have you quit the labour party yet?

If he's advocating a UKIP for the left what's the single specific issue it would be based around? There would surely have to be one.

Have been pondering the concept of BLM as an international political party tho

I'd fully support a breakaway party, even if it might attract some cranks and idiots that would need weeding out and might be a shitty experience. The Labour Party is dead & buried, something new is needed and even if it takes decades to even start making a useful impact on two party hegemony, it is better than drinking suicide-lager inside your despair-shed in the garden of absolute hopelessness.

"If he's advocating a UKIP for the left what's the single specific issue it would be based around? There would surely have to be one."

Socialism.

UKIP's never been anything but a joke as a political party, it was a hugely successful pressure group but it will never challenge tory supremacy (nor did it ever want to, really). With its objective acheived it will now gladly fade away.

xpost "socialism" hardly as concrete a demand as "we want Britain to leave the EU".

I was trying to avoid that answer as I don't see it as a single issue!

UKIP approach was 'with this one weird trick (leaving the EU) we can achieve ___'. Everyone (open to it) could understand that as a setting you untick. Socialism is a hundred different settings to recalibrate from tax bands to equal pay to defunding police to enforced quotas...

Workers rights?

Socialism.

Was wondering about that one myself.

Such a confusing word. What kind of socialism?

socialism put through the legitimate concerns mangler, so they are marginally less racist than the Labour Right dominated PLP and have better slogans on their cups: Let's have a membership vote on Controlled Migration, comrade!

if Centre-left Corbynism is getting called hard-left and Marxists by ignorant cunts in the UK then I say go hard-left, because you are going to called every name under the sun anyway.

sorry . shit-typing/shit-posting!

xpost "socialism" hardly as concrete a demand as "we want Britain to leave the EU".

― Daniel_Rf, Saturday, 20 June 2020

The last two lab manifestos were pretty concrete in terms of a set of demands. Obv a UKIP of the left wouldn't be about one issue, as it's about being a pressure group on the Lab party.

Yes but how successful would UKIP have been if it had made its message a set of demands, as opposed to one specific one? Not that I buy the "too many different ideas!" line with regards to the last election, but it's apples and oranges.

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.

I mean, how successful is the UK’s Green Party?

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.