Red Labour is a sponsoring organisation for the Left Platform meeting being held on Saturday the 7th of February at ULU, Malet Street, London WC1. There will be quite a few of us attending what is a really positive development in the attempt to organise the broad Labour left. If you cant make it, but are interested, please let us know by direct messaging us on this page. John McDonnell has summed up the rationale behind the Left Platform event in this months Labour Briefing. We welcome Johns frank words and hope that the meeting is equally honest and productive. Its time to start punching our weight: On the left, its important to be ruthlessly honest with each other and ourselves. So take this as me writing this as a statement of personal self-criticism. For too long the Labour left has let the right make the running in the preparations for the next election. Of course we can comfort ourselves by arguing that in a capitalist system the left is inevitably swimming against the stream and we don’t have the physical and financial resources that the right can draw upon from big business subsidies. Nevertheless we are sometimes our own worst enemy. What always amazes me is how coherent the left’s analysis of our society and economic system is and how few differences of significance there are on the main tenets of that understanding – and yet how petty disagreements can so comprehensively disable us. In the next 100 days we could be faced with Labour going back into majority government, or seeking to negotiate itself into a coalition government or having to mobilise large scale and effective opposition to a precarious extremely reactionary coalition of the Tories, UKIP and a few Lib Dem stragglers. If the left doesn’t get its act together rapidly, we will be sidelined with no effective role to play. So let’s stop messing about and come together. To try to assist this process I have called a roundtable meeting on Saturday 7 February, whose aim is to bring together left MPs, PPCs, left trade union representatives, elected local government members, representatives from left Labour organisations, and a number of key left academics, policy analysts, commentators and activists. The aim is to discuss and determine the key bottom lines in policy terms that we will be campaigning for Labour to adopt in government and as base lines in any coalition negotiations if Labour goes down that road. https://labourbriefing1.wordpress/2015/01/19/stop-messing-around-come-to-the-left-platform-meeting-on-7-february/
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 22:30:10 +0000
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