The first and most important thing you do when you vote in a General Election is consent to handing power over yourself and everyone else in this country — as well as over other countries in which the UK has colonial and financial interests — to a ruling class, which then has the entire apparatus of the state at its command. This includes the power of the courts to, for example, lock us up in Belmarsh Prison indefinitely and without charge or trial at the request of a foreign power; the power to take whatever percentage of our income they decide away from us in tax and allocate it to their business partners in the form of public funding; the power to pass laws that have absolute authority over us, even when that means criminalising protest against those laws or being made homeless by them; the power of the police to assault, imprison or — if we’re black — kill us with impunity for breaking laws passed by Parliament but written by private think-tanks, no matter how much they infringe upon our human rights; the power of both public security services and private security firms to spy on, investigate and record every aspect of our lives, no matter how private we may think they are, without our knowledge or consent; the power of the UK military to wage war against other people whose land or oil or lithium or water the state wants to take at the point of a ‘peace-keeping’ force; the power to sell military arms manufactured in our name for genocidal wars waged by repressive dictatorships; the power to sell the public assets built by past generations for the common weal that we believed were only in their stewardship to further enrich the private wealth of the highest bidder; and, in order to affect this dispossession, the power of municipal and local authorities to demolish our homes, destroy our communities and force us off the land on which we have lived for generations for the profit of the rich of this and other countries. The nomination of which political party will exert this governmental, military, legal and administrative power over us is secondary and almost irrelevant to our willing collaboration in our own subordination to the capitalist state. So, before you proudly exercise your ‘democratic right’ to put a tick in a box every five years, first think about what you are doing.

As for this secondary choice, the claim — from both the Conservatives and his own Party — that Oh Jeremy Corbyn is ‘unfit’ to lead the country and a ‘danger’ to the security of Britain, is based on a false premise. The real danger to the working-class of Britain — which is no danger at all but a cast-iron certainty — is that Corbyn and the Labour Party present absolutely no danger whatsoever to what rags like The Guardian and The Sun mean by ‘Britain’. No danger to our political establishment and the civil service that has run the country for the past three-and-a-half years while our so-called representatives have argued over Brexit; no danger to Britain’s imperialist interests abroad; no danger to the increasing militarisation of our police force against the working class; no danger to the intrusion of public and private security firms into our private lives; no danger to the UK’s support for Israel’s increasingly genocidal war on the Palestinians and Bedouin; no danger to the upgrading of the Trident nuclear programme at a cost of over £200 billion; no danger to the continued selling off of our land, demolition of our council estates, privatisation of housing provision and marketisation of our public services; and absolutely no danger — whatsoever — to capitalism. Minor amendments to Neo-liberalism are all the Labour Party is promising; and Corbynites that believe otherwise are as much buying into the Red-baiting by the UK media as the tools who believe that media. The illusion — and fear — that a political alternative to monopoly capitalism is attainable through our parliamentary and electoral system is an ideological product of monopoly capitalism. Whether you vote for Labour because you believe Corbyn is a socialist or you vote for the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats for the same reason, you’re believing the same illusion. It’s called Parliamentary Democracy, and its been fooling the English, British and UK electorate for 800 years.

The future political organisation and representation of the working class in the UK will only be built on the annihilation of the Labour Party as an electoral force. At this current moment of Neo-liberal hegemony between the political parties waging the class war, it is the duty of every socialist, anarchist and communist to bring about this electoral annihilation.

Simon Elmer

Architects for Social Housing

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