The Left’s Missing Piece: Why Vision Matters More Than Party Cards

Beyond Starmer’s Wasteland: The Urgent Need for a New Working-Class Politics

Under the shadow of Chesterfield’s famous crooked spire, I carried out my annual May Day pilgrimage, that essential gathering of the British left in its most traditional sense. As always, the parade was magnificent: trade union banners held high, brass bands playing, the PCS Samba Protest Band lifting the crowds and the weathered faces of men and women who’ve spent decades in the struggle, marching alongside fresh-faced youth not yet beaten down by capitalism’s relentless assault.

The guest speakers came and went, some inspiring, others rehashing familiar rhetoric. But as always, the real political education happened between the speeches, in those small clusters of conversation where authentic working-class analysis flows more freely than the overpriced ale at the local pub.

This year, something had changed. The whispered heresy of “time for a new party”, murmured cautiously since Starmer’s 2020 betrayal has erupted into a full-throated rallying cry. Across the market hall grounds, I heard it repeated like a mantra: “Labour is dead to us.” “We need something new.” “The Party’s abandoned its purpose.”

Yet here’s where the coherence ends and the paralysis begins.

In these conversations, our abandoned comrades inevitably recite the litany of existing left alternatives and their fatal flaws. The Workers Party GB is too closely tied to George Galloway’s personality cult. The Communist Party remains trapped in historical re-enactment. The Green Party, while gaining ground, still reeks of middle-class environmentalism detached from working-class material concerns. The Socialist Workers Party carries decades of baggage and sectarian infighting. The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) never escaped its perception as a vanity project. Breakthrough hasn’t broken through. While most have forgotten the material realities of class war and adopted the culture of ID-Pol. The Northern Independence Party became more meme than movement, and yet still new Parties emerge like the National Democratic Party, a promising fledgling learning to fly.

And I nod along, adding my own critiques. This one’s too dogmatic. That one’s too loose. This one lacks working-class roots. That one lacks organisational discipline. Before long, we’ve talked ourselves out of every existing option, retreating to the comfortable certainty that nothing available is quite right.

Meanwhile, across Europe, genuinely radical left parties have managed to break through, Die Linke in Germany, La France Insoumise, Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece (before its capitulation). Even in America, the Democratic Socialists of America has built something resembling mass membership. What do they have that we lack?

The answer hit me while standing amidst the red flags and union banners of Chesterfield, like a slap from the ghost of Tony Benn himself—that pipe-smoking prophet whose voice still echoes in these valleys long after the factories and mines are closed: what’s missing isn’t another Party to join, it’s a vision to rally behind. A vision so compelling it transcends factional squabbles and theoretical hairsplitting, a vision that speaks to both the heart and the empty stomach.

The British left has become exceptional at explaining what it’s against. We can dissect neoliberalism with surgical precision. We can catalogue the crimes of capitalism in exhaustive detail. We can articulate perfectly why Reform UK is dangerous, why Labour has failed, why the Tories are cruel.

But ask what we’re for beyond generic platitudes about equality and public ownership, and the conversation quickly fragments into competing theoretical traditions and historical references that mean nothing to the average person in Barnsley or Burnley.

What made the postwar Labour movement powerful wasn’t just its organisational structure, it was its ability to paint a picture of a better Britain that resonated in mining villages and factory towns. The NHS wasn’t sold as abstract “socialised medicine” but as freedom from the fear of illness. Council housing wasn’t “public sector residential units” but decent homes for working families.

The Parties we have don’t lack policies, they lack poetry. They don’t lack analysis, they lack story. They don’t lack critique, they lack a compelling alternative that speaks to both material needs and human aspirations.

Liberty. Justice. Fraternity. These aren’t just empty slogans…they’re the yearnings that have animated working-class struggle for over two centuries. But they need translation into a vision of 21st century socialism that speaks to both the Amazon warehouse worker and the gig economy freelancer, the nurse and the laid-off steel worker.

Until the British left can articulate that vision, one that makes people feel hope rather than just righteous anger, we’ll remain trapped in this cycle: forever critiquing existing Parties, forever dreaming of the perfect vehicle, forever waiting for a movement that never materialises.

Perhaps it’s time we stopped obsessing over organisational forms and Party structures and invested our energy in crafting a compelling vision of the society we want to create. Because ultimately, people don’t join Parties, they join futures they can believe in. Once that vison is articulated that’s the Party we should join…

Paul Knaggs