“We need a new political voice for the working class”, says TUSC/Collective candidate Dave Nellist

In the twentieth of our video interview series #CanaryCandidates, we meet Dave Nellist – standing in Coventry against Labour’s Mary Creagh

Dave Nellist is the TUSC candidate for Coventry East in the general election, and is backed by Collective – which is bringing together voices on the left to build a “mass movement that will eventually transform into a new political party”. Nellist told the Canary that he’s standing as a candidate partly because of:

that drift to the right of Labour. It’s more authoritarian. It’s… driven out about a third of its members. And almost everything that was worthwhile in Jeremy’s two manifestos has now been ditched

Nellist quoted a recent article by Andy Haldane, CEO of the Royal Society of Arts and formerly the Bank of England’s chief economist, in which Haldane said:

Labour’s proposed additional spending is about one-tenth and one-fifteenth respectively of proposals in their 2017 and 2019 manifestos

This drastic reduction in spending proposals, Haldane asserted, was a result of both Tories and Starmer’s Labour having “self-imposed constraints” which saw them “committing to near-identical fiscal rules”.

Labour will have increasing tensions with trade unions

Because of Labour’s current absence of any meaningful proposal for ordinary people, Dave Nellist said, it is likely to have more and more problems with the trade union movement in coming months and years, assuming it wins the election as polls predict. He asked:

What do unions with members in public services, that are going to continue their decline after the election, say when their members hoped that the new government was gonna be different from the last and are disappointed that it isn’t?

How do they then say at the next council elections ‘vote Labour, even though they’re not gonna give you a pay rise that meets the rising prices, even though they’re not gonna secure or replace the lost jobs in the services that you’re trying hard to provide’? So there will be tensions.

But he also pointed out that for the most people “what changes their view is experience”. So there won’t be a truly massive shift away from Starmer’s Labour Party until ordinary people actually see the results of its awful political positions with their own eyes.

Nellist wants the trade union movement to play a bigger role in left politics going forwards, and reminded us that:

This country was at its most equal at the point when trade union membership was at its highest and when its influence was the greatest, which was the mid-1970s.

In terms of his own electoral promises, he insisted he would continue his commitment to only taking a reduced salary:

As it was my Labour Party’s policy in the early 1980s, only taking the wage of a local skilled factory worker for the nine years I was in parliament or the 14 years I was in the local authority.

And he stressed that his current campaign is largely about trying to:

find the people who think the same way as we do: domestically on poverty and inequality, or internationally on Israel’s war on Gaza. You need anti-austerity, anti-war candidates.

We’re back to square one. And we need a new mass movement urgently.

Dave Nellist is also a firm believer that we desperately need a new mass movement on the left now that Keir Starmer has set in motion the terminal decay of the Labour Party. He argued:

We’re roughly where we were a century and a quarter ago when the trade union movement at the back end of the 19^th century was looking at the Tories and Liberals and saying ‘I can’t really see a difference there, we need a Labour Party’.

We’re now looking at the Labour Party and the Tories and the Liberal Democrats and saying ‘well I can’t see much difference in that overlapping agenda, we need a new political voice for the working class’.

And he pointed out that the left is already sowing seeds in this general election for the creation of the mass movement that the country sorely needs right now:

After the election, I think there will be discussions taking place, both within the trade unions but also across the trade union movement and the left campaigns that exist. I suspect… Jeremy’s Peace and Justice Project will be part of if not central to the bringing together of those discussions.

Again, what we’re doing in this general election: we’re sowing seeds in all our local areas trying to build up networks, hoping that there can be a better collective discussion and approach that brings forward a new party. Exactly what form it will be, exactly what it’s programme will be, will take negotiations and discussions and so on.

What it can’t be, by the way, is one individual at the top and it being a top-down organisation. It has to have democracy, it has to have accountability. And in my view, it has to fight and win a battle amongst the rank and file of the trade union movement to move trade unionists in there and if possible trade unions into that new structure. Because in my view, that’s what will give it weight and longevity

His message of hope and urgency, meanwhile, is that this movement must be democratic, and it must come into being as soon as possible:

We have to get together in large numbers. The new party we need has got to have millions of votes eventually. It’s got to have hundreds of thousands of people actively supporting, at least tens of thousands of people… putting their main effort into supporting it. And I think that is possible.

So that’s my message of hope, if we can get the organisation, the conferences, the meetings and so on… If we don’t do that, then we do face that problem – having to confront the far more confident and authoritarian far-right populists like Farage and others. It is an urgent job… Labour will begin to disappoint certainly within one or two years, possibly within months of taking office.

For more on Nellist’s comments see the full interview on our YouTube channel:

Watch and read all our #CanaryCandidates interviews here.