Labour which wing

In the and elections, it stood a smaller number of candidates, but their share of the vote fell. The SLP has claimed to have 2, members, but in reality has probably only several hundred. They were joined later by the SWP. The SSP claimed over 2, members.

The organisations which founded it continued to exist as tendencies within the new party. In subsequent elections, neither the SSP nor Solidarity have been able to pose an electoral threat to Labour. In , the Network of Socialist Alliances was formed. In the Greater London Assembly elections, its 14 candidates received 2. It therefore decided to mount a major challenge to Labour in the General Election and stood 98 candidates. However, they received an average of votes each a mere 1.

In the local elections, it gained just one councillor Michael Lavalette in Preston. Moreover, the domination of the Alliance by the SWP created problems, leading eventually to the departure of Liz Davies.

The SWP has been the largest extreme left party since the late s. It claimed 10, members in the early s, although this figure was probably inflated. By membership was officially down to under 6,, although the active membership is rumoured to be considerably smaller. However, Respect faced a damaging split, with the SWP and its supporters pulling out. Recriminations continued within the SWP, and John Rees, under whose leadership it had participated in Respect, was demoted in and replaced by Martin Smith.

Two years later Rees, his partner Lindsay German and forty other sympathizers resigned from the SWP and created a new organisation, Counterfire. This was one of the main factors in its decision to stand only a very limited number of candidates, despite its continued hostility to the Labour Party, whose record in office it criticized virulently.

Its forty-two candidates gained on average less than one percent of the votes cast in the constituencies where they were present. The elections were thus an unmitigated disaster for the extreme left. It was punished for its inability to create a credible political programme and was deserted by some sympathizers who preferred to vote Labour in order to try to prevent, or at least to limit the scale of a Conservative victory.

They have been partly in reaction to the rightward drift of the Labour Party and have gone hand in hand with attempts to develop an organisational and an electoral challenge to Labour. This is exemplified by the fact that no major organisation is currently engaged in entrism or attempting to establish a close relationship with Labour.

This change has clarified relations between the extreme left and Labour and removed a great deal of the ambiguity in them. The election of Ed Miliband as leader of the Labour Party seems unlikely to produce a major rethink of strategy on the left of the left, although radical forces may withdraw even further from the electoral stage to focus on the movement against government spending cuts and opposition to the extreme right-wing British National Party and the English Defence League.

Unable to square the circle of its relations with Labour, it functioned above all as a pressure group, attempting to influence Labour from the inside or the outside and push it further to the left. Since the mids, the extreme left has increasingly acted as an independent political force and tried to present itself as a potential alternative to Labour. No matter how it positions itself, the non-Labour left seems incapable of finding a solution to its existential crisis and of becoming a significant element of British politics.

This conclusion may not be particularly new. However, the Russian Revolution was a turning point as it led to a process of ideological and political realignment which created the extreme left as it exists today. Relatively little has been written about the history of the extreme left, and even less about its recent past and current situation. Most studies examine individual parties in isolation from the rest of the labour movement. Looking at the extreme left as a whole and its long-term relationship with the Labour Party sheds new light on the difficulties it currently faces.

London : Pluto Press, Aldershot : Scolar Press, , The latter merged with Charter 88 to form Unlock Democracy. The most significant is the Communist Party of Britain, whose members continue to publish the daily newspaper, The Morning Star. Walton Newbold and Shapurji Sakhlatvala were both elected in but lost their seats two years later. He was soon to become the general secretary of the CPGB.

Darren G. His analysis of the state of the left led him to call for tactical voting against the Conservatives in Because of the widespread use of entrism, it is impossible to define the extreme left simply as comprising all organisations to the left of the Labour Party. This is partly for purely pragmatic reasons since mounting an election campaign is expensive, and candidates very rarely receive enough votes to keep their deposit.

Moreover, poor results can also be demoralizing for activists. However, a major issue is also at stake. As a result, it has usually concentrated on its work in the trade union movement and downgraded elections. They have continued to try to influence Labour, and some of their members and sympathizers, such as Charlie Leadbetter and Geoff Mulgan have worked very closely with New Labour.

The Communist Party of Britain and The Morning Star continue to give critical support to Labour and hope to strengthen what remains of its left wing. Momentum - the biggest left wing Labour group - said it was a "cynical and desperate" attempt to "smash the left". Labour's biggest financial backer Unite also condemned the move.

The expulsions were agreed on Tuesday, at a nine-hour meeting of the National Executive Committee, at which Labour's poor financial state and plans to make staff redundant were also discussed. The Mirror, which broke the story last week, said as many as 1, members could see their membership revoked.

Labour said some of the groups were run by people expelled from the party, while others had opposed Labour's push to tackle anti-Semitism.

In a statement, a party spokesperson said: "Labour is a broad, welcoming and democratic party and we are committed to ensuring it stays that way.

The Jewish Labour Movement said it welcomed the decision and the "strong political signal it sends". A number of small energy suppliers have gone bust.

Wholesale electricity prices have tripled in Britain in the past twelve months, and there is currently a national gas shortage, caused mostly by panic buying. On October 6th, the government plans to cut around a hundred million pounds a month from Universal Credit, a benefit payment received by some six million people. The future looks hard. The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson , is a shirker. Sixty per cent of voters do not trust him. And yet Labour remains peripheral. In December, , under its previous, left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, the Party suffered its worst election result since Corbyn was succeeded by Keir Starmer, who was meant to bring Labour back into the mainstream.

Starmer, who is fifty-nine, comes off like a centrist action figure. Before he became an M. As it did during the Brexit campaign of when the Party opposed leaving the E. So far, Starmer has seemed unable to undo the damage. Eighteen months into his leadership, opinion polls still put the Conservatives, and their program of national disarray, five to seven points ahead of Labour.