Alison Gaughan is a member of Socialist Alternative in the England, Wales and Scotland section of ISA. She lives in Huddersfield, England, where Socialist Alternative, alongside other organizations, union members and activists, organized a conference to launch PACE, a local campaigning organization to fight back against right-wing attacks and the cost-of-living crisis. It has the potential to develop into the local chapter of a new national party. Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party, and a number of independent elected officials and working-class leaders from across the country spoke at the conference. This is an exciting step forward in building an independent party of struggle in Britain, and we think that the conference has useful lessons for socialists and working-class activists fighting to build a new party to take on Trump here in the US!

Congratulations on a very successful conference in Huddersfield! What is PACE and what was the main goal of the conference? 

Thank you! PACE stands for the People’s Alliance for Change and Equality. It started as a proposal for what we initially called an “alliance for resistance.” We appealed to activists in the workers movement and community struggles around the area. Some of those people and movements then came together to form PACE. The idea of the conference was to get what we were doing out to a wider audience and find other people who wanted to get involved.

Keir Starmer is the Prime Minister of the UK and the leader of the Labour Party. After 14 years of Conservative Party (Tory) rule, what has the Labour government done in power and why is now the right time for a new working-class party?

Pretty much the first thing that the new Labour government did after they were elected was to remove the winter fuel allowance from a lot of elderly pensioners. Shortly after that, they voted to keep a really unpopular cap on benefits affecting families with more than two children. More recently, they’ve cut international aid and they’re planning to cut disability benefits. That’s all so they can spend more money on defense. They’ve also very happily accepted a Supreme Court decision that trans women aren’t women and now they’re aping the far right with anti-immigrant rhetoric. 

Labour stood on a platform of change in the election, and it’s made the public very angry that after voting the Tories out, they’re getting more of the same. Unfortunately, there’s not really an alternative on the left. The danger is that this only further fuels the rise of the right-wing Reform UK party which only offers fake solutions and currently leads the national polls.

Could you speak a little about the significance of Jeremy Corbyn for the left in the UK today? What does it mean that he is open to initiatives like PACE that point towards a new party?

The fact that he is supporting initiatives like PACE is very significant. The previous Labour government, from 1997 to 2010, was correctly seen by many on the left as a sellout of the working class. That was not least due to the betrayal that was the Iraq War. When Corbyn won the leadership of the party in 2015, it kicked off a rank-and-file push in the party back to the left, albeit in a limited, reformist way. A generation of young people had a new hope in Labour, and many of those people are now looking for a new political home. Corbyn was hounded out of the leadership, and ultimately out of the Labour Party, by the right wing who still controlled the party apparatus. However, he won reelection as an independent MP against the Labour leadership and is a hugely popular figure on the left. Hundreds of thousands of people would back a new party that was led or maybe even just supported by him.

As you mentioned, Reform UK, a right-wing Trumpist party, is growing. Why is that the case, and how would a new party help the working class fight back against the right?

That’s happening all over the world. The problem, certainly in Britain, is that there is no clear, working-class alternative. There’s no party offering a solution to the cost-of-living crisis, or any issue working-class people face, other than by scapegoating migrants and people on benefits.

In the case of immigrant rights, which are coming sharply under attack by both Reform and the Labour government, a new party would get the narrative out to the public that working-class native-born British people have more in common with immigrants than they have with the ruling class. That’s especially important right now when most of our politicians are actually millionaires. We could organize things like anti-deportation sit-ins. We would demand that immigrant detention centers are closed down and that immigrants have the right to work from day one of arrival and the right to join a trade union. A new party could give focus to the counter-arguments that bring socialist demands back into the mainstream. 

What lessons are you drawing from movements internationally as you fight to build a working-class political alternative in the UK?

We’ve seen examples of left parties gaining momentum in Spain with Podemos, Syriza in Greece, PSOL in Brazil and what’s happening in Germany with Die Linke. What we’ve seen is that the establishment will try to co-opt and undermine new left parties and that we can’t be afraid to fight back. We must remain steadfastly independent of all wings of the capitalist establishment and mustn’t water down our politics to the lowest common denominator.

The other thing is there’s a really big danger of electoralism. An over-focus on institutional politics can undermine democratic accountability within a party, and lead to important political mistakes like entering into coalitions with pro–capitalist parties, sacrificing pro–working-class policies in the interests of parliamentary “pragmatism.” That’s something we have to avoid at all costs by building a party that is based on struggle in the streets, workplaces and our communities and that uses running in elections as one of many tools.

What are the next steps coming out of the conference, and how can workers and young people get involved in building this new political force?

We’ve held a further meeting and we’ve formed a coordinating committee so PACE has a leadership to go forward. We’re planning a series of meetings so working-class people can contribute their ideas.

We’re going to have a large presence at a local Alternative Pride event that we’re organizing, and we’re going to be organizing a demonstration just before the Labour Party conference on September 20. The other strand of what we’re doing is looking at standing PACE candidates in the local council elections in May 2026 on a clear pro–working-class program in contrast to Labour, the Tories, and Reform UK. 

Everybody in Huddersfield is very welcome to come to our meetings and see what we’re about. But PACE is just the beginning. It’s an example to build on all across Britain as we begin to see a linking up of local initiatives under the national umbrella of a new working-class party. That will be an explosive event on the political plane in Britain and definitely one that Socialist Alternative members here will want to play an important role in.