When Zarah Sultana declared there is “no room for socially conservative views in a left-wing socialist party,” she wasn’t simply staking out political territory.
She was drawing a line through the very heart of the British working class, severing the labour movement from its deepest roots. And in doing so, she exposed a profound fracture in contemporary left politics: the unbridgeable chasm between a managerial liberalism that speaks in the language of academic abstraction, and a working-class socialism grounded in place, community, and lived experience.
This is not an abstract dispute about party membership criteria. It strikes at something fundamental: can there be a socialism that despises the people it claims to represent?
The uncomfortable truth Sultana and her liberal allies refuse to confront is this: most working-class people are socially conservative and economically left-wing. Not because they lack education or enlightenment, but because their politics emerge from material reality. From the street they grew up on, the pits their fathers worked in, the schools their children attend, the shops on their high street, the dead they bury and the living they care for. This is not ideology absorbed from university seminars. This is politics forged in the foundry of actual existence.
This is not an abstract dispute about party membership criteria. It strikes at something fundamental: can there be a socialism that despises the people it claims to represent?
The uncomfortable truth Sultana and her liberal allies refuse to confront is this: most working-class people are socially conservative and economically left-wing. Not because they lack education or enlightenment, but because their politics emerge from material reality. From the street they grew up on, the pits their fathers worked in, the schools their children attend, the shops on their high street, the dead they bury and the living they care for. This is not ideology absorbed from university seminars. This is politics forged in the foundry of actual existence.
Continue @ Labour Heartlands.
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