SPGB Snippets: Not socialism (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

April 29, 2026

The so-called Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) is putting up candidates in the forthcoming elections for local councils and for the Senedd (Wales Government). Their watchword is ‘Join the Socialists!’. But their agenda is to ‘fight for the day-to-day issues, like pay, benefits, rights, and an end to oppression and war’. In other words they are campaigning for improvements to capitalism and not, despite their name, for socialism – a society of worldwide cooperation in production and distribution and free access to all goods and services.

Given this, the reference in their literature to ‘a society democratically run by working-class people’ means nothing, since their focus on reforms of capitalism can only mean relegating socialism to a dim, unthought-out, far distant future.

Election results (2021)

Party News from the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party stood 4 candidates in last month’s regional and local elections. In Wales we contested Cardiff Central constituency in the elections to the Welsh Assembly (now called The Senedd), the same we had in the 2019 General Election, with ten others standing for capitalism in one form or another. Some 43,000 election manifestos were delivered free by Royal Mail to households there. In Kent we stood two candidates for the County Council, as we had done four years ago, and one in a by-election for Folkestone town council. As there is no free postal distribution for local elections, some 20,000 were distributed commercially and by members of Kent and Sussex branch.

The results are:

Cardiff Central: Labour 13,100; LibDems 5,460; Conservative 3,788, Plaid Cymru 3,470; Green 1,552; Abolish Welsh Assembly 440; Propel 268; Freedom Alliance 156; Reform UK 151; Socialist 82; Gwlad 65.

Folkestone East: Labour 1324; Conservative 1132; Foundation Party 561; LibDems 361; Socialist 89.

Folkestone West: Conservative 2105; Labour 1782; LibDems 541; Independent 264; Reform UK 127; Socialist 55.

Folkestone Town Council Central Ward: Conservative 1119; Labour 916; LibDem 255; Independent 218; Socialist 61; Independent 44.

Election Communications (2021)

Party News from the April 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

  In the elections on 6 May the Socialist Party is contesting the Cardiff Central seat in the Welsh Assembly and two wards in Folkestone in the Kent County Council elections. Some 43,000 election manifestos will be distributed in Cardiff by Royal Mail while in Kent about 26,500 electors will be offered the choice of voting Socialist.

Welsh Parliament Cardiff Central 6 May 2021

‘Great Resets’

The pandemic has led to much thrilling talk about Great Resets and rethinking the future. Wales’s 6th election since devolution is taking place on 6 May. Do you think that’s going to cause a Great Reset or even much change at all?

You know very well it won’t.

And why not?

Because most of the candidates don’t want change. Instead they will be wittering on about how they propose to fix the faulty system we live under – capitalism – so it’s maybe a tiny bit better for you and yours. But every politician says this. In every party. In every election. And they never really fix anything.

The reason they can’t fix capitalism’s problems is because capitalism IS the problem.

If you want to vote for these hopeless ‘fixers’ on 6 May, go right ahead. If you expect change, don’t hold your breath.

But one of the candidates isn’t saying any of this. Brian Johnson of the Socialist Party of Great Britain says you can’t fix capitalism, because it only works for the tiny minority who possess most of the wealth. And if you can’t fix it, you certainly shouldn’t vote for it.

Especially as there’s an alternative.

Capitalism has revolutionised our science and technology so that we can now produce a global sufficiency of the basics of life. That means we could abolish buying and selling, take the world back from the rich, and run it collectively as a communally owned resource.

It’s not ‘human nature’ that’s causing poverty, inequality, wars and global warming. It’s the fact that we have a 21st-century planet being trashed by an obsolete 19th-century economic system that gives all the power to the tiny minority.

Universal free access would be simpler, cheaper, faster, smarter, a genuine Great Reset.

Vote for Brian Johnson if you like the idea of real change.

Alternatively, there’s always your trusty ‘fixers’.

Further information and offers of help: botterillr@gmail.com Phone: 02920-615826.

 

Folkestone Council Elections 6 May 2021

We can do better than this!

The residents of Folkestone know all too well the powerlessness of life under capitalism. The system that demands that nothing is made, built or planted unless someone, somewhere can profit from it.

The construction of monstrous blocks of ‘high end’ apartments along Marine Parade – with the harbour next – have nothing to do with solving Folkestone’s housing crisis, and everything to do with raking in huge profits for developers. Developers are not paid to care about the homeless, those living in sub-standard accommodation or the young struggling to afford rocketing private rents at a time of rising unemployment and economic crisis.

But it’s easy to blame developers. They are as much at the mercy of the profit system as the rest of us – although their wealth cushions them from its worst effects. Doubtless they would much rather build beautiful homes that fit the scale of Folkestone and meet the needs of local people. But that’s not why houses are built under capitalism.

Now imagine a society where all of us, not just in Folkestone but across the world, actually own the resources of the world. Where we decide together what we build based on people’s needs, not just the demands of the profit system. Then what could Marine Parade, the harbour and Princes Parade look like?

In this election only the Socialist Party stands for the total abolition of the profit system and its replacement by a global society based on the common ownership and democratic control of all the resources of our amazing planet.

It’s time to consign capitalism to the dustbin of history.

Further information and offers of help: Email: spgb.ksrb@worldsocialism.org Mobile: 07971 71556

Wales or the World? (2016)

From the April 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wales or the World?

That’s the issue in the Wales Assembly election – says Brian Johnson, the Socialist Party of Great Britain candidate in Swansea West.

‘Could the Welsh Assembly be the most important thing that has ever happened to Wales?’

This was the question posed by a journalist Brian Walters writing in the South Wales Evening Post in March 1999 shortly before the first Assembly elections. He suggested that the Assembly would profoundly affect our lives deciding issues on education, health, housing, transport.

16 years on, is Wales any better? Are the problems in Wales – job insecurity, poverty, crime, poor healthcare -- any less than anywhere else in Britain?

The answer has to be ‘no’. The reason for this is clear.  These problems don’t come from particular constitutional arrangements. They come from the basic way society is organised – production for profit and ownership of the vast majority of the wealth by a tiny minority of people: the global system of capitalism.

The other parties

This is what all other political parties exist to administer. They have different ideas on how that system can be best maintained, but all agree it must be retained.

Many of their supporters have good intentions but are unaware that, in campaigning for these, they are helping to maintain this built-in system of minority privilege. However different the policies of Corbyn seem from those of Cameron, they offer no alternative to the present way of running society.

No matter how well-meaning politicians may be, they can’t control the system – it controls them. The best any government can do is ride the storms of the market.

So what's the alternative?

We propose an alternative to the system based on ownership of capital and market forces that currently exists in Wales, the UK and worldwide. This alternative is a society of common ownership that we call socialism.

But not ‘socialism’ as you probably know it. Not the type of dictatorships that collapsed in Russia and elsewhere and that were in fact a form of state capitalism. Not the various schemes for state control put forward by some in the Labour Party.

For us socialism means something completely different and something much better. We are talking about:

•           a world community without states or frontiers based on participatory democracy

•           a society without buying and selling where everyone has access to what they require to satisfy their needs, without the rationing system that is money

•           a society where people use the earth’s abundant resources rationally and sustainably, and freely contribute their knowledge, skills and experience to produce what is needed

To sum up:

•           If you don't like present-day society

•           If you’re fed up with the way so many people are forced to live – hanging on for dear life to a job that gives little satisfaction and doing it just for the money

•           If you are sick of seeing grinding poverty alongside obscene wealth

•           If you are sick of the Earth being abused by corporations who couldn’t care less about the future or the environment

•           If you think the root cause of most problems is the market system and the governments that maintain it

. . . then you’re thinking like we are.

What you can do

We are not promising to give you the society we describe. We are not putting ourselves forward as leaders.

The new society is one without leaders just as it is one without owners and wage-slaves. It is a wholly democratic society, which can only be achieved when you – and enough like-minded people – join together to bring it about peacefully and democratically.

If you agree with this, you will obviously not want to vote for anyone but our candidate. In casting your vote for Brian Johnson, the Socialist Party of Great Britain candidate, you will be voting for the kind of socialism you – and we – stand for.