General Elections

Youth vote can beat Tories

“If 38% of voters genuinely go for pro-IRA anti-nuclear pro-mass-nationalisation Corbyn, UK voters are no longer mature enough for democracy.” The Twitter comment from Andrew Lilico of the right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs sums up how a section of the British ruling class views even the outside chance of a Corbyn victory on 8 June. For a whole era after Neil Kinnock quelled Labour’s rank and file revolt of the early 1980s, Labour was a “safe pair of hands” for the ruling class. Tony Blair set out to identify Labour as “unequivocally pro-business”, and on that, anyway, he succeeded...

The limits of Labour’s multilateralism

There has been some recent media attention on Jeremy Corbyn’s alleged past links to the IRA and the claim that he is a “pacifist” — meaning, he is opposed to any and every kind of military intervention, even around “humanitarian” issues. Corbyn does have a record of support for the Republican movement in Ireland (that is, not the IRA as such, but the nationalists fighting for a united Ireland), and he was long involved with the Stop the War Coalition, which did indeed oppose — sometimes, in Workers’ Liberty’s view, with terrible arguments — the major military interventions involving Britain...

Labour: rebuild the welfare state

The welfare state created by the 1945 Labour government was a little bit of the “political economy of the working class” carved out of a still capitalist economy (a phrase Karl Marx first used to describe the victory of the fight for a ten-hour working day). To some extent the ruling class has been forced to accept a minimal level of state provision. There is a constant battle over what proportion of profits is redirected, over who should receive support, and what sort of support is given. The ruling class has been winning that battle for some time. The space carved out of capitalism by the...

Grim picture in French elections

On the website of the French daily Le Monde, Matthieu Goar writes: “If the MPs [of the main right-wing party, LR, The Republicans], Sarkozy [right-wing president 2007-2012], Juppé [prime minister 1995-7, and candidate to be LR nominee for president] and the others give the impression that they are ‘killing off’ Fillon by replacing him, the risk of some of Fillon’s voters going off to the National Front is not negligible. “At the Place du Trocadéro [in Paris, where Fillon held a defiant rally] I talked with many people who said that they would vote for [National Front presidential candidate...

The left in France’s presidential election

In my last letter I wrote about the far right, the right, and the almost right (the Socialist Party), but things have evolved since then. Here I will try to describe the current situation of the far left. Les Republicans’s candidate, Francois Fillon, has had a bit of a tough time. It has been revealed that his wife, Penelope Fillon, was being paid as an assistant while he was a minister. Not a problem in itself but for about nine years she was paid first €3900 and then €7900 per month, a total of 500,000 euros (£430,000) for a job that sources claim she never actually did. Causing further...

Copeland, Corbyn and the future of nuclear

The by-election in Copeland in Cumbria focused attention on the Labour Party’s attitude to nuclear energy. The Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant is the largest employer in the constituency and the previous Labour MP Jamie Reed is leaving politics to work in the nuclear industry. Over the last 30 years the default position of the left has been to oppose nuclear energy. However recently Corbyn visited the constituency and told Labour members that nuclear power would be part of Britain’s “energy mix” under a Labour government. This statement has caused some controversy on the left. Socialists...

Help Labour in Copeland

The resignation of MPs Jamie Reed (Copeland) and Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) will have not caused Corbyn supporters in the Labour Party any sorrow. Constant critics of the democratically-elected leader who have decided to leave their jobs for much better-paid positions at the Sellafield nuclear plant and the Victoria and Albert Museum will not get much of a send-off. However, it is now vital that the we mobilise to get Labour victories in both seats. Labour last lost the Copeland constituency in 1931, the year Ramsay MacDonald led a right wing split from the party. The seat that...

The history of the Progressive Alliance

The result of the Richmond Park by-election has encouraged more calls for Labour to enter a “Progressive Alliance” to oppose “hard Brexit” and the resurgent populist right. Memories must be short, as only last year the Lib Dems were an integral part of a government attacking migrants, the disabled and the poor. It’s not just an alliance with the Lib Dems that should be opposed. The idea of a “progressive alliance” per se should be also opposed. Labour for all its faults is a mass working-class party. A party that is both structurally and organically part of the broader labour movement. The...

Sanders: Whither the “political revolution”?

This is an extraordinary time as we could be at a turning point in American political life. Sanders is receiving mass support for the message of Occupy — the 99% versus the 1%. He has used his candidacy to popularize key radical demands: $15 and a union, an end to mass incarceration, universal healthcare, free public higher education, legalizing millions of immigrants, a carbon tax, and banning fracking, to name a few, even if articulating them within a social democratic framework; impacting millions who were unfamiliar with such ideas, or had dismissed them as impossible. Sanders says there...

Greater Manchester mayor — doubly undemocratic

The selection of a Labour candidate for mayor of the Greater Manchester region is under way. Elected mayors were part of the deal between George Osborne and the ten leaders of the Greater Manchester councils for devolution, despite the lack of any democratic mandate for the plan as a whole, and particularly the control of those devolved powers by a mayor. (An elected mayor was overwhelmingly rejected in a referendum in Manchester in 2012.) The Labour procedures for selection of a candidate for the election in May 2017 have been equally top down. The National Executive has drawn up rules which...

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