Page 9 - Clause Four News Today

Down to the 1880s there was no “labour movement” [in Britain] in the continental sense at all. There were strong trade unions (of skilled workers), and these unions were politically-minded — but the only parties were the two ruling-class ones, the Tories and the Liberals.

  Why should Marxists want to narrow our appeal to 'the workers', enrolling people from other classes only to the extent that they rally behind the working class? Why not seek a broader unity of 'ordinary people'? These questions are live among 'new anti-capitalist' activists, and on the left generally. By Chris Reynolds.  

FOLLOWING the correspondence over the recent P&O outrage, I can agree, indeed empathise from personal experience, with all of the righteous…

In June 1994 when Tony Blair stood for election as leader of the Labour Party he denied wanting to get rid of Clause Four, the Labour Party's long-held, ambiguous, but potently symbolic, commitment to reform socialism.

According to the Telegraph and the Daily Mail, Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle is thinking of quitting the Labour Party and standing Corbyn as an independent in Islington North in the general election likely in 2023 or 2024. It looks like malicious “stirring “by those papers. The Corbynista blog Skwawkbox claims Labour right-wingers have been feeding those Tory papers. Though Skwawkbox is unreliable, that is plausible.

The legacy of the collapse of Stalinism

BBC News By Nicholas Watt media captionJohn McDonnell: "Keir cannot look like a Blairite tribute band." Sir Keir Starmer must avoid leading Labour like a "Blairite tribute band", former shadow chancellor John McDonnell has warned. He told BBC Twos Newsnight the party should become more radical following setbacks in recent elections. Mr McDonnell, an ally of former leader Jeremy Corbyn, also argued there was "disillusionment" with Labour, "particularly among younger people". But a Labour party s...

11 May 2021 • 12:53am Jeremy Corbyn, then Labour leader, and Sir Keir Starmer, then shadow Secretary of State for Departing the European Union, after a meeting in 2019 with EU negotiators  Credit: Reuters /FRANCOIS LENOIR  SIR – Labour has lost its raison d’être. This was to advance the interests of a social stratum called Labour, which was disadvantaged socially and economically with respect to the rest of society. It was coupled with a dogma, derived from the 19th-century origins of...

Hartlepool was more than a horror for the Labour Party. More than a humiliation. It was a colossal, life-threatening defeat such as engulfed and eventually destroyed the Liberal Party 100 years ago. Not a routine defeat for a government in a by-election but a complete crushing by a Government which the Labour Party had attempted to pillory for sleaze for months because it had nothing else to offer. A party under a shiny, new forensically intelligent leader who was going to be a herald of change...

This interview was suggested by the interviewee, Sadiq Khan. Not because he wanted to promote his campaign for re-election as London mayor. We barely discussed it. He wanted to talk about mental health; his, mine and everyone else’s. Fear not, we also talk Trump, Brexit, Sir Keir Starmer and whether Labour can win the next election. But mental health and men was the reason he wanted to reach out to GQ. He had seen my BBC documentary on depression, in which I spoke of how I use a jam jar to m...