Kier Starmer is not going to make it until the next election, this much is clear. This means that there will, in the next couple of years, be a leadership election. We need to pull Labour back towards the left and make it a party that can say it speaks to the working man/woman.
We need a leader that will impose fair taxation on the billionaire class.
To do this a strong leftist wing of the party needs to be present in the memberhip.
It’s more than Starmer though, the rot is through the party. The best thing to do is accept that Labour is dying and pull away from it, don’t give them money or support, and hope that those people all move on to some other party and grift there instead. Then maybe - maybe - Labour can be rebuilt
The only thing that concerns me about that is the current surge that seems to be behind Reform. I definitely agree that Labour is decaying from the inside and needs serious reform if it’s even salvageable at all, but my worry is that the people who stop supporting Labour will fracture off into a bunch of smaller groups, all the grifters will glom onto Reform and we’ll end up with Farage as PM for a decade or more while the left sorts itself out.
And that is very possible, I’d even say likely, but that is Labour’s fault and joining them and giving them your support because of the spectre of Reform is what got us to where we are now. It’s certainly a nice idea to think “yeah, we’ll join Labour and change it from the inside” but the reality is that a surge of memberships will just tell Labour that doing Reform Shit is a working strategy. Genuinely the best option is to pull away from Labour and hope they’ll turn around
Being a member will not help.
The right wing of the party has already evicted to many left wing MPs to vote for a left of centre leader.
While using that power to also raise the % of MPs needed to get any leader on the ballet.
The PLP (parliamentary Labour Party) has to much power over membership for members to ever override their support again. Corbyn was never expected to win. The PLP were taken by suprise by the size of membership support. And the huge demand from younger left members willing to join the party. They also removed the ability for new members to have such an effect on future votes.
Hence why YourParty was set up with such a huge concentration on membership control from Day one.
As bad as the current mess of your party is. This very issue is the argument being had between members. Z Sultana Claims background actors were embedding control before members could take charge. So acted alone to creat membership (if you believe her motives)
Other leaders disagree and and are threatening to take it to lawyers.
A membership lead faction “Our Party” has formed to try and realign the process of building the party. ATM with over 800k supporters this is still the largest movement towards a genuine member lead left wing party out their.
Edited. Fixed a typo and clarified some history.
I agree with a lot of the start of what you say. I will warn to be mindful and question everyone’s motive including Zarah and who is behind Our Party. Politics is filled with bad actors. We should always be cautious, even with something so new.
Part III of Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn, “The English Revolution”:
“In England there is only one Socialist party that has ever seriously mattered, the Labour Party. It has never been able to achieve any major change, because except in purely domestic matters it has never possessed a genuinely independent policy. It was and is primarily a party of the trade unions, devoted to raising wages and improving working conditions. This meant that all through the critical years it was directly interested in the prosperity of British capitalism. In particular it was interested in the maintenance of the
British EmpireNeo-liberal economy, for the wealth of England was drawn largely fromAsia and Africaforeign manufacturing partners. The standard of living of the trade-union workers, whom the Labour Party represented,depended indirectly on the sweating ofIndian cooliesinsert currently exploited Asian workforce, to whom we’ve off-shored dire work conditions. At the same time the Labour Party was a Socialist party, using Socialist phraseology, thinking in terms of an old-fashioned anti-imperialism and more or less pledged to make restitution to the coloured races.”A party tied to trade unions will forever be tied to the capital class, unless industry is first nationalised.
The book makes incredible reading now in light of the recent ‘Patriotic’ rallies; UK conditions are much the same as 1931-1939, with Starmer our Chamberlain whom has the impossible task of appeasing many incompatible sides (the wealthy who fund him and neo-liberal ‘growth’, the middle class who are losing their stake; the impoverished who are looking toward what they think is the quickest way out - Facism)
The book makes an incredible case for a distinctly British Socialism: non-monetary-based classes which retains the idiosyncrasies that makes Britain Britain.
Hell no. Build up an alternative. Labour is rotten to the core.
Labour Together is the insidious poison. Then again, Blair ruined much of the countries institutions long before LT was a thing
Corbyn tried to change Labour from the inside and was coupd by Israel. It is astounding people still think about trying the same thing
I’m afraid that changing leadership won’t change Labour. As a party, it does not speak to or for the working class, it is ruled by career politicians just the same as the Tories are. They could never understand what it means to be working class because most of them were never part of it, and the ones that were have betrayed the working class (cough Rayner cough).
