Goodbye Labour

Yay! Now you too in the UK can be just as without a political choice as we are in the U.S.

Do you have lesser evilists there? Should you expect a chorus of people telling you that you still have to vote Labor now?

Doesn’t this just continue the trajectory of New Labour?
Post-Thatcher Labour mirrors the post-Reagan Democrats.
What’s new (or at least newer), it seems to me, is that the illusion that the LibDems can serve as a real, left alternative has been utterly shattered (I know you never shared that illusion, Chris, but as a far outside observer, I at times did).

I would like to withdraw my congratulations, it was insensitive and doesn’t reflect what I feel. I am only in a trial separation, not yet a divorce, and I feel miserable enough. This isn’t any fun.

@rich that would be polly toynbee and most of the guardian op-ed page.

@chris: the leader of the Labour party abandoning its core principles in a vain attempt to curry favour with Paul Dacre et al? I’m shocked. Truly.

Blockquote fail. The second sentence should have been in the quotes too.

Being a former member of the SPD who left over the party’s refusal to give up on Schroederian third way bs even in opposition (although to be fair also over having lived in the US for a decade with no plan for return), it’s still the case that Labour is the (electoral) party that is carried by the organized working class. (In contrast to the US Democrats who never were and aren’t a working class party.) Much as I wouldn’t be a member of a reformist party any longer, I think fighting for Labour is still of importance to the working class movement in the UK.

…. and I say this as a revolutionary socialist (IS/SWP supporter) myself. Yes. Of course it would be preferable if large sections of the working class dumped Labour and founded a new, more radical workers party (or radicalized even more and joined one of the existing small revolutionary ones). But this does not seem to be on the horizon. It matters then that Labour is still, fundamentally, a working class party with bourgeois politics, not a bourgeois party.

To give a historical analogy, the betrayals of New Labour pale in comparison to those of the SPD between 1914 and 1933. So far New Labour has not ordered the Frei Korps in to put down a workers’ revolt. And yet it was a tragedy that German communists let the Comintern steer them into writing the SPD off as just another bourgeois (“social fascist”) party.

On the other hand, those public sector workers getting paid less won’t have to pay as much for parking and their Ryanair flights to the Canaries.

christian_h, they haven’t had the opportunity to provide that level of betrayal.

You don’t think, seriously speaking, the UK kind of has a massive deficit problem?

Certainly not in the immediate term, during an economic slump. And “bravely” staking out deficit concerns right now only further reinforces the justification for (selective) austerity now and forever. Much better to focus on opposing the Tories, Orange Book or otherwise, as they attempt to dismantle social democracy entirely. Eddy Baby could always reluctantly pivot to making working-class people’s lives somewhat worse once the economy was “out of the woods,” and then fill some more of the revenue gap by hooking up an alternator to Ralph Miliband’s corpse. With Labour not even in power, all that spinning only goes to waste.

This too must be the Germans’ fault. Because of their selfish under-consumption. I bet somehow Britain is being sacrificed on their altar too.

As a yank, I am wondering; what method do you guys over in the Westminster democracies use to chose your party leaders, anyhow?

Here in the States, as I’m sure your aware, our standard-bearers have to negotiate an actual, you know, primary election, during which they stand before the members of their own party and have to win the votes of the rank and file. But I confess to having no bloody clue how you guys do it, only that it must be far more top-down and inside-baseball than our way is; Michael Ignatieff leaps to mind as a man who would never have become the standard-bearer of the Liberal Party of Canada if he’d actually had to be voted on by the party rank-and-file.

I also understand you have higher barriers to entry when it comes to becoming an actual card-carrying member of a political party. I had to tick a box on a form to become a Democrat; that was basically it.

Given the whole UK policy seems based on The City feeling well (and, relatedly, moaning about Europe), there is always a chance a couple of City people decide their appearances are better saved when the leadership goes to the other party for a while.

In an electoral system like that of the UK it should be quite inexpensive to influence the results, it is indeed not like anybody will be able to challenge the duopoly (and if there is always the edifying example of Clegg).

The only way to break the status quo is fund further investigative journalism into the links between the money and the politicians. There has to be a point at which the trust breaks down and real novelty can come into the system.

@bexley “At least in the US there’s a plausible argument that the Dems are less likely to pointlessly invade foreign countries. Over here it appears it doesn’t matter who we’ve voted for, we’ll just follow the US into any quagmire.”

You been reading any Greenwald recently? http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/ Obama the warmongering-Afghanistan-escalating-Libya-bombing-Pakistani/Yemeni-children-killing-via-drones, etc. So much for Democrats.

“Such things are still utterable by leaders of a mainstream, center-left party because the present intellectual and cultural environment still doesn’t fully allow clear, public utterance of the egalitarian ideal that lies at the core of the left’s values and appeal. Instead, this ideal still needs to be disguised beneath ambiguous (because coming from the left) displays of “fiscal credibility” or “frendliness towards business”.

In my opinion, no political intellectual project is as important today as the providing of cover for mainstream center-left parties to reclaim a 21st century egalitarian ideal as their main banner, moving neoliberalism further to the edge of the “envelope of respectable center-left discourse.”

Indeed. And providing this cover is going to be difficult inside political parties. Any political party is going to be infected with the idea that you have to attract median voters, that this means getting the support of the commentariat in centrist newspapers, and that this means displays of “fiscal credibility” or “frendliness towards business”. So all political parties are nervous about public utterance of the egalitarian ideal, even when that idea is supposedly the raison d’etre of the party. The development of the arguments that provide that cover will have to come from outside political parties: that is the only place where there will be space to develop those arguments.

@Harald Korneliussen: Why don’t they eat their own electoral system dogfood?

Indeed. Also: the election of a PM by MPs requires a majority; the election of an MP by constituents requires only a plurality. Hence the anger when the LibDems refused to simply acknowledge that the Tories had “won” the election.

@ Guano: The task ahead is to create a cultural environment such that it is the right that needs to make displays (ambiguous because coming from the right) of egalitarianism and concern for social progress in order to attract median voters.

It is an interdisciplinary decades-long project, but it is central, in my opinion, to any chance of large-scale, lasting, progressive political change in the 21st century.

To your point, it will require committed, patient and sometimes inglorious action both inside and outside political parties. And especially inside the mainstream center-left parties. Those need to be, and understood to be, first and foremost, the parties of the working millions of their countries. In the current cultural environment (economic crisis and Occupy notwithstanding), it is still difficult for someone like Miliband – possibly with the best intentions in the world – to even imagine himself committing to such an identity. The culture that supports such an identity needs to be cultivated and its abandonment was a badge of honour for the Third Way.

A thought experiment: what would it take for it to be unthinkable for a center-left politician to dress like a banker/businessperson (i.e. suit and tie, for men)? Not just on a “it makes me look like I’m with the 1%” level, but on a “it is absurd, it would never cross my mind” level.

#35. “I hate being dragged into giving faint praise for the Dems, but they are actually slightly less evil than the Republicans. Whether thats slightly less evil enough to get you voting for them is another question.”

You make the common mistake of assuming that the Republican Party is a political party. It’s not. It’s a fascist organization that is intent on conducting a legal coup that will prevent free elections for the indefinite future. If you don’t believe that this is possible look at Hungary. We are one Supreme Court justice away from a one-party state for the rest of our lifetimes.

Murc, in Britain, as in my country, the Labour party grew out of trade unions at a time when parliamentarians were unpaid and there was no public funding of elections. Paying your party subs enabled working people to be represented in the political system without going begging to big business or aristocrats. We would all be better off if it had stayed like that, frankly.

Haven’t Labour (those who haven’t truly sold out) yet observed the results in the US of the DLC approach?
Time (long since) for a year of Jubilee. (That would be hope and change we could all believe in — well, I could.)

I don’t know when I’ve felt more depressed about Labour. Even when Blair was swanning around with Bush & Berlusconi, even when David Blunkett was Home Secretary – even when John Reid was Home Secretary – there was at least a sense that things could change. Hang on until the next political turning-point and Brown might move the party to the Left, the Compass group might move the party to the Left, the Lib Dems… ha. And I honestly thought the two Eds *would* move the party to the Left, a bit, out of genuine conviction and also out of self-interest – it’s not as if the Left of the political spectrum is overcrowded at the moment.

Instead, they’ve stitched us up just as thoroughly as Nick Clegg, and with much more damaging effects. Not that education isn’t important, but advocating pay cuts & turning against the unions (all unions)? As Labour leader you just don’t do that; even Blair never did that. And what have they got out of it? At least Nick Clegg got the job of Deputy Prime Minister and the total destruction of his party (shome mishtake shurely).

I got into blogging at the time of the 2005 election, when I was involved in a lot of arguments about voting Labour; my argument at the time was that the Left should abandon Labour. It was a slightly unreal argument by present-day standards – the worst that could feasibly have happened would have been a hung parliament and a Labour-led coalition. But I remember arguing that the people who said the Left and trade unionists should work inside Labour, because it was the best available option, reminded me of the people 100 years ago who said the same about the Liberals. The comparison seems apter than ever now. Sooner or later something new will have to be built.

The UK and Australia are on these crash diets because the politicians have been told by the bankers that they will end up stranded like Bangladesh, Iran, Egypt, Nigeria, and number of other states that can’t get international credit in the form of dollars (or euros) as needed. A fate like the Greeks, who can’t exist without incoming credit, is probably considered worse than what austerity measures would bring.

Thanks for hitting the nail on the head there, what we should all really be worried about right now is the UK not being able to borrow money in our own currency! Even now lenders are holding us to ransom by demanding yields on gilts below inflation.

/snark

Also: the election of a PM by MPs requires a majority; the election of an MP by constituents requires only a plurality.

Well, kinda. But there isn’t actually a formal election of the PM – they don’t all gather together and cast their votes for Cameron or Brown or whoever. HM, technically, can pick whoever she wants as PM if she thinks that he can command a majority in the House. The way it works in practice is that she picks the leader of the party or coalition which has a working majority as in this case. He drives to the Palace, kisses hands, and that’s him as PM.
But the PM doesn’t have to have a majority – we’ve had minority governments before. They just have to talk other parties into backing them pretty much on a case-by-case basis.

depending on the amount of money involved that seems, well, wrong, bordering on the obscene. Political parties should be welcoming, rather than exclusive, and nothing says exclusivity like a cover charge to keep out the riff-raff.

Well, parties have to be funded somehow. And the fees are not huge: here’s the (annual) membership fees for the Labour Party.

£1 14-19/Student
£12 Young Persons aged 20-27.
£1 Serving or Former Member of the British Armed Forces
£15 Local Join Rate
£43 Standard rate
£21.50 Reduced rate Available to joiners who are currently out of work, work fewer than 16 hours per week, who are also members of an affiliated Trade Union or are on a low income (£1.80 per month)

The “suggested payment” is on a sliding scale depending on income.

Which in itself suggests it’s not exactly “a cover charge to keep out the riff-raff”.

“If you think that being perceived to endorse Osborne’s narrative on the economy will be electorally fruitful for Labour, you’re mad”

Oh, agreed. The real issue is that before the general election, the Labour government and Osborne were in general agreement, and Labour campaigned on that basis, and Milliband was a member of that government. Milliband then moved left from that position to get elected as Labour leader, because the median Labour activist is well to the left of the median Labour voter, who is well to the left of the marginal Labour voter. But now he’s leader, he has to appeal to the marginal Labour voter, or at least the median one. And that means moving back to the election position. But because of Milliband’s shifts, that means Osborne now has “ownership” in the public mind. In other words, the problem is not so much what Milliband is doing now, it’s what he did before.

But perhaps even bigger is that Labour has no real narrative of its own. They need to be clear as to whether they endorse or repudiate 1997-2007, and they need to repudiate 2007-2010. At the moment they don’t, or rather, can’t, because there are no major figures who didn’t serve under Brown, and the party lacks intellectual leadership.

@ 51

Conveniently ignores anyone who did actually run from the left and won. Harold Wilson?

Also exactly what are the Labour party now offering that is different to the Tories? They don’t appear to be running from the centre but from a position on the right in which austerity is entrenched. As one US Prez might have put it, the Labour party looks increasingly like “a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it”.

Wouldn’t it have been better if you had stayed in the party and put forward clear and careful arguments as to why the move was substantively and/or tactically wrong, laying out what should be done instead and putting all this to your branch meeting and/or to the constituency general committee? Or you could have just spelled out the same on here.
To my mind the fiscal question is an important but secondary issue compared with the question of what does social democracy and/or socialists do now that both deregulated capitalism and statist brands of leftism have failed. As someone with a good knowledge of social philosophy, I’d have though this was something that you should be in a good position to help out with.

What happened to the Real Utopias discussion that was supposed to happen, by the way? The Labour left could learn a lot from that, but they seem a bit stuck in old fashioned statism. Some of those experimental schemes needn’t cost that much.

I agree with Chris, and it does seem that Labor (like our Dems) have decided that the “responsible” thing is to drink the austerity Kool-Aid. It’s pretty retarded, actually. To the extent that they feel a need to demonstrate to the voters that they’ve learned from their policy mistakes, the biggest one they made in the Blair era was to exalt the City financial sector and leave it to make its own contribution to plunging the UK into an economic crisis. Why they don’t concentrate on that, rather than beggaring people living on the margins through no fault of their own, is a real question. My suspicion, however, is that Labor (like the Dems) have long since turned their back on the working class (defined broadly) and are now almost solely attuned to the financial elites they court and hang out with.

“My suspicion, however, is that Labor (like the Dems) have long since turned their back on the working class (defined broadly) ”

I think that one of the reasons that the left is weak is this kind of workerism. It’s a remnant of Marxism, and should be tossed out with the rest of it, because it’s hitched to an analytical framework that completely failed. I mean, here we are, nearly all of us part of a middle class that works with symbols, not in direct production, talking about how we know what the “working class” wants. The usual response is to say that we’re wage laborers and therefore “working class”, but no one really believes this in other contexts. Defining ourselves as the “egalitarian left” is a cover for saying that we have no real theory about what we want and no real connection or solidarity with other people other than the remnant of some poorly understood and discredited statist-left symbolism.

Does anyone have statistics on what percentage of the “working class”, however defined, votes Labour in the UK as opposed to other parties, or not voting? What percentage of the other classes do?

I think Ludo @ 27 captures the problem:

I share Chris’ dismay at Labour’s implicit acceptance … of further degradation of the status of public servants as legitimate…
the egalitarian ideal that lies at the core of the left’s values and appeal.

These two are extremely hard to reconcile in an environment where public servants have pensions and job security much greater than the rest of the working class.

an environment where public servants have pensions and job security much greater than the rest of the working class.

But very often lower pay, like for like.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14028848

Did you see the look on Miliband’s face immediately after he learned he had won the leadership? It was a very, very, worrying sign (you can find it on youtube somewhere). I suspect he entered the race to put himself on the map, but not to win, and is living with the consequences.

@Rich Puchalsky 60
I mean, here we are, nearly all of us part of a middle class that works with symbols, not in direct production, talking about how we know what the “working class” wants.

I have to disagree with this: I’ve got a degree (in media studies) and I work with simbols (websites), but still with my rich wage of 1050€/month I’m below Italian average and I think I am quite “working class”.

In my opinion what happened is this:
1) Lots of years ago, there was a big social divide between “blue collars” (with scarce education) and “white collars”, with “white collars” being middle class as opposed to “proletarians”;
2) But the economy changed a lot both because the education level increased in the population, thus diminishing the “rent” from a higer education that white collars could gain, because of automation and maybe because of “offshoring”;
3) However “culture” reacts quite slowly to this kind of change so that we still associate “white collar” to middle class while many or most white collars are now “proletarians”;
4) This created an illusion of upward mobility in many, that is now sadly dispelled by the crisis.

While it is well possible that most commenters here are “small burgeoise” (hey I hope you all have lots of money), this idea that the “working class” is only composed by manual workers is IMHO very wrong.

“50% or so of working class people in the UK still vote for Labour.”

Oops, I meant that 50% of the working class people who vote still vote for Labour. As of 1997, anyways.

As for truly unserious people like *bexley*:

The point is that Millibrand is talking about trying to balance the resolution of an economic crisis pretty much entirely on the people he supposedly represents.

We just shouldn’t act as if there hasn’t been a major earthquake overseas, and no tsunami headed here. I think a great deal of the current austerity stupidity is the elite quietly panicking and setting up lifeboats, paying off goons for “future considerations”, and the works. We should be wise to that.

Awesome I’m deeply unserious.

We just shouldn’t act as if there hasn’t been a major earthquake overseas, and no tsunami headed here.

What tsunami is heading here?

The working class wants a big juicy steak and to get laid

(read–the working class is composed entirely of ‘meat and potatoes’ guy guys, as noted by the respected authority Taxi Driver Bud Lite advertisements Caitlin Flanagan)

and what does it have to do with anything?

They (using your implied definition of ‘they’) also want quite a few things to be true about the lives of other people, and that happens to have everything to do with politics. Putting meat and potatoes on everyone’s table isn’t putting the bitches in their place.

“Of course I’m the judge, who else?”

How about them?

You can make unfalsifiable personal judgements about classes of people, sure. But when half of the people in that class don’t agree with you, as evidenced by their voting behavior — then either you are right and half of the people in that class are fools, or you’re wrong about what benefits them. More to the point, if they’re split half-and-half of what you think should be their defining issues as a class, then maybe there’s no class there to begin with and the whole thing is a false analytical category.

(I’m not saying that it’s a false sociological or cultural category — but in that case no white-collar worker can be “working class”.)

They are not fools, they just don’t see the world the way you do. They are individuals, they make their own judgements. ‘Social class’ is a different category, it’s not a simple aggregate of individuals.

it does have a lot to do with politics, but what does it have to do with your judgement of politics?

We might not be in disagreement, I can’t tell. How does this sound?

It’s completely natural for a lot of people to prefer the current society* to one in which their life and prospects would be improved, even by their own standards for improvement. People like living in societies they think are appropriate, which for me is acting as a synonym for just, but for others might mean anything — morally corrective, maybe, or righteous, or putting women in their proper place, or whatever.

Folks will often forgo narrow self-interest because they value supporting a society or community structure of their liking much more highly than whatever material gains they’d receive through a different structure.

Heck, if I were made wealthy, I’d vote against my own economic interests because I prefer an environment that seems more just to me. Why shouldn’t I accept the fact that most other people can and do, rationally, make a similar type of decision?

I might happen to think the precise society they value and wish to support is awful and atrocious, but I won’t do them and myself the indignity of pretending they’ve in any way lost their ability to make the most rudimentary and universal political assessments.

All this would be my way of saying, dear god is Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? book just flat out stupid, if I cared enough about Thomas Frank to address it.

*or community, environment, nation, whatever — the precise delineation isn’t important to my statements

I don’t want to be too down on America (or up on UK) at but personally agree with Uncle Kvetch. That is the basic difference and it’s a difference that makes a _big_ difference (imho).

What Meredith said.

From a Marxist point of view, the working class is continually produced & reproduced through its involvement in capitalist relations of production. (If you grow up in a working-class family you’re sociologically a working-class kid, but you’re not a member of the working class until you have to try and provide for yourself. Remember how you felt at the end of that first day at work? Remember the realisation that you were going to have to go back the next day?)

Also from a Marxist pov, it is just not very new or interesting to be reminded that many – even most – members of the actually-existing working class don’t support the party with the best record of allying with working class organisations and achieving reforms for the working class. Working class consciousness isn’t given and never has been. Labour hasn’t been part of the solution for quite a few years now, but thanks to the two Eds it is now definitively part of the problem.

As for the idea that Miliband is somehow being shrewd and tactical, I don’t begin to buy it. Firstly, there’s no problem: the polls are fine. (At least, they were – the Labour lead seems to have disappeared in the last couple of weeks. Odd, that.) There has been some deeply dishonest and destructive criticism of Miliband’s performance as leader; people were saying that Labour was “flatlining” in the polls, at a time when Labour’s poll rating was holding steady at 3-4% above the government’s. Secondly, the duty of the opposition is not and has never been to make tough choices for the good of the country (i.e. to alienate its own supporters) – you can start doing that once you’ve been elected. The duty of the opposition is to get elected, by finding the gaps in the government’s armour. Thirdly, there’s a massive gap on this very issue, given that Osborne’s initial optimistic forecasts for growth-through-austerity haven’t worked out, and given that the Lib Dems (if you remember them) were advocating budgetary expansion before the election. Miliband’s just thrown away any possibility of exploiting that. Lastly, while it’s quite clear who this is aimed against, it’s not at all clear who it’s supposed to appeal to. People who agree with Cameron and Osborne’s attacks on Labour were generally inclined to support Cameron and Osborne already – and Miliband saying that Cameron and Osborne were right isn’t going to attract them away.

I’m reminded of Berlinguer’s wretched performance as leader of the Italian Communist Party in the late 70s (he’s now looked back on as a great leader, so maybe there’s hope for Ed). His response to the economic crisis of 1977 was to call for “austerity”, i.e. for the unions to accept pay cuts. Because, you see, austerity’s not a *bad* thing:

“Austerity, by definition, means restrictions on certain availabilities to which we have become accustomed … But we are deeply convinced that to replace certain habits of life with others that are more exacting and not extravagant, can lead not to a worsening in the quality of life, but to substantial improvement, to growth in the ‘humanity’ of life. A more austere society can be – indeed ought to be – a society that is more just, better ordered, with less inequality, in reality more free and democratic, certainly more humane.”

Quoting myself:

“The Communist Party had reined in its supporters and suspended its reforming ambitions in order to build an alliance with its former Christian Democrat opponent; it now adopted a Christian Democrat diagnosis of the economic situation and endorsed Christian Democrat demands on the Communist Party’s supporters.”

The Communist Party’s vote in national elections – and its membership – had been rising up to 1977; both went down from then on.

There’s a working class because it’s not possible for everyone to live without working for a wage. There will always be a working class for as long as that continues to be the case. (If I gave up my job and roamed from town to town singing folksongs, I’d be self-employed and no longer a member of the working class. At least, until I starved.)

I just think the concept of the working class is so analytically useful that it doesn’t make sense to junk it, however much elaboration and development it may need.

“Emancipation of the people” – I agree that this is (one way of putting) (a big part of) what the Left is about, but then, in what sense are people not emancipated, as in freed from enslavement? We’re all free to get a job, if we can persuade someone to employ us, and if we don’t like it we’re free to leave. Sure, financial capital might have behaved irresponsibly in the past, and it might have too much power in the economy now, but that’s just a matter of regulating capitalism so that it delivers the best results for everyone, or something equally bland and uncontroversial (actually doing it is a bit more controversial, admittedly). Class gives you a handle on what’s wrong about capitalism, not just what’s wrong with it.f

Yeah, but I am working for a wage and I don’t have the impression anybody will think I’m working class. On the other hand I know people who are self-employed and who would be intuitively considered as working class.

I’d make a guess that you are working at a wage that is fundamentally determined by the possibility of you going off and doing that. As opposed to negotiated by a union, determined by the state through a minimum wage law, set by a patron, calculated from the costs of recruiting and training a long term unemployed person, or whatever.

If so, your rational self interest is more aligned with that hypothetical business you could start than with other people that have a similar income level due to a different determining cause. If something changes so that single-person web design companies make double the profit they did before, you will very likely benefit, without actually having to sign any incorporation paperwork .

Not getting that, and not getting the logical consequences of people like that being an electoral plurality, is the fundamental weakness of the modern left. Lacking that understanding, their leaders make concessions at random, never with the desired effects.

It’s like a web designer trying to get some columns to align by hacking the CSS without a backup: that didn’t work, change another thing, repeat indefinitely. By the time you stumble on the right change, the things you have broken in the search will still be screwing up the page.

I wonder if this, in the CT tradition, will appear in all strike-through or something?

“(If I gave up my job and roamed from town to town singing folksongs, I’d be self-employed and no longer a member of the working class. At least, until I starved.)”

I’m self-employed. I guess that I have no basic connection with the left then. Actually, the “singing folk songs” lumpenprole bit has always been a classic Marxist way of dismissing those people who don’t work like real workers and can’t be expected to show proper class consciousness.

No problem, I’d like to be able to do something useful such as designing websites. But the thing remains: it is not so easy to become self-employed. Rather, there are consequences to it. And also, I don’t think that it makes a whole lot of difference whether you are hired for a wage or hired as a contractor.

I don’t think that it makes a whole lot of difference whether you are hired for a wage or hired as a contractor.

Indeed (I’ve done both), but the difference it doesn’t make is more towards “wage-labourer” than towards “independent artisan”.

We (those of us who self-identify as left first & working-class second if at all) can try what we like; if we’re persistent enough & lucky enough we can make a genuine difference to a lot of people’s lives. In the last 40 years Britain has changed from a country where racism was normal to one where it’s taboo; that wouldn’t have happened without a lot of leftists (not all of them either Black or working-class) pushing very hard. What we can’t do is change capitalism in any fundamental way, because doing that requires pushback from workers as workers.

‘I’m self-employed. I guess I have no basic connection with the left then.’

Ah, the argument from wounded pride! (World’s tiniest violins..)

I agree with Phil that there is little point in the Left being wedded to the Labour Party any longer (however I never had any hopes for the two Eds, partly given that they were at the centre of New Labour, and also probably because I am too young to have experienced anything like the Labour movement of old and so the party occupies no place in my heart).

Now, lots of people on the Left have tried forming parties in the past, but all have failed to gain any significant electoral support. But clearly we do need a new party.

I’m not very knowledgeable about these things – has anyone tried setting up a new party by trying to get many of the small left-wing parties to merge together? Whatever party it is, it needs to be a big church approach.

IIRC, Labour lost 1 million voters in 2005 to the Lib Dems (0ver Iraq?) but lost 3 million in 2001. Where are they all? Has any work been done to find out why they never voted?

I don’t know that any new party will be successful (and looking at the history of Labour parties round the world, it will take a long time) without the support of a number of trade unions. Has anyone tried a disaffiliation campaign?

It also seems to me that our media presence is woeful on- and off-line. Online, where is our “Democracy Now”? Where is our Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi?

Offline, where are our passionate orators? Where’s our Tony Benn?

Most people don’t read the web religiously. What are we doing to disperse online information not found (at all, or at least not easily) offline? It’s all fine and well to write a blog saying e.g. William Hague lied yesterday when he said “Iran . . . enriches uranium to 20 percent for which there is no plausible civilian explanation” – it’s quite another thing to get more people to hear about it.

How many know about the government’s planned changes to unfair dismissal? How many know about it’s plan for a massive expansion in secret courts, or withdrawal of legal aid for large numbers of people? How many know about Royal Mail privatization? All these points (and many many more) need to be not just mentioned once on the news, but rammed home to millions of people, many of whom are too busy to be political junkies. Other than some sort of local activism campaign, the only other thing I can think of is protest. The best thing about the protests against increasing tuition fees, was that they put the issue right in the media glare for days, repeatedly, where it couldn’t be ignored.

The only other thing I can think of is to take advantage of Cameron’s so-called Big Society idea. There are going to be huge repercussions from the austerity and other measures this government is taking. If the problems of forming a new party are too intractable, why not an organization devoted to helping those affected on the ground?

No doubt many people have already thought of all these issues (and more) but I’d love to know what people have attempted before.