“I still support the idea of revolutionary change”

What Steven asked Chas Berry, socialist and coordinator for Your Party Medway

Chas Berry has been involved in working-class struggles since the 1980s. Formerly a member of Militant tendency. He stood in the 2015 local elections as a candidate for TUSC, and is now a coordinator for Your Party Medway. Steven met him at The Royal Crown in Rochester where they discussed whether people should support Your Party, why he left Labour, why he hadn’t considered joining the Greens, and lots more.

Chas Berry

Is Chas short for something?
Short for Charlie, which is my middle name. My full name is Timothy Charles. Some people still call me Tim. But generally, I’m known as Chas, and it’s stuck.

Is that a school thing or a work thing?
It was a school thing. I tried to get rid of it briefly in my early 20s, and then when I met Sue, my wife, and she was introduced to all my school friends and my political friends, they said it’s Chas. That’s it, I’m stuck with it.

Why is Your Party a serious proposition? Why should people join?
Well, I suppose it is because there’s a fracturing of politics across the globe. The reason that we’ve got the rise of the populist right and the rise of groups like the Greens, and you’ve got other formations like in Germany, you’ve got a group around the left in France as well. It’s because fundamentally, the system is in crisis. Economically, certainly since 2008, but it’s been going on a lot longer since then. There’s been this polarisation. It’s put pressure on the ruling parties, and the neoliberal model of globalisation is not working. Fewer people believe in it. Fewer people at the top believe in it, really. It’s probably only Labour and the Lib Dems who still believe in it in this country. What’s happened is that there’s become a fracturing and a polarisation, and that whole process hasn’t worked its way out. You’re getting a lot of people who are turning up at rallies in London, rallying around the flag, saying they support Tommy Robinson, what have you. But actually, when it comes down to the social issues, many of those people will probably be more likely to be on the left. I think there is space to the left of Labour for a proper articulation of a full-blooded socialist programme that is anti-war, anti-imperialist and fully in favour of public services. Not just taxing the wealthy, as Polanski says, but actually expropriating, commanding heights of the economy and running them in the interests of ordinary people, that’s what a socialist program is. There is space for that in a way that there hasn’t been probably, since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

If someone’s reading this and they’re interested in finding out more or joining Your Party, what do they need to do?
Well, at the moment, there’s a national sign-up. You can go online to Your Party, and you can sign up online. If you want to find out what’s going on locally, then we have an email account, and we are in the process of setting up social media accounts. We have a Facebook account, we will have an Instagram account. But at the moment, we don’t know what the branch structure is. What has been called the proto-branch, we are a group of people living in and around the Medway Towns who have joined Your Party and want to make it work. There’s lots of confusion about what the priorities are, we can’t really decide any of that until there’s a proper structure, but what we can do is try to work collaboratively. By convening the meeting in September, by setting up an interim committee, it’s drawing people together who are going to work constructively together.

Let’s talk about a couple of those issues because they were nationally discussed. Zarah Sultana described it as being cut out by an old boy’s club. Is that the case?
Right. It’s... (pause) If you focus on trying to get people together at the top, you’ll never achieve it. You have to build it from the bottom up. The only way you can build it from the bottom up is through struggle. My feeling is that if we can get a group in the Medway Towns that is focused on the issues that really matter to the people in Medway Towns, for example, cuts to the youth service, the abominable state of public transport, the housing situation, you can unite people around collective struggles to win reform. That’s what brings people together.
You can talk till the cows come home about the position on Gaza, or the position on trans rights, or where you stand on war in Ukraine. It’s very difficult to get unity on the basis of ideas. You have to get unity on the basis of struggle.

What is your response to the often-used viewpoint that any votes for a left party basically take votes away from Labour, which will then increase the chance of a win for Reform?
I think that if Labour was standing for something fundamentally different, then there would be an argument, but they’re not. Labour is continuation of austerity really, a continuation of the rule of capital and of big business. I don’t sign up to this idea of lesser evilism. It was the argument used with the Democrats as the only way you can stop Trump is coming behind the Democrats. We didn’t stop Trump for a start, in fact, all it did is demoralise a section of the left and has put back the struggle for an independent party of working class in the US, which is what is needed. There’s a reason why Labour was created as a working-class party with a basis on the unions in the first place, and that was because throughout the 19th century, people only had a choice between the Tories and the Liberals.
Independent workers started to stand as candidates, Keir Hardie being one of them, but ultimately, they drew the conclusion that they weren’t going to get proper representation, independent representation as working class, until they formed their own party. That party has effectively now been taken over by big business. Although the unions are still nominally part of it, the trade union leaders, most of them, go along pretty much meekly with what the Labour leadership wants.

Will Your Party, or whatever it’s called by that time, be ready for the 2027 elections?
In Medway? Yeah. In local elections next year, yes. Nationally, I’ve got no idea. It’s not looking great at the moment. We’ve got a national conference organised at the end of November. There’s supposed to be regional assemblies before then. There’s no branch structure. It’s very difficult for me to say what is the mechanism by which a programme can be agreed. That candidates can’t be selected when we haven’t even got past the first hurdle yet. They may well do it, but at the moment, I can’t see it.

Do you have any public-facing Your Party events coming up in the Medway towns?
We’re organising a rally on the 15th of November at the Sunlight Centre in Gillingham. That’s going to be our first public rally, and it’s going to be on the theme of ‘Tax the Rich.’ We’re working out the programme of that. It’s unlikely that we’ll get a big name speaker like Corbyn or Sultana who will come down. It’s going to be very much down to us to try and build for that. We think the timing of that is going to be good, because it’s going to be just before Reeves’ autumn statement, and more attacks upon working people, and particularly on benefits as well. It’s just ahead of the national conference.

When Zack (Polanski, new leader of the Green Party) announced, people asked him why, when surely he should join Your Party. Now that there has been such a protracted start, people are asking what the need is for Your Party.
The announcement of Your Party has been a mess. It’s very disappointing, but I think I’m realistic. You’ve got a lot of angry, disenfranchised people, and you’ve got people who have not got a political home in parliament. You have to somehow try to coalesce around a leadership and a programme, and that’s not easy, because you’re dealing with power and egos. I am an optimist.