Building New Parties for a Different Kind of Socialism: A Response

Abstract

Barry Winter and I share a common starting point: a common concern with how the left can connect and communicate with the majority of people. I believe that the left's position inside the Labour Party has changed from being the opportunity it arguably was in the past into an imprisonment, which actually distorts and constrains the left's ability to convince the people of the relevance of radical socialist politics. The implication of my argument is that any section of the left which restricts its political location to the Labour Party and refuses seriously to consider the prospect of a party to the left of Labour, isolates itself from the people. It will make itself marginal, 'on the fringe' of political debate. My case is that in the long or even medium run, the most effective way for the radical left in the UK to engage with the political mainstream, as in most other West European countries, is with a political voice to the left of social democracy. This is not to say that working through such a party is an exclusive option; there would still be a significant left working mainly within the Labour party as, for example, in Denmark, Germany, Norway, Holland and Spain where there is a significant social democratic left, strengthened by the existence of a political competitor to social democracy's left.