Labour Party

Labour and the “trend of Bregret”

The “trend of Bregret” — people who supported Brexit changing their minds — “is accelerating and looks set to cause a growing problem for the... Conservative Party”, wrote Matthew Goodwin, an academic focused on the Eurosceptic hard right, on 18 November. It may — it should — cause a problem for the Labour leadership too. Goodwin identifies the main things driving this as “younger and more pro-EU voters entering the electorate and people who did not vote at the 2016 referendum changing their mind”. In any case, it is indisputable. The view that Brexit was right has not held a lead in polls...

The politico-economic consequences of Liz Truss

Andrew Gamble, author of The Conservative Nation and other books, talked to Martin Thomas from Solidarity . There’s been a long civil war in the Conservative Party over Europe. It became more intense after the 2016 referendum. A majority of Conservative MPs and Cabinet Ministers voted Remain, but 57% of voters who had voted Conservative at the general election only a year before in 2015 repudiated David Cameron and voted Leave. Ever since 2016, the party has been disoriented. It has radical factions who want to do different things with Brexit, and a bigger group of MPs who haven’t known what...

Oust Braverman! Hold Labour to its free-movement policy!

Join the solidarity protest at Manston detention camp on Sunday 6 November: details here The appalling conditions in which refugees are being held at the former RAF base in Manston, Kent, are part and parcel of the ramped up “Hostile Environment” presided over by Home Secretary Suella Braverman. Braverman has relished the opportunity with her second bite of the cherry, reappointed by Rishi Sunak after having to resign in disgrace on 19 October after six weeks in office, to be even more hardline than Priti Patel. The scandal at Manston will not be the last. Opened to process migrants more...

Tory fiasco raises the stakes

The Tory party melée may now subside a bit, with Rishi Sunak nodded in as the new prime minister on 24 October. But it has triggered an economic crisis. It has taken the lid off a swirl of dispute in the Tory party. And it has raised the stakes for the labour movement. The usual pattern of capitalist crises is that debt builds up in a boom, with easy credit and speculative ventures, then a jolt reveals that many debtors are unlikely to pay, and collapse snowballs. Not through a boom, but through the Covid lockdowns, government debt has increased hugely since early 2020, corporate debt mildly...

Lessons in democracy... from Xi Jinping!

The Morning Star , concerned about the rise of authoritarianism in Britain, has identified a major source of it: “Starmer’s Labour is playing a key role in that process and its successes accelerate the drive towards a more authoritarian and repressive British state (editorial, 12 October). The editorial cites, as examples, the expulsion of members “for rule breaches invented retrospectively”, the suspension of a conference delegate “for arguing against one of the motions on the agenda” and the deselection of Sam Tarry. The editorial goes on to warn: “Some MPs fear the Labour leader is prepared...

BJP out of the Labour Party!

The BJP announces Neeraj Patil (in black jacket) has joined it at a press conference in Karnataka, March 2014 There has been significant disquiet about left-wing candidates excluded from Labour Party parliamentary selections on absurd pretexts. Starmer’s leadership has grotesquely abused the notion of “due diligence” — disqualifying candidates because of bad past behaviour — to rule out even left-wingers who under the rules should automatically make the list because they have multiple union nominations. So far, the unions are making little fuss. But in Camberwell and Peckham (South London)...

The left and lessons from Corbynism

Michael Chessum met Martin Thomas from Solidarity on 15 October to talk about his new book on Corbynism, This Is Only The Beginning . Near the end of the book (p.210) it says: “Socialist was the movement’s prevailing adjective, but its immediate policy programme was… social democracy, and there was little or no collective discussion inside Corbynism about what a truly socialist or anti-capitalist programme might look like in the future”. Wasn’t that fundamental? And wasn’t the same lack also true of the “movements” of 2010-15 which the book describes as feeding into Corbynism? Corbynism was an...

How Tories won a huge swing in Leicester amidst Truss debacle

Despite the Tories crashing in the opinion polls, they’ve just won a council by-election on a huge swing – in Leicester. On 13 October, in North Evington ward, in Leicester East parliamentary constituency, the Tories took 49.6% of the vote – up 32.7% . Labour was down 49.8% to 22.5%; and the Greens up 20% to 25.8%. Turnout was exceptionally high for a council by-election - 44.9%. What’s going on? In an area dominated by people of Indian background, this dramatic result seems to stem both from a rise of the Hindu nationalist right and from pandering to it by Labour - who ran a Hindu right...

67% of Labour voters want to rejoin EU

Of those who voted Labour in 2019, polling firm Redfield & Wilton Strategies found 67% would support a campaign to rejoin the EU; only 16% would oppose. 55% positively say Labour should campaign to rejoin the EU, with 28% opposed. Meanwhile wider public opinion is shifting too. For a long time polls found a narrow majority or plurality against rejoining. The last five national polls have an average “rejoin” lead of 10.2%; in the five before that it was only 3.6%... This in the absence of pretty much any leadership, including from an anti-Brexit left that feels deflated. Yet, despite some buzz...

Letter: Qatar, Al Jazeera, Israel and The Labour Files

Keith Road’s review of The Labour Files on Al Jazeera mainly accuses the series of saying nothing we don’t know while conflating all accusations of anti-semitism in a way that suggests none of them has substance. That seems pretty spot on. But one sentence troubles me. It seems overly simplistic and conspiracy-minded. “The primary purpose of the footage is not to give insight, but to further Al Jazeera and the attitude to Israel of its owner the Qatari state.” Russia Today, Press TV, etc. are straightforward propaganda mouthpiece channels for their regimes. Al Jazeera is different. Many of its...

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