ALB
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They are not former members but former Trotskyists who seem to have independently come to much the same conclusions as us.
Since he says “I” it might even be the view just of the author.
There won’t be many more of them than the average number of members of one of our branches.
They will be well aware of us. They have in fact been accused by those they were planning to form a “mass communist party” with of “SPGBism” (the plan fell through because they discovered that the others were dyed-in-the-wool Leninists). See the thread on this under Events.
It looks as if the Thinking About Socialism group are going to join the new party to try to put over what we can recognise as the case for socialism:
I don’t suppose they will be welcome unless they are prepared to campaign at election time for the new party and its programme of reforms. Which of course would compromise them.
This local by-election result from yesterday in an area just outside Nottingham is interesting.
CON 405 (28.6%, down 16.5)
RFM 400 (28.3%)
BA 275 (19.4%)
LAB 244 (17.2%, down 20.1)
GRN 70 (4.9%, down 6.7)
IND 21 (1.5%)BA is the Broxtowe Alliance, formed as a breakaway of councillors from Labour and presumably a candidate group for Corbyn’s new party.
If this result was to be repeated elsewhere both Labour and the Greens would have something to worry about.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cewxrzq0489o
As this is just down from our offices in Clapham High Street I know the area too as a car driver and as a pedestrian. At one point the activist cyclist suggests that the side road in question (it is hardly an intersection) is a rat run, ie a short cut for cars. I can’t see from where to where. It is rather an exit on to a main road for those living in the area. Anyway, it is often closed at weekends. I suspect the problem for cyclists is that the main road is down hill at that point and that they inadvertently find themselves going faster.
He also omits to say that, at the pedestrian crossing with lights further back, some cyclists take no notice of the red light. But that of course is par for the course.
He says that the road was not built for cars. True, it was built for horse-drawn traffic including, being Clapham, omnibuses.
It seems that Trump is considering doing one good thing — abandoning the Orwellian Newspeak name of the department for war:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/trump-defense-department-to-department-of-war/
Here is the attitude of the so-called “Communist” Party of Britain (the Morning Star lot) to the proposed new party. In an article in the August issue of their paper Unity under the heading “Communists ‘broadly positive’ about the Corbyn/Sultana new Left Party”, its General Secretary, Robert Griffiths, writes:
“The experience of previous electoral initiatives on the left pose two other problems that will have to be confronted: firstly, the readiness of the ultra-leftist sects to infiltrate broad-based mass movements in order to divide them, pose as a ‘left opposition’ to the leadership and recruit from those they influence and mislead ….”
He doesn’t say how he thinks this problem should be dealt with.
This is good. And Starmer too.
“France summoned Italy’s ambassador following “unacceptable” comments by Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini mocking President Emmanuel Macron for supporting Ukraine, diplomatic sources said Friday.
Ambassador Emanuela D’Alessandro was summoned Thursday after Salvini, whose party is a junior partner in the Italian government, said that if Macron favours sending European troops to Ukraine as a part of a security force, he can put on a helmet and “go himself”.https://www.barrons.com/news/france-summons-italian-ambassador-over-macron-attack-44816cba
For the record here is the result:
HOUNSLOW Cranford
DHILLON, Hira Singh (Labour) 951
SIDHU, Gurpreet Singh (Conservative) 679
SINGH, Khushwant (Reform UK) 405
VIRDI, Gurpal Singh (Green) 156
LEITOIU, Miruna (Liberal Democrats) 145
Turnout: 21.65%
There were 19 rejected ballot papers.Labour won but their share of the vote fell from over 60% to 41%.
The response to the QR on the leaflets we distributed was not nothing.
Two letters from Party members are published in this week’s Weekly Worker answering the claim of a member of the so-called Communist Party of Britain (the Morning Star lot) that the world isn’t ripe for socialism as enough capacity to produce food to feed the world’s population properly doesn’t currently exist and won’t for decades (as well as his defence of Lenin’s false distinction between socialism and communism where “socialism” is his name for state capitalism).
Who ever thought that the free marketeers weren’t stupid.
It’s a bit of jump (and fault of logic) to move from saying some people are stupid to saying all people are stupid.
Now they are accusing Trump of “state capitalism” and “MAGA Marxism”:
https://fortune.com/2025/08/12/maga-marxist-maoist-trump-assault-free-market-capitalism-socialism/
Trump seems to be saying that it was NATO’s bid to expand eastwards right up the Russian border by incorporating Ukraine that provoked the Russian invasion as the rulers of the Russian state regarded this as an existential threat.
At least that is how his statement that the war would never have happened if he had been President on 2023 can be interpreted. In other words, he would have backed down in the face of Russian opposition and not insisted on Ukraine joining NATO.
Whether he would have done at the time is another matter. In any event, he is now saying that Ukraine shouldn’t join NATO, which is a shift from the position the rulers of the US took at the time. This could also be interpreted as admission by the US of the failure of its previous policy.
Another example to record of everyday matter-of-fact acceptance by practitioners and journalists that banks can’t make loans without deposits. This time an article in today’s Times on non-bank financial institutions that raise money to lend to businesses to buy out another business known as “private credit”.
“Many argue that central banks are unnecessarily alarmed. Private credit funds may better because they provide semi -permanent capital, unlike banks which are dependent on their short-term deposits staying steady.
… Ludovic Phalippou, professor of financial economics at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, … told a House of Lords committee last month: ‘They are, in fact a very natural type of lender -— pools of committed capital making long-term loans. Structurally, this is far more stable than deposit-based banking’.”Nobody dares suggest of course that private credit institutions conjure up the capital that they lend out of thin air.
If there really were a ‘deep state’ what would be the point of socialists trying to win an election? It wouldn’t give the majority of socialist delegates in the central law-making body control of the state. It would justify the insurrectionists’ view that the only way to overthrow capitalism would be to smash the capitalist state in a violent uprising.
Lord Palmerston put it rather well in 1848 when he was Foreign Secretary:
“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
He later became Prime Minister. No ‘deep state’ was needed to tell him what policies to pursue. He already knew.
