Corbyn’s Labour and the path to power

..like people don't understand that the uk is out of the eu now. a statement made based on nothing.

..brexit as originally presented is finished. as stated above the brexit coalition has broken apart. so what is on the table is may's brexit position. it will not be supported in parliament also stated above. the movements have been working on ways to come out of this as unified as possible. unified and under a labour government since may will have to call an election. this is the way forward. this is the way to approach europe. it's the best of bad choices being offered up since the right began this brexit process. 

Corbyn's proposals to transform Labour party parked for a year

Labour’s ruling body agreed to park some of the most controversial proposals for party reform at a marathon 10-hour meeting on Tuesday, which saw Jeremy Corbyn defeated in a series of close votes.

The national executive committee (NEC) set aside for a year plans for Labour councillors to be forced to defer to new “local government committees” before publishing their own manifesto, and for council leaders to be directly elected by Labour members.

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One NEC member said the meeting had generally been good-tempered, but estimated that Corbyn himself had been outvoted on more than half of the complex series of proposed rule changes.

Corbyn’s political secretary, Katy Clark, has spent months carrying out a review of party democracy as the next stage in his project to transform Labour into a grassroots-led movement.

As a longtime supporter of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy lobbying group, the Labour leader advocates greater involvement by members in policymaking.

But his critics fear that approach would undermine the role of Labour’s MPs and shadow ministers in developing policy, and weaken their accountability to the electorate as opposed to Labour’s membership.

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Momentum claimed the latest plan “makes it harder for a socialist candidate to get on the ballot in the future and completely misjudges the mood of the membership”.

The campaign group urged its members to lobby the NEC in advance of the meeting. It claimed hundreds of emails were sent in the half an hour before the meeting started, which it believed had helped to sway the mood towards delaying a decision, and perhaps to allow fresh proposals to be tabled.

One source close to NEC said the democracy review “is going to look very thin at this rate, with many measures just either rejected out of hand or watered down by the NEC”. They added it was “especially embarrassing that local government reform has yet again been kicked into the long grass”.

It is understood Momentum plans to ramp up its campaigning to persuade NEC members to back bolder reforms when the body meets again. “Everything still to play for on selections and leadership threshold,” a Momentum source said. “Seems like lots of members getting in touch did change some minds today.”

..this in response to the nec antics from post #156

Labour’s radical left must fight the rise of a new machine politics

In the face of the NEC's bureaucratic elitism - and the nightmare legacy of Stalinism - the democratic and humanist left needs to be more assertive.

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The decision by a left-dominated NEC to create a new PLP and trade union veto over candidates in future leadership elections, combined with their rejection of the right of local parties to select parliamentary candidates in open primaries, combined with bureaucratic machinations to avoid a conference vote on a second Brexit referendum, all speak to the survival of “machine politics” even inside a left-led Labour party.

And all students of the 20th century know where the impetus towards bureaucratic elitism backed by left phraseology comes from: the nightmare legacy of Stalinism and its destructive reach into western Labour movements, where it strangled workers’ democracy and attempted to impose thought control.

I’m now backing a second referendum – Jeremy Corbyn should too

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Last December, the Institute for Public Policy Research presented Labour with a white paper advocating Swiss-style “alignment” with the single market, rather than participation. As with May’s Chequers plan, the IPPR wanted Britain to align voluntarily with some single market rules, but diverge from others in order to promote growth and social justice. Though the shadow cabinet refused to endorse the IPPR plan, the document is the closest Labour has ever come to drawing up its own version of Chequers.

But the Salzburg summit showed that a voluntary alignment option is no longer possible. May has wasted two years, and expended almost all the UK’s negotiating capital, only to get her version of it rejected. Labour’s new conference motion, committing the party to participation in the single market, appears to recognise that.

Corbyn’s strategy to date – of spelling out red lines and opposing solutions that crossed them – was always designed to allow Brexit-supporting Labour voters to learn by experience how treacherous the process would be. The Tories had told them that leaving would be easy; it wasn’t. They told them the new treaties would be done and dusted by March 2019. They will not be. They assured voters there would be no downsides to a no-deal solution. Now they urge voters to stockpile food in case it happens.

The gameplan worked up to a point. May’s chaotic negotiating stance has eroded popular support for Brexit, though not decisively. But the process of learning by experience now has to be supplemented with a positive vision, reinforced by Corbyn and Keir Starmer spelling out a clear Brexit proposal of their own.

My position on Brexit has always been a compromise between principle and what’s needed to assemble a voting coalition to put a leftwing Labour government in power. If it had been possible to achieve a leftwing Brexit, I would have supported it: the Lisbon treaty is a machine for destroying jobs and growth, and is stoking disillusion in democracy. But the real-world forces pushing for Brexit in 2016 were always those of xenophobic nationalism, and their project was an even more deregulated and polluted Britain. So I campaigned on remain and reform.

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I refused to back calls for a second referendum so long as May was engaged in meaningful negotiations to enact what both the referendum and parliament had voted for.

But after Chequers collapsed, and the Tories had to rely on Labour Brexiteers to defeat the customs union proposal, it became obvious that there could be no majority in this parliament for any of the government’s desired Brexit outcomes. The best option is a general election – the sooner the better. In that election, for Labour, the promise of a second referendum could be a powerful weapon – especially if it was combined with a clear outline of a Norway-style deal.

The shock of Salzburg is likely to push the Tories towards a hard, Canada-style free trade agreement. In that case, the way is open for Labour to make a new, broad offer to British civil society and business. A Norway-style deal, and a second referendum to ratify it and confer democratic legitimacy, could create an electoral coalition ranging from fervent remainers to Brexit voters who just “want it over with”, and would resonate strongly with businesses desperate to remain close to Europe.

..interesting discussion

UK Labour Alarms Elites With Plan to Democratize Workplace, Public Ownership

The UK Labour Party has unveiled proposals for what it calls the “greatest extension of economic democratic rights that Britain has ever seen.” The plan includes transferring a portion of company shares to workers and giving them a third of seats on company boards, and expanding public ownership of water and other utilities. We speak to Leo Panitch, professor of political science at York University

..check out this new labour party video.

We have a plan to rebuild Britain.

Rebuilding industry. Rebuilding opportunity for workers. Rebuilding our communities. Rebuilding our economy. Rebuilding our public services. Rebuilding for people, not for profit. Rebuilding for families, not for investors.

Here’s how – and why – we’re rebuilding Britain for the many, not the few:

A Future in Common

On Monday night Jacobin hosted a rally at The World Transformed conference in Liverpool, addressed by France Insoumise’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The event took place alongside the Labour Party conference, at which the French radical-left leader also met with Jeremy Corbyn.

In an enthusiastically received speech, Mélenchon called for new forms of mobilization able to confront the challenges of environmental disaster, war, and the neoliberal destruction of democracy. Here we present a lightly abridged translation of his talk.

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The first is obviously the possible destruction of the only ecosystem that makes human life possible. If we acknowledge that this is a real threat, then we must admit that there is a general human interest. And if this common interest exists, it must be placed above all other interests that may compromise it. This common interest is profoundly anticapitalist. For capitalism is based on the dynamics of endless predation without repair. It is based on a short-termism which is incompatible with the cycles of nature itself. From this observation we deduce two structural demands.

The first of these is “the green rule“: do not take from nature more than what nature can replenish. We must, with all our strength, delay the date at which we will be in ecological debt to our planet.

The second is ecological planning: the collective organization of processes so that we can transform all the forms of production, trade, and consumption patterns in compliance with the “green rule.”

The second element I would like to present is the form of political organization which corresponds to “the peoples’ era.” We put in place such a form of organization during my presidential campaign in France. And since then it has become what I think we can call by far the largest activist organization in France. We have 420,000 people registered on our online platform and 54,000 active members in 5,000 action groups connected by this platform. Everyone is free to decide the nature and the extent of their commitment to the movement and can change that at any time. We are not a classical political party that leads society, but rather a movement that is itself part of the life of society and totally porous to engagement with society.

The movement is to the people what the party once was to a social class. But it is neither a vanguard or a leadership. Rather, it sheds light on possible paths open to the people and is a detonator that helps people take action on the ground. The movement exists for this objective, and this alone.

Our movement, France Insoumise (often translated as France Unbowed — insoumise literally means “unsubmissive”) is an object in constant evolution. It is a common banner and includes party activists who want to participate, the only condition being that they abide by the movement’s own rules. But the vast majority of participants have no party membership. The movement is inclusive. There are no internal power struggles. Often, we choose decision-makers by lot, by random selection.

magoo

..from post #161

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Labour conference delegates overwhelmingly backed the party’s Brexit policy on Tuesday after Keir Starmer sparked a burst of sustained applause for dropping into his conference speech the line that “nobody is ruling out remain as an option”.

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In a compromise brokered by Starmer and backed by the vast majority of delegates in a show of hands on Tuesday, Labour’s formal position is now that the party will seek a public vote on Brexit if parliament rejects Theresa May’s deal and it cannot force a general election.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

OK.  But it seems like there's lots of loosey-goosey talk about "another vote on Brexit" that doesn't make it clear whether the vote is to accept/reject the terms on the table, or try to convince the EU to pretend that the UK hasn't already left.

As I've noted about fifty times, the UK has already left.  They're not "negotiating" whether or not they've "Brexited", they're negotiating the new terms between themselves and the EU.

This is like a divorced parent telling the kids "Well, you know that Mommy and I divorced almost two years ago, but if you're unhappy, let's vote on it and if you vote 'stay married' then Mommy has to remarry me!"

No, Mommy doesn't.

..going past what your reading about negotiations, in or out. what may will bring to the table at the end of it will be rejected by parliament. right now the important thing is the process that will bring in the labour gov. already were starting to talk about dealing with the eu. this needs to unfold more. with greece syriza did not turn to the population for support even after it's referendum that rejected the eu position. labour will not make that mistake. 

..from #165

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Where this will tell is if Labour comes to power as a beleaguered left-wing government, surrounded by enemies within civil society. If it can’t mobilise its supporters to enable the execution of radical policies on the ground then, as with Syriza in Greece, the institutional obstacles, combined with a strategy of tensions stoked by the right-wing press, might overwhelm a Corbyn government.

..i listened to galloway. he's correct that there is more than one point of view on brexit within labour. eta: my mistake labour did vote for a new brexit vote.

..how labour will proceed on brexit still needs to be worked out. they still have a bit of time but it's getting shorter fast. i'm ok with that for now. it will be important to be able to sell that position to a divided public because an election will be following close on the heels of the tory brexit offerings.

The Party Transformed

quote:

People’s Vote

These campaigns’ combined efforts saw about 150 motions on Brexit submitted to conference, overwhelmingly from local parties in London and the South East, with a majority favoring a referendum on EU membership. Yet as over the last two years the Corbyn leadership’s position was upheld, in essence leaving all options on the table. The final motion passed by conference called for a fresh general election while leaving open the question of a public vote on the ultimate Brexit deal.

This was a result of “compositing”, the process through which the ultimate motion was written. Motions that make it to conference floor are produced by the merging together the many different texts submitted by CLPs and affiliates, with the effect that they are often rendered vague enough to allow multiple readings. If some pro-EU ginger groups and even foreign media claimed Labour had voted to take a stance against Brexit, in reality it merely voted not to rule out a referendum.

At the same time, battle is joined over what exactly a “people’s vote” would mean. In his speech, Shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer, a relatively centrist figure in the Shadow Cabinet, went off script and trailed a fresh vote on remaining in the EU, in direct contrast to John McDonnell who argued any vote would only regard the specific terms of leaving. Likewise, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady announced the TUC’s commitment to a people’s vote the day before Congress had even voted on it and has been equally ambiguous on what such a vote will actually entail.

Ultimately, delegates did not vote to call for a fresh referendum of any kind. Labour’s stated preference remains the immediate calling of a general election and a Corbyn-led Brexit. Some powerful forces in the movement may try to bulldoze the party into more specific policies that were not voted for, and in the present context, to undermine the leadership. In this situation, the call for party democracy is decisive; it is a battle to ensure policy is controlled by members, and not those MPs and press barons who seek to miscast what Labour stands for.

What was clear is that Labour Party Conference has become conference again. The debates on the floor matter. There are normal, comradely tensions, and even some unexpected alliances produced by the debate over the European Union. The press has covered most of it inaccurately. But the simple reality is that the party is changing, and so, too, its conference. Corbyn, like Tony Benn before him, promised to deliver power back to members, and he has. It is now up to us to use that power to build for socialism in Britain.

Jeremy Corbyn’s ideas have become mainstream – even George Osborne is quoting Marx

George Osborne is quoting Marx. Francis Fukuyama, who triggered free market euphoria in the 1990s, thinks we need the return of socialism. And the Conservative government is trying to “out-Corbyn Corbyn” by declaring austerity over – even if it struggles to deliver the price of an extra minibus to our cash-strapped schools.

Something has changed in the mindset of people who were once convinced that the market would solve all humanity’s problems, and it’s not hard to see why. Liberalism and the centre-right are surrounded by a rising tide of far-right ideology that they cannot deal with.

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We need politics more radical than Corbyn offered

For the last 10 years, we’ve seen wages stagnate and growth underperform. Before that, even in the good times, we had revelled in the atomisation of traditional communities, assuming the social problems caused by de-industrialisation would go away. Now we have to live with run-down high streets, police forces struggling to contain crime, pervasive insecurity and a sense that, though things might not get any worse, they won’t get substantially better.

To rescue the situation we need politics probably even more radical than the ones Corbyn offered in June 2017. We need to tax more and spend the proceeds on rebuilding Britain. But John McDonnell’s team know that the £49 billion they wanted to raise in taxes on companies, rich individuals and property speculators is about the limit; most of it would go on reviving schools, councils and the NHS and making university tuition-free.

That’s why the most important Labour policy is to borrow £250bn and spend it on reviving our national infrastructure. In addition to taxing, borrowing and spending I would – unlike McDonnell – use the Bank of England’s formidable money printing power to kickstart a modernisation, research and innovation drive across British industry.

..this piece is behind a pay wall. 

Labour will join Tory MPs to block no‑deal Brexit

Labour will unite with MPs across parliament to stop Theresa May taking Britain out of the European Union without a deal, The Sunday Times can reveal.

Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary, warns the prime minister that she will not be allowed to blackmail MPs by presenting the deal she comes back to parliament with as the only alternative to no deal.

..don't know. maybe someone else does.

..i believe deal or no deal the majority of brits will be better off under a labour gov with their current platform.

Socialism beyond borders

In an age of transnational corporations and global finance-driven speculation, socialist strategy is doomed if it focuses exclusively, or even primarily, on any individual nation state. Yet, at the same time, popular struggles for control over nation states are an essential part of a necessarily international strategy. This is my starting point in responding to Costas Lapavitsas (page 38) and his call for socialism to ‘start at home’.

We must learn from the recent successes of cross-border movements and their distinctive capacity to counter the power of the huge corporate lobbies, most recently in the defeat of the TTIP trade deal between the EU and the US.

Contrary to the options implicit in Lapavitsas’s approach of choosing between independent left government at national level or European integration, which is seen as a recipe for neoliberalism, what is needed is a multi-level strategy. The transnational nature of the challenges we face points to the need to work simultaneously for a left government and to make political alliances across Europe to build social controls over corporate power and financial speculation, for example. ‘And’ rather than ‘or’ must be the watchword.

Local, national, European

Moving beyond this national-versus-international dichotomy, the local level is also vital in this hybrid approach. Local gains can be fought for and won simultaneously and in a positive dialectic with engagement at national and European levels, as we are seeing with the municipalities refusing and reversing privatisation across the continent that are now co‑ordinating internationally through the Fearless Cities network.

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A Europe for the many

As a strong supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, and a member of Momentum, I want him to work with the Portuguese and Spanish governments as well as labour movements and left parties resisting austerity across the continent, to map out a strategy for a socialist Europe. We should extend the principles of Labour’s 2017 manifesto to the goal of a ‘Europe for the many’.

British governments have been at the forefront of turning the EU into an instrument of market politics, from vetoing or opting out of key elements of Jacques Delors’ Social Charter (attacked by Thatcher as ‘socialism by the backdoor’) to David Cameron’s veto of the financial transaction tax. The various possible Tory Brexits, whether a hard, hedge-fund Brexit or a softer Theresa May Brexit, continue this anti-social approach.

Only a Corbyn-led Labour government can prevent the legacy of this disastrous market-led politics haunting the UK for a generation. In the same way that New Labour once shifted European social democracy to the right, Corbyn’s Labour could shift it to the left – for example, by supporting the new social democrat German finance minister in putting the transaction tax back on the table, and backing measures now under discussion to end undercutting, by requiring companies employing migrant labour to respect union agreements and pay the wages of the host country.

Labour has coherent national policies for public-led economic development, addressing the inequalities that underlie support for Brexit in the north of England. Why not extend these principles of public productivity on a European scale? Public ownership of the railways, for example, could enable Corbyn to champion an integrated, reasonably priced and publicly owned European railway system, providing an alternative to airport expansion and taking freight off the roads. Similar Europe-wide applications of Labour’s manifesto commitments could be developed by bringing together decentralised city-run public companies for renewable energy and expanding the co‑operative sector – both of which already have considerable support across Europe.

MPs approve Labour’s motion forcing publication of Brexit legal advice

Labour’s motion forcing the government to publish its legal advice on Brexit has passed without a division. The motion, put down by Keir Starmer, uses the humble address procedural device that Labour used last year to force the government’s hand on the impact assessments.

The text of the motion reads: “That an humble address be presented to Her Majesty, that she will be graciously pleased to give directions that the following papers be laid before Parliament: any legal advice in full including that provided by the Attorney General on the proposed withdrawal agreement on the terms of the UK’s departure from the European Union including the Northern Irish backstop and framework for a future relationship between the UK and the European Union.”

Tory MPs were told by whips to abstain on the vote, which led to the motion being passed without a division. It has become common for May’s government to abstain on Opposition Day debate votes that they might lose, as they are non-binding, but a humble address is different.

What should the approval of Labour’s motion mean? That the legal advice given by Geoffrey Cox, the attorney general, will be published in full, without caveat or redaction, for MPs to read. (It does not have to be made available to the public.) It should be released after the government comes to a withdrawal agreement with the EU, but a reasonable amount of time before it is put to a Commons vote.....