The assumption you are making there is that anyone is going to care. There were massive problems with people wrongly being turned away at polling stations at the last council elections, let alone the large number who weren't allowed to vote through having no suitable ID. There's been precious little fuss about that and no changes as a result. It's just giving the establishment what they want.
i bet we agree on everything on this. As to good luck with it, its not for me, but as I say if I did have the time/energy/inclination to get involved in party politics doing exactly what you set out seems as better an option that any other in terms of british party politics. Corbyn showed there are literally tens of thousands of people up for that work with no place to channel their energy. As a party it does seem to have a serious class problem, definitely in perception and sounds like in reality too.
No, I don't think I'm making such an assumption, tbh. I'm fully aware that they don't care, or rather they do care to the extent that voter suppression is precisely what was intended by the vermin's photo ID legislation; dedicated thread here if you're interested.
But if the mass media can't be trusted then why the fuck should we believe that the rest of this shitty, failed system can be trusted and can actually be for our interests?
too many people have faith in logic
you're always
when the point being made is obvious to everyone else
Keep your eyes and ears on high alert from the middle of this month. That is ALL I am allowed to say.
How would we do IDs for it?
My view is that we need to get over this desire for figureheads and leaders. Personality politics suits the right and not the left. We need to enable the "little people" to speak directly for themselves. In my opinion JC just wants to get on with representing Islington North and speaking his mind when he gets the chance, but he isn't going to be allowed to do that.
Where did I say I trusted the system? I just think that right now if we look at it more realistically than the mainstream parties are currently doing, don't just look at it through a media filter intended to make us feel powerless, and look for how WE exploit its weaknesses, then there's an opportunity to at least make some inroads. We aren't going to have a different system any time soon. So let's see what we can do with what we currently have.
As an ex-member couldn’t agree more!
It's a tragedy that keeps being repeated. Somebody has a good idea for a political party that could really change things for the better. It gets set up with good intentions, but within years if not months, a few big egos turn it into a vehicle for their own ambitions and a good proportion of the membership dutifully fall in line behind them and it becomes yet another waste of time. Meanwhile if anything gets set up without those big egos willing to pursue personality politics just about everybody ignores it until some self important poser joins it and starts getting themselves into the newspapers or on TV, and that too becomes a waste of time. The Green Party was already in trouble, but if effectively died in the 90s with Green 2000. TUSC has never really managed to create a national grass roots upwards democratic structure and most of the people who could have made that happen have either left it or burned out. Everything Galloway has set up has run aground on his ego. The SWP have never really attempted to do anything other than try to grow the SWP by trying to control other initiatives and thereby strangling them practically at birth. Pretty much everything else has rapidly been turned into somebody's personal fiefdom. The vast majority of the people who left the Greens over Green 2000, and left the Labour Party after Corbyn, have retreated completely from electoral politics and only do single issue campaigning or direct action now. I will give Transform a try and see if the constitution can be amended to prevent it going the way of everything else before it is too late. However I think that will be an uphill task because 99% of the people who should join won't until they see somebody well known on TV telling them they should, at which point it will probably be too late.
has the perfect political party ever existed that has avoided all the traps I wonder... possibly it's impossible and intrinisic to the system in which they exist....
Good idea. Let's have a vote on it.
That is like a virgin giving advice on sexual technique.
The Labour Party was at least largely a positive thing for nearly a century. I don't think it's worth aiming for perfection. When it comes to political parties I'm happy to settle for basically democratic, largely useful, and not totally corrupt. Currently there are two amendments to the Transform constitution amongst those waiting to be voted on. One states that no representative of the party should ever directly receive any donation over £100 (I put that one in), the other states that they should ever receive any donations directly at all. If nothing along those lines is adopted I will probably leave fairly soon after the first party representative gets elected. Corruption has always been endemic in British politics, we just pretend it only really counts if it happens somewhere abroad.
So basically you trust and believe in the system. It would explain why you believe in the contradiction of 'anti-establishment candidates'.
Not sure that 'Going back to the 1970s' swipe is the zinger the vermin think it is.
I was just saying this to someone today. Because the 70s started over 50 years ago so most people aren't old enough to remember any issues, plus you can't really make a claim that the outcomes of voting in a party 50 years later would be exactly the same, plus we've had a Labour administration since then that didn't 'take us back to the 1970s'. Plus the most recent round of strikes and high inflation was.... last year.
All that...and the fact that it was a decade, possibly the last decade (?), in which most ordinary working people could expect to be be able to house themselves reasonably affordably, enjoy job security, a functioning health service, public services, a functioning local state, be part of organised labour and expect community cohesion etc. etc.
I though Brexit was about taking us back to the 70s. I thought that's what the Tories wanted.
Yeah, I think this has been much discussed on the Brexit threads; the interests behind the L campaign certainly exploited the nostalgic correlation between the better times of pre'73 and the UK's non-membership of the EEC. Maybe some Leave voters did want that, but back in 2016 most vermin wanted to remain.
