Adnan Hussain’s article in Politics Home explaining why he left Your Party is yet another contribution to the demonisation of the left employing all the well-worn canards of the mass media: a series of generalisations and simplifications which show exactly why he should never have been near the leadership of a socialist party.

The main thrust of the article is that Adnan is of the working class and understands them so much better than the dogmatists of the left who fail to engage with workers as they actually are, not how the left believes they should be. And it is this failure of the left which has let in the far right who make the working class ‘feel seen’.

Basically, the left must accept ‘social conservatism’, the desire of the working class to hang on to conservative traditions and culture, and should concentrate solely on bringing about improvements in living standards.

Adnan portrays himself as an advert for what the left should be striving for, the economic advancement of the working-class. He doesn’t give details of his career in the article, but after leaving school he started a car wash business before becoming a solicitor and landlord. He seems to have missed one of the key points about socialism, however – it’s about the advancement of all the working class, indeed the end of class society, and not through making money at others’ expense. There is however a party which continually champions the kind of advancement he has made – they’re called the Conservatives.

You have to wonder also what ‘social conservatism’ Adnan believes is so prevalent and to be cherished. Is it the hanging of union jacks on lampposts, for example?  Or is there a distinction to be made between bad social conservatism and good social conservatism, where, just maybe, the good social conservatism is the type that Adnan himself subscribes to?  Is he merely defending the Muslim faith, in which case, which Muslim faith – his, or Zarah Sultana’s?  

That is the problem with the generalisations Adnan is making. There is no working class community which is not riven by differences, sometimes intense differences, and the acceptance of, or rejection of sexism, racism, homophobia etc: there is no pure working class culture: every head is a battleground in the class war. And this is why politics can never separate off the struggle for economic justice from the liberation of  those oppressed not just economically but through the imposition of ruling class ideology regarding gender, race etc.

But there is another problem with what Adnan is saying – that because an avowedly socialist party does not want to compromise on these issues, this means that the left do not engage at all with more conservative people. Active socialists do so in every campaign they are involved in., No-one was banned from the poll tax campaign because they believed in God. No-one is vetted on their views on trans rights before they go on a Palestine demo. And every major campaign in living memory has had at its heart a disciplined body of activists from explicitly socialist parties. It is not their fault that the working class has been betrayed, disorientated and demoralised by their supposed champions in the Labour Party.

Finally, Adnan tells us that the old categories of right and left are no longer relevant. Of course, he is not the first person to say this. Virtually every presenter on GB News says it, usually in support of people protesting against migrants. So when he says “solutions must come from wherever they are found: sometimes from the left, sometimes the right” the alarm bells should be ringing. Maybe he could find a home in Galloway’s hopelessly conflicted Workers Party, but no-one should regret him leaving the Your Party stage. If the party, as so many of us hope, becomes the fighting heart of every working class community, it will soon gain hundred of thousands to replace him.