Former ANC MP and arms trade campaigner will address activists from around UK tomorrow at Collective launch – and poses real threat to friend-of-genocide ‘Labour’ leader Andrew Fe…
We've seen this happen before, and it always ends in failure. A small number of Labour Party members leave the party in disgust, an even fewer number are angry enough and motivated enough to form a new party. It either fizzles out due to burnout, or gets invaded by Trots and destroyed from the inside.
The one example I can think of that's survived for many years is Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party, formed in very similar circumstances to now: a decaying, corrupt, widely-hated Tory government almost certain to lose the next election but the leader of the Labour Party (i.e. Blair) was in no way left wing or promising any socialist policies.
The SLP was set up in 1996 and is still going. After nearly 30 years, how much electoral success has it had? How many people other than ultra-committed political obsessives (such as us!) even know of its existence?
Well I hope they don't split the vote enough to keep the Conservatives in power.
Do these guys not know how to play FPTP? Or maybe any dark money coming in behind them does..... Would be not the first time they have played the left to keep them out of power. Like Conservatives joining Labour to vote Corybe leader.
There is one Labour party and that is the party that is actually funded by the labour movement. Everything else is just another bourgeois party because it draws its money and its activists from people who have money and time to spare, i.e., middle-class people. It doesn't matter what it calls itself or how it describes itself. It doesn't matter what it says it's going to do in the near-impossible scenario in which it gets elected. The material reality of such a party is that it's middle-class. By contrast, the Labour party is the Labour party. It is imperfect because it's real. It might not even be the best that a party-of-labour hypoethically could be. But it is the party of labour. Everyone else is just a poser. That's it.
We've already seen the RMT and BFAWU de-affiliate, union funding has slumped and private donors like Lord Sainsbury now make up the majority of funding.
How big does a movement need to be to describe itself as “mass”?
I’m not sure that any party that wants to participate in the Westmister House of Distraction is anything other than riddled with state security services operatives.