An effective new leftwing party is one of the recurring dreams – or nightmares – of British politics. Many have tried and failed to create one that wins and then holds a significant number of seats in parliament. Labour, founded 125 years ago, has been the only successful example. Others have been defeated by the electoral system, the sheer number of interests ranged against the left, loyalty to Labour and the left’s tendency to over-promise and quarrel.
Could be that the British left is just more than a bit shit with even worse policies….
The German left is our model here.
The once all powerful SPD still wheedle themselves into power but struggle now to achieve 15% in national polls. They are only strong, where there is anti AfD tactical voting. Die Linke and Greens are eating the SPD’s lunch. The leggy Frau Wagenknecht’s party had not achieved the breakthrough it thought it would.
If ( big if ) the landscape stays as it does, Labour will suffer the same fate as the SPD. At the moment there are only the Greens. The other challenge is from Islamist independents, which will cost a lot of cabinet ministers dear.
The other challenge is from Islamist independents, which will cost a lot of cabinet ministers dear.
It’s rather amusing, they put all their favourites into safe seats and now those seats are no longer safe.
As a side note, I see the firewall is being broken at the state level in Germany. The AFD has been talking to the BSW at a fairly high level in Thuringia.
An effective new leftwing party ….. is an oxymoron.
Likely as effective as the Judean People’s Front, but without the “judea” in the title 🙂
Pretty much an admission that the extreme left doesn’t have much support amongst the English. Even Labour have traditionally relied on the Irish, Scots and Welsh vote to get into power.
Jonathan,
Labour have really only done well when the right of the party were in charge, like Wilson and Blair. People talk about Tony Benn as a giant of politics, but after the 80s, he was basically a fucking loser.
The operative word in that paragraph is quarrel, along with word of the week – fissiparous! The latter has the same root as fissile, with the same detonating quality when lefties become too concentrated. Of course the concentration has to be no more than two for some activity as the Corbyn/Sultana fiasco demonstrates
Not my joke, but the most popular name for the new party is JEZBOLLAH.
I really hope Jezza starts his new party. It should pull the hard core lefty 18-24 year old vote from Labour and the green party and hopefully halt their current steady defection from Labour to Green.
Currently the stats for that age groups are
Labour: 33% (down 8% from 2024)
Green Party: 26% (up 8% from 2024)
Anything that does harm to the Green party is great. Harming Labour too and compounding the effect with the way small parties suffer in the first past the post election system, is icing on the cake.
Another suggestion was New Anti Zionist Independent party.
Any idea who wrote the scripts for this comedy? It’s got the makings of a multi-season hit.
WB, I’d question whether Blair was actually on the Right. He certainly ‘talked’ Right but he was a radical who sowed the seeds of this country’s destruction.
Starmer must be jumping for joy. He gets rid of a handful of troublesome backbenchers. If it stops at the current suspects, the new party has to fight for attention with the Greens. Which can well wear them down before 2029.
Jonathan,
Absolutely on the right of the party. Lowish taxes, pro-markets, pro-private sector in the NHS. And the left of the party hate him.
And whatever bad stuff he introduced would have been simple for the conservatives to remove within 14 years in power. You can’t blame Labour for expanding the state. That is what they do. But conservatives not taking a hammer to it?
Beckett sure is putting his heart into it. He really, really wants ‘an effective new leftwing party.’
Because all the old ones ain’t getting the job done. But this new one will! You can believe!
Never forget, for the left “this time it will be different” is an article of faith.
WB
….whatever bad stuff he introduced would have been simple for the conservatives to remove within 14 years in power….But conservatives not taking a hammer to it?
I’ve worked in the civil service and I’ve been a management consultant specialising in the public sector, so I have seen government close-up in different roles. Removing “bad stuff” is not “simple”: it’s laborious, and few ministers have the stamina, dedication or time to overcome civil service obstruction and inertia. And when the civil service wants to prevent reform, it has dozens of tactics it can employ…
You can’t blame Labour for expanding the state. That is what they do.
Bollocks. ‘You can’t blame paedos for sexually assaulting children. That is what they do.’ ‘You can’t blame the civil service for obstructing….That’s what they do’. So, yes, we can blame socialist cretins for what they do!
The Popular Fronts are definitive. In their book Families And How To Survive Them, John Cleese and his therapist pal Robin Skinner discussed the background. Essentially the root of all this purity spiral/splitter stuff is paranoiac projection: utopian individuals cannot bear to acknowledge their faults (their Dark Side) and instead project it onto some Out Group. Unfortunately this doesn’t solve their problem: they know unconsciously that their Dark Side remains and hate themselves for it, and off on the fissiparous purity spiral they go.
When the book was written the authors referred to the groups then forming and splitting: various SWP and IMG spin-offs; political lesbian separatist feminists, and so on. Whether or not you give credence to the psychological theories behind it the behavioural pattern is obvious, repetitive and predictable. And on it goes.
‘Let them fight’…
Cutting the bureaucracy is easy. You simply stop paying them.
Trump eradicated a whole department.
In NZ we have had several massive cutbacks. Jacinda Ardern increased civil servants by 30%, so the next government told all the departments to go back to their previous numbers. Done.
It’s been done in Argentina, of all places.
What UK lacks is politicians prepared to just get it done.
What UK lacks is a functional press. BBC/Guardian are entomopathogenic fungi. Healing begins with their elimination. It CANNOT start without their elimination. Reform needs a BBC platform.
Theo,
“it’s laborious, and few ministers have the stamina, dedication or time to overcome civil service obstruction and inertia.”
Bollocks. The Tories just didn’t care, except Gove. When did they ever, even once talk about closing DCMS, cutting the DFID budget, cutting uni spending, cutting rail wank ? They were enthusiastic about The Olympics, about HS2. They were Continuity Blair, except for Liz Truss (who was destroyed by her own party). They never once opposed Brown ramping up spending, until the crash.
Looking at the people involved, who thinks this is going to turn out to be ‘an effective new leftwing party’..?
That depends on your definition of “effective”. Effective splitters, possible; effective at getting rid of some annoying backbenchers and simplifying Starmer’s task, possibly; effective at distracting from the Greens, possibly; effective at carrying out what they say they intend: not.
Will their flag have a hammer and sickle on it, or a crescent? I think we should know before considering voting for them.
@Penseivat
That’s a fun one. Pretty sure Jezza would want both. I suspect most of his ‘friends’ would rather have just the crescent, but taqqiya. Gaining power comes first. There’ll also be the pronoun brigade.
Which group will split first?
Splitting heads from necks will be the second applied to the first
@ Penseivat
The crescent is present in the sickle – or one might think that the communists are putting a handle onto the cresecent to use it as a means of killing all who disagree
Must be something in the air: Musk says he is going to create a new political party.
Musk has enough money to start something.
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I think we should move to PR..
Otherwise we many end up with an extreme party of either wing taking a massive majority, followed by a coup and dictatorship.