Meet the New Left Challengers ...

... Same as the Old Left Challengers? It was inevitable some of the left were going to decamp from the Labour Party with Keir Starmer's election as leader. But to do what? That was always the interesting question, and now it has a clear answer. Since Corbynism's defeat and the tightening of thumb screws on the left who've remained, several new left parties have come into existence. The best known and attracting the lion's share of media interest is the Northern Independence Party, but it is far from alone. The Breakthrough Party, self-identifying as a youth-led democratic socialist party, stood its first candidate in the Chesham and Amersham by-election. Joining it one would find the Harmony Party, the BLM-linked Take the Initiative Party, and Chris Williamson's Resistance Movement, which happened to hold a festival in Nottingham this Saturday.

Political science ain't rocket science, and you don't need to hold a professorial chair in politics to understand why this is happening. Frustrated hopes, defeat, and the double whammy of an incompetent, right wing Labour leadership with the hapless politics to match call political consequences into being. The main question is whether there's a space for these new parties to make a go of it?

This was the subject of a joint public meeting hosted by NIP, BTP, and our old friends Left Unity. The subject? What the parties are about and what they're going to do. Chaired by Thelma Walker who stood for NIP in Hartlepool, she rightly identified there's a political vaccuum existing on the left, but how's it going to be filled?

The first contribution was from Joe Skeaping of BTP. He argued politics was geared toward older people, and therefore the new party wanted to address youngsters as they're at the sharp end of multiple crises - rents, lack of propery, precarious work, large debts, problems with the police, and the looming spectre of climate disaster. Despite billing itself "youth-led", BTP is not an exclusivist organisation and membership is open to all ages. The new party is a work-on-progress as it builds its policy platform, but already it claims "hundreds of members" and "thousands of supporters". Its immediate focus is on video content to articulate the urgency of the moment and get the party's name out there, but it is more than a Twitter pop-up. It attends demos as a party, has its first elected representative (Samantha Cooper, a town councillor in Bradford) and contested Chesham and Amersham from a standing start. Joe said the party hopes to deepen its electoral work by building support in targeted constituencies, and is planning on having a BTP presence at COP26. In a welcome break from the usual sectarianism, Joe said the party's core focus wasn't just on building Breakthrough but the wider movement too.

Speaking for Left Unity, Kate Hudson said LU was founded in 2013 because Labour had moved too far to the right. In office it embraced neoliberalism, failed to restore trade union rights and renationalise what the Tories sold off to their cronies. LU also saw itself as an expicitly internationalist party and aligned itself with the European radical left, like Greece's Syriza and Podemos in Spain. Before 2015 the party only took modest steps forward, but Corbynism saw most of its membership move into the Labour Party. LU persisted because even if the Corbynist revolution in Labour had become permanent (if only), there would still be need for a radical left party. This is because different perspectives on the left should be valued and Labour's history and policies are problematic. For example, the party of the NHS and the welfare state was, at the same time, the party of the atom bomb, NATO, and the Partition of India. Anti-imperialism needs political expression too. Therefore, it's time to stop hoping Labour will be a useful vehicle and the left should be building something new - though the left outside should be open to cooperation with left the in Labour while remembering we're all on the same side.

The founder of NIP, Philip Proudfoot, went next. He asked what was the future of the left? For starters, it had to ask constitutional questions and offer a vision beyond the UK itself. He roboustly defended why NIP are a separatist party, saying this was because the UK isn't a normal country: it's over-centralised with the sorts of unevenness and inequality one would expect from a state recovering from civil conflict. London parliamentary parties are the root of these disparaties, and so the left needs to take up these centre/periphery grievances lest centrists like Andy Burnham does, who'll only use it to ride to power without substantially addressing the problems. Likewise, there are regional disparities between the working class in different corners of these isands, and therefore requires different political responses. Touching on what has been built so far, Philip said the party has thousands of members all across northern England, is currently establishing branch structures, has (finally) properly registered with the Electoral Commission and is and ready to contest elections.

Coming in at the end, Thelma Walker talked about what the next steps are going to be. She identified an opportunity with existing non-voters, noting the low turnouts at the last three parliamentary by-elections. Many of them don't vote out of apathy, rather its a political passivity born of anger and frustration. What then are they going to do about it? The parties have to engage with those who believe no one's sticking up for them, offer policies that improve their lives, and work to turn them out at election time. The second opportunity is the break up of Britain. The SNP and Green pact in Scotland and could see it replicated across the country as they make a success of devolved administration, while Boris Johnson works at stalling a referendum and Labour cling to the union to preserve its junior position in the Westminster duopoly. When Scotland breaks free, Wales and Northern Ireland will too and this opens opportunities for NIP. But in the immediate term those outside of Labour have to organise and build an alliance on the left. Therefore, it's not just BTP targeting constituencies but all three parties are with an informal agreement to support each other, and avoid clashes.

This place is an old hand when it comes to commenting on the far left, so does this new alliance of new parties stand a chance under First Past the Post? Unike the delusional nonsense and official optimism from the established far left, at the very least none of these parties are pretending the mountains they face are gentle gradients. Philip is fond of using the example of UKIP who were able to sucessfully menace the Tories to achieve its policy objective, despite doing consistently poorly at general election time (at least in seat terms). He said they were able to leverage by-elections and turn them into publicity victories, something the new parties could do too. I'm a bit more sceptical. It wasn't mid-term Westminster contests that powered UKIP, but rather the five yearly cycle of EU elections. Fought on the basis of PR, they pulled in the anti-political establishment protest vote as well as right wing discontent. They ensured its leading figures a platform, Nigel Farage particularly, and gave them an institutional base and resource from which to strike. Additionally, they had sympathetic media on their side. The Daily Express in particular, now the most slavish of Johnson supporting titles, happily amplified UKIP's messaging and therefore ensured they were a constituency of opinion broadcast journalism had to take seriously. For obvious reasons, this is not open to any of our three new parties and so they've got to find their own way to impinge on mainstream politics. Hence where a strong record of activism outside of elections would come in handy, and why they're prioritising them.

As I've argued previously, it's not just that there's a "left space" going unfilled but thanks to Starmer's stupidity, his disassembling of the Corbynist voter coalition is seeing chunks of that support drift away. More might if these parties are able to make a splash. The rising working class are there, not going anywhere, and are only getting larger over time. But the question of treating with others who already inhabit the left-of-Labour space can't be ducked, either. In Batley and Spen, George Galloway performed very credibly, showing there is space for what we might very generously call left populism. But the issue is how does the three-party alliance deal with him, especially given his recent adventures in voting Tory, the crass pro-UK constitional politics, and the downright scabby positions his Workers Party of Britain fan club have on women's equality and LGBTQ issues? Likewise, the Socialist Party's Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition has contested elections for nearly 12 years without any success. If they want to maximise socialist votes, then an understanding should be sought from them.

However, the three-party alliance does have some advantages that TUSC lacks. In the first place, the SP has an antiquated conception of class, which has fed into a strategy that, at best, has seen them tread water for the last decade and left them unable to comprehend Corbynism and its eruption in the Labour Party. Second, the SP is utterly focused on building the SP. There are no other considerations, which has meant TUSC challenges are haphazard, sporadic, and amateurish. There is no consistency in working an area, and because it is less than the sum of its parts there's nothing to build even if TUSC worked a seat over time. NIP, BTP, and LU aren't beholden to this approach and therefore enter the fray without these impediments.

The best indicator of future behaviour is past behaviour, and leftwing splits from and alternatives to Labour have never fared well. It's taken 40 years for the Greens to start looking tricky in some circumstances. Can a renewed LU with NIP and BTP break with electoral history? The smart money would say no, but then again the smart people are set on driving Labour into the ground, taking the votes of millions for granted and others left up for grabs, so who can say? If the parties put their efforts into targeted localities, standing paper candidates far and wide, getting their banners seen on demonstrations, supporting high profile campaigns, and generating their own buzz via social media, there is an outside chance they could do better than any other left challenge of the last 20 years has managed to. But it is a hard road and the odds are stacked against them.