have you quit the labour party yet?

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

"to be clear about my disquiet"

People are dying Louie, nobody cares.

quite right, let's take ILX offline until the virus goes away

"people are dying" is obvious a semi-decent reason for why KS didn't have to bat an eyelid over this nonsense, but alas, people dying is rarely enough of a cause for focus

Lol.

Anyway thought this was a good quit don't quit reflection.

I've said this before, but maybe worth restating, "Stay & Fight" is a fantasy position that doesn't recognise how badly the left have lost.

— Tom Gann (@Tom_Gann) June 25, 2020

If you see Labour as a "platform" to express yourself it will inevitably disappoint. If you see it as an instrumental "gateway" to inducting yourself into a movement you can work with others to change it and it will also inevitably change you and others too

— Charlie Mansell (@charliemansell) June 26, 2020

This is better than joining the Greens.

I've cancelled my Labour Party membership, and am splitting the money between Community Action on Prison Expansion (@CAPExpansion) and the National Mikey Powell Memorial Family Fund (@fund_memorial) for families affected by custody deaths.https://t.co/vqQdbIxNJT

— Dr Harry Josephine (@HarryJosieGiles) June 29, 2020

Great you posted this. People simply would not believe you today if you said Michael Foot had Labour polling at 56%, had 24-point poll leads & pushed Thatcher down to 28% (then the Labour Right wrecked and more importantly an actual war changed everything)https://t.co/upZMcr3WJ2

— Stephen Smith (@SteveNickSmith) June 29, 2020

lol, an FT journalist speaking truth to power.

On the momentum elections:

1. POH section is a disgrace, should be abolished or democratised
2. Three people who refused to sign the @Labour_Trans pledges is three people too many
3. There needs to be structural work to address problems with representation (and FM could've done better on this) https://t.co/mt8LOOcqvq

— Dan (@d_j_frost) July 1, 2020

Lol @ Tory journo Oborne looking at the Lab report:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/were-labours-antisemitism-failures-really-corbyns-fault/

(Of course it's mainly a question of journalistic integrity for him, but still..)

That the traditional media has failed, almost entirely, to report these suspensions and the ongoing legal proceedings is, to say the least, odd. It has also largely failed to report the contents of the leaked report. Newspapers and broadcasters have no interest in publicising a document that asks serious questions about the narrative they pushed so unquestioningly regarding Corbyn and antisemitism.

This is cowardly and irresponsible. Either they need to show that the Labour report is wrong – or they owe Jeremy Corbyn , Jennie Formby and others an apology. They at least have an obligation to report the other side of the argument.

oh, obornepaws...

It's rarely mentioned that the Tories missed out on a working majority by just 50 votes, or that those specific 2,227 votes would have required a national gain of around 116,000. This is a good @anthonybmasters analysis of the myth of Labour's near miss.https://t.co/17iDcgILd0 https://t.co/dkv5e5iBJJ

— Dorian Lynskey (@Dorianlynskey) August 9, 2020

This could be the thread for arguing over history. We can argue the toss over numbers. I think it's worth saying how many people voted for this very dysfunctional unit and maybe how many more could've done so.

They would not have gotten much through but again. An anti-imperialist in No 10. No arms to Saudi. Abbott as home sec. The emboldening of the left. This argument over numbers and what could or could not be done misses what is basic to me.

how's his Remain podcast with Dunty going? Has it run it's course now Corbyn isn't there to kick anymore. Fucking melt jerkoff!

It’s rarely mentioned that every time I see a Dorian Lynskey tweet, it’s because he’s getting #numbers due to some dogshit Labour opinion rather than whatever it is he actually enjoys.

By the way, Labour’s numbers increased in the weeks after 2017, and were strong and around 40% for much of the following year and a half. The more voters in 2017 thought Labour would win, the more likely they were to vote for them. This is all out there and established by the polls themselves and by the British Election Study.

If he wanted to go back over numbers he might want to consider the national gain required for Remain to win. And how Leave missed out on a working majority by a negative number.

Even in that optimistic scenario it's very difficult to imagine how a Corbyn minority government would have survived for very long - particularly trying to get Brexit legislation through the Commons and with Labour MPs sending blood in the water. Even a confidence and supply agreement with the SNP would have crashed on the Brexit rocks surely?

They might have won in early 2018 when they were polling level with the Tories though.