Sacha Ismail

Oaklandsocialist
Note: This interview was conducted in the latter part of December, 2025. It explores further developments since the interview we did with Sean Cudden. Because of intervening events, we have been unable to publish it until now. However, it is still very relevant, in part because UK is the closest ally to the US. Here, Sacha talks about:

• The UK doctors strike
• The situation in the unions in UK
• The Labour Party, the Green Party , Your Party, and Reform UK as well as perspectives for the next election in UK
• Russia and Ukraine, including the role of Russia in Reform UK
• The Ukraine Solidarity Campaign
• An assessment of the political situation in UK in general
• There is also an added section on the end about the reaction in UK to Trump’s threat to annex Greenland.
  
  Oaklandsocialist
  We’re talking with Sacha Ismail, who’s based in the UK, in London. Sacha is a long time socialist and trade unionist, and Trade Union Liaison Officer for the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, which I think is how our paths first crossed. A little while ago I did an interview with Sean Cudden about British politics; but Sacha mentioned there’s also been a couple of recent developments that are quite significant. One is the restarting of the British doctors’ strike. The other is that just yesterday it was announced that the General Secretary of UK’s largest union, UNISON, was voted out and the left has taken her place. As I understand it there’s also something of a budget crisis there. So maybe we should start with that.

Sacha Ismail
Over the best part of two decades, in conditions of financial crisis and right-wing governments, the UK state’s provision of services to the working class has been severely run down relative to what existed before. There have been very large tax cuts for the rich, and simultaneously cuts in public services, producing a major transfer of wealth upwards to the capitalist class and the rich. As a result we have long-running budget crises in various permutations. To address that even modestly you need a government willing to carry out serious taxation of the rich and employers. Obviously from a socialist point of view, there are far more radical things we advocate – but taxing the rich is really the minimum starting point.

Unfortunately what we is a very neoliberal Labour Party government that isn’t willing to do that. They’ve put an end to deep cuts to public services, but these services are still desperately, desperately thread-bare and underfunded, and so the problems in them are still worsening, and really reaching crisis point. The government has made some very limited tax rises on employers and better-off people, while really not touching the super rich, the upshot of which is aggravating employers and giving grist to the right wing of politics; while simultaneously not going anywhere near what’s necessary to actually address the budget crisis or working-class living standards and growing inequality. So it’s an ongoing issue.

The connected problem is that even on the level of political campaigning, let alone mass working-class struggle, the UK labour movement is not vocally demanding an alternative. When I say an alternative, I don’t even mean in terms of socialism. I mean in terms of a significant shift of direction in the interests of the working class. Even more left-wing unions tend to adopt the approach of, essentially, being pleased we have a Labour government and lobbying in very passive and insider way, seeing if they can get this or that concession rather than mobilising their members to demand a change of direction. That’s the general background.

Oaklandsocialist
So how is the resident doctors’ strike related to this?

Resident doctors strike

Sacha Ismail
The connection to both the things in the unions you flagged up at the start, is that they’re both significant in terms of public sector workers. Obviously questions of pay and conditions and jobs in the public sector relate very directly to funding of public services. These strikers are what used to be called junior doctors, they are qualified but in the early stages of their career. They make up I believe a narrow majority of doctors in our public National Health Service. Over the last fifteen or more years they have suffered very, very serious pay erosion, real-terms pay cuts. After the financial crisis in 2007-8, the introduction of public-sector austerity, and a general capitalist offensive, pretty much all workers in the UK experienced real-terms pay cuts. But some of the most severe cuts were actually in the public sector, and doctors worst of all, even though they of course relatively well-paid and privileged.

I think at the height of the erosion for junior or resident doctors it was in the region of 30%. Since 2015 and particularly since 2023 they’ve waged a series of very determined campaigns, including many weeks of strikes, and have made up some of that ground, though they are still down in real terms. In the process they’ve somewhat changed the nature of their organisation. Historically the British Medical Association was a conservative professional association. In the 1940s, it opposed the creation of the NHS for self-interested sectional reasons. That evolved over decades but now, through their organising and their struggles, these younger doctors have pushed it in the direction of being a union and even in some respects a militant one. 

Between 2022 and 2024 we had a relatively big wave of strikes in the UK, in the context of soaring inflation. It wasn’t big by historical standards, certainly not compared to the very high level of working-class struggles in the 1960s and 70s and early 80s. But it was certainly the highest level of strikes since late the 80s, and it took place in many different sectors, public and private. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to hear that the workers who did the best at making up ground against inflation were those who struck in the most determined and self-organised way. Unfortunately a lot of workers who did strike weren’t able or didn’t understand the need to push their unions beyond quite tokenistic action. So for instance, there was a lot of buzz around the rail workers, because it was their action that began the strike wave in 2022, and because their union RMT had a very charismatic general secretary, Mick Lynch, who was forceful on television. But in fact their disputes were very lacklustre, with only occasional strikes. At the other end of the spectrum you had the resident doctors and the train drivers in another union, ASLEF – which ironically in some other cases has been more industrially conservative. They took much more sustained action, with a much larger number of strike days, and they won the best pay settlements of anyone, in terms of nation-wide disputes at least. 

In the case of the doctors, it was very much a movement from below that pushed their union into action and kept it going, and they struck right up till our general election in 2024. The Conservative government had already made significant concessions, and when Labour came in they conceded further. The result is the doctors made up a good chunk of the pay erosion they’d experienced. Now they’re quite rightly coming back for more, but the Labour government is digging in. The doctors are showing some determination, they’re now on strike for another five days, starting yesterday. There is a significant impact on the operation of the NHS, which is in a precarious state, and particularly now during the winter with flu and so on. This is a strike with tens of thousands of workers in a crucial sector across the country, so it is high profile, and is having an impact in politics as well.

Oaklandsocialist
And is there public support for the strike?

Sacha Ismail
Actually there has been a swing against. Back in the last round, between 2022 and 2024, they had quite strong public support, but it’s gone down. The government, backed by the right-wing and even the liberal media, has been successful in arguing that they’ve already had a big pay rise, citing 29%. That’s very misleading, because it was 29% over three years, and after years of big real-terms cuts. But a lot of people are buying it, particularly because doctors are relatively well-paid – although some of those early in their careers actually aren’t. They are seen as undeserving. I’d have to check the exact figures, but I think support for the strikes has fallen from something like 60% in the 2022-4 round to 35% now.

Obviously that’s not good, but as you know strikes don’t necessarily need majority public support in order to win. Moreover through its intransigence and its use of disingenuous arguments the government has enraged a lot of resident doctors and actually shored up their own internal support for the strike. I also have the impression that support from other trade unionists is getting stronger and more active.

Oaklandsocialist
What we’ve seen here is that support for public-sector workers who go on strike is weakened by the fact that almost every dispute is waged as a case for a particular group of workers. Unions never seriously bring in the wider issues. Is that also true in this case, I mean in terms of funding for the NHS and so on?

Sacha Ismail
The British Medical Association or people in it do some of that. Another result of the struggle younger doctors have waged is that the BMA does more to raise those questions. Certainly it could do it a lot better and a lot more. The other context is that the other NHS and health unions, the unions that represent more blue-collar and proletarian workers in the health system, nurses, cleaners, admin workers, everyone else, have been very weak in fighting for their members, even during the 2022-4 wave. That may feed into the public sense that it is the most privileged workers who are striking all the time, and they are not deserving.

Unison. Like most unions, it has a left and a right wing.

This relates to second development we mentioned, in UNISON. UNISON is a cross-public sector union with well over a million members. It has members in schools and higher education and some smaller areas, including non-firefighters in the fire service, for instance. But by far its biggest sections are local government and health, mainly in the NHS. Nurses, for instance, are mainly divided between UNISON and a specialist nurses union, the RCN. Both have been very weak on fighting for their members and on the wider questions such as rebuilding the health service. Over years there has been bubbling discontent among UNISON members about its performance in all kinds of spheres, and in recent years that has started to take more organised form.

Now just this week there is a very significant change, in that the incumbent General Secretary, who presides over this situation and is also a very close ally of the right-wing Labour leadership, has been thrown out of office. A note of caution is the very low turnout, which is concerning and says a lot about members being disconnected from the union. On the other hand the new left-wing General Secretary, local government worker Andrea Egan, won with a big majority, just off 60%, which against an incumbent is pretty remarkable. It’s not what I, as a pretty active activist in her campaign, expected at all. I thought we might win or lose by a couple of percent. Straight away the result is having some impact in politics too, because of the size of UNISON, its role in public services and its close connections to the Labour Party. It has been widely interpreted, including in the mainstream media, as a workers’ protest against the policies of the Labour government that I’ve described.

Clearly winning the leading positions in a trade union – and in fact the left does not even have a majority on UNISON’s national executive – only takes you so far. The key thing is how is it used to build the left, and even more importantly rank-and-file organisation and struggles. Nonetheless, this is significant.

We’ll come to Ukraine later, but I’ll mention that in UNISON specifically – though it’s also the case in a number of unions – both its left and right wings are divided over Ukraine. It is hard to know for sure, but in UNISON – this is different in some other unions – a majority of the left activists probably lean towards a “Stop the War”-type position. The view among the majority of left-leaning members who voted for Andrea Egan is a different question. I’m honestly not sure what Egan herself thinks about Ukraine; I think she has largely avoided discussing it in order to avoid splitting the left. We have quite an active solidarity network in UNISON, and it will now have to continue its work in a changing environment.

Oaklandsocialist
Here in the US we regularly have union votes for the national leadership, where a new leadership is sometimes voted in, but when you look at it, there is a very poor turnout; only a small minority of members vote at all. You mentioned that this is a problem in the UK too, including in this election?

Sacha Ismail
Yes, this was a very low turnout, less than 10%. In general here small unions with a more compact membership tend to have somewhat higher turnouts, while bigger, more sprawling unions have lower ones. So in our recent Fire Brigades Union election for General Secretary, the turnout was just under a third. This is a big issue, reflecting I think not just disengagement in a general way, but a gradual erosion of unions’ connections and living links with members in the workplace and their communities. Some on the left have dismissed the issue of turnout, essentially, and I think that is wrongheaded. If we don’t consider how to use openings such as these to rebuild organisation and a living labour movement culture among workers, then we’re going to be in big trouble.

Oaklandsocialist
Given the way unions have been led, have been misled, for many decades, you can’t dismiss the effect of that on the consciousness of workers. You get a situation where even those workers that are in unions don’t see the union as really part of their life. They feel alienated from the unions. Is it similar there?

Sacha Ismail
Yes, undoubtedly.

Oaklandsocialist
Ok, what about the political situation? You have the Labour Party, to which many unions are still affiliated to this day, and then you have the Green Party, and also the new party Your Party. Can you talk a bit about those?

Sacha Ismail
The first thing I’d say is that the biggest possible layers in the unions and in all these left parties, and in social movements more broadly, need to connect with each other to wage united struggles on the various issues we face. There is a problem that supporters of the various political projects tend to have a dismissive attitude to one another. So for instance, particularly now we have many thousands of left-wing young people joining the Green Party, a lot of Greens will say the Labour Party’s dead, that there’s nothing of interest there. Which I think is deeply misguided, because even in its current state, 15% or 20% support is not nothing, and nor are its hundreds of thousands of members. Moreover, it’s still the place where you have by far the most members of Parliament who in any sense represent socialist or labour movement politics. 

Keir Starmer, UK’s prime minister and Labour Party leader

Most importantly, Labour still has major organisational as well as financial links with some of the most important trade unions. And even now I would say the majority of union leaders and many officers, reps, etc, are to some degree Labour left people. The weight of that is much less than it was even three or four years ago, let alone at the height of the ‘Corbyn movement’ in say 2018. Nonetheless, it remains the case that for any struggle against the right, and any struggle around the interests of the working class, drawing in people and organisations connected to the Labour Party is going to be important.

UK’s Green Party

Since it elected a new, more vocally left-wing leader – Zack Polanski – the Green Party is having a surge of support and its membership is now close to 200,000, which is a huge increase. I should add that it is a real party with democratic structures and spaces where people get actively involved and argue about what it does. There are probably for the first time significant numbers of trade unionists joining the Green Party as well. It has a trade unionists’ network which before this was very anaemic, but is now attracting significant numbers of people. 

“Your Party”

Then you have Your Party, the party founder by Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and others. In many ways this is quite a politically reactionary project, but it is undoubtedly attracting people who want a socialist political voice, including many activists on the left of unions. I do think the democratic and internationalist left should organise in Your Party. I don’t want spend my time doing that, but it’s potentially valuable or least necessary work.

What I would emphasise again is the need to try to connect people across all these spaces to campaign around concrete issues in the class struggle. So whether that’s supporting workers’ struggles, or raising demands to improve living standards, about wages, about public services, whether it’s fighting to get rid of anti-strike laws, or challenging the right and far right, we need united-front organising across all these divides. That’s the approach I would centre.

Oaklandsocialist
When you say Your Party is reactionary, what do you mean?

Sacha Ismail
Look at the issue of Ukraine. Your Party hasn’t really done any policy making yet; its founding conference was really about structural and procedural questions. But I think there is no doubt, barring some kind of very unexpected change, that when it takes a position on Ukraine it will take a campist position, if not an outright pro-Russian one. Both Sultana and Corbyn have been very vocal opposing support for Ukraine, and I think those kinds of ideas have broad support among the members. I’m all in favour of helping comrades in Your Party wage a fight for a better, internationalist position, but it’s going to be a serious uphill battle. More broadly I think in terms of a lot of the kind of issues you’ve identified in your writing where the left has gone astray, certainly in terms of internationalism, this is going to be a very difficult space to work in.

Oaklandsocialist
We’ll return to Ukraine. Could say something about Reform UK, explain for American workers what that party is?

Reform UK

Sacha Ismail
I think it’s pretty similar to what your Republic Party is now. In general British politics is not as right-wing as US politics, but we are trending in your direction. Reform UK is very much like the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. No party like that has ever previously come anywhere near power in the UK, but now as of recently they run a number of large local authorities, and they are substantially ahead in the national opinion polls, at about 30%. It is entirely possible that if there was an election tomorrow Reform’s leader Nigel Farage would become prime minister, and we would have something very much like the Trump regime in the UK.

The irony is that a very clear majority of the UK now regret Brexit, the UK leaving the European Union, and even say they would want to reverse it. Yet we may end up with a government of those who drove the push for Brexit and even want to deepen the breach with the EU further. Of course attacking the EU is very much central to the far right’s project, and not just in the UK.

The other thing is that these political trends are accompanied by growing activism from more militant and fascistic elements of the far right on the ground, targeting migrants and ethnic minorities and in a few cases even involving violent actions against the left.

Oaklandsocialist
Would you envision a Reform UK forming a government on its own, or would it have to be a coalition?

Sacha Ismail
There are polls suggesting they could win a majority alone, but I think in all probability it would be a coalition with the Conservative Party. Pretty much all the polls at the moment give them at least a large majority between them. Arguably such a coalition would be the worst of both worlds, in that you’d get the nationalist and authoritarian dynamic from Reform UK, and the more strongly neoliberal dynamic from the Conservatives. Though in fact both parties are nationalist, authoritarian and neoliberal. The Conservatives have drifted towards being more similar to Reform UK, at the same time in fact that the Labour leadership has also accommodated to them, for instance on asylum laws, foreign aid and trans rights.

Oaklandsocialist
So in the US, and I’m guessing over there too, there’s been a lot in the news about the so-called negotiations with Russia regarding Ukraine. There’s now more open tension between the position of Trump, the position of most European nations and that of Ukraine. Can you talk a little bit about how that enters into British politics?

Sacha Ismail
Apart from Reform UK, all the mainstream political parties here are or claim to be pro-Ukraine. So again, in terms of Reform representing something new, they do represent a break from the Conservatives say about Ukraine. The Conservatives were in power when the full-scale invasion began, and they did support Ukraine with military aid and so on. Now, with Reform, there is a clear pole in British politics that is opposed to support for Ukraine and sympathetic to Russia. I don’t know if you saw about the conviction of Nathan Gill, who was Reform UK’s leader in Wales?

Oaklandsocialist
Yeah, we saw that.

Sacha Ismail

l: Reform leader Nigel Farage; r: Reform leader in Wales, Nathan Gill. Gill was on the payroll of Russia.

He was convicted for taking bribes to speak in favour of Russia in the European Parliament, before we left the EU.  More broadly Reform UK is definitely a pro-Russian force. Beyond that there’s a woolly and not seriously debated consensus in favour of Ukraine. The Labour government makes a lot of noise about being pro-Ukraine, but they are actually very hesitant about action to really help Ukraine win. You have the debate in the EU about frozen Russian assets, but there are also £25 billion or so frozen here, and the government does nothing to touch them. Firstly because of their broader political approach, where they don’t want to seriously touch the interests of capitalists. Secondly because on Ukraine specifically they are locked into the same paradigm as the old Conservative government, and from what I can see also the Biden government, namely give Ukraine enough not to be over-run, but not what it needs to actually win.

There are even instances, to illustrate, where the UK government scraps old military equipment or sells it to arms dealers, when it could easily give it to Ukraine. And there is a problem with its wider approach.

Part of it is that the Starmer government is very, very reluctant to challenge Donald Trump in any way. On Ukraine, they have a different position from Trump, but they refuse to challenge the US, or even really admit there’s a difference. Meanwhile they accommodate elements of the Trumpist position. Individual Labour MPs, particularly on the left, do criticise the US and Trump, though the leadership has tried to exert pressure against that too. The most vocal political forces against Trump include the Labour left, the Greens but also in their own way the Liberal Democrat party, which is a socially progressive neoliberal party, something like the leadership of the Democrats. They have been very vocal against Trump, firstly I suppose because they’re not in government and so it’s easier, but also maybe because they have more solid liberal principles than Starmer and co. 

Oaklandsocialist
In the US, real estate development massively involves money laundering, including from Russian oligarchs, which as you know is a big part of Trump’s story before he got into politics or started running for office. That also involved laundering money for drug cartels. That came to my mind when you spoke about frozen Russian assets. As I understand it London is also a big centre for real-estate development, so would you say it is the same?

Sacha Ismail
I wouldn’t claim to know much about the real estate industry; but for sure in London it is connected to various kinds of foreign influence. One aspect is that before the full-scale invasion London was – and to some extent it still is – a paradise for Russian money.

Oaklandsocialist
Tell us about the Ukraine solidarity work you are involved in.

Sacha Ismail
I’m on the committee of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, which is a trade union, labour movement and more broadly left solidarity campaign. I’m now the co-Trade Union Liaison Officer; we had our Annual General Meeting a few weeks ago, and I was re-elected alongside a comrade called Bev Laidlaw, who is a prominent activist in our civil service union, PCS. 

Ukraine Solidarity Campaign in action

The campaign wasn’t set up in 2022 or 2021, but much earlier, long before I got seriously involved. It was set up in 2014, at the time of initial Russian intervention in Crimea and Donbas, to counter Russian and pro-Russian disinfo and influence in the UK labour movement, which was extremely strong at that time; and organise links and solidarity between trade unionists here and in Ukraine. The campaign had strong union connections from the start, including affiliation from two national unions, the train drivers’ in ASLEF, and the NUM, which is our old mining union. The NUM has only a very small working membership now, but it maintains an organisation and has a great tradition and symbolic importance. 

From the time of the full-scale invasion, USC really expanded its activity; we began to organise in a much wider range of unions, and now we’ve won affiliations from five more national unions, alongside union branches and other organisations across the country. We’ve also helped set and develop up solidarity networks in various unions. We’ve organised a lot of practical aid in terms of money and equipment for Ukrainian labour movement causes, whether trade unionists now at the front or workers behind the lines. We’ve organised a whole series of delegations, taking trade unionists and others over to meet comrades in Ukraine. We’ve also made links with people in Ukrainian communities in the UK, which is possible particularly because there’s now a younger Ukrainian activist scene that is broadly progressive, that is frustrated with older, more conservative community organising, and as a result open to working with socialists and trade unionists. Those connections have allowed us to organise quite a number of significant demonstrations and protests in the last year or so, much more than previously.

We organise in the Labour Party and the Green Party. Even now, many of our most active supporters are on the left wing of the Labour Party, and certainly our most active supporters in Parliament. You have probably heard of John McDonnell, who was central to the Labour leadership under Corbyn; he is a founding member and still very active supporter of USC. There are also other newer, younger left-wing MPs involved. We work with them with a broader range of Labour MPs, party activists and trade unionists to exert pressure on the Labour government for changes to the approach I criticised earlier.

We also now work with a very active network in the Green Party, seeking to firm up and amplify the party’s support for Ukraine, and connect it to support for workers’ and social movements in Ukraine. I think the degree to which this succeed will be very important for broader debates on the left about Ukraine.

In addition to the affiliated unions and organisations, we have over 300 individual members, almost doubling in the last year. We have a fairly well organised committee structure, with representatives elected at our AGM and from the national affiliates.

I don’t want to over-inflate what we’ve achieved, but I do think we’ve had some significant impact in terms of attitudes to Ukraine and the degree of solidarity organising in the UK labour movement.

Oaklandsocialist
My guess is that the great majority of people involved with USC do it out of a desire to show solidarity with workers and people in general in Ukraine. That is a left value, so to speak, but we know, a lot of the left does not adhere to that value. What is the experience of your campaign in terms of this? How do you try to make connections with others, groups and individuals, to try to meet in a serious, concrete way, that value of international working-class solidarity, around Ukraine, around Palestine, or wherever, beyond the UK itself?

Sacha Ismail
So I think there’s a wider question about the political health and future of the left, and then within that a second angle specifically about our international links? On the first I think most people involved in USC would, in one way or another, see this as about not only practical solidarity with Ukraine and Ukrainian workers – although that’s central, immediately – but part of the context of working-class solidarity more broadly. And also as part of a fight around the political health of the left, about whether it tries to consistently meet the demands of solidarity. 

We have not been shy of arguing that Ukraine is not just a single issue, that it connects to many other issues in the world, and that moreover it has become a kind of touchstone for wider left-wing arguments and political analysis and understanding. I think that if we compare USC to the Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign that you were involved in, we do have a more practical focus, in terms of both aid work and organising to win arguments in labour movement organisations. But at the same time we use that work and that organising to also make wider arguments about working-class solidarity and about the kind of labour movement and left we need.

The political problems in wide sections of the left aren’t limited to Ukraine. You’ve written about Syria. One could also cite the democracy struggle in Hong Kong, and workers’ struggles across China; or many other examples. We’ve made connections with campaigns around those kind of struggles in the UK and beyond. For instance we spoke at the demonstration of Syrians in London shortly after Assad was overthrown. We have not shied away from the point that you can’t wall off the issues of Ukraine and Palestine – you can’t oppose oppression and imperial violence in once case but ignore it in the other. Developing that argument is very important, because on a practical level, the fight against slaughter in Ukraine and slaughter in Gaza are crucial fronts in the fight against authoritarianism. But also because explaining how they relate, rejecting campist views of Palestine and Ukraine, is politically important for the left’s current and future health.

Oaklandsocialist
But then how do you see the role of your campaign in this? To what extent do you reach outside the UK, in the first instance to others who are doing similar work around Ukraine?

Sacha Ismail

European Network in Solidarity with Ukraine

We’re a pretty central part of the European Network in Solidarity with Ukraine, working very closely with groups around Europe. We meet together weekly, organise common initiatives, coordinate demonstrations and so on. In March we held an international conference in Brussels. Through them and on our own account we have some connections in other places. For instance, we’ve worked quite a bit with a comrade of yours in the US, Tanya Vyhovsky in Vermont. The main focus of USC’s international links is in Europe, I suppose because it’s close to home, close to Ukraine and it’s where there’s the greatest concentration of left and labour movement people working on Ukraine solidarity. But we’re certainly keen to expand connections anywhere.

Oaklandsocialist
To finish, is there anything you’d like to add about the general political situation in Britain, or anything else more broadly?

Sacha Ismail
The situation in the UK is that the two previously dominant parties, Labour and the Conservatives, are very thoroughly discredited, and in many ways Labour even more, because it has so thoroughly failed to stand up for workers, while aping the right and alienating so many on the broad left. There is a lot of left-wing opinion in the UK, but it’s quite demoralised and dispersed. We have the rise of new left-wing forces with the surge in the Green Party and with Your Party, but how they relate to working-class socialist politics is not straightforward. And what to do about this is not straightforward, but I do think two things we have already touched on are important.

Firstly, the question about renovating the unions and workers’ organisation. And secondly, the question about the health of the left and renovating it politically. Those are not totally separate questions. The broad picture is that our labour movement in the UK is pretty quiescent. A few years ago we had that sizeable strike wave. Yes, it was defensive, in response to inflation, but nonetheless it was a very significant experience for large numbers of workers, not even just those who went on strike. But rather than building on it our trade unions, our union leaders particularly, once inflation had subsided and particularly once we had a Labour government, allowed things to go quiet. This or that exception aside, they did not build on the strikes to launch new struggles or expand organising. There are important rank-and-file struggles and initiatives scattered across our labour movement, but their strength and their impact on workers’ consciousness is not currently near enough to change where we’re going. We need to build on every front.

Sometimes, in the immediate, it can feel like there’s a contradiction between developing the class-struggle left and pursuing the arguments about issues such as Ukraine, because they divide the left and cut across working together. But the reality is that the left is already divided, and it will not become a force to be reckoned with unless we start to seriously address these divisions and specifically the mistaken perspectives broad swathes of the left have adopted. We need to pursue these arguments, particularly about international solidarity, and stronger international links of course help with that.

Oaklandsocialist
Additional question (January 8, 2026): We asked Sacha about how Trump’s threats to Greenland have been taken in the UK.

Sacha Ismail
I think the various wings of the UK “political class” have been unsure how to respond. The new ramping up of the Greenland issue came after Starmer effectively backed Trump over Venezuela. Labour spokespeople were clearly reluctant to criticise Trump even over Greenland; a junior minister went on TV and when asked refused to do so. There was quite a bit of outrage, and after that Starmer did make a statement saying Greenland’s future was a matter for Greenland and Denmark, and them alone, and then signed a similar statement with European leaders. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said quietly that she agreed with this stance, while vehemently backing Trump over Venezuela. Nigel Farage said that “of course” he agreed with them, then immediately pivoting to argue that Trump’s arguments about Greenland are essentially right.

It seems likely that, even if the US does use force to seize Greenland, the dominant forces in UK politics will do little to try to stop it, or even protest. The danger is that swathes of the left may also be indifferent, because Trump’s target being linked to a European state that is traditionally pro-US.

Sacha Ismail