No website, nor any name yet. Indeed, the LabourList article says they're not interested in splitting from the SCG, but instead it's an effort at pooling resources and pushing their particular kind of politics. Their leaked strategy document says it aims to provide "intellectual leadership" for the new left, and get slick with the social media game. This attracted some hostile commentary from an existing SCG MP, saying they should bugger off and split if that's what they want to do. Before rowing back and stressing the importance of sticking together to get Jeremy Corbyn the whip back. What's the game then, People's Front of Judea hi-jinks or something more?
The latter, in my view. One of the frustrating things about the left in the Labour Party is its disorganisation and lack of coherence. All that unites us is what we're against: awful Tory policies, their adoption by the party, and the petty tyrannies of the Labour right. Apart from that, what is there? Consider the infrastructure. The left is bigger now than before 2015, but the old faults are replicated at a larger scale too. Momentum does its thing of mobilising people and having policy primaries, but is not known for articulating an analysis and an intellectual project. Time serving organisations like the Campaign for Labour Democracy is barely perceptible among members except when it sponsors fait accompli slates for internal elections. The newly rejuvenated Tribune, as good as it is, stands a step removed from Labour Party shenanigans. And there is the SCG themselves. While most of its MPs are fine, from the standpoint of the ordinary member trying to build the party and the labour movement, it is less than the sum of its parts. Newer comrades like Zarah Sultana and Richard Burgon make the right interventions in the Commons, turn up at demonstrations, encourage extra parliamentary mobilisation, but like the older generation they do not try and provide political leadership. They do their own thing, campaign, and occasionally backed by warm words from the more radical trade unions.
Contrast this with the Labour right. Progress, when it was a thing, used its finances to coach candidates, publish its own literature, and influence party debate with its regular publication and conferences. This was the shiny front that complemented the dirty business of working selections, competing/cooperating with Labour First over shenanigans, networking, and all the other things. And while now living in reduced circumstances, it offers an intellectual outlet for those on the Labour right who fancy themselves brainy revisionists but see the Fabians as too left wing. And from their point of view, their factionalising works well. If the Corbyn interlude taught us anything, all sections of the spectrum of right wing opinion are more serious than the left about taking power and holding it within the party.
Hence this initiative from some of the left MPs should be welcomed. It puts our representatives on the spot when it comes to pushing ideas, building capacity in the party, and doing the job of cohering the left - the job that, let's be frank, the SCG should have done from the beginning. If the left are going to advance in the party it needs a strategy and some coordination between parliamentarians, activists, and trade unionists while articulating its own standpoint. A Democratic Socialists of America if you like, but here in this plague-blasted isle. Whether the new group reaches out to the wider left or not, winning ground back definitely won't happen for as long as we amateurishly chug along, fighting the good fight but never fighting to win.
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7 comments:
What? No mention of proportional representation?
This is the story behind a relatively small SOCIALIST party, the Left Alliance, becoming a partner in the coalition government now running Finland. They got 8% of votes. That meant 8% of seats. Simply could NOT happen under our archaic voting system.
GET PR DONE!
https://getprdone.org.uk/how-the-left-gains-by-pr-the-finnish-example/
Progress, when it was a thing, used its finances to coach candidates, publish its own literature, and influence party debate
There's a clue there. We've got no equivalent to David Sainsbury et al - which, among other things, is why we periodically hear stories about Left organisations suddenly being buoyed up by bequests from eccentric relatives, Old Masters found in the loft etc: that's the only way anyone on the Left is going to have access to big money. The Momentum answer is to substitute people for money through mobilisation and more mobilisation; it's not a great answer (particularly in times like this) but it may be the best answer we've got.
all sections of the spectrum of right wing opinion are more serious than the left about taking power and holding it within the party.
I'd put that point less critically but more pessimistically. For any given position of power, from a local branch's officers up to Southside, the chances are that some part of the spectrum of RW opinion has that power - and yes, you can be damn sure they're serious about holding it. But holding is orders of magnitude easier than gaining. It's not remotely an equal contest.
"If the left are going to advance in the party it needs a strategy and some coordination between parliamentarians, activists, and trade unionists while articulating its own standpoint"
This proves to me that you are either in complete denial about the nature of the party that you support or you are simply indulging in faux leftism in order to justify Yvette Cooperism. I suspect it is the latter, I have you pinned down as a woke hysteric who wants at least one of the Tory parties to peddle your demented ideology.
But I would not worry, every single party peddles woke to one extent or another , and every single major corporation not only endorses woke but indulges in woke hysteria. You only have to open your eyes to see it everywhere. It is more pervasive than child poverty.
So all bases are covered, you can stop pretending that the Labour party is a vehicle for leftism, and can stop your silly thought experiments as to how that can come about!
«I have you pinned down as a woke hysteric»
Sometimes I find our blogger's notes a bit too reflective of "liberal righthink" and attention to "Westminster bubble" gossip, but let's not forget that he is a "very public sociologist" working at an university as an academic. He cannot, even if he wanted to, move outside the "guardrails" of polite discourse too much. Consider the fate of some "f*cking racist and antisemite" who tried to do the mildest form of class interest politics.
I charitably suppose that it could just possibly be as Phil hopes with this new small subset of the slightly larger utterly useless PLP Socialist Campaign Group, ie, that they are genuine committed socialists who want to simply organise efficiently and campaign more - whilst being ever so loyal to the utterly disingenuous producer of those Leadership contest signed 'Ten Pledges' (to continue with the ten key Corbyn era Left policies) , the Trilateral Commission's man, Starmer.
But a much more likely reality ( given that we already should know what poseurs and chancers the individuals in this new grouping are) is that this tiny subset of the only slightly larger SCG are actually a bunch of cynical younger faux Leftist careerists , with potentially 30 years more of comfortable Parliamentary careers stretching out ahead, looking desperately to avoid the quite likely clean out of the majority of the Socialist Campaign Group old stagers on the usual trumped-up charges before the next Election. By being TOTALLY loyal to the Starmerite NuLabour Mk 2 regime, and offering merely a 'Potemtkin Village' stage scenery PLP 'Left' - to fool the gullible young socialists outside the Party that Labour still has its Left Wing side. An important con trick, to retain and secure those vital local tireless Left activists, and get them wasting yet more of their time canvassing locally for the Right Wing corrupt careerist Labour MPs who are going to be their local MP or prospective MP in the next election.
Not that the posturing old stagers like Lavery, McDonnell, Abbott, Corbyn, etc, were ever any great shakes when it came to any decisive action, beyond verbiage, to progress the socialist cause in the Labour Party - by actually ORGANISING to stand up to the deeply corrupt Labour Right, particularly in their supine non pushback to the constant sabotage by the Right of the 2015 TO 2018 'Corbyn era'.
The Labour Party is nowadays a tragic zombie Party, still going through the mechanical motions of life, but really entirely operated by the internal writhing mass of maggots of the Right, who give the surface appearance of an actual breathing movement, but in reality Labour has reached, and is now past , its fatal, terminal 'PASOK moment' , and will never be in office again. As with the French Socialist Party a few years ago, it will soon have to sell off its property assets to stave off bankruptcy, because membership and union fees will continue to fall, and Mandelson's promised returning billionaire Blair era big funders ain't going to turn up .
"Mandelson's promised returning billionaire Blair era big funders ain't going to turn up"
Odds are that they are going to turn up because it is in their interest to have a "continuity thatcherism" alternative to the Conservatives, and the LibDems cannot be that party, because it is New Labour that owns the "Labour" logo that gets reflexively ticked by 25% of the voters.
They haven't turned up yet to pretend that New Labour is poor so it can get rid of "undesirable" staffers by way of redundancy.
Also New Labour's finances are much better than they appear because they were hit by the huge reward payments to the staffers (and their lawyers) who worked to defeat Labour, and that's (hopefully) a once-only loss.
« The newly rejuvenated Tribune, [...] Richard Burgon make the right interventions in the Commons, turn up at demonstrations, encourage extra parliamentary mobilisation»
Burgon was one of the very few to mention publicly "zero COVID" publicly, on "Tribune":
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/01/the-vaccine-is-not-enough-we-need-a-zero-covid-strategy/
«Contrast this with the Labour right. Progress, when it was a thing, used its finances to coach candidates, publish its own literature, and influence party debate with its regular publication and conferences. This was the shiny front that complemented the dirty business»
The Militant Mandelsoncy and assorted are often well trained, well funded, and can rely on expensive consultants or on help from "volunteers" from their "sponsors", just like the Conservatives and to a lesser extent the LibDems. The most the "trots" can rely upon is some help from some labor unions and some much poorer think tanks.
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