In last year’s Brexit referendum, Jeremy Corbyn carried the baton for the City of London and trampled on his working-class and minority supporters by campaigning to remain in the EU. Crime hasn’t paid. Corbyn may have capitulated, but the Blairites will be satisfied by nothing short of his political annihilation. As New Labour’s prince of darkness Lord Peter Mandelson ranted at a 20 February Jewish Chronicle event: “Why do you want to just walk away and pass the title deeds of this great party over to someone like Jeremy Corbyn? I don’t want to, I resent it, and I work every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of his tenure in office.”

The bourgeoisie and its Blairite agents despise Corbyn for his talk of socialism, his support to trade union rights and his stated support for unilateral nuclear disarmament. In the eyes of the imperialist rulers, Corbyn’s opposition to the Trident nuclear missile system in particular makes him unfit to govern. On Remembrance Sunday in 2015, the head of the armed forces, General Sir Nicholas Houghton, made that view clear in a thinly veiled coup threat during an appearance on the Andrew Marr show.

Mandelson and the rest of the cabal led by Tony Blair spent two decades trying to transform Labour into an outright capitalist party. They abandoned even lip-service to socialism, abolished Clause IV and attempted to cut Labour’s ties to the unions. Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in September 2015, and his resounding re-election a year later, called the Blairite project into question. Driving the Blairites out of the Labour Party would constitute a step towards the political independence of the working class, despite the bankruptcy of Corbyn’s parliamentary reformist programme. For Marxists, it would offer an opportunity to expose the pretentions of the Labour lefts to speak for the working class. It would also further the struggle to win the most advanced workers and youth to the perspective of building a revolutionary workers party.

Corbyn continues to accommodate the Blairite agents of capital within Labour. Despite having the support of the majority of the party’s hundreds of thousands of members, Corbyn has not insisted on mandatory reselection of the despised Blairite MPs, or the removal of witch-hunting general secretary Iain McNicol. To avoid a split in the Parliamentary Labour Party last November, Corbyn and his allies John McDonnell and Diane Abbott absented themselves from Parliament during the vote on a motion by the Scottish National Party (SNP) calling for Blair to be held to account over the Iraq war. This unrequited peace offering was an offence against the hundreds of thousands of members who flooded into the Labour Party to support Corbyn, in large part driven by justified hatred for Tony Blair’s crimes.

The class war in the Labour Party poses the question: what type of party is needed to represent the interests of working people and the oppressed? The old Labour Party that is Corbyn’s model prided itself on being a “broad church”, meaning that it had room for a wide spectrum of political currents and opinions. Bloc affiliation of the trade unions to Labour ensured that the pro-capitalist union bureaucrats called the shots. In practice, such a “party of the whole class” necessarily submerges the most advanced layers of the working class into the most backward ones, with the result that the right wing dominates and the left bends to it for the sake of unity. Such parties are inevitably chauvinist, based on the dominant ethnic grouping and tied to the defence of the imperialist interests of their own ruling class. Corbyn’s leadership of Labour illustrates what that kind of party means in action — subordinating the needs of workers, immigrants and the oppressed to the likes of Tony Blair and his bourgeois cronies.

A Leninist vanguard party, in contrast, consists of the most politically advanced layers of the working class and oppressed, as well as elements of the petty bourgeoisie who have been won to the cause of proletarian revolution. A vanguard party would not tolerate the existence of pro-capitalist elements and English chauvinists in its ranks. It would champion the defence of immigrants, women and minorities, whose liberation must be tied to the proletariat’s struggle against capitalist class rule. Actually fulfilling the burning needs of working people and the oppressed cannot be achieved through a Labour majority in Parliament — it requires breaking the power of the capitalist exploiters through socialist revolution. To that end, the workers need their own steeled and tested combat party, modelled on the Bolshevik party of VI Lenin and Leon Trotsky, which led the working class to power in the Russian October Revolution of 1917!