Motion B1
Interim Platform For A Socialist Federation
The following Interim Platform is suggested as an initial basis for campaigning, pending a full congress that can debate and adopt a detailed manifesto.
Preface: We Stand for a Socialist Republic
We campaign for a Socialist Republic in which production and distribution of goods and services is carried out to meet public need, not private greed.
Socialism means a planned economy in place of the market, a society without private ownership and class division, a world free from bureaucratic control where we share the work and the fruits of our work.
This is different from the model of the Labour left and European social-democratic parties which tries to regulate capital while leaving it in private hands.
It is also different from the model of the USSR, where a plan of production was imposed by a bureaucracy that was not accountable to the mass of the people.
The socialist republic will come into being when the mass of the working class overthrows the capitalist state and takes power into our own hands.
To achieve this, greater numbers of working class people need to gain real experience of democratic self-management of their own struggles, learning in practice the need to link their struggles with those of other working class people all over the world.
So in every campaign, whether it is around the cost of living, pay, rent controls, democratic rights, against racist attacks or war, we push to connect the struggles.
We campaign for committees of action in every city and every town, made up of recallable delegates from the workplaces, working class estates and communities, schools and colleges.
In this way the Socialist Federation will actively promote the self-organisation and unity of the working class.
And we will prepare for the day when the rule of capital ends, and a socialist republic is formed, based on councils of working class delegates, recallable at any time by the people who elected them, at mass meetings in our workplaces and on our estates.
Stop the Cost-Of-Living Crisis
We campaign for a rent freeze and rent controls. We want a price freeze and cheaper household energy and basic goods. We campaign on the estates and in our unions for direct action against central and local government cuts and private profiteers. We demand above-inflation pay rises tied to a working-class cost of living index, drawn up by committees of representatives from the big estates.
Fight Racism and Far Right Violence
The far-right street gangs are criminal thugs that hate the real working class, the multi-racial workers and youth that make up the real majority of the British population.
When they threaten refugees, migrants, Muslims, we fight back: we defend migrants’ rights to come here, live here, work here, and we demand citizenship for all. We oppose all racism whether against black people, Asians, Muslims, Jews or any migrants or refugees.
Against the violence of the far right we propose an organised mass movement of legal, digital and physical self-defence.
Oppose Farage and Reform UK
Farage’s lies have gone unanswered for too long. We will prepare and keep updated a Truth Kit to answer Trump, Musk and Farage’s lies and turn the tables on Reform by taking socialist arguments to every doorstep and every workplace.
We will be patient with ordinary people taken in by the lies, but we will turn our most hostile face towards the demagogues who deliberately promote hate and race war in Britain.
We will never consent to a Reform government taking power, and if they ever try, legally or illegally, we will campaign to stop them, through mass direct action.
Against Militarism and War
The generals and the billionaire arms companies are not on our side.
They send guns and bombs to Israel while they genocide Gaza, and they stoke the flames of war to make millions rearming.
We are an antimilitarist movement: we oppose arms exports; we fight to boycott Israel, exit NATO, and withdraw British troops from Ireland.
We reject the establishment’s propaganda campaign for a massive military build-up and oppose the drive for greater military spending – not a single penny or person for the defence of the profit system.
An Economy for Us, Not for Them
We reject the owners’ dictatorship in the workplace and the so-called “right of managers to manage”. We fight for workers’ control and management.
New technology such as AI should mean cutting working hours, not jobs. We campaign for a maximum 30 hour week with no loss of pay, an end to compulsory overtime and unnecessary night work, and union recognition in every workplace.
We demand that the government nationalise the top 100 corporations – including the banks, the utilities, the energy companies, big landlords, construction and big retailers - without compensation to the former owners.
Stop the Climate Catastrophe
We oppose fossil fuel burning and all forms of pollution. We resist the wanton destruction of forest, rivers and lakes and biodiversity.
We campaign for a programme of investment in solar and wind power, flood defences, integrated clean public transport and a cleanup of lakes, rivers and canals.
Prosecute the climate criminals: nationalise the energy, natural resources, plastics, aerospace, logistics and car industries without compensation under workers’ control.
Against the oppression of women
Open the fight across the whole of Britain against violence against women and girls – in the streets and in the home, where it happens most.
We fight for equal pay in every enterprise, full rights to divorce, contraception and abortion on demand, 24/7 nurseries, cheap food, six-hour day, subsidised community dining rooms and laundries, and the complete liberation of women.
Education for the Masses
We campaign to bring together parents, students and teachers in a national education shutdown and teach-in.
We propose a People’s League Table not of school “performance”, but an inventory of what’s needed today for kids living in poverty, kids with special educational needs, neurodiverse kids, kids at risk of exploitation, kids in or leaving care, and all children in Britain.
We support direct action along with education unions for billions in extra funding for schools, nationalisation of all private schools, cancellation of tuition fees and student debt, and the abolition of Ofsted in favour of democratic school boards of workers, students and parents.
A Health Service, not a Sick Service
We campaign to support health unions’ action up to and including strikes, and support the right for emergency cover to be set by health workers themselves.
We campaign for the government to restore all NHS funding, raise pay and cut hours for health workers, invest scores of billions in hospitals, GP surgeries and dentistry, scrap prescription charges and nationalise private healthcare and pharmaceutical companies.
Down with the Crown
We don’t need a king or a royal family costing us billions and sitting on billions more.
We don’t need an unelected House of Lords, unelected judges, unelected civil servants ruling us.
We campaign to abolish the monarchy and all unelected rulers. We demand proportional representation and the recallability of all elected officials.
Real Rights for All
Legalise recreational drugs – with a state monopoly. Break the hold of the criminal gangs and spend revenue on health, education, sport, recovery and drug awareness programmes.
Stop the campaign of hatred against trans people. Legal protection for all trans people, not just those with a certificate. Access to healthcare. No-one to be subjected to gender stereotypes about who you love, what you call yourself, what you wear.
End the oppression of homosexuality, gender non-conformity and all LBGT+ people.
Defend juries. Scrap draconian ‘anti-terror’ legislation, and lift the proscription of Palestine Action.
Sovereignty for the Senedd and Holyrood. Referendums in Scotland and Wales on whether they want to leave the UK and a poll on Irish unification.
A Working-Class Government
The British ruling class is the oldest, craftiest, most cynical ruling class since the dawn of capitalism. In their brutal colonial land grabs and wars, from Africa and India to Palestine and Ireland, the “British establishment” is soaked in blood from head to toe.
If we won an election, the chance of the British billionaires, finance capitalists, landed aristocrats, Admirals, Generals, police and spy chiefs meekly accepting our right to rule is precisely nil.
A workers’ government will need to break with the ruling class and their state and pass power directly into the hands of working-class organisations to begin transition to a socialist society: a Socialist Republic of Britain.
Amendment schedule 14
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Amendment B1.1
Chris S, Ian S, Bryce B [Democratic Socialists]
Delete the three paragraphs starting with “To achieve this”
And replace with:
To achieve this, we need to fight for a Democratic Socialist Party that can unite existing struggles and, crucially, present a viable political alternative to this rotten system. Such a party has to be thoroughly democratic, allow minority viewpoints to organise in open factions, publicly discuss disagreements and fight for a principled socialist programme and international socialism.
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Amendment B1.2
Richard G
Add after the preface and before point 1
Britain may be getting a new prime minister, but the Labour Party will still be spearheading an offensive against the living standards and rights of working class and poor people at home and abroad.
Burnham wants more military spending to be paid for out of the welfare budget. He wants to deepen the clamp down on refugees and migrants and to move desperate people from hotels to actual camps.
He will continue to back Israel all the way in its genocide of the Palestinians and its predatory wars in Lebanon and Iran. He will continue pumping money and arms into Ukraine, inflaming the war in central Europe to boost the profits of the arms companies.
Meanwhile millions of people want real action to defend their living standards. They want controls on price and rent rises, they want inflation busting pay rises. They want an end to the poisoning of our rivers and lakes. They want health, social care and education properly funded out of the profits and wealth of the rich.
But there are massive obstacles in the way of building a powerful resistance. Union leaders like Sharon Graham of Unite back the war drive and oppose climate action. Labour left MPs talk the talk – until they're told to be silent – and continue to prop up Labour's apparatus of austerity, racism and war. And the Your Party fiasco frittered away an historic opportunity, leading to historic growth of the Greens who cannot deliver the wave of extra-parliamentary action – industrial, political, on the streets and on the estates – that we need to bring this government to its knees.
The vacuum on the left allowed the far right to seize the initiative. From a series of violent pogroms and attacks on black people, migrants and asylum hotels all over the country, to a surge of support for far right Reform and fascist Restore, we urgently need a powerful socialist force that can champion resistance by any means necessary.
The Socialist Federation works to unify all resistance into a challenge to the state itself.
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Amendment B1.3
Eibhlin McColgan
Motivation: The proposed platform document contains good material. But it is at times too vague. It shies away from raising some controversial questions on the left while also not clearly demarcating ourselves from what currently exists politically. The goal of this amendment is to target what I consider the main source of weakness in the socialist movement.
I propose adding the following as its own section, serving as a political “starting point,” after the “preface” and before point number 1 of the programme.
Our starting point: For working-class socialism, not liberal progressivism
We believe that to build genuine working-class power, we need to firmly stand for working-class socialism and distinguish ourselves from liberal progressivism.
We oppose the Green Party as a liberal outfit seeking to solve the climate crisis within the framework of capitalism. It supports regressive taxes on workers and the shutdown of industries while implementing cuts to local councils. We will work with the Greens on specific issues in the interests of the working class—but we will not merge banners.
We stand for class-struggle politics, not liberal moralism. We unconditionally fight for the liberation of immigrants, trans people, and minorities as essential for working-class unity. But we reject identity politics as a middle-class tool designed to divide the working class.
We stand for consistent anti-imperialism, not human rights imperialism. We stand against Zionism, NATO, and the EU, and support the liberation struggles of all oppressed nations directed against American and British imperialism.
We recognise that the liberal left has abandoned the working class and that the current trade-union leaders defend the capitalist status quo. The Socialist Federation seeks to turn decisively to the working class, as it exists today, to carry out serious, ongoing work in workplaces and on the shop floor. We aim to rebuild the trade unions as fighting, collective tools against the bureaucracy that has turned the unions into partners for the capitalists, managing decline.
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Amendment B1.4 · For A Sovereign Industry
Eduardo Salgado
Insert as new opening point:
For A Sovereign Industry
We campaign for the deliberate, planned construction of a sovereign industrial base: democratically controlled, territorially rooted, and strategically complete. This means not only nationalising existing corporations but creating new domestic productive capacity where we currently depend on hostile powers or foreign supply chains. Regional self-sufficiency is the precondition of federal solidarity.
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Amendment B1.5
Vincent David
To finish point number 2 “Fight Racism and Far Right Violence” with the following sentence:
Against the capitalist class’s use of immigration for cheap labour to depress wages and divide and rule the working class, we fight to unionise all workers, native and foreign-born. Working-class unity against the capitalist class is how racist reaction can be defeated.
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Amendment B1.6
Vincent David
In point 6, delete the first sentence: “We oppose fossil fuel burning and all forms of pollution.”
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Amendment B1.7
Simon Hannah
Insert new first paragraph:
In section 6 replace 'Climate' with 'Environmental' in the title.
Capitalism is causing ecological collapse and declining living standards, and it is the working class, the marginalised and oppressed above all in the Global South, that pays the price. A non-ecological socialism is a dead end; socialism will not be possible on a seriously-degraded planet. The Federation links ecological and social struggles and builds for both. That is why for us ecosocialism is a foundational principle.
Insert 'free and accessible' before 'public transport' in paragraph 2.
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Amendment B1.8
Terry Conway
Replace the heading 'Against the oppression of women', with: 'Support the struggle of oppressed peoples (racialised, disabled, youth, LGBTQI+, self-identified women)'.
Section 7, heading
Section 7, new clauses:
After the paragraph ending 'the complete liberation of women', insert:
We oppose the Cass review, the EHRC guidelines and the erasure of trans rights.
We oppose disablism and the scapegoating of disabled people, both in the workplace and through various government’s attacks on disability benefits. The elimination of benefits for disabled people 18-22, forcing them either into employment, education or training must be opposed.
We oppose differential wages for young workers.
We fight for these principles across the labour movement.
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Amendment B1.9 · An Anti-Austerity Pledge
Duncan Chapel, Reece Stock, Bob Goupillot
Insert a new numbered section after Section 9 (A Health Service, not a Sick Service):
Against Local Government Cuts
The Federation commits to developing and promoting an anti-austerity pledge for the 2027 local elections. Candidates standing under or endorsed by the Federation will be required to commit to: opposing cuts to local services; refusing to implement central government austerity through council budgets; supporting workers in dispute with local employers, including Labour-controlled councils; and opposing the use of council powers against tenants, benefit claimants, and migrant communities. Where a balanced budget cannot be set without cuts, pledged candidates will commit to using reserves and borrowing powers and to setting a budget based on community need before passing on a single cut. The Federation will work with trade unions, tenants' unions and community organisations to build the mobilisation needed to defend councillors who hold this line. Affiliated groups, including those embedded in the Green Party and Plaid Cymru, are expected to advance this pledge within their own structures. The Federation will support local branches in developing transitional demands rooted in community need: rent controls, council housebuilding, and a national care service among them.
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Amendment B1.10
Duncan Chapel
Replace 'Sovereignty for the Senedd and Holyrood. Referendums in Scotland and Wales on whether they want to leave the UK and a poll on Irish unification.'
with: 'Sovereignty for the Senedd and Holyrood. We support the rights of Scotland, Wales and Ireland to self-determination, including the right to call referendums on independence with no Westminster veto, and we support a poll in Ireland on unification.'
In the final sentence, replace 'a Socialist Republic of Britain' with 'a free federation of socialist republics across these islands'.
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Amendment B1.11 · For A Democratic Militia
Eduardo Salgado
Insert as new closing point:
For A Democratic Militia
We campaign for the dissolution of the standing army and the creation of a democratically controlled workers' militia, under the command of elected and recallable delegates, as the armed guarantor of the socialist federation. The militia shall be locally recruited, territorially based, and politically subordinate to the federal delegates, not to the old officer caste or state bureaucracy.
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Amendment B1.12 · Fight For Proportional Representation
Simon Hannah
Insert a new numbered section:
Fight for Proportional Representation
Genuine PR, by which we don't mean either AV or D'Hondt, should be a central demand to ensure the best democratic outcomes for elections under capitalism.
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Amendment B1.13 · Vectoral Programme
Graham Jones
At the end of the document insert the following:
Future Programmatic Development
To ensure the Socialist Federation produces an effective programme appropriate to the present day, we must learn from the successes and failures of previous attempts.
Common problems include detaching our vision of the future from present action, or on the other hand emphasising immediate tactics with no connection to a long term strategy. Programmes may be vague about the path from the present to the future, or set out a simplistic series of stages. Strategies can tend towards merely listing aspirations, rather than identifying the bottlenecks that prevent those goals from being realised. And if developed entirely by a small group within the party, it can lack a sense of ownership by the wider members, and fail to resonate beyond the party.
The programme should therefore aim to mitigate these problems by i) developing its content in dialogue with the wider class through agitation, community listening exercises and workers’ inquiries, and ii) by ensuring an ongoing balance between the following interacting layers:
Future Vision: an emotionally powerful image of alternative futures with and without socialism;
Transitional Path: a plausible step-by-step strategy towards that goal, dealing practically with the obstacles we will need to overcome;
Present Analysis: our immediate moment, in this country, in this year, naming specific opponents and potential allies, and considering the overall shape of the contemporary working class.
Immediate Minimum: a limited number of priorities and simple guidelines to allow members to act on the ground in the immediate term, without having to memorise the entire programme
This does not need to be complicated — a one page programme or a fifty page programme may both equally satisfy the four levels. The programme also doesn’t need to be laid down in full or in great detail at the founding congress, but the above framework will be embedded in the ongoing process of programme development.
The four layers are neither isolated from one another nor collapsed into a simple unity, but adjust as the others do. Theoretical debate, class dialogue, and practical experience all contribute to their development. So as we learn more about the implementation of democratic economic planning, a barely sketched future vision may become clearer, and necessitate a redrawing of our path. As we act upon our immediate policy platform and listen to the feedback, our understanding of the path forward may change, or as the present political context shifts unexpectedly, previous routes may close off and new ones open up. In each case the adjacent layers may also need to shift to maintain a coherent line of argument through the programme. The programme can then remain as mutable as the world it is responding to, while retaining its stable focus on the practical achievement of socialism.
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Amendment B1.14 · Swarm Organising
Graham Jones
At the end of the document insert the following:
From Programme to Action
The programme will be condensed into a form appropriate for rapid training and organisational growth. This should be as short and simple as possible for quick delivery, and only as complex as necessary to ensure consistency with the full programme when acted upon. This will enable the Federation and future party to maximise base autonomy while ensuring the programme guides local organising.
The condensed programme should include:
the story of the organisation, to foster a sense of belonging
the strategy, a clear and believable path from now to end goal
the structure of the Federation and of how to operate in local branches — enabling the inexperienced to learn how to act effectively
This will function as part of a standard onboarding process. It will be made available in a series of short videos, accessible to all members upon joining (such as in an online portal). Materials will also be produced to enable local groups to deliver this onboarding through in-person workshops.
This training should be used as an anchor to attract and maintain new member-organisers. The primary route for this will be through social media, by documenting community action carried out by Socialist Federation-affiliated groups, and publicising that anyone who joins can receive training and resources to help them bring similar action to their communities.