Solid Workers

Owen Jones asks why are groups of hard remainers refusing to acknowledge the victory their marches, campaigning, and consistent pressure have won. If you go back to the so-called People's Vote demonstrations, many a speaker called on, nay demanded Labour ditch its ambiguous Brexit position. "Where's Jeremy Corbyn?" went the mischievous chants. Well, Jeremy Corbyn is where you wanted him: calling for a second EU referendum with an option to remain. But it's not enough, never enough. Some have moved the goal posts and now only revoking Article 50 will do. Others have vowed to never vote Labour with Corbyn as leader, even if the only discernible route to their political objective is through a Labour government. You can fantasise about the hard positioning of the Liberal Democrats winning a majority, and I can dream of winning the EuroMillions jackpot. We've spoken about Corbynphobia plenty of times . The very prospect of Jeremy Corbyn entering Number 10, if o...

For a brief, beautiful moment it appeared as if the stitcher-in-chief had become the stitched. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Jon Lansman's surprise move at Friday evening's NEC to abolish the Deputy Leader post, and therefore dump its awful incumbent fell. Overnight too many people got cold feet, were spooked by the promise of bad press, and fretted it would push more Labour MPs out of the PLP, so instead of an unexpected but welcome defenestration we got a review . And now we will have to endure another episode of wrecking when Tom Watson takes the stand for his slot on Tuesday. Is he going to thank Jeremy Corbyn for saving his bacon, or glory in a confected legend of seeing off the "hard left"? We know him too well to put the answer in any doubt. In his usual disingenuous way on Radio 4 this morning, he called on the members to decide his fate, knowing full well there is no mechanism to recall him and there being as much a chance of refreshing his mandate as, um...

That moment when you're walking to work and remember a point you were supposed to make in last night's piece . And, perhaps, this is the most glaring error in Bolton and Pitts's Corbynism: A Critical Approach . In their book, they answer previous criticism for their being unconcerned with providing an alternative politics or strategy to Corbynism with a shrug of the shoulders and a dismissive meh. All well and good if you're interested in merely writing things and building careers as soi-disant Marxists with a neat little niche. And yet, their book is explicitly located as an intervention in strategic debates about socialism today. Remember, their argument is two-fold: the left should be in the business of defending its gains and holding the centre against the brutish, populist hordes. It's almost as if their declaration is a rhetorical flourish to try and position their critique of Corbynism from within the left for, well, marketing purposes . The second point fl...

In his recent interview on Politics Theory Other about the long-term decline of Conservatives and Conservatism, Andy Beckett suggests incuriosity about Corbyn and Corbynism is a symptom of the establishment right and establishment left's disengagement from political reality. It's a point this blog has made plenty of times . Apart from the ridiculous “explanation” favoured by sundry right wingers that a quarter of a million Trots were waiting for their moment to swarm into the Labour Party as soon as Jeremy Corbyn gave them the green light. But the claim of incuriosity does not apply across the board. Gavin Shuker recently had a go explaining Change UK's failure, an endeavour that, euphemistically speaking, left a lot to be desired. And last year we had published Corbynism: A Critical Approach by Matt Bolton and Frederick Harry Pitts, which claims to be a Marxist critique of Corbynism. For this reason alone it is worth considering. It begins, as you might expect, with an...

A guest post from David Osland Last weekend, The Sunday Times opinion pages carried an article arguing that comparisons between Boris Johnson and Hitler constituted ‘hysteria, hyperbole and mass bed-wetting’. This weekend, the Sunday Times opinion pages carried an article arguing in all apparent seriousness that Jeremy Corbyn in office would seek to channel Robert Mugabe. Double standards from the Murdoch press will hardly surprise anyone on the left. Some of us remember the routine attacks on the Labour Party from the very same publications back in the 1980s, known in the slang of the day as ‘monsterings’. But at a time when an unelected Tory prime minister has just suspended parliament, and the salami-slice erosion of democracy in Britain is self-evidently emanating from the right, the gravity of the charges demands more than tenuous linkage on the back of a couple of anecdotes from any given journo’s student days. The recently-deceased Zimbabwean dictator may not have been in the ...

Writing about Boris Johnson's record-breaking run of five defeats last Wednesday, it was nigh on impossible to believe his week could possibly get worse. Let's take this opportunity to pick over the ruin and humiliation, then. In addition to the defeats, which included the general election he's desperate to have, he lost one MP to the LibDems before sacking 21 of his fellow Tories, saw his filibuster of the Benn Bill fall apart in the Lords, had his cabinet papers released to the courts , the departure of his own brother because he couldn't stand what was happening, the resgination of Caroline Spelman, the threat he would go to prison if he did not follow the Article 50 extension instruction by October 19th, the resignation of Amber Rudd, and last of all Sajid Javid making the unconvincing case on this morning's Andrew Marr that the PM would never extend Article 50 while saying he would obey the law. Absolutely excruciating. It took Theresa May almost a year to h...

Writing last October, I argued that a chunk of the so-called People's Vote campaign were motivated less by the case for a second referendum and reversing Brexit and more about driving a wedge between Jeremy Corbyn and the (mostly) pro-EU base of Corbynism. And this argument has been conclusively proven over the last few days. Not only have the Liberal Democrats so thoroughly exposed their opportunism and posturing to their newly-won layer of voters, so Chuka Umunna and his former ex-Labour colleagues grouped in whatever the two sides of Change UK are calling themselves today have also shown their opposition to Brexit is subordinate to their (failed) factional aim of deposing Corbyn. Pathetic. What's the root of this? After all, think about it for a moment. In his open letter to other parties, independents, and "rebel" Tories, Jeremy Corbyn proposed a temporary caretaker government. This wouldn't implement any Labour policy, and be limited to requesting an exten...

It's not been a good day for the Liberal Democrat leader, Jo Swinson. Still on a high after snatching a seat at the Brecon by-election, chillaxing in the after glow of picking up another recruit from the much-missed Change UK, and making uncomfortable waves for Labour with her Tom Watson chum-in , I expect she arose this morning felling quite chuffed.  And then that utter bastard Jeremy Corbyn went and ruined everything.  In his letter to the leaders of opposition parties, and the smattering of independents and disgruntled Tories, he holds out the hand of friendship. To stop no deal, in the event of a successful no confidence in Boris Johnson's government JCorbz proposes a Labour-led caretaker government that would apply for an Article 50 extension and call a general election in which Labour would campaign on the basis of a second referendum with the option of remaining. Surely the Liberal Democrats, the self-styled party of remain would applaud Labour's move to stop no d...

The future is indefinitely delayed and may never arrive. I haven't written much/at all about Mark Fisher's work for no particular reason, but I've often thought along the same lines as Magdalen Rose had certain themes that easily periodise them, but you can't say the same for the 00s and this decade (we can't even reach a consensus about what we should call it). For example, when you think about the 1980s the popular imagination is littered with hair spray, neon, electropop and stadium rock, arcade and video games, and catalogues stuffed with an overabundance of gender normative toys. All of it the glitzy and kitsch accompaniment to a grimy decade of intense class conflict and right wing revanchism. It might be too early to talk about the 2010s, but the 2000s lie 10 years in the past and we lack a retrospective consensus about its highlights and themes (reality TV? The PlayStation 2?), it's all uncertain and a bit baffling. Instead, the two decades bleed togeth...

John McDonnell was a bit naughty talking off the cuff about the Labour Party and its approach to Scottish independence. But he's right. In his chat with Iain Dale at the Edinburgh fringe, the shadow chancellor said a Labour government would not stand in the way of a second Scottish independence referendum if Holyrood was minded to call one. This is against Conservative policy and, as it happens, Labour policy too. Ian Murray, the ever-useless member for Edinburgh South and the sole Labour survivor of the 2015 wipe out retorted that this is giving succour to those "who want to divide communities and people", and runs against Labour's "internationalist" values. What codswallop. Let's consider Labour's strategic dilemma in Scotland. The party generally is against Scottish independence and would prefer either the UK, or some reformed, federalised successor state to continue with Scotland as an integral part of it. The latter is my view, as it happens. ...

Twitter is a blessing and a curse. Mostly a curse. It enables the rapid networking and dissemination of information - any information - but simultaneously doubles down and condenses the pathologies of platform capitalism and the attention economy . I'm reminded of this every single moment of scrolling through my Twitter feed and seeing shared articles and bad tempered polemic mixed in with attention seeking and mind-bending narcissism. Normally, you just go with the wretched flow. In terms of a cost/benefit analysis the price of scrying performative stupidity is outweighed by the pay off of decent opinion and info. But the toxicity does grate, and a lot of what is bad has to do with the Twitter tribes. Because I inhabit a very particular online universe, there are two groups who are especially annoying and sometimes toxic. The Follow Back Pro Europe crowd, grouped by their totemic #FBPE hashtag overlap with the worst people in the Liberal Democrats, the Labour right, and with cen...