ACFM - ACFM Microdose: The ‘Radical Realists’ of Mainstream, Labour’s New Faction

Episode Date: December 21, 2025

After a Trip episode about the meaning of mainstream, this time the gang go deeper into ‘Mainstream’ – that is, the new soft-left faction inside Labour. Yes, a festive episode about the inner workings of a political party! Don’t say we don’t spoil you. Jem, Nadia and Keir explain the emergence of Mainstream’s ‘radical realists’ […]

This is Acid Man Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Kea Milbin and I'm joined as usual by my good friend Nadia Idle. Hello? And my other good friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're discussing a new faction in the Labour Party called Mainstream. No, don't turn off. Let me explain what's going on. We're in the middle of a series of episodes where we're trying to look at all of the different things that are going on in the left in the UK at the moment. We started off with a main episode about parties and then did a microdose about your party.

the new Left Party that just formed on the weekend as we record this. Then we've just recorded an episode on the concept of the mainstream as a setup really to discuss this new faction mainstream. Then next we'll be discussing the concept of ecology and we'll be discussing the Green Party and Zach Pallanski's leadership of the Green Party and all that that involves. So I've just explained why we're talking about. talking about mainstream. Perhaps we should just get into it. And perhaps, Jeremy, you could

just give us a little bit of a rundown on what is mainstream? Where's it come from? What's it trying to do? Okay, sure. Before I do that, let me just apologise to everyone listening for the fact that this is going to be an episode involving a lot of gemsplaining of the history of the soft left and things like this. And this is, this is in effect going to be our festive episode. We often like to do a sort of fun or a thematic episode for the Christmas season, but we haven't got that together now. So this is going to be the equivalent of that new chest of tools that your partner has given you for Christmas, like it extremely useful.

You've woken up on Christmas morning, you see a big ACFM rapper, you unwrap it, and what have we given you an episode about the Labour Party? Happy Christmas! It could have been collective joy, it could have been friendship, but instead we are doing factions within the Labour Party friends. But look, we are going to be covering a history which is very poorly understood on the British left at the moment, especially among younger people, really, and really anyone younger than me is very poorly understood. And if you listen to this, at the end of it, you will have a much better understanding of it.

All right, so what is the actual initiating event? The initiating event for us is indeed, in September of this year, 2025, a new organisation was launched for members of the Labour Party who want to differentiate themselves from the right-wing programme of the people currently running the Labour Party and the Labour Government. It's in some ways an odd thing to do because there is already an organisation which does that, which is Momentum, which is the organisation set up in 2015 to support Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party,

which still does a very good job of representing what we might call a hard left or far-left position within the party. So mainstream is differentiated from momentum, although the relationship between them is not hostile, to be clear, is differentiated insofar as it quite clearly represents a different tradition within the Labour Party, the tradition which is often referred to as the soft left. Mainstream has actually been set up by two organisations that already exist. One of them is an organisation called Compass, which I have been involved with for a long time, which I will talk about the history of Compass and how it's changed over time

when we get into the more detailed history of the soft left. The other organisation is one called Open Labour, which has existed for a few years for a shorter time than Compass and has decided actually to wind itself up completely now. And Open Labour has really always been an organisation which saw itself very, very explicitly as representing this very specific tradition of the soft left.

Compass didn't really use that term about itself and Kump has always had sort of pretensions to extend its reach, you know, to include sort of, you know, maybe more kind of intellectually adventurous Blairites right through to people who are really more associated with the hard left. I mean, you could say people like myself and Clive Lewis and John Tricket, who've all been involved, would fall into that camp. So that is what has happened. I've written an article about it in British Left Magazine Tribune, which you can find online if you want to read that. But we thought we would get into all of the context for this in a lot more detail than you can get into in a 2000 word article

that has to fit on a printed page. The name is mainstream. The name, I've got to say, I'm very ambivalent about it. I was ambivalent about it until Keir came up with the idea of this set of episodes and that meant that we could have the idea of doing a main episode about the concept of mainstream, which is a great concept and it was a great episode to do. So I'm now sort of happy about it. The idea of the name derives from the fact that, yeah, the right wing of the Labour Party very rarely admit publicly or explicitly to being on the right wing of the Labour Party. They don't like to use that language because they know it alienates most Labour members and activists. So instead they like to call themselves moderates. And the implication there

is always that somehow they represent a sort of norm from which any form of radicalism is a deviation. Whereas, you know, lots and lots of opinion polls of Labour members over the past, just over the past few months have shown that the existing membership of the Labour Party is very, very unhappy with the current direction of government and really wants a programme, which is way to the left of anything which Stama and the people in his cabinet and the political tradition they represent would ever really endorse. So it's making an ideological claim to be the mainstream of the Labour Party. one of the things I wanted to bring up was like so the tagline as far as I can work out the tagline for mainstream is radical realists you know a group for radical realists which I sort of quite like

but obviously that's a little bit contradictory in some of the discussions of what the concept of the mainstream sort of signals basically i.e are we realists because we exist you know what we want to do exists within the the sort of like constrained sense of what's possible at moment. Perhaps we start then, the radical is the bit that, like, but we have to push it

further sort of idea. Because, like, one of the criticisms you'd have of Starmerism and Reevesism is that, like, they have been very realistic, as in they've just basically followed the orthodoxy from the treasury, etc., completely with it, stayed completely within the realms of what's possible to do, et cetera, these sorts of things. One of the problems with that is that basically you can't do anything. The problem is they, they, so they're, they, so they was this, there was a survey the other day where 75% of the population of the UK said that they thought that the Stama's government had been a continuation of Tory, a Conservative Party policies. If you want to know why Stama's so unpopular, like it's that, isn't it? It's more than just

the fact that he has no, not no charisma. He has zero charisma. He removes charisma from the, from the room, any room he's in. It's that, isn't it? It's basically that there has been, you know, there is a realism, the adults in the room. We are not in a situation. We are not in a situation. in which that can lead to anything good, basically. So it's that what's up for debate with mainstream is what's most important to you? Is it to be realistic or is it to be radicals? Well, I think the claim being made by mainstream, which is a pretty radical claim. I mean, its program is based on a pretty radical analysis.

And that is that, well, there is nothing realistic about thinking that you can just carry on the way the current government is without it ending in disaster. Yeah, there's nothing realistic about thinking that you can just continue to tinker around the edges of what's left to us from 30, 40 years of neoliberalism without the result being the election of a fascist government in another few years. So it's not realistic, really. It's not realistic.

And in fact, you have to be more radical if you want to be realistic about actually achieving even moderately progressive outcomes. So that would be the claim. Of course, it's true that that slogan does sort of echo in a way the claim made by the Blair rights in the 90s and 2000s to be radical, radical modern, radical centurists. They call themselves the radical centre because they were committed to an aggressive programme of modernisation,

but they weren't interested in peasing forces to their left or their right as they saw it. And I think the frame, the whole framing of mainstream has been fairly controversial. I think within the networks of people who got it set up. I mean, I was personally, I was part of conversations about it, going back a couple of years. I think it was in the new statesman about three years ago. I first said I thought we really needed some new vehicle for the Labour Left inside the Labour Party, but we didn't really get what I was advocating for. What I really wanted was some vehicle that would include momentum, actually, and that would explicitly designate itself as socialist, because I think that is actually what would really sort of

inspire a lot of the current remaining Labour membership who are really very demoralised. And, you know, the people who actually took the initiative of getting it set up took a different view. They took the view that it was good to have this kind of name and this rhetoric, the signals the fact that they don't really position them. So they don't accept the kind of designation of somehow being on the far left of the party. And I think if you look at the website and stuff, and if you look at the founding statement, it's a demand for a fairly radical. program. It is basically saying that what we need is like Labor's 2017 manifesto, and that that is a mainstream view within the Labour Party. So the risk of the strategy that's been

adopted is that it's never going to actually attract enough people to get inspired by it and join it and be active within it and organised within the party under its banner. And I'm not sure, I have to say, I don't have figures at the moment for how many members is actually attracted, but my intuitive sense is that might, I think that might be right. I don't think it has attracted loads of people to join. So, and I would, I mean, but then I would say that. I mean, it's kind of self-serving for me to say that because I'll be honest. When Neil Lawson first told me that was going to be the name, I like just, I completely scoffed at it.

I said, it's a clever name. It'll really annoy Morgan McSweeney. It'll really annoy the right. And the Guardian leader writers will say how clever it is, but it will not. rally the membership the way we need to. I mean, we had a really interesting discussion about the mainstream. We should go there and listen to the main episode, dear listeners, because we were saying it's such an ambiguous concept because we want our ideas to be mainstream, but like there

is a very anti-establishment insurgent mood in the country that I think the name mainstream doesn't talk to, do you know what I mean? So I can understand it in terms of like internal Labour Party positioning. But like there really is. an insurgent mood, you know, that's why reformer on whatever they are on, dropping actually a little bit now, probably between 25% or 30%. We'll have to see if it works, basically. I can understand what it's trying to do.

My big worry is that, like, it doesn't capture that, you know, anti-mainstream, anti-establishment, anti-mainstream media, that sort of thing. You know, when we said, when people talk about the mainstream media, nobody's talking about that in a positive sense. That's a critique, do you know what I mean? Whereas there's other uses of mainstream, which are. are more attractive, perhaps, something like that. Yeah, well, I mean, I agree with all that.

That also speaks to one of our themes for this episode, actually, which is the whole concept of faction and factionalism, which I know Nadi is going to talk about a bit more in a moment, because I have resolutely referred to mainstream as a new faction, or a factional organisation, but I know a lot of the other people. To be clear for listeners, mainstream is basically launched with a statement signed by a bunch of,

sort of people from, basically from the Labour left, not many people from the really, the really radical left. I think myself and Clive Lewis and John Lansman would probably be the most kind of conventionally left wings for signatories. We were not invited to comment on the statement. We were presented with this statement with you sign this. And right now it just, it still has an interim kind of management committee and the membership hasn't really been formally constituted and there haven't been elections yet to its management committee or anything. So that's, the stage, we're at with it at the moment when we're recording in early December. But presumably people can join this, Jim, and you've got to be a member of the Labour Party,

presumably. I'm not sure actually with mainstream. Maybe you do have to be a Labour member. And the rule with momentum has always been, well, you don't have to have an up-to-date individual membership of the party, but you can't be excluded from it by virtue of being a member of another party. I think you do have to be a member of the Labour Party for momentum, unless they've changed it. You definitely did when it was a very big organisation.

But they never used to enforce it, this is my understanding. But anyway, anyway, within that sort of network with those sort of networks, a lot of people are sort of uncomfortable, we're calling it a faction. And one of its big claims for why it's being set up is it's being set up in opposition to what is called, referred to as the hyper-factionalism of the right wing of the Labour Party. And that is also, of course, that is an important part of the context. Part of the context is the current leadership and the bureaucratic management of the Labour Party have adopted a position which really has broken with what were pretty well established and well-observed conventions within the party for the past

100 years, according to which there were limits to how far you would basically, you would punish and try to exclude anyone who doesn't belong to your particular political tendency in the party if you ended up in charge of it. And those norms were, unfortunately, I would have to say, they were still observed, for example, when Corbyn was leader of the party, despite people like myself, to be honest, strongly urging the people around Corby to purge the right when they had the chance. In this sense, you know, a lot of the people around mainstream want to call it an anti-faction in some sense, which I reject, I say it's silly, and I think we shouldn't participate in the discourse which overlooks the extent to which

you just can't really, you know, any political organisation, any political movement will develop internal tendencies and disagreements, therefore, factions. In British politics, generally speaking, when we talk about factions, like within parties, we're not necessarily talking about formal organisations. We're talking about broader political tendencies, histories, histories, and those will map to a greater or lesser extent onto actual membership organisations. I mean, that's not the way it works in all countries. Like famously, the Australian Labour Party has like two official internal factions. And when you join, you have to say which one you're joining.

Basically, a notionally left-wing and a notionally right-wing fraction. And it's been the case like for decades. And certainly within political traditions like Trotskyism, there are all kinds of established mechanisms by which internal organisations within parties will constitute themselves and make themselves publicly visible, etc. But certainly in the British party system, traditionally, when we talk about a faction, you're really talking about a relatively loose ideological and

organisational grouping. And then there are all, sometimes there are organisations which actually map directly onto factions. And importantly, of course, one of the features of the British political culture in particular, I'd say particularly English political culture, probably more even than Scottish and Welsh, is there is historically within the Labour Party and the Labour Party and within other parties, there is a real allergy to the whole idea of factions. There is this idea that they shouldn't really exist, that people in a party are all on the same team

and should all pull together, and there is something sort of nasty and distasteful about the whole idea of having a faction. I would say that is a chronically debilitating attitude to politics, and that attitude is one of the reasons for the failure of communism in the Labour Party. But I think there will be much easier to understand all that. If you talk a bit about this,

this history of the idea. Yeah, well, I think basically you've explained part of the reason why this is important, Jeremy, which is that it's even there in the terminology. In the previous episode, we were talking about the mainstream and whether it's understood as something positive or a pejorative. And I feel like, you know, in popular culture on left-wing circles rather than the left or like progressive circles, like factionalism and factions, as you say, is kind of understood as like a negative thing, which I would say could almost be parallel to this idea of like

non-hierarchical organizations, which of course create informal hierarchies, right? So I think it's important to have that kind of multiplicity of views represented within parties in a more formal sense or like in a recognized sense, otherwise it's going to happen anyway. But I think it's important to have a little bit of a discussion for the benefit of our listeners on what is this anyway. Like, what are we talking about? What is, like, how does this function in terms of factionalism on the left and especially, I think, on the European and British left? Because I would say that if you are on the left, but not in the left, none of this might make any sense to you. So I think we owe it to our listeners to talk about this a little bit. So I think

it's best to approach this from thinking, like, why? Like, why do factions occur on the left. So I think it's useful to think about the left in this sense as kind of a coalition perhaps of emancipatory projects, right? It's a coalition of these different projects. And I like the Stuart Hall quote here about the left being inherently like a coalition of social forces, right, with different histories and priorities. Okay. So if we think about it like that, then you start to understand that there can be like disagreements about strategy, like how change should happen, what's the role of the state, the priority of class struggle, and then it could be disagreements about analysis, right, like, you know, the different

traditions thinking about capitalism in a different way, and then, you know, the commitment to internal democracy and kind of how that plays out. So in a sense, it's important to recognize like what the role of the left is and within that, what kind of, what kind of of a party is, and what we would be demanding of the Labour Party in a kind of understand that in a wider sense, to understand that factionalism in a sense, like, has a role in terms of transformation, but also for allowing the multiplicity of views and struggle. So, in short, this understanding, like, this is important for this discussion about, you know, mainstream going forward, is understanding that left factionalism is, you can't just say, like, this is infighting,

although obviously there is infighting, and there's a lot of, like, there's a lot of insider jokes around this stuff, and there's a lot of behavior, which, of course, is incredibly unsavory, but rather to understand left factionalism in a kind of wider analytical sense of what it's historically rooted in, right, about whether it's strategic disagreements about, like, achieving certain change or liberation or whatever, analyses of capitalism and, like, commitments to critique, etc. and like the fact that there has to be like a coalition aspect to left politics in a sense, right? So in a way it's a byproduct of a transformational movement and it's kind of necessary rather than thinking about it as within the language or the imaginary of just simply of splits, even though, you know, on the ground, the experience of those kind of splits might be quite fracturous and, you know, unpleasant. I'm not saying those things don't happen. They definitely do, and we have all experienced them. But in order to understand the role of why is an organisation like mainstream coming about

and what is the history it sits within, we kind of have to understand the fact, like this idea of the left as a coalition of different progressive or emancipatory project. So I hope that helps as a kind of launch pad to talk about some of these things. It might actually be better to think about the left as an ecology rather than a coalition, where each sort of element that's moving, you know, it sort of influences the other elements that are moving. Do you know what I mean? They're not mutually exclusive concepts, are they? I think a coalition is an ecology. Yeah, no, no, totally, yeah, but it, yeah, they're just sort of different registers for the same thing. One of the ways that might help us is to think that,

like, it's not just that there's an ecology of different parties or something, but each, it's like a nested ecology, isn't it? Because each party is sort of like an ecology. Like, one of the things with factions is, like, I just think they are just, you know, an essential part of operating when you have political parties. But like one of the things that determines whether they can be useful or they can be destructive is the sort of political culture within which they exist and the sense that there might be a shared project amongst these different factions. I'm not sure that is true in a Labour Party. I'm not sure whether there is a common project. I think people in mainstream, most of people in mainstream, we've probably got more in

common with, like, people in the Green Party than they have with, with the Labour right and the Blairites, who basically have more in common with the Conservative Party, and probably some parts of that with Farage than they do, with the radical left anyway. I actually think that's a really, that is a really good point. And I'm thinking back to, like, when I was researching this, like, the different figures over history that have, like, made comment on this, you know, like, Emma Goldman, the anarchist. feminist, et cetera, like, it's got this great quote about no real social change has ever been brought without a vast amount of confusion, contradiction and pain, which I think it's like a really

intense quote. There's your Christmas present listeners. But I think it's important to understand the context in which something like that was said, which is that a shared, like where that sits within like an Uber level, like umbrella level shared project. And I would say that even in terms of the anarchist and communist, like, split, it was still understood as who the enemy is, whereas I think what you've just said, Keir is, like, really important, which is that actually the question of whose side are you on, like in a fundamental way, is not something that is, like, fully understood by all the players in this specific case. No, I think that's completely right.

And I think that has, to any certain extent, that's been the case in the Labour Party right back to the 1910s when there was severe disagreement over whether or not Labour was on the side of the Bolshevik Revolution. And to some extent, that disagreement has never gone away. That disagreement was largely contained in the post-war period by the assumption that that matter had really been settled, that if you wanted to be an advocate for the Bolshevik Revolution's legacy, you should join the Communist Party or one of the small Trotskyist organisations, that Labour wasn't really the place for you.

But on the other hand, Labour was committed, to the eventual substitution of capitalist social relations with something like socialist social relations through the extension of the public sector and the retreat of the private sector. And it was written in Clause 4, isn't it? Well, it still is, to be honest. Well, they changed it.

They changed it. Well, they changed it, but they were not able to remove the statement, for example, that Labour is a democratic socialist party, which is still part of Clause 4. So after the 1990s, really, the question of what is it, like what is the Labour Party actually for, it becomes much more contentious. Because there isn't, really, during the period of the post-war settlement, you can say, really, Labor created the post-war settlement and its job is to do defend and where possible

extend the post-war settlement. After the period of Thatcherism, like basically the right wing and the social forces the right of the party represent become convinced that the social settlement cannot be recovered and shouldn't be even if it could. And really the Labour Party has not really had a kind of stable political identity. The Labour Party since that point has really been a space within which there's an ongoing contest between people who basically still think that the job of the Labour Party over the very long term at least should be to aim to substitute capitalist social relations for more egalitarian ones and people who absolutely don't think that and who think anyone who thinks that is a dangerous lunatic. really the idea that there is a shared project, a project shared by all of the factions

in the Labour Party, which is the project of at very least getting a Labour government and having that Labour government be as left-wing as it's realistic to be. I mean, that got smashed in 2017 because basically the right of the party, their own self-conception, their own way of thinking about themselves

and their own project up until 2017 was, well, of course, we, like, the soft left, like even the hard left, would like to build a socialist society. We would like to restore the post-war settlement at least, but it's not politically possible. The public don't want it. We just can't get elected on that mandate. And when it became clear in 2017, you absolutely could get elected on that mandate, or they just went into an existential crisis from which they haven't recovered at all, which they're still going through, even while being in government. But I think probably like to elaborate on all,

that. I should probably, I think we should go into a couple of points, and then I'll explain more of this sort of detailed history. Firstly, mainly to understand where mainstream has come from. We've got to understand the history of this thing called the soft left, and I'm going to say really, I'll say really briefly, what I think that means to people, and then, and how it fits into the ecology, indeed, of the factions in the Labour Party, and then we can get into a bit more detailed history. All right, So the idea of the soft left is, well, explain, you can only really understand it in historical context, but I would say that it's a really misunderstood term by people who do not know the internal policies and culture of the policy very well. But I would say, broadly speaking, the soft left, when members of the party refer to themselves as soft left,

and you have to understand for most of the past 40 years, the average member of the Labour Party would, see themselves as being on the soft left. That changes a bit in the latter period of the Blair Brown government when so many people have left the party, mainly after the Iraq war, that really the majority of the members are really on the right of the party, the Blairite centrist. But that's a pretty brief window in a long history when most members are really on the soft left. And what they mean by it is they are committed to, as radical a transformation of society in a socialist direction, as could be achieved through peaceful electoral means, but they don't really have any identification with any revolutionary tradition. That's what they mean when they call

themselves soft left. Where it gets really confusing is the term soft left also gets used for MPs and even factional groupings within Parliament. And when that term is used by journalists or by MPs themselves in that way, it doesn't really mean that at all. So the term soft left tends to get applied to groups of MPs, usually ones with close ties to the trade union bureaucracies, whose political position I would sum up as being, well, basically, they don't really want any more extension of the Thatcher Eye and New Labour project of privatising public assets. They don't really want any more of that. They might even want like a bit of public ownership, like the sort of piecemeal renationalisation of the railways we're seeing in Britain,

but they're not really interested in engaging in some kind of Graham project to restore the post-war settlement. There's a real divergence between what is meant by Soft Left when people are talking about MPs and what people mean by it when organisations like Open Labour or Compass refer to themselves as Soft Left. They mean something quite different. And what they mean is really they see themselves in the tradition of social democracy. And I'll explain that to him a bit more in a minute.

I think it's probably useful to say, like, quickly, what are they like the other traditions and tendencies? And the classical typology of factions in the Labour Party after the early 80s, really up until the present, is that there are four main historical tendencies or factions. there is the so-called hard left and the hard left really emerges in the 80s and it's a sort of I'll explain where that comes from when I go through the history but it's you know the most extreme sections of the Labour left sections which many of whose members would have some identification at least notionally with revolutionary traditions would mostly see themselves as Marxist even if they're not really interested in sort of Leninist forms of organization or

what have you, etc. Then there's a soft left, which I've already sort of described. Then there is what is referred to as the old right, which is the traditional right wing of the Labour Party, which right back to the moment of its foundation in the early 20th century, was closely associated with the trade union bureaucracies, at least the more right wing unions, the unions who can trace their roots back really into the kind of skilled craft unions of the late 19th century. And then the Blairites who really emerged as a new formation in the 1990s around a project to implement something like Clinton is doing in America at the same time, which is basically a form of neoliberalism, which has various mitigating elements built into it. So you're basically doing

neoliberalism. You're still privatising public assets. You're still basically trying to constrict the power of trade unions. You are effectively trying to reduce the power of democratic institutions over corporations. But alongside that, you're putting some money into public services to try to at least enable citizens to compete with each other in the labour market more effectively and on a bit more of an equal footing than if you just allow the rich to use all their inherited wealth to give themselves massive advantages. That's the Blairites, new labour. So those are the four main traditions. Those are the four main factions. And a few years ago, like I did propose a different a typology which would include a different strand which I called the radical left by which I really

and that was really borne out of my sense that really programmatically and strategically that there really isn't any difference between like the left of the soft left and the more sort of strategic strands of the hard left so there's there isn't really any difference programmatically or even at the level now of political strategy between like john macdonnell who's long associated with the hard left and the program of mainstream which is coming out of the soft left there really isn't any difference there

but nonetheless partly because of all this institutional history there is still this perceived difference between the soft left and the hard left and it continues to resonate to this day in terms of which groups of people tend to talk to each other the most and that really is part of an effect

of the long kind of resonance of really significant divisions in the 80s I was going to say, isn't it identitarian as well? Well, it is for a few people. I would say for surprisingly few, we're kind of building up to the sort of deep history of the split within the left in the 1980s

that produces the idea of the soft left and the hard left. And my observation, like something I've been saying for years, like as somebody who's been active around the Labour Party, is basically the people who lived through that split within the left in the 80s, who went one way or another on either, the side of the division between the soft left and the hard left are immensely bitter towards each other. And they really, they can't really get over it to this day. They can't really forgive

each other for it. There's a few exceptions to this. So John Lansman, who is absolutely a central figure of the hard left, gets on very well these days like Neil Lawson, who's a central figure from the soft left and is one of the signatories to the mainstream statement. But for the most part, like that left this real bitterness. And like I will always remember having gone. I mean, I had conversations, I don't mind, with very senior MPs of the soft left in 2016, at least two figures. I'm not going to say who it is. Soft by their definition or by ours? This would be very rare instances where you could say it's clearly both, really.

But each said to me, I absolutely should be supporting Corbyn, but I can't. I just can't, basically because all my friends, all my social networks, since the 80s have been based around this faction really being the sort of the soft left rather than the other one. And yeah, and so it was sort of identity, it has been identitarian for some really key players, although not really for most members. And that's partly, that's been a real source of frustration, I think, for members, like for years and years. And, you know, I remember, well, I'll talk about, I'll give an anecdote illustrating

that frustration when we get to that point in the narrative history, which we're going to get to in a moment. All right, the first thing I want to say really clearly, because people often don't understand this, is just like what is the Labour Party? The Labour Party is not like an ideologically focused party, like you get in European countries. It's really a mass party, like more like the Democrats or the Republicans in the United States. And the Labour Party was formed at the beginning of the 20th century out of a federation of different organisations that included Marxist revolutionaries and included most of the major trade unions and included the Fabians who were committed to this kind of technocratic sort of reform program. So it's always been a

really complex federation. It's not, it's never been an organization that you join because you are absolutely committed to like the current program, whatever it is at a given moment or the current leadership. It's never been the nature of it. And it's the case today. And it's the case today. that if you join the Labour Party you have to abide by certain rules but the basic rule is you're not allowed to publicly campaign against a Labour candidate in any election at any level.

The rules do not include that you have to endorse the current programme of the party at all. It's not a democratic centralist party. I will say though that like lots of people in the Corbyn era, lots of people did join because they wanted to support Corbyn.

That's why they had such a horrible shock when they actually went to a CLP in. Which is understandable because if you do not come from the background of operating within this infrastructure, that is going to happen. And I'm very sympathetic to that. I'm very sympathetic to that. But, you know, these were the outcomes.

I completely agree. I'm also sympathetic. But I also think, I feel like there are loads of people out there. They can't imagine, like, being in the Labour Party now because the Labour government is like doing bad stuff, like especially around Palestine. And I think, you know, if you're going to understand that without just, I mean, I mean, Which is the point of this podcast, right? Yeah. I mean, I have been screamed out personally a lot, like online and in person over the past few months,

and accused of complicity with genocide, which I think is obviously ridiculous, because, I mean, if you think that's true, then is Zoran complicit because he stood on the democratic platform in New York and was Jeremy Corbyn complicit with the invasion of Iraq? I mean, but it's also based, I think it is just based on a misunderstanding of what Labour Party membership means to, like, a lot of people who joined. It doesn't mean, like, you endorse the current ideological program of the leadership. It means you're claiming the right to contest over the ideological program of what is still the party of organised labour in this country. So you're claiming, and that is also what it's meant. I think another, and so, and that doesn't mean, of course that's not for everyone. I mean,

it's an important point. This is, I think what you're pointing to, Nadia is, we learn during the Corbyn years, that is not for everyone. Joining this big, sprawly messing organization, which is really if you're going to be effective in it, you have to see it as a terrain of struggle rather than like a community of shared values. That is not for everyone. And a lot of people just find that really stressful and upsetting. Yeah, no, absolutely. I think it's also something else, which is people's experience of joining organisations per se, right? If you have a certain idea of like what democracy is, like an experiential idea of what democracy is and or what an organization is and a hierarchy and like how that operates, which you might have from being a

member of a charity or like being in a community group or being in a lot like a lot more of a structured organization in a professional level. And then you come and join the Labor Party and you assume for good reason that it's going to function in the same way and that the terrain is going to function in the same way. And because of historical reasons, you know, which we've just discussed and we will continue to discuss on this episode, it is not. Right. And you can't blame people for it because a lot of people haven't had the experience of, like, political parties, especially political parties at this point in history with this specific set of historical realities, right? So it's all of those things at the same time. Yeah, that's totally

correct. Yeah. I mean, my response to that has always been, well, actually, it's also, it's not wrong to want to join an organisation that you're going to relate to in that way, but if you're going to do that within a mass party, then actually you need to join a faction, a factional organisation. You know, that's what I always said to people, well, you should join momentum, it all means join momentum and expect momentum to have a pretty consistent ideological program that you're going to support. And I'm saying that to be clear, I am still a member of momentum, you know, proud to be. But you shouldn't think of it as the same kind of thing as the Labour Party. It's not the same kind of thing. And I understand that people also want to

join parties that are more like just belonging to an ideologically consistent organisation. But the Labour Party's never been that. That's partly why factions within it are unavoidable and actually necessary. I would say even within momentum, there hasn't been necessarily consistencies. I mean, I think there are disagreements. We've all been engaged in factional struggle within momentum. Yes. We've all done that. It's factions all the way down. It's fractal the factions. That's why I'd say. Another term, I think we really have to clarify, as well as the Labour Party, before we get into this detailed history, is this social democracy. Because I'm really conscious these days, I think, especially on the left in Britain, there's a real misunderstanding around this term.

like people seem to think these days that social democracy refers to the sort of pro a sort of Blairite type program where you have no intention ever of replacing capitalist social relations with other types of social relations and you're just trying to mitigate the worst effects of inequality etc and i have to be really clear that is not what social democracy means even today to people who consider themselves social democrats i'm not saying i consider myself a social democrat but you know i would consider myself a social democracy radical socialist really. But that is not what it means at all. And there's a real misunderstanding here around this term and around terms like reformism. I hear all the time these days, I hear people like on sort of podcast saying, what reformism means is it means thinking that capitalism can be reformed without it no longer being capitalism and it can still work fine for people. And that's, that is not what it means. Like historically in the history of debates within the organized left, like in Europe, historically, the term reformism, refer to the idea that capitalism could be ended through a progressive process of peaceful

enactment of reforms rather than through a violent revolutionary struggle. But it didn't, what it didn't mean, like you weren't trying to ultimately replace capitalism. And to this day, you know, it's really important to understand. When people talk about social democracy, what they mean is they mean a program which will very deliberately try to remove key areas of social democracy. life from the domain of capital accumulation and commodity circulation, whether that's just core services like health and education, or whether it's a much more expansive program. That is what people mean by it.

And this is very important because the Blairites in particular, you have to, if you have to understand any of this faction of, you have to understand this, to understand any of this factional history, the Blair rights were never in favour of social democracy. They were absolutely defined themselves against any kind of social democratic program. They absolutely did embrace the idea that basically the whole idea of replacing capitalist social relations was an old-fashioned idea. It had been proven wrong by the defeat of communism. You shouldn't try to do it. And if you did try to do it, you'd just get eaten alive by competitors in the global market economy.

They did muddy the waters, though, because Blairites would claim social democracy. No, they wouldn't. Okay, okay. Actual real ideological Blair rights did not call themselves Social Democrats. They were called themselves progressives, but they would not call themselves Social Democrats. and they were quite clear that they weren't. But just to expand it, you know, further. So, like, you know, the Democratic Party wouldn't call themselves

social democracy, the US. No, no, no, not at all, no. But like, but there's like a, like, you know, there's a, so like, you know, the social democratic federation, that was a Marxist organisation, you know. Yeah, again, this is, I mean, the, the, the shift in meaning of the term is really weird, because indeed, when the Labour Party was first formed,

one of its constituent elements was the Social Democratic Federation, and that was the revolutionary Marxist organisation that William Morris belonged to. And indeed the Bolsheviks called themselves that the Social Democrats, it was the same time on Federation or Party of Russia. So Social Democrat meant you were revolutionary Marxist. And that terminology changed. It really changed because the mainstream, the non-Bolshevik aligned socialist parties in Western Europe, over the course of the post-war period, gradually became less and less ambitious in terms of their

supposed desire for some kind of revolutionary change. And so social democracy became associated with their projects. But their project remained, really up until the 90s, their project remained at least notionally that of a kind of gradual kind of piecemeal, like dismantling

of capitalism. Like it wasn't just to protect it. And that is still really important, because you really can't understand the politics, like the soft left of the party, or even actually the old right, without understanding this idea that social democracy, while it defined itself against what it understands to be revolutionary projects, which it thinks of quite negatively, that doesn't mean it doesn't want to replace capitalism. It just has a different idea about how you're going to go about doing

that. But we have to kick into account, like, you know, the continental European social democratic parties, they all took a very similar trajectory, do you know what I mean, which was to move away from the idea that we would be, that this is a path through to socialism, basically. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, really the central institution in this history is the German Social Democratic Party. It was the German Social Democratic Party who basically officially abandoned Marxism and the goal of complete transformation of capitalist social relations. It was in the 50s or really 60s, the famous the Bad Gozberg Conference, which became a kind of reference point in internal debates in the Labour Party for decades afterwards. Just to give it in a sort of theoretical thing, as well. I think you have to understand like Keynesianism and like, you know, John Maynard Keynes as

actually having a very radical trajectory. Well, he thought that we'd be in a situation now where productive forces had grown so much that we would almost be in a post-scarcity situation and we would have the euthanasia of the rentiers in that like, you know, the power of capital would be dissolved because of the rising productivity and the easing of the threat of destitution, basically. What he was wrong about was not necessarily that, you know, it's not that productivity didn't rise, it's that the benefits of it were not shared, basically, and the fear of destitution is higher than it was in the mid-20th century than it was now. Yeah, well, that's all correct, yeah. And, you know, one of the assumptions of most social

Democrats, certainly in Europe, but also in the states, the assumptions were that the gains, like the building of a so-called mixed economy and the gains, and the gains, and the gains for working class and progressive forces between the 30s and the 70s were largely irreversible. And, you know, one of the things that's really forced a lot of people to have to reconsider a lot of those assumptions is the understanding that it turned out they weren't reversible in a way that, you know, Marxists and communists had always said they would be. They would be reversible without some more fundamental change. I mean, certainly my own sort of, my own thinking on this stuff, that's one of the most, the biggest shit.

it's gone over the period of decades, is realizing more, look, actually, like, the trots were right about this. The trots were right. Like, without, if you don't really keep pushing towards some kind of revolutionary horizon, they're going to just start taking all this stuff back off you. The other thing that's a challenge in contemporary period to any sort of social democratic project, which is why I'm not a social democrat, is that sort of, like, gradualism,

it needs economic growth, basically. You need economic growth, because then you can have, rising living standards for the working class, but that doesn't necessarily eat into profitability to such a degree that like private investment doesn't make sense. And the really big problem is a really sustained long, long period of economic stagnation, which means there isn't that growth. So that means you're in a much more conflictual situation. There cannot be a sort of like a historic settlement with capital between capital and labor, as we had in the post-war years, basically. Your prospects for social democracy from that point are what you think is causing stagnation

and whether it's something which can be addressed within capitalism or whether this is like, you know, a secular trend that cannot be addressed in capitalism. That's a bigger debate, but I think that that does, that we should position that, we have that position when we think about the social democratic project. I think now we should get into this more detailed history. So come with me, if you will, to the heady days of the early 1980s. The Thatcher government is wildly unpopular. The right-wing faction is about to split off from the Labour Party,

condemning the country to a decade and a half of a Thatterite program that basically nobody wanted. And the Labour left is arguably at the peak of its mass influence within the party and its popularity. Now, up to that point in history, really, well, really since, I would say since the 30s, you could say that there have been two dominant tendencies in the Labour Party, the so-called Bevanites, the followers of Nye Bevan, the radical socialists, where the kind of Marxist and analysis of society and comprehensive aspirations for a very radical form of social democracy.

And what we today would call the old right rooted in the trade union bureaucracy, represented by figures like Ernest Bevin through to Dennis Healy, figures who arguably their commitment to the eventual substitution of capitalist with socialist social relations was always sort of ceremonial. They were never really that bothered about it. But the way I always think it's useful to come to understand those people's mentalities is at heart they are trade union bureaucrats who do want to get the best possible deal for their people.

In this case, you know, the British working class really, at any one time, but they are not at all ambitious about or even interested in the idea of really changing social relations on a historic scale in a way that would make a better deal available. And during the period of post-war economic expansion and working class militancy and the Cold War, then the best deal they can get for their people is a pretty good deal. It's a really good expansive deal, which even the left is mostly pretty happy with. But as we enter the period of de-industrialisation and economic contraction in the 1970s, it's much less clear. What kind of a deal can you get for people without some kind of revolutionary challenge?

And the answer is not a very good one. And the right-wing Labour government at the end of the 70s collapses, leaving a great deal of bitterness within the Labour movement and the wider electorate. That's the context within which Tony Ben, who has been emerging as the key figure leading the Labour left, emerges as the kind of dominant totemic figure of the Labour left. He challenges Dennis Healy for the deputy leadership of the party. The party is being led by Michael Foote, who is seen as the kind of, in some ways, the great air of Bevan. But Ben just about misses. He misses by a whisker becoming deputy leader. Because actually, he actually wins amongst the members, but he loses amongst the trade unions who support he needed.

And then what happens is really a sort of series of calamities for the left. The SDP, the Social Democratic Party, so-called, splits off from the Labour Party, taking with it quite a chunk of Labour's more conservative electorate, and then eventually goes into the 1983 election in a kind of coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Eventually they will feud, with the Liberal Party, rather, eventually they will fuse into the Liberal Democratic Party. At the same time, Thatcher's popularity massively. recovers largely because of jingoism and nationalism during the Falklands War.

And the consequence is the 1983 election is a total disaster for the Labour Party. Whenever anybody claims that 2019 was Labour's worst result since the 30s is nonsense. Like it might have been a worst result in terms of seats, but Labour's vote sharing, the 83 election goes down to 28%, which is the lowest to any election since the 20s. And it's widely perceived as calamitous and quite possibly exist. And the question of, well, how are you going to respond to this really divides the left, the Benites, the supporters of Ben. Can we just say that Stama would dream of polling at 28% of the moment? Yeah, now, yeah, sure.

And the question of, well, what do you do? Because the 1983, again, by widespread consent, the 1983 Labour manifesto is the most left-winged in one it's ever gone on. I mean, it's really, it's much more left-wing than 2017 or 2019. The 1983 manifesto is saying Britain's going to leave, I think it said it would leave NATO. I'm not sure. It's definitely said it would implement unilateral nuclear disarmament, said it would leave the European economic community, the foreigner of the EU, and basically initiate a full-scale transition towards socialism. And so the widespread perception is, OK, Labor has tried,

it's tried what the left has always wanted, you know, since really since the foundation of the party. It's tried going to the country on a program of full socialism, and the consequence is its vote has collapsed, and it has, you know, it looks like it's in a death spiral. So understandably, a lot of people think, well, can't keep doing that, that isn't going to work anymore. Neil Kinnock becomes leader of the Labour Party. Neil Kinnock is a Welsh politician from the South Wales Valleys, very much seen as an heir to

the tradition of Neid Bevan, very much seen as a figure of the left. He had refused to serve in the Callaghan government, actually, because he thought the programme was two right wing. So he's a figure from the left, but he doesn't fully support, he didn't fully back Ben in his challenge for deputy leadership, and he doesn't fully support the minor strike in 1984. And this is one of those issues. I think it really is worth saying something about for a moment. I mean, the kind of our collective memory now of the minor strike is that it was this heroic struggle and anyone who, in the Labour Party, the Labour movement, who didn't back it was a traitor and a fool and was obviously bad. I think you've got to say in Kinnick's defence. Kinnick always

said he wouldn't bat the strike because he didn't think they could win. And he was right. didn't win. And the idea, and there is this kind of circular reasoning which a lot of people engage in on the left to say, well, it's basically Kinnock's fault they didn't win. I mean, if you think Neil Kinnock had that much influence over the British public, like just after Labour had scored 28% in a general election, you're kidding yourself. Kinnock can't be blamed for the failure of the strike. He was right that the strike was, to say the strike was ultimately defeated, with catastrophic consequences for the Labour movement of going forward to this day. It's a very poor argument, though, that I think you're going to lose, so I'm not going to

support you. Well, I agree, yeah. Well, he thought that there was a lot of contention over whether the strike should have been called, and especially the fact that there wasn't a ballot held. There was never a ballot held. I mean, that was a real point of contention. And for a lot of people who were not coming out of any part of the right of the party, for people who are coming out of traditions, including like anarchism and syndicalism and libertarian communism in the 70s, Scarguel's refusal to call a ballot seemed like a classic example of kind of Leninist or Stalinist

authoritarianism. Yeah, you must follow the leadership. We're not even holding a ballot. And I'm not saying any of this is right. Obviously, one has to be really sympathetic to Scargill. Scargill was correct that they were planning to shut down the British coal industry when they denied they were doing it.

And it was a heroic struggle. But Kinnock thought that calling the strike in that way was a disaster of strategic mistake. And I'm I'm not saying Kinnet was right. I am saying, well, to just dismiss it and say he was obviously wrong, he's also just kind of nonsense. I mean, he's got a lot of evidence on his side.

So that was part of the split. And another, the major reason for the split, more than anything else, was the differing attitudes to the militant tendency. A militant tendency was this organization within the Labour Party, organized around a newspaper called militant. I mean, basically it was a entriest project. enacted by a Trotskyist organisation called the Revolutionary Communist League, and this was proper entryism in the sense that they had a whole programme of setting up a front

organisation, really, which claimed to be a network of supporters of this newspaper called Militin, denying publicly that there was any other organisation behind it, and attempting to take over key positions in the Labour Party. Eventually, the idea was that you would try to when push Labour to adopting a completely radical socialist program. And in the process of Labour's attempting to implement that programme and being defeated, you would kind of emerge from the chrysalis of the Labour Party, this fully formed butterfly, which would be a revolutionary vanguard party. I mean, my attitude to that was always, well, they had a go. They had a good go. It was a good plan, and they got caught. And they were absolutely breaking rules, which weren't just

rules of the Labour Party, but which would have been rules for any democratic party, which say, you can have a faction, but you can't have a secret faction that has all its own rules and its own internal and its own internal discipline and doesn't make that transparent to other people in the wider party and actually has part of its long-term program, the destruction of the party. Well, if you get fine, but if you get caught doing that, you shouldn't really squawk about being expelled. Yeah, I think, I think, like, no, I was going to say that. I think, like, being, like, outing yourself as a, as a member of militant, like, it's still quite politically. in many circles. Like, I remember when I started working at War and One in my early 20s and, like, people would come up to the store and, like, whisper, like, I used to be a member of militant. Like, it was still, you know, like a thing, like a lot of people had lots of feelings about it. Into the 2000, sorry, I should identify when I'm talking about, yes. Yeah. There was a sort of alliance of political convenience between Militon and some of the other

sort of Trotskyist organisations active in the party and the Benites. The real strongholder, the Benite strength was the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone. And it was always fairly contradictory. It was always a bit, because really they came from different traditions, these people. And they didn't really have that much in common ideologically in some ways. But because they would basically support each other in like trying to get elected to positions in the party. And because the Ben, I mean, the Benites supported militant and didn't want them to be expelled. Because if Militin all got expelled, then support for Benites in a lot of local parties, for example,

will become much weaker. The soft left emerged as people who came out of Benism but didn't really agree with militant still being in the party and didn't and weren't still really sort of loyal to Tony Ben and who took took the perspective that Labour was going to have to adopt a different sort of electoral strategy to the one adopted in 1983 if it was ever going to form a government. There were also some other sort of differences emerged. I would say a lot of people in the early soft left, they were heavily influenced by strands of the new left. People like Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, they were heavily influenced by feminism and anarchism. One of the things they had in common was that they were very hostile to kind of Leninist forms of organisation.

Whereas the Benites, although really the Benites supposedly saw themselves in this democratic socialist tradition, you could trace back to Bevan and to the Independent Labour Party. they were much more sympathetic to people whose tradition really went back to Bolshevism. The soft left emerges then is this distinct formation in the mid-80s. It has some programmatic differences with the hard left, particularly around issues like proportional representation, which the soft left really start to think you're going to have to implement sooner or later to get a progressive program after the 83 election,

and the hard left are completely hostile to. I mean, really, honestly, they remain hostile to, until the 2020s, basically, and also over Europe. Basically, the soft left mostly think that actually membership of the European Union is probably a good idea, and this really gets reinforced in the late 80s, when the socialist government in Spain takes over the presidency of the EU, it's still the EEC then, and brings into the negotiations for the Maastricht Treaty, which establishes the European Union in the 90s, what's called the social chapter, basically a kind of program of

protection and workers' rights on a Europe-wide scale. This starts to make people think, actually, the European Union might be a good idea for the left. And, yeah, that's a typical position on the soft left. And like the main organisations you can talk about on the soft left end in the 80s. I mean, the key organisation is this organisation called the Labour Coordinating Committee, which is itself set up by a bunch of smaller left organisations, like most of which would have been at one point in their history, sort of revolutionary Marxist organisations. And the labour a coordinating committee really sees itself as trying to get Labor to adopt a political, a strategic political program, which has socialism as a long-term objective, but is realistic about the fact

that socialism is very unpopular. Explicit socialism and explicit class politics have become very unpopular with the wider electorate. Conversely, at this time, you know, the hard left, especially the supporters of Tony Benn, I would say they really, they don't really have an answer to the question. Like, well, you know, why would we just keep advocating for this maximum socialist program when we tried that in 1983 and we got massively defeated? And I've got to say, this is a point I've put, like, to colleagues and friends, like, who were kind of active Benites from that time and I've never got a straight answer out of them. And, you know, to me, as a teenager in the 80s, this was the key thing. Like, I liked Tony Ben. I wanted a maximal

socialist program withdrawal from NATO nuclear disarmament, but it was clear that that had been comprehensively defeated in 83 when I was like 11 and I wanted to hear from the Benites okay why is it that you think that if we keep advocating for that program something's going to happen other than we just keep losing to the Tories and they just didn't have an answer they didn't put forward okay and what they never did do was put forward like a real strategic case which I think now they could have done they could have said look the defeats of the mid 80s the minor strike etc have been so devastating that they no chance of a progressive government for 10 years. So forget about winning the 87 election.

Forget about winning the 92 election. It's going to take us like 10, 15 years. We need to build a mass movement and then eventually we'll get a left-wing government. But that wasn't what they said. You know, if you said to these people, look, we lost in 83. They would just get kind of annoyed and call you a traitor, basically. And they just sort of advocated for socialism as a sort of religious dogma. And that was the sort of position that pushed, you know, a lot of people towards the soft left, I would say. At the same time, key institutions of the soft left then would be the Tribune newspaper, which was seen as the traditional vehicle of the Bevanites and became associated

with the Kinnokai Soft Left in the 80s, and the Tribune group of MPs in the 1980s was the largest grouping in Parliament and was understood as a sort of soft left grouping in Parliament. And we would also have to mention the infamous of Marxism today, a magazine published by the Communist Party of Great Britain, which had been really really. taken over by the Euro-communist kind of revisionist wing of the Communist Party and featured a lot of writing by people like Stuart Hall and people like Stuart Hall were really seen as being a key influence on the soft left. And again, I was saying this as someone, like my own politics at the time, you know, I was, I was really an anarcho syndicalist. But my view of politics actually

was, it was this sort of a narco-syndilist's Marxist view. And that was that, well, if we wanted radical social change, we were never going to get it through. the Labour Party, or even the unions. We were going to have to build, like, community organisations, we were going to have to build social centres. We were going to have to build, like, militant workers, organisations and unions. But at the same time, that what you could get out of the Labour Party and the Labour Government, obviously, we'd learnt from the historical record, were meaningful reforms that would really improve the lives of some of the most vulnerable people. And so it was unrealistic to demand that the Labour Party or Labour Government

implement, like, reform on a scale, they obviously couldn't. And it was better, actually, to be relatively modest about what to expect from a from a labor government so this was this kind of you know fairly idioticocratic position so i ended up with in relation to the labor party that's you know that's why all through the 90s and 2000s i kept being involved in things like you know the squat movement and the roads moot anti-roads protests but you know in terms of the labor party i became more associated with the soft left and it was but it was more than anything because i thought there was just no chance of ever getting a progressive government without proportional representation which i still think um

But the other reason, though, is that, you know, Marxism Today, you know, it's now really kind of remembered really negatively by people on the left, because it's true that in the very last couple of years of its publishing, it published a bunch of people like Jeff Moulgan, who became key figures in New Labour. It's seen as having kind of opened the door to New Labour, and there's some truth to that. But in the late 80s, New Latin Today was the only magazine, the only publication really on the broader British left

that was really taking seriously the idea that we had entended into a really, distinctive historical phase, because of new technology, because of globalization, because of the environmental crisis, that we just, whatever was going on, like the rules of politics that had been established in the 50s and 60s, like had all changed, and we had to do something different. And I've been very critical of Marxism today. Subsequently, in as far as I think Marx and Day never really had a very strong programmatic answer. It's like, okay, well, how do you build socialism under conditions of post-Fordism and globalization? And mostly, it was a very strong, you just to sort of shrugged the shoulders an assumption that, well, probably you couldn't.

But they were still, at least they were still engaging with those issues. And my experience, you know, being active on the left when I was a student was that, if you try to raise any of those issues with people from the Benite left, from the hard left, from the Chotsky's left, they would just like get angry. They would just say, oh, you're a traitor. Or they'd say, oh, these are all short-term things. Like, none of this is a long-term change that we should be adapting to. And so if you had any interest in sort of actually understanding the way things were changing

and adapting to it, well, you ended up on the soft left because the hard left just wasn't interested in any of that. And I would say, honestly, the hard left didn't really accept the things like globalisation, post-forwardism, new technology, changing class composition, were like permanent changes that we would have to adapt to strategically. They didn't really accept any of that until the early 21st century, which was a real weakness, frankly. So that was all part of the conditions for the soft left. But the consequence of all that is that most people, on the soft left, and the organisations on the soft left, like the Labour Coordinating Committee, by the early 90s, they sort of don't really have anywhere to go, apart from, to form some kind

of alliance with the emerging Blairites. And they do do that. I would say there's a very tiny little strand of people who, I would say, are sort of coming from the soft left, but are totally sceptical about Blair and new labour, and hostile to it. And that strand will be represented by people like Stuart Hall, like his journal Soundings, people like my old friend Mark Perryman, some people who'd come out of the Communist Party, who'd been Eurocommunists, but could see the way the wind was blowing with Blair. And there's a very, very small strand of people who were just sort of really sort of between the hard and soft left. And we were very isolated. But for the most part, the so-called soft left, just fully embraced New Labor, the promise of the New Labor program. And they

sort of fully embraced it really up until the Iraq War, the moment of the Iraq War. The moment of the Iraq War is not just the Iraq War itself is a disaster, is that it's becoming clear by the early 2000s that the promise of New Labour that it would adopt a very moderate program of socioeconomic reform in its first term or two, but eventually it would shift gear towards some more expansive social democracy was not being realised, that Blair had reneged on the 1997 and manifesto promise for a referendum on proportional representation with House of Commons that they were not even going to reverse the the Thatcherite trade union laws. And so what happens in the early 2000s is the soft left really starts to peel away from the Blairites. And that's

the moment when key figures in Parliament from the soft left, Robin Cook, Claire Short, John Denham or resigned from the government. And that process really leads to the launch of this organisation Compass. And then in the early 2000s, Compass becomes this organisation who's initially you have to be a Labour member to be in Compass and it is quite explicitly a factional organisation to kind of reconvene the soft left of the pre-Blair era around some sort of political project to challenge new labour. Compass is pretty successful at getting members and getting sort of traction within the Labour membership totally fails to persuade any significant block of MPs to ally themselves with it, only ever has like two or three MPs in Parliament

allied with it. And this is the point at which the soft left in Parliament really stops existing, I would say, as a kind of functional force. Eventually when Gordon Brown takes over as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister in 2007, when Blair is basically, Blair is forced to resign because partly because of the long-term consequences of Iraq, but also because a lot of the MPs in Parliament do have still have a sort of ideologically soft-ed orientation, but even the old right of the party is not happy with how far new labour has embraced. That's right. Economic policy, privatisation, etc. And they want a more social democratic programme. Even the old right, what's some kind of return to social democracy.

Gordon Brown comes in in 2007 claiming he's going to do that. But then the financial crisis happens. He isn't able to do that. The he press successfully blame him for it, he loses office. He is replaced as Labour leader, not by the Blair Wright, David Miniband, who's the favourite to win at the time, but by Ed Miliband, who is widely seen as a figure from the soft left. But Ed Miniband is Ed Miliband, like Neil Kinnock, when he's leader, really seems to exemplify the failings of soft left political strategy, the failure of soft leftism, if you like, as a political strategy, being basically the soft leftism as a political strategy under Neil Kinnock in the 87 and 92 elections

under a midiband leading up to the 2015 general election basically tries to make a critique of neoliberal capitalism but also tries to make that critique in sort of moderate terms which sound very reasonable and sensible and offers kind of a few reforms that would obviously push into direction of social democracy without anything really. the trouble with that is these people have a kind of folk memory of when like in the 1960s you could propose like social democratic reforms and not get destroyed by the press for having done so that's not the case by like the late 80s it's definitely not the case by the 2010s so on the one hand for even really mild reform proposals ed miliband gets totally annihilated by the press but what he's proposing isn't radical or interesting enough to inspire a mass membership to kind of join up and fight for it like they did with corbyn and then eventually Ed is replaced by Corbyn. I think we all know that story. During that period, you get this little organisation within the Labour Party set up called Open Labour, whose key figure is the now MPs, one of the Leeds MPs, Alex Sobel, who is someone who really sees himself as sort of wanting to be ideologically off the classic soft left of the late 80s.

And, you know, he has this small organisation in the Labour Party, which, you know, It makes a bit of impact on National Executive Committee elections a couple of times, but never really does much else. Meanwhile, Compass really decides as an organisation that it doesn't really want to be a faction of the Labour Party anymore, and instead becomes an organisation that campaigns for the idea of a progressive alliance of left and centre-left parties the only way to really ever get a progressive government. Under Corbinism, really, I would say the soft-left organisations, like Open, labour and compass are really uncertain because they really have always predicated their political

strategy on the same assumption as the right, which is we're never going back to a kind of full-blown social democracy, even if we'd like to, it's not possible. And then on the other hand, I would say like the sort of the kind of average Labour Party soft left membership are basically enthusiastic about Corbyn. Initially, a lot of them, even by 2016, are becoming a bit more skeptical because of the level of attacks he's receiving from the press. Quite a lot of them do go and vote for Owen Smith. But then after the 2017 election, I think this is a key thing that no one has really fully understood has happened, actually.

You see, you're like your traditional middle-aves, middle class, guardian reading, soft left Labour member, they were skeptical, they voted for Corbyn in 2015, they then, a lot of them didn't vote for him. They went along with the idea that although we wanted his program, he was a hopeless leader in 2016, but then after 2017, they were the people who became convinced, oh, look, you can win on this basis. You can win on the basis of a radical programme. And that constituency of people has never been winnable back by the right or the centrist.

And that's why they voted for Stama on the assumption that he would keep his promise to implement a radical program, but they absolutely hate him now. They hate and despise Stama now precisely because he has gone back on that program, and they remember 2017. And really mainstream, I think, is sort of expressing that it's giving institutional expression to that core section of the Labour Party membership, who have basically been sort of soft left for decades, who sort of believed what they were told by centurists and commentators in the 90s and 2000s when they were told, yeah, you might want to go back to post-war social democracy, but you can't. It's never happening again. But the experience of 2017 has showed

them. Well, you can actually. You should. And now they're not willing to kind of get back in the box and they're not willing to just go along with, you know, what has been offered by Starma. And that is basically where we are now. I mean, it's really, that really is interesting history. I have you in it before, mind. But I don't think our listeners will have. But when it, when you were accounting at Gem, it did make me, it made me even more worried about the name mainstream. Because especially the bit about, you know, Ed, Miliband, you know, not being able to attract that enthusiasm to have a sort of movement built behind it. Do you know what I mean? And like the name mainstream is not aimed at that, is it? It's not aimed at like capturing

that mood of like things must change and this is the... No, well, I agree. I mean, if if I'd had my way, it would have been called Labor Democratic Socialists. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah. It would have, it would have, it would have, we would have brought momentum in, it would have been, momentum would have been like, you know, co-founders of it. And the founding statement would have said something about Palestine. you know, if I'd had my way, those are the things that would have happened, but that's not how it's been done. I mean, the everything to talk about, I think, is we should go through the signatories, not all of them, of course. One of them is Jeremy Gilbert, I do believe. The signatories

of mainstream statement. Yeah, I was looking about who Jeremy appears above, because I thought, you know, that's fun for you guys, not factional at all, that. Well, because there's two names that we need to talk about, I think. One of them is that John Crudder's site as a signatory. and I was a little bit surprised to see him because John Crudus is associated with Blue Labor we haven't got time to go into Blue Labor but like I would not associate that with the soft left well I would say Crudus

he himself he definitely sees himself as on the soft left and he only ever flirted with Blue Labor quite casually and as a possible iteration of the softlet I can say something really actually really interesting here though about Crudus and the genesis of Blue Labor in relation to the history of the soft left one of the great problems

for the soft left historically has been what is its relationship analytically to Marxism basically and there has been a strand of the soft left you can trace back to Marxism today to people like Stuart and Robin Murray writing in Marxism today and which is really very close

to the politics of people like John McDonnell and Labour briefing although they've been institutionally separate for most of that history and that is basically a policy that is basically a Marxian politics but which says that look on the basis of a sober analysis of a contemporary class relations, it doesn't make any sense to, like, you know, go into an election saying,

you know, spouting socialist slogans all the time. Whether that's right or wrong, that's one strand. But there's another strand which has really wanted to completely replace Marxism as an analytical orientation with some sort of an ethical socialism or even a Christian socialism. And Crudus definitely sort of comes out of that. He's also a proponent of like Marxist value theory. Well, that's true. I'd say that is, that is absolutely exemplary with a very confused relationship. the soft-led tradition's always had to Marxism, basically. It can't live with it and it can't live without it, basically. It tries to distance.

You trace the history of soft-left thinking back to the 80s. People are always trying to find some kind of philosophical substitute for Marxism, and then they find sooner or later. You can't understand what's going on with contemporary capitalism if you don't use the tools of Marxism. I mean, I would argue, though, that the reason he's attracted to Marxist's value theory is that it does not lead you to some sort of conjugal. analysis or a political strategy, basically.

It sits before that. Their analysis of the conjuncture is really, really weak, I think, and it's much more that basically nothing really has changed and therefore nothing can be done sort of thing. I'm a little bit bitter because John Cruddis apparently wrote, as written that articles critiquing me in a very, very unfair way. He actually probably didn't write that. It was with a couple of characters called Harry Pitts and Paul Thompson.

I mean, Paul Thompson is, who, was one of the authors of that. He was also the editor of renewal, which is a, there's journal, which now, like Malin, Finlayton is the Malanching gate to draw, but is one of the points of continuity in the history of the soft left over the past few years or so. Paul Thompson is a really weird figure because he is a sort of, he's politics, he's sort of a revolutionary Marxist. He was once in Big Flame, actually, a libertarian socialist. Yeah, he's a fanatical anti-Bolshevik, fanatical anti-Leninist. And like really, He's one of the people, he belongs in that intellectual tradition,

which basically blames like the Bolshevik revolution and, you know, the dissolution of the constituent assembly and then Stalinism for the failure of socialism in the 20th century. In the same way, you know, there's a tradition in the soft left of the Labour Party. It runs through organisations like Compass. I think people really don't get this outside this milieu, that blames the hard left for Blairism. basically thinks that it was the intransigence and vanity

of Ben and his followers in the late 80s that meant that they, the kind of radical soft left, had nowhere to go, but as some sort of coalition with the Blairites. We should say about these two figures, really, that they have made a really significant contribution to left intellectual culture in the UK over the past few decades. As I said, Paul Thompson was editor of this journal renewal for many years,

and it's still a really important journal for the soft left, And as I said, Alan Finlayson, actually he's not the managing editor, a friend of the show, and Professor Alan Finlayson is chair of their editorial board, I think. And John Crudders, when he was MP for many years for Dagenham and Rain, and played a pretty significant role as one of the few members of the Parliamentary Labour Party who was really interested in ideas and in a sort of critical relationship to the new Labour project. And John does have a longstanding interest. in both Marxist philosophy and theory and wide political issues and, you know, for quite a long

time he was very close to the journal soundings and the Stuart Hall tradition as well. So I think it's partly because, you know, they made, they did make such an important contribution to those people and should be taken really seriously. I know I said, I said Paul was, you know, weird and was a fanatical anti-Baltrow here, but that, and that sound a bit dismissive, but they are really insignificant figures and it's because they're really significant figures though that I think it was ultimately quite disappointing that they tried to make this move using Marx's value form theory along with these younger writers Harry Pitt and one or two other people to try to construct a kind of intellectual justification for their not supporting the Corbyn project which ultimately

I just don't think it was convincing it wasn't convincing on its own terms to be honest having known John Crunner for many years, I doubt he was ever himself totally convinced by it. And it does show the extent to which really the soft left, strands of the soft left have themselves, I think, been guilty of as bad sectarianism as strands of the hard left. And as I've said before on this show, you know, that's something that's often been really frustrating to younger members of both traditions. I said earlier, actually, I would relate an anecdote about that. The anecdote I was going to relate was how, and I think it was many years ago, maybe it was 2007, maybe 2010. I was talking to sort of senior figures at Compass, and I said, why aren't we working with this guy John McDonald? You know, he's obviously basically got the same politics as us.

He's saying all the same stuff we're saying about neoliberalism and his legacies, and they were totally dismissive of that idea. And a few weeks later, I was talking to an old friend of mine who at the time was, heavily involved with Labour Left Briefing, which is the magazine that came out of the Benite Left of the 80s and was a sort of institutional vehicle for the Benite strand of the hard left for a long time. And he said he basically said exactly the same thing to some of his senior colleagues, said, well, why aren't we working with Compass? They seem to be saying exactly the same stuff as us. And then it took several years for any more significant rapprochement to take place, but it was really one of the strengths of the Corbyn project and

the early foundation of momentum, that there was a commitment, including to people from the Benite left, to really overcoming this sectarian divide between the hard and soft left. And it's really regrettable that some key figures from the soft left held out against that forever. And I think all that really is partly indicative of the extent to which, you know, the hard left soft left split was a disaster. I don't think, I don't want anyone listening to this show and listening to this detailed history of the soft left, I think it's all just an apology for the soft left.

Ultimately, my position is, and no one on either side of that divide was correct all the time about everything. I think there were some people who came out of that fragmentation of the left who were basically right about everything all the time. And that was people like Hillary Wainwright, Red Pepper Magazine that she was associated with and still is, and Ken Livingston, people like that. But I don't think anyone really, who was firmly on either side of the hard left, soft left divide, was completely right. about everything all the time, and the divide was basically a disaster. Anyway, that's enough on that. Kear, I think you really wanted to talk about another figure, another key signatory to the mainstream statement,

having talked a bit about John Crudders and some of his friends. So who was it you wanted to talk about, Keir? The other figure to raise in that is that obviously that Andy Burnham has signed up to it, and it was immediately sort of seen as a Burnham vehicle, even though it definitely wasn't set up in that way. And so, like, we should probably finish on a little bit of an analysis of what the prospects are here for mainstream and its strategy. One of the things I'd point to is that we could sort of raise our horizons a little bit here and sort of think about what is going on on an international scale on this, like, move towards basically the defeat of Corbyn and Sandersism happening within a month of each other, a centrist restoration in both countries and a defeat. of centristism in both countries.

And one of the things that really raised my interest the other day was that, you know, so Zoan Mamdani won the election to be mayor of New York. And then this character, James Carville, who is like a real Clintonite sort of centrist, really central to the Clinton Project, etc. He made this statement saying, it's abundantly clear to me,

now the Democratic Party must run on the most populous economic platform since the Great Depression. You can sort of see at least some of that centrist sort of constituency, even in the US, have had their eyes, partly, I think, because of the rise of Trumpism, etc. But have like, you know, they've turned their face. Some people have said that he was bending the knee to Mamdani.

I don't think it's that. I think it is some sort of realisation that centriism is over. Do you know what I mean? There is signs of that. Part of my worry about, like, you know, the idea of erected Andy Burnham as like perhaps he could be the leader, all sorts of problems for him to become the Labour leader and then the prime minister, partly because he's not an MP. We'd have to get elected to become an MP.

That would have to be approved by a Starma-dominated National Executive Committee of the Labour Party, etc, etc, etc. But my thing beyond all of that is what would keep him left, what has moved Andy Burnham, apparently to the left when he's been in the mayor of Manchester. And what would keep him left, basically. Partly it might be the conjuncture. But also, I think, you know, I want to come back to this idea of ecology as well. Part of the reason we're doing this whole series, and we're going to talk about ecology next, the concept of ecology, and we're going to talk about the Green Party, is that, like, I think we have to see all of these mainstream momentum, your party, as it is now officially called Greens, Green Organised, the factions within the Green Party are pushing it to the left, you know, and all of the smaller parties who, you know, majority, Jamie Grissel's lot up in Newcast and, etc. We have to think about them all together about, like, what tasks can they, do to sort of like hold and pin people, create a sort of momentum and hold and pin people from drifting to the right, basically. That I think is a sort of interesting aspect. And I think

it might be, so it's like with all of this sort of stuff, the fate of mainstream may be determined partly outside the Labour Party as much as inside. Well, I've just joined, I've just joined the mainstream network on this call. Wow. Out of being inspired, by being inspired by this gem and kier spain momentum is building oh no that's not momentum is it the other one i mean i'm glad you have but i would also say i also i share some skepticism about whether mainstream can succeed and i think you're totally right here i mean i think it's worth saying well what what does mainstream think its objective is yeah its objective is to get someone like and d'y byrne and leader of the Labour party and prime minister with the aim of implementing

democratic reform proportional representation and implementing a robust social socioeconomic program. That's the aim. Has it got any chance of actually doing it? I mean, its chances of doing that at this side of another general election are pretty slim, to be honest. I think we probably are about to see a Labour leadership election next year. Whether that is won by someone from the soft left, who will end up, somebody like Angela Rainer, who would end up probably getting sort of lukewarm backing from mainstream and the rest of the soft left, maybe even from momentum, to be honest. I think momentum would probably strategically, but reluctantly. deputy leader in the last election.

Yeah. Even if that happens, probably they're just going to try to carry out the traditional soft left program of, of, you know, more reform than the right would implement, but not enough to have a dramatic, you know, world historic effect, which means they're probably then going to only last for a couple of years, and they'll probably be replaced by West Streeting, as a Labour Party and Prime Minister. And I think if West Retrieing goes into the 2029 election as Prime Minister, he will end up forming a coalition government with the Tories after that election. Well, he's going to have to battle them with reform. Reform want to go into an electoral coalition with a Tory. Well, that's true. That's already likely. So, yeah, it's pretty unlikely.

It's pretty unlikely to succeed. I also agree with, I agree, it's totally dependent on things happening outside the party because really the question of whether we get a soft left or a west streeting leadership of the Labour Party next year, presuming Starma goes, as most people still presumably will, after the May local elections, is largely down to the question of how many people have left Labour to join the Greens by that point. Because it's definitely the case at the time when I wrote the Tribune article, there was no, you could see from all the polls of Labour members, there was no chance, really, of the right winning a leadership election. But so many people, I mean, we don't have clear information about this, but I think the circumstantial level,

evidence is that a lot of the people who've been joining the Green Party over the past few weeks have been going straight from Labour, actually. Yeah, that makes sense. If that carries on up until and after the May local elections and the right might finally get what they want, which is the Labour Party membership so small that it's just a kind of centrist rump like it became in the sort of end of the 2010s, not the beginning of the 2010s. So in which case, mainstream will just fail or mainstream might hang around until streeting collapses in 2028, at which point the parliamentary Labour Party probably would call on Andy Burnham as the only chance they've got as a popular national figure of keeping some of their seats. I mean, I keep trying,

I don't want to make this analysis because it's really annoying. Like if there is a Labour leadership election in the next six months, I will feel obliged to support the most left with plausible chance of winning, even though objectively, honestly, I think probably it would be better for the country on the left if streeting wins. Because I think whoever wins the next leadership election, if there is one next day, will probably only last for two years. You know, it would be great if there could be like some other sort of outcome.

And I also think, I mean, I mean, that does leave, obviously that's going to leave people wondering, well, why are you even bothering, why are you bothering with the Labour Party with mainstream? Like, why don't you go join your party with Kit, have fun with Kit, with your friend Keir, you know, join the Green Party, have fun with your friend, Zach, you know.

And the answer is really, I just feel like someone has to do it. I mean, partly, you know, in the end, we're not looking at a situation, even if Labour follows the trajectory of the most unsuccessful of the traditional socialist parties in places like Greece and Germany and France. You know, we're not looking at a situation where Labour is just going to disappear. You know, it's going to continue to occupy a really important place in the whole electoral ecology. And as such, though, we do have to kind of do what we can to try to make sure it isn't totally captured. by forces who ultimately will just use it actually to shore up a centre-right program.

I mean, that's why I'm doing it. It's not because I'm optimistic. It's not because I think that the program represented by somebody like Burnham or Rainer is like the program I want. It is really because I just think, I think it's a dirty job that like someone has to do really. And I can see why, like most people on the left don't want to do it. But I think rather than shouting at me for being a genocide there, they should be like thanking me and people like, Nadia me for like doing this really, this frankly frustrating and tedious job. I have to say that I, joining an email list is pretty little commitment, which is what I've done. I've joined an email list. That is all I've done. Literally. And I think, you know,

going back to the question of like what organisations are for and, you know, understand like I've made zero commitment. I've signed up out of interest because I'm having done the research and have this conversation. But I think it's an interesting time to be, you know, dipping a toe in various different political waters on the left at the moment. Yeah, absolutely. So like, let's just wrap up by sort of, I want to come back to this idea of like thinking about the left as an ecology. And like, you know, in lots of ecosystems, you have, you have things like dung beetles that have to tidy up all of detritus. And I think that's what Jeremy said he's doing. And of course, next, the next episode we're going to do

is about ecology and then we're going to talk we have to do a microdose about the Green Party Green Organised and Zach Palanski's leadership, etc. And perhaps at that point we could have a we could think about it on an ecological level, you know, where the Greens fit in and what the prospects might be

towards the 2019 general election and beyond it. And on that bombshell let's draw a line. Whoa, that's pretty far out.