imposs1904
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It looks like the New Left of Labour Political Party is on:
https://x.com/zarahsultana/status/1940850950681554996
In case the twitter link doesn’t work, Zarah Sultana MP has announced in the past hour her resignation from the Labour Party to “. . . co-lead the founding of a new party [with Jeremy Corbyn], with other Independent MPs, campaigners and activists across the country.”
If they’ve got any sense, they’ll try and come up with some sort of electoral understanding with the Greens or they will end up sinking each other.
Sounds cynical but I wonder if the upper echelons of the Starmer leadership, staring at an electoral annihilation at the next general election, will consider doing their own ‘French Turn’?
No, not a reference to Trotsky’s French Turn of the 30s but the French Turn of the mid-80s where an unpopular French reformist government passed legislation to change the electoral system to a form of PR to ensure that Mitterand’s Le Parti socialiste weren’t completely wiped out at the 1986 National Assembly elections.
If it’s still the 8th when posting.
40 years to the day since the release of the classic Style Council album, ‘Our Favourite Shop’. (Retitled as ‘The Internationalists’ when released in North America.)
One of only five albums ever to be reviewed in the Socialist Standard (shocking, I know):
http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2013/10/capitalism-on-vinyl.html
As the National Guard are on the streets of Los Angeles, a track that still hits the mark 40 years on:
Just posting part of the June 2002 Socialist Standard on the Socialist Standard Past and Present blog, and one of the items posted was a notice for the Heather Ball pamphlet, ‘A Socialist Life’.
It turns out that this 2002 pamphlet is not currently online on the Party website, and it also looks like print copies are no longer advertised for sale so I’ve scanned in the introduction to the pamphlet and provided links for the short stories which were included in the pamphlet.
The only things missing from the pamphlet are four pieces that Heather wrote which didn’t appear in the Standard. At some point I’ll scan these in and post them on the blog.
She really was a wonderful short story writer for the Standard. If you haven’t read her before, I urge you to do so:
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2025/06/new-socialist-party-pamphlet-2002.html
Excuse my cheekiness in reposting something from 2020, but the link listed below is to a wee post detailing the early Socialist Standards and its reaction to the annual May Day.
Naturally, those early Standards were much more combative and optimistic in their tone.
As the post from 2020 indicates, it was my intention to produce an expanded version of the piece, covering later years and the changing temper of the Party’s May Day pronouncements but then I promptly forgot about it.
Maybe next year . . .
May-Day and the Socialist Standard
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/05/may-day-and-socialist-standard.html
Always thought the video below was a fascinating window into the old Labour Party and its in-fighting in the late 70s/early 80s. All the more intriguing ‘cos this programme would have been on prime time UK TV during the week of that year’s Labour Party conference.
Peter Taaffe and Tony Mulhearn debating Austin Mitchell and John Spellar. Taaffe was in his element in this:
Where Taaffe’s passing (and legacy) has been discussed on various left social media forums, it’s telling that more than one person has praised the fact that he wasn’t especially aloof when relating to ‘ordinary’ – sorry, Danny, if you’re reading this – folk. One commenting:
“. . . he could talk to working class normal people who were not leftists or academics”
Do vanguardists not hear themselves sometimes?
In its own way, his passing marks the end of a left-wing era in Britain.
Once upon a time, I knew the names of all the leaders of the various Trotskyist groups in Britain. I couldn’t tell you who is the current ‘leading member’ of the SWP. (Callinicos, maybe?)
I’m not especially tech minded but I know that on certain social media sites, they give the user the option of switching to dark mode for the screen appearance. (I take them up on it.)
Is that doable for the Party website, or is it something that only websites with budgets of billions can do?
Special Supplement on Marx (1983)
All online for the first time.
From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard:
“One hundred years ago this month, Karl Marx died. In a speech at his graveside, Engels said that “the greatest living thinker” had “ceased to think”. Since 1904, the Socialist Party of Great Britain has kept alive the socialist analysis of Marx’s thought, and exposed its distortions by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. We are marking the centenary of Marx’s death with the publication of this 24-page special supplement in the Socialist Standard.”
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2025/04/special-supplement-on-marx-1983.html
