Your Corbyn/Sultana Party - Discussion thread - Part 2

[fromorbit]

The YP starting conference is in the ACC in Liverpool between 29-30 November so only three weeks off. With competing factions involving Islamic conservatives, every variety of Marxist/Communist, former Labour members, trade union activists, entryists from SWP and SPEW, splitters from the Scottish Greens, trans activists and actual left wing feminists [not the nice kind] it is difficult to underplay how much controversy there is likely to be. So we will need a second thread in advance.

Thus far following the internal drama of the UKs newest left party has taken a whole thread. It has been a wild ride and the party still does not have a name.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5394557-your-corbynsultana-party-discussion-thread

Corbzy says sorry for the mess and stuff

https://nitter.net/meganekenyon/status/1993002465583939642#m

Meanwhile, questions remain on the following (via https://nitter.net/jrschlosberg/status/1992990067703377966#m)

But if they're reporting or commenting on the new party, these questions must surely be asked:

- is 500k+ raised by 'mistake' being refunded to donors?

- Why didn't zarah/MOU alert prospective members to the fact that Jeremy wasn't on board or told about the first 'membership launch'?

- What exactly are the 'liabilities' that zarah claims she wants Your Party to assume?

Now that you've clarified "they" refers to JC, ZS and the people at the top setting up the original project, rather than the membership, I don't think many would argue with you that their actions were chaotic, insufficiently thought through and hard in retrospect to understand.

OH NO SHE DOESNT

I've decided the entire endeavour is pure drag panto from start to finish.

Off what hook? The only "hook" I brought her up to argue with was the one of the left being all about "White Middle Class Worthy Men fighting oppression from other White Middle Class Men who arent as worthy as them".

In which case yes, of course she gets off that hook because she's neither white nor a man.

You know I hate to be disrespectful to the leaders of the left, but this whole thing would have had more credibility if the organising committee was made up of the PG Tips chimps.

You know I hate to be disrespectful to the leaders of the left...

Yeah right.

You fuckin love it 😀

I liked Bob Crow. I didn't necessarily agree with him, but he earned respect, he had a solid record of achieving things for his members, and he had a professional attitude to organisation.

This lot though...

<Lady Violet Bonham Carter voice>

"Who is this Max Shanly? Who is he? Is this how one ascends to leadership these days, by posting on 'Twitter' 18 hours a day? Are we supposed to view these jackanapes as serious people?"

I am suspicious of Adam, Mohammed, Hussein etc for the reasons you mentioned but I think it's fair to say they may believe in socialist-leaning or at least somewhat left wing economic policies. Obviously this would be separate from things like women's equality or gay rights,,which they presumably don't support.

Agree strongly.

On the Muslim/socialism issue : someone like Shabana Mahmood is probably much more devout than Sarkar and Sultana (at least from what I've read about her) and socialist economically (Blue Labour alliance).

On the landlord issue : I think you can be a landlord and left-leaning, advocate for fair conditions for tenants etc Hussein argued that Muslim immigrants arriving here often had no choice but to be landlords. However, that wouldn't apply to him personally now. I do think social housing should be a key Labour cause though and probably any left leaning party with prominent landlord members could face issues.

Lloyd Russell-Moyle- that's definitely very hypocritical.

I assume you're referencing the way some Palestine campaigners use 'Zionist' as an anti-Semitic slur?

I agree on that. Honestly I find it hard to wrap my head round YP. I suppose they maybe hate Muslims who oppose TWAW but have no issues with misogyny, cousin marriage etc? Obviously they could oppose members who are GC without disliking Muslims just for being Muslim, it's not necessarily hateful. Just as it wouldn't be hateful for Labour to question membership of MPs who use faith to promote cousin marriage etc

Weird especially as I've always thought Sultana would be proud to be called 'ultra left'.

@RainbowBagels, On Socialism and atheism...I think it depends what you mean. If you're referring to economic socialism there's lots of examples of that coexisting with Christianity and also Judaism.
Adnan Hussein mentioned East End Jews & Welsh Nonconformists' role in the early Labour Party. Lots of early Labour MPs were Christian Socialists, Unitarians etc Then in the US you have the Catholic Worker Movement by Dorothy Day, and many other movements driven by Pope Leo XIII's affirmation of Labour rights & Catholic social teaching- South American liberation theology, Cesar Chavez's farm worker movement etc Lots of Jewish involvement in these kinds of causes in US too, as well as civil rights.

If Socialism is broadened to include women's rights then that can be more difficult but in both UK & US (& others) there are a lot of examples of both Christians and Jews supporting women's rights at least to some extent. Gay rights would be more difficult but also examples.

I can't really compare to Islam as I don't have adequate knowledge but I assume there have been economic justice-focused elements?

Imo it's really communism rather than socialism which is atheistic, and this is borne out by Mao, Stalin etc smashing religious places so nothing would stand in the way of total control. And of course Marx saw religion the way the pigs see Moses' tales of Sugarcandy Mountain in Animal Farm.

Adnan Hussein mentioned East End Jews & Welsh Nonconformists' role in the early Labour Party. Lots of early Labour MPs were Christian Socialists, Unitarians etc Then in the US you have the Catholic Worker Movement by Dorothy Day, and many other movements driven by Pope Leo XIII's affirmation of Labour rights & Catholic social teaching- South American liberation theology, Cesar Chavez's farm worker movement etc Lots of Jewish involvement in these kinds of causes in US too, as well as civil rights.
I would agree, and for those reasons would say that the Labour Party isn't a 'Socialist' party. It is a Social Democratic party. They have Socialists in it but they are and were set up to be Social Democrats. It wasn't set up as, and cannot survive as, a purely ideologically based party because political parties need to be elected and then need to do things like run the economy (granted both main parties have been spectacularly crap at this) but they cannot be wedded to ideology as a government.
I agree with what a lot of what Hussain says, and I think he is more aligned to the Labour movement than what some people want YP to be ( Surely if you are Social Democrats you cannot then not allow people the freedom to make money however they choose, even if they choose to get a BTL- you just need to also provide social housing for example) However I do have a problem in general with religion based political movements, where people get elected on the basis that they will promote religious ideology. I think that is different from people like Shabana Mahmoud and Wes Streeting who have strong religious beliefs and sometimes (eg assisted dying) say they are voting with their conscience but not overtly campaigning on the basis of religious beliefs and promoting them in Parliament. I say this as someone with a religious belief of sorts!

Hussain reminds me in some ways of the late Labour MP Jim Dobbin, though Jim was Catholic rather than Muslim. In some ways the Muslim element in Labour politics, especially in the North West, is similar to when local CLPs used to be dominated by Irish or Scottish Catholics. You even find that today with someone like Becky Long-Bailey, who isn't a social conservative but will talk about her Catholic upbringing, which has made a lot of metro-lefties suspicious of her.

The question was never whether you would have a Labour Party dominated by Jim Dobbin types - that was never likely - but whether the Jim Dobbin types could find a home in Labour. More recently, the dominant strain in Labour politics has been telling the Jim Dobbin types to fuck off to Reform. I think many of them have done so.

There are quite a few voters in the "economically left, socially conservative" camp, what you might call Peter Hitchens voters. The SDP is in that territory, and so is Galloway's WPB. I think Adnan Hussain's voters in Blackburn lean that way, and he's intuited that his working class white constituents have a lot in common with his Muslim constituents.

So again, the question was never one of YP being dominated by social conservatism. The question was whether it would have space for the median voter in places like Blackburn, or whether it was going to confine itself to people who share the cultural tastes of SWP members in Walthamstow. I think we have seen the answer to that.

I would agree, and for those reasons would say that the Labour Party isn't a 'Socialist' party. It is a Social Democratic party. They have Socialists in it but they are and were set up to be Social Democrats.

There's a very interesting one hour interview of Thatcher, made in 1977 where she appeared on William Buckley's (seminal American conservative) Firing Line shortly after assuming the leadership of the conservative party. She makes the point that the majority of Labour are social democrats but a small minority are hard left and they terrorize the majority into supporting their positions. She then compares British politics to American by saying that in Britain there is a market based party (the Tories) and socialist party (Labour). But in the US there are two market based parties the Democrats and the Republicans.

So, the implication is that social democrats == socialist, and hard left == socialist plus something else, presumably that unkindly (as Bertrand Russell put it) class consciousness.

During the 90s Democrats under Clinton scrapped their big government brand of capitalism, and adopted Reagan-esce neoliberalism with enhanced distribution. New Labour under Blair basically adopted Clintonian neoliberalism. So, not only did he expel the hard left, he expelled the social democrats and those who wanted to move in a Carter-esque market oriented direction! That's why the massive impact of New Labour can't be underestimated. It was a seismic total reordering.

I have such a hard time making sense of what the modern day left is trying to accomplish (I'm repeating myself here because I asked this question earlier in the thread), because no one seems to understand just what a profound shock going back to 1970s-style hard left politics would be. Even Corbyn who was an actual member of the 70s hard left seems to not really comprehend it!

Some of those old Firing Line episodes are amazing. Buckley was a great interviewer - though he did have a tendency to blame all the ills of the world on 1960s liberals, which seems a little unfair on Jo Grimond.

Labour politics has changed so much that today's leftists couldn't even understand where an old school trade union right-winger like Jim Callaghan was coming from. Even the Marxists have redefined the concept of "working class" so it includes university lecturers but excludes self-employed plumbers and electricians. This makes more sense if you know what the sociological makeup of Marxist groups is.

Ill look those up. Ineresting Thatcher said that. She was right then and now. As a light aside, apparently its Parliament week this week. I had to drop DS to college before going to a meeting. I had on a blue dress and my handbag. DS said ' Have you dressed up as Margaret Thatcher for Parliament Week'? So twice Ive had to think about Thatcher in a morning!

Remembering Barbara Castle as the first woman UK Prime Minister that Labour could have had.

but of course , didn't

Yes, sadly...

Interesting re Jim Dobbin..I'm not that socially conservative myself but he sounds like a positive kind of person.

I think we should be a bit wary though of equating Hussein & his Muslim base with Dobbin types though. Cousin marriage, wider women's equality issues (veiling, sex segregated runs etc, male clan leaders controlling everything,) Palestine as an indeprndent state and so on...would Dobbin's Catholic positions have been so extreme?

The only issue of similar gravity I can imagine a Catholic MP potentially supporting would be mother and baby homes when those existed (which were never such a powerful institution here anyway).

Obviously there's degrees of social conservatism too...Mahmood & other Muslim MPs probably disagree with gay marriage privately but they still voted for it, for instance. That's not to say that stricter social conservatives whi vote against etc shouldn't have a home in Labour, and I think faith can be a very positive thing for politicians. I'm just unsure if the kind of religious social conservatism Hussein espouses is really on a par.

Hmm...googling Dobbin, I see he was chair of a pro life group and campaigned for a 'radical reduction in the time limit below 12 weeks'. I would agree with him that the time limit should be lower, especially with all we know about development and awareness of the foetus since 1967. The UK is an outlier in Europe, most have much lower limits.

I don't put pro life campaigning on the same level as cousin marriage etc. Admittedly Hussein has been fairly quiet on these but some of the other Gaza Independents have been much more vocal.

Sorry I'm a bit confused : I thought Clintonian neoliberalism and Blair's economics are arguably both Third Way, and more similar to Carter, who is sometimes seen as a precursor of the Third Way?

As far as Sultana goes... this flash back to 2019 rang some bells with me
The Lib Dems' decision to back an election is the worst blunder since the Trojans welcomed that horse

Buckley was an interesting character. In a way he was a precursor to US right wing conflicts today : he supported segregation and apartheid initially (though he later changed his mind), as well as praising Franco, Salazar & Pinochet's regimes as he saw them as bulwarks against communism. Admittedly you could defend this by saying they were less brutal than a communist regime would have been, but his defence that they would have eventually introduced democracy isn't factually supported.

On the other hand, his elitist intellectual side also made him fiercely protective of the National Review, refusing to let in anti-Semites, John Birchers (who even thought Eisenhower was a communist agent) and Ayn Rand objectivists. Arguably his loss has intensified modern US conservatism's wilder elements, though it would have been hard for him to police in the same way in the online era.

I do think it is a difficult one when it comes to religious views and politics. I think if we are a free society then we should respect peoples rights to freedom of expression through religion and for them to be able to express those views, but those views need to be voiced and taken into account alongside other views ( for example the abortion limit). There have been Christian MP's (Kate Ford and Tim Farron for example) who said they have strongly held Christian views but that this wouldn't affect party policies. It didn't do them any good, but that's double standards for you-whereas the Operation Muslim Vote Independent MP's are explicitly campaigning on a religious basis. And they are things which can mean that people ( especially women ) in those communities have fewer rights than other women which cannot be justifiable and becomes the point where religion must take second place to other rights. I would say the same for trans rights. The right to equality on the grounds of sex, race and sexuality- not gender- (things that cannot be changed) need to take priority over other rights if there is a clash.