Left groups and people

Maya Ilany is the deputy director of Yachad, which campaigns for a two-state settlement to the Israel/Palestine conflict. Eric Lee is the editor of LabourStart, and when living in Israel in the 1990s ran the BibiWatch website. They participated in a panel on “the future of the Israeli left” at Ideas for Freedom 2019, alongside Tom Harris. Maya and Eric spoke to Solidarity (in their personal capacities) about the context for the discussion. There’s still a majority for two states What are the prospects for the left, following the poor results in the 9 April elections? Maya Ilany: When we talk...

On 31 May, Pete Willsman, a veteran of the Labour left and a current member of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), was suspended by the Labour Party on charges of antisemitism. The suspension followed publication of comments made by Willsman at a chance meeting with a journalist. How should the left respond? Simon Nelson and Sean Matgamna present different views. A victim of panic Sean Matgamna The new Pete Willsman affair shows yet again that you cannot effectively fight antisemitism unless you have a working definition of what it is. In my opinion, the definition should be advocacy...

Ken Livingstone, billed since January as debating with us at the Ideas for Freedom summer school on 22- 23 June, has now withdrawn, pleading family commitments. Sean Matgamna responds with an open letter. Ken: it’s a shame you have bottled out of our scheduled debate. I’ m bitterly disappointed. I was looking forward to kicking your butt. It’s been quite a while since I had a chance to do that. We will keep an empty chair on the platform for you in that session, and give extended speaking time to anyone ready and willing to come and argue your case. You have been an active antisemite since at...

Defining people's oppressions? I’m canvassing opinions on the call for marginalised groups of people to “define their own oppression”. The LGBT+ organising group at the National Education Union conference argued for a definition of transphobia which I agreed with. It was however defeated on the basis that there are conflicting views on what constitutes transphobia and that the amendment was anti-woman. The arguments in favour were largely that trans members had agreed on the motion and we should, as a union, listen to them. I think this is a relatively weak line of argument. For example, if a...

The veteran Marxist writer Paul Le Blanc has written the most substantial and critical account yet of the collapse of the USA’s International Socialist Organization, of which Le Blanc was himself a member, though not a central one. The ISO was the most active revolutionary socialist organisation in the USA, with 800 or 900 members. At its convention in late February 2019, opposition groups displaced its longstanding leaders with a platform promising wider activism. Le Blanc (who was outside the USA at the time) reports “at the convention’s conclusion there seemed among people I trust...

It wasn’t just Alistair Campbell types, Blairites, who defected from Labour to the Lib Dems or the Greens in the 23 May Euro-elections. Many left-wing Labour supporters defected too, or didn’t vote, disgusted by Labour’s equivocation on Brexit. In July we will get a new Tory leader and prime minister, almost certainly a hard-Brexiter. How they will negotiate the difficulty, which destroyed May, of getting a parliamentary majority for any Brexit formula at all, we don’t know. They will be under pressure to steer a course capable of drawing back millions of Tory voters who on 23 May went for...

On 23 May, the United Nations General Assembly voted 116 to 6 for the UK to end its occupation of the Chagos Islands. Three years before ceding independence to Mauritius in 1968, the UK separated off the islands from the rest of Mauritius to keep control of them, deported the entire population, and leased the largest island, Diego Garcia, to the USA for a huge military base. The Chagossians have been fighting ever since then for the right to go back. A major force in that fight has been the Mauritius socialist group Lalit. Lalit comments: “So, the struggle that Lalit has been spearheading for...

In the 23-26 May 2019 elections to the European parliament, social-democratic parties and left-of-the-left parties floundered in the face of rising nationalism. The mainstream social-democratic group in the European Parliament lost 45 seats; the left-of-the-left grouping lost 13. The mantle of “left” opposition to the rising right seems to have gone to the Greens and Liberal Democrats, who gained 19 and 42 seats respectively across the continent. At the time of writing, it seems likely that the European Parliament will remain dominated by parties of the mainstream right. The single largest...

Left2030 is a website and statement set up a few months ago by people on the anti-Brexit left of the Labour Party – generally the soft left, with a scattering of more radical people. The initial signatories include Paul Mason, Zoe Williams, Paul Hilder, Michael Chessum, Sam Tarry, Mary Kaldor, Manuel Cortes, and Luke Cooper, and Labour MPs Clive Lewis, Alex Sobel, Paul Sweeney, Rachael Maskell, and Preet Gill. The founding statement has lots of nods towards what sound like good political positions, which is good, but much of it is fairly unclear. Also, strangely given who set it up, it refers...

This is an article about the “autistic screeching” image posted on Twitter. It is not an article about how the image is “offensive”. That wouldn’t need an article. It’s pretty much self-evident to anyone who considers the feelings of others. The problem here is not so much the image as the politics behind it — a political outlook that sees autistic people and others as fair game for mockery, that lionises a stereotypical “normal” and weaponises it against people who dissent or diverge. That’s what this article is about. It’s an appeal to take this shit seriously and to oppose it. This image...