Hodges is a weird fucker. He's well at home at the Torygraph, where idiot Tories call him "leftist scum". Little do they realise how much they have in common.
CLASS is seen as having run out of steam (already!) - and a miscarried bureaucratic attempt to "do a thinktank"
A network being set up by media lefties like Jones will, by definition, be top-down. And what happens when your open structures mean that people decide to start attacking Labour, when you think it's too soon? Maybe you'll have to force these idiots to be pluralists.
And what other think tanks - esp the labour linked ones - is there a red pepper presence on?
By who? Who views it like that? I didn't get asked. Who here did?
It seems to me - maybe I'm naive! - but if you want a locally-rooted grassroots network then you have to make sure it is owned by the grassroots, you have to see that it's initiated by local groups. This means that celebrities like Owen Jones will have to commit themselves to trying to build a network that they don't themselves entirely agree with, and submit to the priorities of anti-cuts groups.
This is has been the thrust of my posts here - and i hope people have been picking up on that, because it seems to me that articul8 (and by extension his bubble) have already decided that they are the ones who own this vague proposal.
I just assumed you were worried that the Greens would suffer electorally
Agreed. Yes, Syriza is a good example of what can be done, within a particular polity, to resist. That really doesn't mean that such an example represents a "best possible hope" transplanted bodily to the UK, except for the "bottom-up" nature of the movement, something that I'm not convinced that Labour (or indeed articul8) would be too happy about.
Genuine question based on my ignorance of UK politics: do these community coalitions you speak of already exist. Which group are you in, that you say is so much better than CoR?
I'm in Brent Fightback - it is small and has serious work to do to engage a wider base of people - but it brings together the LRC, Greens, TUSC, SWP along with a local housing campaign, an unemployed workers campaign, NHS campaigners, Anti-Academy campaigners and a campaign to save a local pub/social space. Other than the question of elections (where TUSC want to stand, the Greens want to stand, LRC would be kicked out of the party if we supported them etc.) then it's going OK. But although we get covered occasionally in the local rag, there's nothing similar on a national scale.
Sounds like a good group. What do the other people in Brent Fightback think of this Network idea? Won't the SWP in your local group want everyone to be in CoR? Again, practical problems.
And they aren't strong enough to push that through. I don't see the idea of a network as an alternative to a group like this - it would be about creating a framework of institutional support at a national level and have some form of national profile without the kind of unelected and unaccountable bureaucratic directives of a CoR/UtR
In articul8's case it's more of a scaffold
