have you quit the labour party yet?

Not very.

UKIP was so "succesful" it didn't know what to do with their potential influence and drowned in their own unexpected sudden found wealth (and dumb assery).

England is still a two-party country. As long as there's no proportional representation electoral system, this will not change. Apart from if Labour is salvageable at all, no third party - like the Greens - will ever have enough leverage to act as a pressure group. Any third party is too insignificant number-wise to make a meaningful dent into anything. Heck, even the rise of a more left, grassrootsy Cromryn pressure group - pressure from within the party - got washed away and Starmerized.

wait, ukip clearly succeeded (or is about to), i mean that's not seriously in question is it?

I think that if you think a pressure group on Labour could work that means you still think Labour is inherently salvageable. I'm agnostic on this but it doesn't seem to be the consensus here.

― Daniel_Rf, Saturday, 20 June 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Just following the logic of that thread. A party running on a left-wing anti racist platform could get 6-8 million votes, not get a seat and depress the Labour vote. Can totally see that scaring the shit out of Labour.

Apart from if Labour is salvageable at all, no third party - like the Greens - will ever have enough leverage to act as a pressure group.

There was a referendum, not that long ago, that could have led to the break up of the United Kingdom, thanks largely to the electoral success of a third political party - a success, which continues to this day.

... in fact, the third party in UK politics.

I’m not sure UKIP is an unqualified success insofar as much if not all of their DNA is already overwhelmingly present within the Tory Party. They just accelerated the inevitable.

Exception to the rule tbf. This is chicken or the egg stuff but UKIP seems more on par w/ how A LOT of Tories think anyway, instead of some third party throwing the wheel into a completely different direction. Tories wanted the referendum, Tories wanted out of the EU, as much as UKIP. UKIP gave Tories an excuse to show their own tough side, you could say.

xp yeah otm, that

The parliamentary Tory Party did not want out of the EU though.

the titular question of thread has been answered quite clearly by Scottish voters in the last decade, yes they have.

Sturgeon was quite openly hostile to Corbyn, any SNP leader has to tread carefully around coalition talk, but she seemed to go a bit further to distance herself from him with personalised comments like " I'm no fan of him but...". I bet she will be a bit more cordial towards Sir Melty-face.

I'm sure she doesn't care much either way, the Labour Party are completely irrelevant in Scotland.

Of course they might not be if there was PR, the saviour of minor parties the world over!

A party running on a left-wing anti racist platform could get 6-8 million votes, not get a seat and depress the Labour vote. Can totally see that scaring the shit out of Labour.

There is absolutely no way that such a party would get anywhere near that. Even UKIP in 2015 didn't break 3m. But they probably wouldn't need to in order to change Labour policy on specific issues. Infiltrating the Green Party is probably a better route.

Green-LibDems/Libdem-Greens, they have both shown in different ridiculous extremes what they are truly about in the last decade, when push comes to shove. it's quite clear neither can stand the idea of even a mildly centre-left party getting anywhere near power (even if they want to wear different shirts now), so they are both pretty much a dead end at the moment for people hankering for a meaningful opposition party imo. The Greens are the worst offenders at positioning themselves to the left of Labour, and then shitting the bed and aligning themselves with the likes of Soubz, and many won't forget this.

I think the pandemic showed there is potentially very bad situation coming for millions of regular voters (+ incoming new voters) whose anger could be harnessed if Labour stays quiet. 6-8 was more late night speculation but perhaps higher than the UKIP number.

This is where UKIP from the left breaks down as this would need to be more like Syriza or what have you where it comes down to a more socialist platform, but it depends on where the next crisis comes from.

I’m not sure anything has held Labour together more than the fact that it’s immensely expensive and difficult to run a major political party - as CHUKTIG found out, even with a sympathetic press and name recognition. Absent of the billionaire backing and free press handed to UKIP, I think the absolute minimum a splinter party would need, for resources and genuine leverage, would be to peel off Labour’s union backing. That strikes me as unlikely.

I don’t think it would be implausible to have a DSA-style organisation independent of Labour coming up with ideas, running organised small-l labour campaigns and providing strategic endorsements to Labour (or Green) candidates.

There are a few non-Labour affiliated unions aren't there? Besides, I think a group that asks questions about the wastage of subscription money to ineffective unions and Labour could be another starting point.

Good point on DSA. Momentum is seen as our version of it but it isn't.

A path, which the Lib Dems have been utilising for years*, is to target seats in local elections and see how you do - people seem more likely to give small parties a whirl there.

Or of course the path the most important party of the last election took was to win 29 MEPs.

*slightly complicated by the fact that the Lib Dems now have the name of being good in local government.

Yeah, think it's time.

Feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.

to quote Longshanks : A man does good work when he rids himself of shit

even I have folded

going through my direct debits, aside from pissing £50 a month away on a home insurance policy my ex (who left in 2013) set up for me I discovered to my amusement that I never quit the Greens, they can stay for now lol

Not me.

Angrily composing a resignation email in my head

Angrily composing a resignation email in my head

Felt good to send mine off even tho I'm aware the Hackney North & Stoke Newington branch is unlikely to feel any different about this decision than I do.

Angrily forgetting till now my membership of the Green Party in my head

Right, I can't see any other option but to resign Lab membership. This is heat of the moment stuff but I also feel that it's rationally the right thing to do, coming off the back of lots of other stuff I've thought about in the cold light of day. What's everyone else thinking?

— Alex Niven (@Alex_Niven) June 25, 2020

Stubborn it me

This is v well put.

the good thing about Corbyn wasn't that he might Win And Do Socialism, which was always very unlikely. But he did help folk to imagine some kind of ecosocialist long game, & exposed a new generation to the systematic complicity of British public life in their immiseration

— Rory Scothorne (@shirkerism) June 25, 2020

thank god the kneejerk lefty defence of the BBC is mostly over now

there isn't really any viable electoral platform to move to if you're leaving labour. staying in labour seems like paying some losers to submit you to a series of low-grade indignities to no end. the alternative is no party affiliation or the dreaded Leninist groupuscule route

I'm fortunate in that I don't live In the uk and could, theoretically, disengage from the political culture there. can't seem to manage it completely, but I'm definitely moderating the dosage I ingest. I likely have the right to vote in one more general election and seeing as my constituency is safe SNP with Labour in second-place I likely won't bother my arse voting.

There are alternatives if you don't live in England, to be fair.

The SNP and the mainstream nationalist political culture are also pure shite but

unless you meant voting for the shinners in the 6 counties

a thing I saw on twitter the other day wrt BLM protests in Glasgow - a nationalist saying that people should take their saltires and make it an indy reunion. kind of encapsulates the ideology of the indy movement in 2020

The SNP and the mainstream nationalist political culture are also pure shite but

Oh I know that but it's a moot point because no-one's voting Labour in Scotland anyway.

god the "labour together" report's appendix on Scotland (which appears to be from 2018 for some reason) was some dire reading:

1 in 4 labour voters in Scotland in 2015 voted for the tories in 2017, and 48% of labour voters in Scotland thought Ruth Davidson was doing a good job as party leader

1 in 4 labour voters in Scotland in 2015 voted for the tories in 2017,

They're all over Facebook, my sister seems to know lots of them and I just this minute got into a barney with about five of them on Facebook because my sister posted a story on half a million people being on the beach at Bournemouth which had a headline blaming 'Boris the Buffoon'.

is that just from pure former Labour Yoons/Brexiteers?

they're all No voters but not all of them are Brexiteers

yeah sorry i meant either/or

Unionists. Most of them are probably Brexiteers too, just to annoy everyone else.

You see, the Labour Party's on a hiding to nothing in Scotland, I've got left wing pro-independence friends on FB now talking about Starmer being Blair Mk. 2 and it's all Red Tory this Red Tory that.

The Scottish appendix noted that while voters Labour lost in Scotland to the SNP liked Corbyn and thought he was an improvement it didn't make many of them revert to voting Labour, whereas he turned off the older unionist voters

lads i'm disquieted, indulge me

Labour gained Scottish MPs in 2017.

Yes,with a gain of 9,860 votes from their modern nadir

7 seats out of 59, promptly losing 6 of them in 2019. What's even worse is that the sole remaining Scottish Labour MP, the face and big ba'heid of Labour in Scotland is Ian Fucking Murray.

to be clear about my disquiet, i am disquieted at having quit labour when my red line - RLB being sacked over fuck-all - appears to have been more a case of RLB being sacked for refusing to comply with a silly but simple request to delete a tweet

like, KS is clearly a man with deeply compromised priorities and there have been plenty of potential red lines before this that i've swanned nervously by, but.....idk. have i just tapped out of relevant political membership? ugh

if he is going to run a tight ship with ruthless discipline he might want have a word with that lad in his shadow cabinet with the history of putting out hate pamphlets about travellers, an historical offence but he should be put on notice.. no forget it, Starmer is a tory cop wanker who is all there for landowners and landlord rights