On December 12, 2019, voters in the United Kingdom will go to the polls in what promises to be an era-defining election. The incumbent Tory government, led by Boris Johnson, has been an unmitigated fiasco, bungling Brexit while neglecting institutions and communities in desperate need of investment and support. In this regard, Johnson has merely perpetuated the devastating neoliberal politics of neglect promoted by the May and Cameron governments. The United Kingdom needs a real alternative, and for the first time in decades, it has one in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. DSA wholeheartedly endorses the Labour Party in the upcoming election and expresses its solidarity with the millions of people in the United Kingdom who have been forgotten, marginalized, stigmatized, and scapegoated by Conservative and New Labour governments. We stand with you.

DSA’s decision to endorse the Labour Party at this juncture is a response to two critical changes in the party. The first pertains to its leadership. Buoyed by an energized base, party leader Jeremy Corbyn and figures like Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott have successfully promoted an ideological and strategic reorientation of the party. Theirs is a politics “for the many, not the few” that promises to shore up critical institutions, such as the National Health Service (NHS), while building a Britain ready to meet the unique economic, political, and environmental challenges of the 21st century.

The second significant change within the Labour Party is expressed in its latest platform. From pledging significant spending increases for the NHS, abolishing tuition fees, and introducing a £10 per hour minimum wage to auditing the colonial period, decarbonizing the economy with a Green New Deal and nationalizing the railways, postal service, energy and water utilities, and broadband infrastructure, Labour has developed a policy portfolio that ranks among the world’s most radical, forward-thinking, and just. It would not only break with the politics of the recent past but inaugurate an altogether new era in the history of the United Kingdom.

Across the world, socialists are engaged in a titanic struggle for the future of democracy and economic, climate, and racial justice. This struggle is not unfolding exclusively within the electoral institutions of parliamentary democracies. Still, democratic politics remain a critical realm for translating the demands of working people into radical action. The upcoming British election is unique in both its stakes and possibilities. DSA thus joins with the Labour Party and calls upon British voters to abandon the broken politics of the Conservatives to embrace a new, inclusive vision of the future.