhetoric around worker’s control and dignity has been replaced by vagaries around national security and defence. In contrast, Britain’s Road to Socialism states that a left government would use compensation from public ownership to invest in sectors or parts of the population on the basis of proven need – with investment that reflects the needs of the working class – which is anathema to the current militarisation projects and private equity.
With this in mind, the biggest industrial activity at the moment is the ongoing Birmingham bin strike, along with the NEU stating it would launch a formal ballot to strike if the government’s final pay offer isn’t fully funded. What is significant about these two pockets of industrial activity is that they are representative of the state of our public sector. Two vital services – sanitation and education- are under attack due to the continuing austerity measures.
Unsurprisingly, the media has chosen to highlight the piles of rubbish and rats instead of the fact that unelected, highly paid commissioners were parachuted into Birmingham Council or the fact that our government does in fact have the money to fix the crises – it is just that our money is being spent on proxy wars and funding a genocide in Gaza. Most recently, our government has expressed an intention to boost military presence in the Arctic as well – allocating vast amounts of resources to fuel a cold war with Russia. As a result, it is imperative that members of the League who are active in their unions focus on fighting against the rhetoric of militarisation and the cold war within them. The economism of these unions exposes a key contradiction within them – which is that they are in favour of expanding an industry which siphons off resources from the public sector which thousands of their members rely on and work for.
Lastly, the League and Party welcome the Supreme Court’s ruling on the fact that sex equates biological sex, which strengthens women’s rights to single sex provision within their workplace, education, sport and other vital facilities. Because the previous definition was not concrete enough – employers were given more room and interpretation to discriminate against women due to the previous ambiguity around ‘sex’ in the equality act. This ruling is a victory for women’s rights, and it is imperative that we defend the existing rights that we do have using the bourgeois legal systems to our benefit when we can.
The widespread hysteria and misinterpretation of this ruling on other parts of the left further strengthen the need for a logical, material analysis of conditions when they arise. A knee-jerk, emotional reaction to significant events and rulings such as this does not have a place in Marxism-Leninism. The path of investigating, reading through necessary literature and approaching events from a scientific, materialist point of view is the hard, tedious path but one that leads us to positions we have today – the easy alternative is the liberal, individualistic, and anti-intellectual point of view that can be easily arrived at through lack of investigation.
Matthew Miller is one of the YCL’s Industrial Officers
