Mark Serwotka’s Warning: Is Your Party Facing an Identity Crisis?

Class vs. Identity: The Battle for Your Party’s Soul.

The Party We Need, or the One Being Undermined? Mark Serwotka Sounds the Alarm on Your Party’s Identity Crisis

When a trade union leader with Mark Serwotka’s credentials warns that toxic behaviour is already poisoning a fledgling political movement, you would do well to listen. Because what he describes is not merely organisational teething troubles or the usual factional squabbles that accompany any new party’s birth. It is something far more corrosive: the deliberate replacement of class politics with the very identity-obsessed liberalism that has already hollowed out every progressive movement it has touched.

Your Party was supposed to be different. It was supposed to be the vehicle that finally gave working-class people a voice in Parliament, a party that would speak for the factory worker and the care assistant, not the university lecturer and the diversity consultant. Yet before it has even contested its first election, the warning signs are unmistakable. The same ultra-liberal activists who have captured Labour, the Green Party, and countless socialist organisations are already at work, rewriting the rulebook to ensure that class takes a back seat to identity, and that anyone who objects can be swiftly dealt with.

This is not paranoia. This is pattern recognition…

The Liberal Trojan Horse

I have watched this process unfold across the left for two decades now. It always begins the same way: with the language of inclusion, diversity, and progressive values. Who could object to such noble aims? But look closer, and you will notice something peculiar. Every application form demands to know your gender identity, your sexuality, your race, your disability status. Yet none of them ask about your class background, your union membership, whether you have ever worked a night shift or paid into a strike fund. The very category that socialism is built upon has been quietly removed from the equation.

This is not an accident. It is a deliberate strategy to transform working-class movements into middle-class identity projects. And it works because it flatters the people doing the transforming. It allows them to feel radical while never threatening their own material interests. They can champion the marginalised without ever confronting the wealthy. They can talk endlessly about oppression without mentioning exploitation. They can build entire political careers on the performance of progressivism while the working class continues to suffer.

Orwell understood this species perfectly. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he wrote about the “fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, Nature Cure quack, pacifist and feminist” who attached themselves to socialism, not because they cared about the working class, but because it gave them a platform for their own peculiar obsessions. The faces have changed, but the phenomenon remains. Today’s equivalent arrives clutching a tote bag and a list of pronouns, ready to explain why your concerns about material conditions are actually a form of bigotry.

Women’s Rights Are Not Negotiable

Serwotka’s warning is particularly urgent when it comes to the treatment of women. He states plainly: “If we cannot stop men threatening women for having different views, this movement will go nowhere.” This is not hyperbole. This is an accurate description of what has been happening across the left for years.

Women who defend their sex-based rights, who insist that safeguarding matters, who note that women’s spaces exist for a reason, are routinely subjected to campaigns of intimidation and abuse. They are called bigots, transphobes, fascists. They receive threats of violence. They are driven from organisations they helped build. And all of this happens while men who claim to be progressive stand by and watch, or worse, actively participate in the silencing.

Let us be absolutely clear about what is at stake here. Transgender people already have legal protections in this country under the Equality Act 2010, protections that recognise gender reassignment as a protected characteristic. No one is trying to remove those protections. What is under attack is not transgender rights, but women’s rights. The right to single-sex spaces. The right to organise on the basis of biological sex. The right to participate in sport on a fair basis. The right to speak about their own oppression without male interference.

These are not abstract philosophical questions. They have material consequences for working-class women who cannot afford private healthcare, who depend on state-funded refuges, who use public changing rooms, who send their daughters to state schools. The wealthy women championing gender identity ideology will never face these consequences. Their private spaces remain rigorously single-sex. It is working-class women who are being told to shut up and make room.

This is class warfare masquerading as social justice. And any movement that cannot see this is not a socialist movement. It is liberalism in a red rosette.

Socialism Is Materialist, Not Idealist

Here is the fundamental problem with gender identity ideology: it is metaphysical liberalism, not socialism. Socialism is rooted in material reality. It analyses the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be. It deals with concrete conditions: who owns the means of production, who profits from labour, who has power and who does not.

Gender identity ideology, by contrast, is pure idealism. It insists that material reality can be overridden by subjective feeling, that sex is irrelevant but gender identity is sacred, that biological facts are less important than personal identification. This is the philosophical opposite of socialism. It is closer to religious belief than political analysis.

When a political movement spends more time debating pronouns than poverty, when it is more concerned with language than with labour rights, when it rallies around abstract notions of identity while ignoring concrete questions of class, it has ceased to be a workers’ movement. It has become a vehicle for middle-class professionals to signal their virtue while doing nothing to challenge the structures that actually oppress people.

The working class does not want lectures about gender identity. They want their wages to rise, their rents to fall, their hospitals to function, their children to have futures. They want power, not performance. They want socialism, not semiotics.

The Poison Serwotka Identifies

What Serwotka describes, anonymous operators pulling strings, factional stitching, intimidation of dissenters, is textbook entryism. Small groups with rigid ideological commitments infiltrate larger organisations and gradually take control of the machinery. They dominate committees, control communications, and establish themselves as gatekeepers. Anyone who challenges them is subjected to accusations of bigotry, isolated, and driven out.

This is not how democratic movements function. This is how cults operate.

The collapse in Your Party’s membership that Serwotka references is entirely predictable. People join political movements to change the world, not to navigate byzantine purity tests and live in fear of saying the wrong thing. When the culture becomes one of paranoia and denunciation, when every meeting feels like a struggle session, ordinary members simply walk away. They have jobs, families, responsibilities. They do not have time for this nonsense.

The tragedy is that this pattern has played out repeatedly across the left, and we seem incapable of learning from it. The Socialist Workers Party tore itself apart. Respect imploded. Labour has been captured so thoroughly that it now campaigns against its own working-class base. And now, before Your Party has even gotten off the ground, the same poison is already spreading through its veins. With Green Party activists spreading the bad news.

The Only Politics That Ever Worked

There is a reason that every successful left-wing movement in history has been built on class politics. It is not because class is fashionable or because it fits some ideological template. It is because class is real. It describes material relationships that actually exist and can be changed through collective action.

The great victories of the labour movement, the eight-hour day, workplace safety laws, the NHS, the welfare state, were won by workers organising on the basis of their shared economic interests. They were not won by endless debates about identity or by fragmenting the working class into ever-smaller categories of oppression. They were won by solidarity: the recognition that workers have more in common with each other than with their bosses, regardless of what other differences might exist between them.

This is the politics Your Party claims to represent. But if it allows itself to be captured by liberal identity politics, it will achieve nothing. It will become just another protest group, perpetually marginal, internally fractious, and entirely irrelevant to the lives of working-class people.

What Must Be Done

If Your Party is serious about being a party of the people, it must make some hard choices. It must decide that women’s sex-based rights are non-negotiable. It must recognise that transgender rights and women’s rights can both be protected without erasing biological sex as a meaningful category. It must understand that socialism is about material conditions, not subjective identities.

Most importantly, it must create a culture where debate is welcome, where disagreement is not treated as heresy, where ordinary members can speak their minds without fear of being denounced. As Serwotka said, “If we welcome division, debate and difference, but focus on fighting the real enemy, we can smash Reform out of sight.”

The real enemy is not women who defend their rights. It is not workers who are sceptical of gender ideology. The real enemy is the ruling class that exploits us all, the corporations that extract our labour, the landlords who drain our wages, the politicians who serve capital instead of people.

This should not be difficult to understand. But it requires clarity, courage, and a willingness to stand up to the liberal entryists who will scream “bigot” at anyone who resists their agenda. It requires putting class first, always and unapologetically.

The working class has been abandoned by every other political party in Britain. Labour serves the professional middle class and big business. The Tories serve themselves. Reform serves nostalgia and xenophobia. There is an enormous vacuum waiting to be filled by a genuinely working-class party that speaks to people’s material interests and treats them like adults capable of rational debate.

Your Party could be that party. But only if it has the backbone to resist the takeover already underway. Only if it listens to voices like Mark Serwotka’s and acts on his warnings before it is too late.

The working class doesn’t need another talking shop for liberal academics. They need a party that fights for their interests, not their pronouns. If Your Party cannot understand that distinction, it will be dead before it ever lived.

If Your Party is to mean anything at all, it must return to the only politics that ever delivered real change: class politics.

That means talking about poverty, jobs, housing, energy, public ownership, and the right to organise.

The working class doesn’t want more lectures about pronouns. They want their buses running, their wages rising, and their hospitals open. They want power, not platitudes.

So yes, Mark Serwotka is right: we need a party of the people, not a playground for liberal ideologues.

Because while they’re busy rewriting the rulebook on language, the Tories, Labour and Reform are rewriting the country.

This isn’t just about strategy.
It’s about survival.

“If we welcome division, debate and difference, but focus on fighting the real enemy, we can smash Reform out of sight.”
— Mark Serwotka, The Party We Need