by Roger Silverman Roger Silverman As an NEC member, I would campaign vigorously to restore the supremacy of party conference, uphold the democratic right of open selection of candidates for office, end arbitrary suspensions, and put forward radical socialist policies along the lines of the 2019 election manifesto. I was born into a Labour family and have been a lifelong party activist. … [Read more...]
Britain: The Pandemic, the Working Class and the Left
By Andrew Burgin The coronavirus pandemic is accelerating across the world. Every few days the scope and scale of the disease is increasing. Hundreds of thousands of people are being infected, many thousands have already died and many tens of thousands will die. In China, where the outbreak was first identified, it has been brought under control, but elsewhere it is spreading rapidly. In … [Read more...]
Editorial: On the Brink Spring 2020
This is no time for glib slogans. December’s election result is a serious setback. It clears the way for the most brutal Tory attacks yet seen on our living standards and our democratic rights, destroying the last remaining vestiges of the welfare state and plunging into despair a generation of youth desperate for the chance of a future. It also puts at risk the advances made in the last four … [Read more...]
UK Election 2019
This election was a big defeat for the Labour Party. There will be much debate and questioning in its aftermath. The enemies of socialism will do their best to use the election result to try and destroy the socialist message. Did Labour promise too much? Britain is the sixth richest country in the world. The Attlee government could afford to introduce and fund the NHS directly … [Read more...]
The 2019 Labour Party Conference – a brief report
Roger Silverman It won’t surprise many of us to learn that the recent Labour Party conference was nothing remotely like the press and media reports. For them, it was a disaster: rival factions were tearing the party to pieces over Brexit and anti-semitism, and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was finished. This was not the conference I attended, as delegate from my constituency party. The … [Read more...]
The Myth of 1983
By Eddie Doveton "The Labour party is in danger more mortal today than at any point in the over 100 years of its existence... If Jeremy Corbyn becomes the leader, it won’t be a defeat like 1983 or 2015 at the next election. It will mean rout, possibly annihilation..." (Tony Blair, writing in the Guardian, 13th August 2015) A myth is a story handed down by a tradition, a story that … [Read more...]
The Labour Left Alliance
A new democratic and genuine grassroots alliance of the Left in the UK Labour Party launched this summer. The Labour Left Alliance is a network of national and local left groups and individuals, who recognise the vacuum within the Left in the Labour Party and who want to organise democratically and transparently in order to: Support Corbyn (and by extension, his supporters) against attacks by … [Read more...]
Labour and Britain’s Crisis
Beneath the immediate crisis over whether, when and how Britain is to leave the European Union lies a deeper trend: the chronic decline and death agony of British capitalism. Where once it was the “workshop of the world”, today it is losing its last remnants of productive industry, most of them by now assembly plants owned by Japanese, Indian and other foreign companies. Where once it ruled “an … [Read more...]
The Birth of the Labour Party: Struggles within the Labour Movement
A hundred and ten years ago, in 1909, the Miners Federation of Great Britain affiliated to what was then a new workers party, the Labour Party. The mining union was the largest union in Britain and its newly won commitment to Labour marked a triumph in a struggle to win the trade union movement to the creation of a political party to represent working people. Eddie Doveton writes about this early … [Read more...]
