Jeremy Corbyn: Britain’s anti-socialist witch-hunter
Having been deprived of Labour’s century-old apparatus for expelling socialists and repressing the party membership, Corbyn and his allies are endeavouring to create a new one.
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps
Thomas Scripps, 30, 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.
Socialism versus Corbynism
Corbyn’s anti-socialism, Sultana’s reformism and the necessary revolutionary alternative
Corbyn’s “broad church” housed a political inquisition against the left. Sultana’s own “broad church” offers a home to Corbyn while he does the same. The SEP warns that neither provides a solution to the crisis facing the working class.
Thomas Scripps•
10 years since the Greek referendum: The lessons of Syriza’s betrayal
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.
Thomas Scripps•
The Revolutionary Communist Party and Corbyn and Sultana’s new party: Naked opportunism and political amnesia
In words that constitute an indictment of the RCP’s political amnesia regarding Corbyn’s new party, Trotsky wrote of “the ‘left’ leaders” who “readily changed their line” to accommodate pressure from below: “to evaluate them one must take both sides of the matter into account. Revolutionaries need a good memory.”
Chris Marsden, Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps•
Chris Marsden, Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps, Chris Marsden•
Thomas Scripps•
The fight against the Labour Party
The crisis of the Starmer government, the Labour Party and British capitalism
The crisis of the Starmer government is the product of two long-term and twinned processes: the international decline of British imperialism amid the convulsions of global capitalism, and the total collapse of the Labour Party’s working class constituency.
Thomas Scripps•
UK Labour government in crisis as ruling class demands ramped up war on the working class
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.
Thomas Scripps•
Labour in crisis and Reform UK gaining ground—build the Socialist Equality Party!
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.
Thomas Scripps•
Build the socialist opposition to Starmer’s right-wing government!
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.
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps•
Socialism versus Green politics
The Revolutionary Communist Party abandons Corbyn only to embrace Zack Polanski’s Green Party
Building socialist consciousness means fighting to bring the historical and international experience of the working class to bear on contemporary political issues, in order to break the working class from its potential misleaders.
Thomas Scripps•
Zack Polanski’s Greens block anti-Zionist motion at conference
Polanski made clear that he was opposed to the motion’s description of Zionism as racist.
Thomas Scripps•
COP30, capitalism and the socialist solution to the climate crisis
In the face of mounting climate change-induced natural disasters and evidence of runaway global warming, capitalist governments and corporations have abandoned any pretense to be fighting climate change.
Thomas Scripps•
Zack Polanski’s Greens are no alternative to Your Party’s debacle
Polanski’s recent resort to radical rhetoric does not write off either his party’s or his own history, including their very recent history.
Thomas Scripps•
Capitalism failing on all 45 indicators of climate progress
The United Nations’ “Emissions Gap Report 2025” shows the planet is on course for 2.8 degrees Celsius of warming above the pre-industrial average by the end of this century based on current policies.
Thomas Scripps•
Socialism and Art
Glastonbury’s defiant stand for Palestine and the radicalisation of the working class and youth
There are events which burst through the crust of official politics and media-managed opinion and let popular sentiment erupt to the surface. Saturday afternoon at the UK’s Glastonbury music festival was one of those.
Thomas Scripps•
Adolescence: Gripping realism explores social pressures behind young male violence
The series asks how 13-year-old Jamie came to be capable of stabbing to death his schoolmate Katie, addressing themes of social breakdown, parenting, social media, bullying and the many malign influences on young men and boys.
Thomas Scripps•
Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat: Sympathy for migrants spiked by misanthropy
Depicting the November 24, 2021 drowning of 27 migrants in the Channel opens a window onto the crimes committed against migrants all over the world.
Thomas Scripps•
Sam Fender’s People Watching: “I don’t wear the shoes I used to walk in”
Fender gives voice to a generation of working class youth which has grown up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, amid a prolonged suppression of the class struggle and a rotten “left” culture of barely disguised liberalism, actively hostile to class politics and to Marxism, concerned with the micro-policing of language and the selfish advancement of rival “identities”, leaving millions of people politically at sea.
Thomas Scripps•
Orbital: Samantha Harvey’s award-winning novel about problems of climate and social change
The Booker Prize winner has struck a popular chord in a world poised between the immense potential of scientific advances and the threat of military and ecological catastrophe.
Thomas Scripps•
The campaign to free Julian Assange
The fight to free Assange is the fight against war!
At this critical juncture, it is urgently necessary to unite the fight against war with the struggle to free Julian Assange.
Thomas Scripps•
UK High Court orders Assange extradited: A pseudo-legal travesty
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.
Thomas Scripps•
Imperialist gangsterism and the CIA plot to kill Julian Assange
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.
Thomas Scripps•
The American working class must come to Assange’s defence!
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.
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps, Kevin Reed•
Thomas Scripps•
Against eugenics and the far-right
The far-right danger in the UK and the soporifics of the SWP and RCP
A real fight for socialism is necessarily the most conscious of political movements, rigorously analysing events, thoroughly exposing political misleaders and establishing the independence of the working class.
Thomas Scripps•
Far-right Reform UK benefits from the electoral collapse of Britain’s Labour Party—what way forward for the working class?
Labour has been haemorrhaging support since Tony Blair, but what has really given Reform UK its head is the repeated sabotage of the striving by workers for a left-wing alternative.
Thomas Scripps•
Hundreds of thousands march against far right in London to be told to vote for Labour
The growth of Reform UK was used by the Together Alliance, to mount a “get the vote out” drive for the Labour Party, backed as necessary by the Green Party.
Thomas Scripps•
The Malthusian underpinnings of Boris Johnson’s “herd immunity” strategy
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.
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps•
Thomas Scripps•
Speeches and Lectures
The rally took place in front of the main building of Humboldt University in Berlin. It was directed against the threatened deportation of four activists who had demonstrated against the genocide in Gaza.
The rally took place in front of the main building of Humboldt University in Berlin. It was directed against the threatened deportation of four activists who had demonstrated against the genocide in Gaza.
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.
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