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14th November Movement for Left Unity

assuming have butchers on ignore sass- there are two different left unities. The one you are on about is not the subject of this thread
 
No one called to support the socialist platform, apparently. Suspicions of a stitch up already circulating.
 
Decent attendance (not 600 though - more like 400). All taken up with tedious internal left attempts at building factional platforms​
 
Decent attendance (not 600 though - more like 400). All taken up with tedious internal left attempts at building factional platforms​
there was a, what, one hour, debate about platforms. Hardly unreasonable.

Not a great turnout tho. Not terrible, but no better than anything that went before.
 
Shocking! A new organisation trying to decide what its constitution should be. How bloody ridiculous.

(campaign priorities are the last of the three things on the agenda, so it should get more interesting then. A little)
 
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A bold decision has been taken!

They're going to call themselves....

(can you bear the tension?)



Left Unity
 
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2fbfa6ba-5813-11e3-82fc-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2m9KQrWs7Yet, within a few minutes of the meeting starting, a familiar division emerges. There are 10 people around the table, including Todd, her partner, her mother and her father (her grandfather was general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union). The latter has a problem with David Smith, another attendee, who is accused of being insufficiently working class (he went to university.) The mood quickly darkens. If Northampton is indicative of Left Unity’s future then, according to one attendee, “it could dissolve on the basis of what happened at Kronstadt”.

Dear me, I hope that's not right...
 
It was in another thread actually.

I received an odd email from my local Left Unity group today. They asked if recipients of the emails minded the fact 'left' language was used, such as 'comrade' and 'solidarity'. Apparently the sender had received complaints from some for her persistence in using these words.

On the one hand this seems fair enough, as moving beyond the old left (it's strategy as well as it's culture) is necessary. I can't help feel this is just surface-level change though. Changing the language, without changing the methods, structure and even aims of the left, will not make much difference. If it's the same old people, organising in the same old way, debating about the same old things, then Left Unity will go nowhere.
 
Northhampton Left Unity in the F/T, part of a wider article on 'wither the left'

Bit of an odd article I thought (front page of the life & arts weekend supplement with a big cringe inducing picture of Owen Jones and Laura Bates)
pic.jpg

Most telling part (in relation to left unity's thinking) I thought was when Salman Shaheen said left unity wanted to be the 'UKIP of the left'. At first I thought, interesting, might be something in this, until the next paragraph went on to explain that this was a metaphor that expresses the need for a 'gravitational pull on labour from the left, similar to how UKIP moves tories to the right'

Even the FT journalist pulled up this bollocks for what it is, pulling on the work of others he points out this metaphor is misguided (on both sides), that lefty unity has no grounding in popular sentiment, and most importantly that far from the idea that an effective far left and ukip have different audiences, they shouldn't, and that UKIP is 'the most working class party in Britain'

Yet here we have the brightest and best minds on the conservative left pushing the lie that UKIP represent nothing more than a home for disaffected right wing tories. Was pointed out far back in this thread that once more we have a project rallied around unity rather than an analysis, much less a strategy, and that it's all about a starting point of what 'we must be' rather than looking at the situation objectively first, looking at what they 'must do' and let the political programme flow from that. But, no. Dead in the water, box ticking.
 
That meeting looked terrible. The standing orders person at the front was clueless about what was going on so I can't imagine what anyone else was supposed to think.
 
1385852858-new-radical-political-party-of-the-left-founded-in-london_3386450.jpg


Photo by Peter Marshall


Owen Jones lookalike sitting next to Ken, who unlike Rees and others clearly has no intention of dominating his new party.
 
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