Now that the significance of the EU electoral debacle has set in the outcry is strident. Even Lenin's Tomb ( situated in the SWP camp)has had enough. Phil Hearse offers a straight talking analysis in a piece aptly titled If this debacle doesn’t wake up the British Left, absolutely nothing will.
On similar lines:
Locally , Duroyan Fertl has a sharp analysis of the results here in the GLW elist.
The tragedy is that the British far left has had years of hard Labour to get its proverbial shit together and has cynically squandered it.
Which part of that do they not understand?
Even the initiative for the No2REU package had to come from outside the main socialist left orgs. Crappy program. Formed late in the show. But hey, it's something ....!
I don't mean to suggest that regrouping the left is a walk in the park. The Australian experience has been very difficult to negotiate (see:Uniting the Socialist Left: the Australian Experience for a review)
But at least we've been able here to keep our eyes on the prize and rather than wank on about unity and collective action, actually work at the coal face creating a small beginning pointed in that direction. Our task has often been handicapped by the very same political myopia that infects the English left -- a myopia that the UK left exports via a distribution network of various toy international franchises.
But will or can the English left change its spots?
See also:
As Lenin writes:We fluffed it, boys and girls. It has been obvious for some time that a fundamental crisis of social democracy was brewing, and that this was going to be deeper than ever before, and that nothing the left could do - even if it was so deranged as to want this - could rescue it. We watched a yawning political vacuum open up and, due to our shibboleths, totems and taboos, our inward-lookingness, our traditions of feuding, and many other flaws, we failed to fill it.Elections are not the be all and end all, and ultimately what will matter far more than such votes will be what we do between elections. But this was one important way for us to assert ourselves in this crisis, and we handed the initiative to everyone but the radical left. I am not saying we should hammer ourselves over the head repeatedly with such facts, but I think it would be healthy to begin by acknowledging them and resolving never to let that happen again.
On similar lines:
Phil Hearse points out: The outcome of the county council and Euro elections means that the British left – the left to the left of New Labour – has to wake up and break out of its dire sectarian, bureaucratic and factional mindsets. Nothing is more shameful than the lack of of united left slate, around a minimal set of demands in the interests of the working class, in these elections. The near-absence of the Left from the electoral field was one important reason – though far from the only one – that such a large number of the protest votes against the main parties went to the hard right UKIP and the fascist BNP. It is shameful that the Left abandons so much of the electoral field to the far right because of nothing more than hardened, bone headed, factional idiocy – topped off by bureaucratic exclusions and anathemas.
Locally , Duroyan Fertl has a sharp analysis of the results here in the GLW elist.
The tragedy is that the British far left has had years of hard Labour to get its proverbial shit together and has cynically squandered it.
Which part of that do they not understand?
Even the initiative for the No2REU package had to come from outside the main socialist left orgs. Crappy program. Formed late in the show. But hey, it's something ....!
I don't mean to suggest that regrouping the left is a walk in the park. The Australian experience has been very difficult to negotiate (see:Uniting the Socialist Left: the Australian Experience for a review)
But at least we've been able here to keep our eyes on the prize and rather than wank on about unity and collective action, actually work at the coal face creating a small beginning pointed in that direction. Our task has often been handicapped by the very same political myopia that infects the English left -- a myopia that the UK left exports via a distribution network of various toy international franchises.
But will or can the English left change its spots?
See also:
