Labour Party

Luke Akehurst, secretary of the right-wing Labour First faction, hopes to bring down Labour's new Corbyn-McDonnell leadership by pressure of public opinion. Akehurst disavows those on the Labour right who want a coup against Corbyn. Writing on Labour List (22 September), he relies on this: "Some of [Corbyn's] grassroots supporters will go through the same painful process of awakening and political education that led to many Bennite activists becoming successively Kinnockite then Blairite in the 1980s and 1990s. Their idealism didn’t survive repeated interaction with electoral defeat and...

An article, signed by “Phil”, on the LibCom website, puts the anarchist case against Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. It says that working-class activists should “steer clear” of Labour, and makes five specific arguments: 1. The fight isn’t just against The Tories No-one who has been involved in Corbyn’s campaign, and witnessed the attacks and attempted sabotage by figures on the right of the Labour Party, could believe that the Tories are the only enemy. This is a straw-man argument; only the most credulous and ignorant could imagine that Labour under Corbyn’s leadership will be uniformly...

At the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy fringe meeting on the last night of Labour Party conference, a number of speakers discussed rumours that right-wing Labour MPs will shortly seek to trigger a new leadership election and exclude Corbyn. Labour Party rules state that "Where there is no vacancy [for leader], nominations may be sought by potential challengers each year prior to the annual session of Party conference. In this case any nomination must be supported by 20 per cent of the combined Commons members of the PLP and members of the EPLP [members of the European Parliament]...

Jeremy Corbyn has joined many demonstrations and protests over the years, and all to his credit. When there have been conflicts within the left, however, Corbyn has tended to shy away, or go with whatever looks most like a broad consensus. Yet on 11 February 1991, Jeremy Corbyn joined another left Labour MP, the late Bernie Grant; ourselves, then grouped round the weekly Socialist Organiser ; and some people now round Socialist Resistance, in a protest sit-in against the manipulation by another left faction of the movement against the Gulf War. The driving force in the manipulation was a group...

If Labour adopted Jeremy Corbyn’s discussion document Protecting our Planet as its environmental policy it would be the first serious attempt by a mainstream political party to face up to the challenge of climate change. Protecting the Planet is a huge improvement on Tory and New Labour policies, which pay lip service to environmentalism whilst subsidising big energy capitalists and polluters. It is also out-greens the Green Party who combine reactionary Neo-Malthusian analysis with vague promises to tinker with the energy market. The document states that the labour movement and environmental...

This Labour Party conference hasn't quite caught up with the Corbyn earthquake. To a campaigner outside the conference entrance, selling papers, leafleting, lobbying, and so on, this 2015 Labour conference looks surprisingly undifferent from others since 2010. 2007 was perhaps the low point. Standing outside the conference, I could see almost no young person going in who wasn't sharp-suited, bland-faced, with all the insignia of a careerist. Since 2010 it's become different. Socialist papers sell pretty well at the conference entrance, left-wing leaflets are welcomed. Surprisingly, there are...

There is no reason why any attentive socialist should be surprised at the treatment of Jeremy Corbyn by the British media. Angry yes, surprised no. The great majority of the print media is after all Tory. The very rare exceptions to that rule purvey a peculiarly tepid form of liberalism which holds that growing income inequality and poverty are very bad things, but that the collective working class action which would reverse it is, on balance, the greater evil. Across the entire national press only the Daily Mirror has shown consistent support for Labour. Much of the reaction to Corbyn’s...

Although familiar with Martin Thomas’s educational agitation, analytical explanations and delivery of argument in discussion over the last five years: I don’t share the same historical tendency, having come to political maturity through the Communist Party of Great Britain (original CPGB 1920-1991) in its final eurocommunist stage. Martin, in Solidarity 377 makes some good points in his feature on the possibilities of a Young Labour revival. Orthodox Trotskyist sects and Communist Party national roads to socialism were deeply affected by high Stalinism; influencing some in the Labour Party and...

The Corbyn surge has drawn into the Labour Party hundreds of thousands of people previously outside it. It couldn't have done that unless, before the surge, there was enough oomph inside the Labour Party to get the Corbyn candidacy going (which wasn't easy: he was the fourth person approached to be a left candidate; he wasn't keen; enough soft-left MPs had to be pressured into nominating him that enough right-wingers would feel embarrassed about denying him the few extra nominations necessary to get on the ballot paper). In my letter ( Solidarity 376) about which Mark Osborn complains (...

While the Labour right openly try to sabotage and smear Jeremy Corbyn, more subtle Labour centrists tell him that he must move only as fast as the middle ground. The Labour left surge of the early 1980s saw the same debate. That makes this exchange from that time relevant today. Vladimir Derer was the secretary of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, a central force in that early-1980s surge and still important today. Sean Matgamna of Workers' Liberty replied to him in Socialist Organiser, then the paper of a broad range of activists on the Labour left. By Vladimir Derer Comrade O'Mahony...