United Kingdom General Election: July 4, 2024

[Cassius]

And now, the end is near
And so I face the final curtain ...

https://twitter.com/alexwickham/status/1799350801514528924

Ironically Howard was actually rather Sunak-like, but somehow was able to parlay that into being Australia’s second longest serving PM. No such luck for Sunak here.

[Cassius]

Just to give a rundown of the various minor left parties:

Workers Party: George Galloway's latest vehicle, standing in about 150 constituencies (making it by far the largest left-of-the-Greens effort at this election). Founded back in 2019, it's broadly socialist, but with a socially conservative and green-sceptic tinge. Anti-EU, anti-NATO and very, very pro-Palestine. Not quite a one-man band, as Chris Williamson (the former Labour MP for Derby North who was thrown out of the party at the height of its anti-Semitism crisis) and Peter Ford (the ex-ambassador to Syria) are also involved, as was, briefly, the former England spin bowler Monty Panesar. The party is also backed by the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), a Stalinist splinter group from Socialist Labour (on which more later) that has its origins in the Association of Communist Workers, which itself was an anti-revisionist splinter group from the Maoist Revolutionary Marxist League (which was also a splinter group, this time from the original Communist Party of Great Britain).

Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC): An umbrella group, founded back in 2009 largely at the behest of the late Bob Crow, then the leader of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), also backed by the Socialist Party, a Trotskyist group which is the modern incarnation of Militant (the entryist organisation that caused Labour so much trouble in the 1970s and 1980s) and led by former Militant activist and ex-Labour MP Dave Nellist). It didn't contest any seats in 2017 or 2019 as it was broadly favourable to the Corbyn-led Labour Party, but is now contesting seats again and has also had somewhat favourable things to say about the Workers Party (it endorsed Galloway in the Rochdale by-election).

The Communist Party of Britain (CPB): The Marxist-Leninist faction of the old CPGB, which broke away from the main party in 1988 after it adopted a Eurocommunist platform. A fairly old-school Marxist-Leninist formation, it maintains ties with the Workers Party of Korea and is a signatory to the Pyongyang Declaration (organised in 1992 by the latter party).

The Socialist Labour Party (SLP): Led by Arthur Scargill, the former President of the National Union of Mineworkers (and the architect of the 1984-85 miners strike), it was founded in 1996 in response to the amendment of Clause IV of the Labour party constitution which had, up until then, committed it (in theory) to common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Favours renationalisation and also supported leaving the EU in 2016.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB): The oldest by far of the all the groupings listed, it dates back to a 1904 splinter from the Social Democratic Federation; it is anti-reformist (hence why it is usually described as 'impossibilist'), but also, uniquely, anti-Leninist as well, making it different from the aforementioned Socialist Party, which is a Trotskyist organisation. Headquartered in Clapham, which these days is a relatively well-heeled area of London - I briefly considered voting for their candidate before Reform managed to get onto the ballot at the last minute.

The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP): Not listed above and not technically running any candidates, but they are backing one independent candidacy in Stratford and Bow. Not to be confused with the old Revolutionary Communist Party, a splinter from the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, which eventually abandoned Trotskyism altogether (many of that organisation's key members have now migrated to the right of British politics, including one Baroness Claire Fox, a Brexit Party candidate in 2019 who was later ennobled by Boris Johnson), this RCP is essentially a rebranded Socialist Appeal,  the British section of the International Marxist Tendency, that was expelled from the Militant organisation (mentioned above) in 1992 due to its opposition to the 'open turn' away from entryism within Labour (which is what led to the formation of the Socialist Party in 1997). Alan Woods is the guru of this particular organisation (I myself was also briefly involved, lol).

EDIT:

The Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP): One of the fragments of the WRP that split from yet another Revolutionary Communist party, this time in the 1940s and led for a long time by Gerry Healy - the present party descends from the faction that formed after Healy’s expulsion from the party in the 1980s (alongside well-known acting siblings Vanessa and Corin Redgrave) amidst allegations of rampant sexual assault. It originally sought to pursue an entryist policy vis-a-vis Labour and was eventually proscribed by the latter. Trotskyist and eurosceptic, like most of the parties in this list.

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP): Split from the Healy faction of the WRP in 1986 after that faction’s fallout with the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which the SEP (then the International Communist Party) supported. There are now two ICFIs (the ICFI originally formed in opposition to the leadership of Michel Pablo in the Fourth International; Keir Starmer funnily enough was briefly involved in a Pabloite journal during the late 1980s), one linked to the SEP and one to the WRP. The SEP regards the WRP itself to be Pabloite, ie ‘national opportunist’.

[Cassius]

Ironically, I think the only last-minute replacement who might stand a chance of saving any of the furniture (not very much of it, but maybe a couple of small chairs and a footstool) would be... Boris Johnson.

[Cassius]

Well then I do not understand why it’s considered so essential for Holden, the Tory party chair, to be an MP. It sounds like a full time job that should be done by a party bureaucrat who is not tied down having to represent a constituency

Tradition mostly, although the party has had non-MPs as chairmen in the recent past such as Ben Elliott, a businessman who was effectively Boris Johnson’s chief bagman, and Lord Feldman (ditto but for Cameron).

[Cassius]

Obviously it doesn’t matter and nobody cares, but Starmer just rubbished the Tory manifesto as ‘a sort of Jeremy Corbyn style manifesto where anything you want can go in it, and none of it is costed’, which is quite an… audacious… line to take, given that he stood on that manifesto in 2019 and would’ve signed off on it as a key member of the Labour shadow cabinet at the time.

[Cassius]

author=afleitch link=topic=576275.msg9511146#msg9511146 date=1718126890 uid=73]
Remember, even if the Tories get Kim Campbelled, they are still the largest bloc in the Lords. So expect some more visceral 'Lords reform' than Labour are currently signalling.

Even leaving aside the restrictions on the ability of the Lords to block anything in the long term (the Parliament acts and the Salisbury convention etcetera), the Tories in the Lords don’t have anything like the numbers needed to successfully vote en bloc to delay Labour legislation, and I suspect that the present makeup of the Lords will be much more amenable to a Starmer government than it has been to the current, with the balance shifting further once Labour start creating more Labour peers. I expect we will get some window dressing (booting out the remaining hereditaries, age limits etc) whilst plans for a ‘democratised’ second chamber are left to gently gather dust.

[Cassius]

What sort of a place is Gillingham and Rainham? Is it a remain voting "blue wall" sort of place?

Absolutely not, it’s a rather typical Kent coast seat that voted heavily (64% I believe) to leave the EU and was a Labour-held marginal during the Blair years. Such places had a high UKIP vote in 2015 and swung comically far towards the Tories in 2017 and 2019 (although Labour didn’t perform terribly in 2017). Gillingham used to be the home of most of Chatham dockyard, which closed many years ago and left the place with considerable unemployment. Whilst that’s no longer the case, it’s not an especially well-heeled place. Rainham’s a bit posher, but nonetheless the area as a whole is very far away from the stockbroker belt stereotype of ‘the Blue Wall’.

[Cassius]

This is uhhhh..... someone who has given up?
https://twitter.com/Mike_Fabricant/status/1802968304736194856

I see we’ve reached the drunk Burgdorf phase of the Tory untergang.

[Cassius]

PeoplePolling - Labour 35% (-4), Reform 24% (+7), Conservatives 15% (-4), Lib Dems 12% (+2), Greens 8% (-1), SNP 3% (NC)

Obviously a lot of caveats with this one...

The crosstabs of this poll are massively entertaining… Labour at 20% in Scotland, 17 points adrift of the SNP, whilst simultaneously being in a statistical tie with Reform in the Midlands and Wales.

[Cassius]

https://twitter.com/ChrisMasonBBC/status/1803689400070480360

As per the Dear Leader: ”This candidate should be suspended, and it’s very telling that Rishi Sunak has not already done that. If it was one of my candidates, their feet would not have touched the floor.”

Starmer to bring back the rope?

[Cassius]

It’s not really surprising that the parties lack self-confidence in promising big commitments in their manifestos, given the generally negative reaction to Labour’s big spending plans in 2019 and the way in which the Conservatives’ 2017 campaign was holed beneath the waterline by the proposed changes to social care. In addition, I think the way in which the markets attacked the pound and UK gilts in the aftermath of the Truss mini-budget will have given all parties a significant pause for thought over the feasibility of major spending commitments that can only be funded by borrowing (given the absolute refusal of any party to broach doing anything more than tinkering around the edges with the tax system to squeeze out a few extra billion here and there).