Earlier in the year, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) launched this project of drawing all the forces that joined the anti-war movement into an electoral challenge to Labour. The first attempt failed when an approach to the Communist Party of Britain was rebuffed in the Morning Star. Attempts to draw in leading figures from the Mosques likewise ended in failure. Now meetings and rallies are being held up and down the country under such titles as "British politics at a crossroads" and "A new programme for Britain".

It is certainly the case that tens of thousands of workers and anti-war campaigners want a real alternative to New Labour. They want to see Blair and his pro-business policies defeated at the polls. Combine the young anti-war activists, the trade unionists who have made a stand against privatisation and union busting, with the campaigners to defend council housing or local hospitals from the privateers - and you have the basis of a formidable movement.

The key question is what sort of movement and what sort of party is needed to challenge Labour? The SWP, and its supporters in the Socialist Alliance like Socialist Resistance, recognise that you cannot unite the whole of the anti-war movement around a radical socialist alternative. Their answer? Dump the socialism and go for a broad, "populist" or radical alliance.

Here is where George Monbiot, a liberal anti-globalisation writer and Guardian columnist, and Salma Yaqoob, a Birmingham-based Muslim anti-war activist, come in. They have issued a manifesto, called Principles of Unity, "which promotes social justice, harmony with the environment and peace in the world". This document runs to over 2,500 words without mentioning the words 'socialism' or 'class' once (see box). They have published it on various e-lists and invited the Socialist Alliance, among others, to discuss it.

Peace, justice and harmony - these are just the sort of vague values, in place of clear class-based policies, that would suit the projected movement perfectly. As John Rees of the SWP has said, the Monbiot/Yaqoob document is "part of the process".

It is certainly a deeply undemocratic process - with decisions being made behind closed doors by the "leading figures" and then presented at meetings. For example, at the October London rally where Galloway, Yaqoob, Rees and Bob Crow, the railworkers' leader, spoke, it was announced that the new movement - which Galloway called "popular unity" - would be contesting the Euro and London elections but supporting Ken Livingstone. Who decided this - no one knows.

Salma Yaqoob herself has called for a convention to decide the basis of the electoral coalition. There are two problems. Firstly, the experience of the last few months leads us to suspect that anything involving the SWP and George Galloway will be a staged-managed affair in which any convention is presented with a fait accompli - probably a very basic document which is against privatisation and war but is not specifically socialist. Secondly, Salma Yaqoob talks of the "majority" and "people" rather than the working class as the basis of the campaign. She told the Birmingham rally, where her manifesto was launched, that she wants to "get past labels", which is another way of saying we must appear as all things to all people.

This leaves the way open for another cross-class bloc in which working-class demands and interests would be sacrificed in order to keep other supporters on board - for instance, as in the Yaqoob-Monbiot document, restricting the platform to opposing further privatisations rather than taking services back into public hands.

Hundreds of thousands of workers, from the railways to the hospitals, continue to suffer from New Labour's privatisations and anti-union laws. They want their unions to stop funding Labour and seek an alternative political voice for the working class. While most union leaders and Labour MPs have sought to steer this discontent into the dead-end of a "Reclaim Labour" campaign, Galloway and Crow's answer to the capitalist leadership of the Labour Party is to ditch the idea of a working class party completely!

A loose, populist alliance, where the working class is just another "interest group" and the leaders cannot be held to account by base organisations of the movement, suits these left reformists down to the ground. It is the kind of arrangement that has held the working class back from winning the battle for democracy in countries as different as the USA and Argentina. It would be criminal if the SWP and Socialist Resistance allowed the left leaders to lead the most militant section of workers into ditching 100 years of class independence and returning to the days of alliances with the liberal capitalists.

Workers Power says socialists should clearly oppose the whole project of building a populist bloc. This does not mean socialists have to be relegated to "sectarian carping" (which is undoubtedly what defenders of the project will say). We argue not only for a new workers' party won to a revolutionary socialist programme, but also for broad social forums as part of the anti-capitalist movement, where campaigners and workers' organisations can come together to fight against privatisation, for jobs, against war and so forth; and we have demonstrated in practice our willingness to work with others to build these forums.

Nor does it mean ignoring the upcoming elections which do indeed present a great opportunity to challenge the Blair government. There is surely an opportunity to convene genuine workers' conventions at a local and national level to debate the way forward, to decide whether and who to stand, to ensure candidates are accountable to working-class organisations and to debate the programme of a new workers' party. These conventions could encompass dissident Labour voices as well as anti-war groups, trade unions and working class political organisations.

We will continue to argue for a genuine, democratically-run debate on how to build a new working class party, how best to challenge Blair at the polls and how to win the anti-Blair forces to a genuine socialist platform.

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