My experience in SGP, which I don't expect to be much different from GPEW, is that the anti-nuke and corresponding anti-NATO sentiments for the majority of members are probably more instinctive than well thought through (the same would be the case for many other policies).
Yeah, I think George Galloway and maybe Jeremy Corbyn are guys who've made what seems to them a logical transition from "Hands off the USSR!" to "Hands off Russia!" But I'd imagine amongst the European centre-left, you've got at least a few people who went from thinking...
..."NATO is evil because Reagan is using it to drag us into a conflict with the peaceful Russians" to...
...in 1983 to thinking "NATO is bad because the Trump won't fulfill his obligation to stop the warmongering Russians" in 2025...
...without sensing much of a contradiction.
(And maybe there IS no contradiction, if one believes that there is, in fact, a qualitative difference between the USSR and Putin's Russia, in terms of the threat posed.)
@stetson suggesting that Corbyn is somehow pro-Putin is a bizarre claim to make.
I'm happy to stand corrected. Most of my knowledge of his position on Russia is second-hand.
This seems like an incredibly dodgy basis on which to base your knowledge of politicians in another country. On what basis does your informant think that he is pro-Putin? Corbyn has been a CND supporter for many years, his anti-nuclear stance has nothing to do with Putin.
@stetson suggesting that Corbyn is somehow pro-Putin is a bizarre claim to make.
I'm happy to stand corrected. Most of my knowledge of his position on Russia is second-hand.
This seems like an incredibly dodgy basis on which to base your knowledge of politicians in another country. On what basis does your informant think that he is pro-Putin? Corbyn has been a CND supporter for many years, his anti-nuclear stance has nothing to do with Putin.
Well, like I say, I'm happy to stand corrected. FWIW, the one complaint that comes directly to mind right now is that he was unjustifiably reticent about assigning blame in the Salisbury poisonings.
I will admit that, having read his most controversial statement on the matter, it did seem to me that he might just have been saying "Let's not jump to conclusions", which is always wise advice. I am also aware that statements of hesitancy can be used to dog-whistle apologia, but I wouldn't care at this point to debate what Corbyn was doing there.
You can consider my linkage of him with Galloway retracted. Apologies.
@stetson suggesting that Corbyn is somehow pro-Putin is a bizarre claim to make.
I'm happy to stand corrected. Most of my knowledge of his position on Russia is second-hand.
This seems like an incredibly dodgy basis on which to base your knowledge of politicians in another country. On what basis does your informant think that he is pro-Putin? Corbyn has been a CND supporter for many years, his anti-nuclear stance has nothing to do with Putin.
Well, like I say, I'm happy to stand corrected. FWIW, the one complaint that comes directly to mind right now is that he was unjustifiably reticent about assigning blame in the Salisbury poisonings.
He didn't immediately jump to conclusions based on purely the pointing of a finger. The press, of course, ever the faithful tory lapdog, portrayed this as apologetics for Putin.
The worst Corbyn can be accused of (in both domestic politics and international relations) is a naïve belief that people are, at heart, decent and honest, and if only they could all sit down with a pot of tea they could sort things out.
There are anti- imperialist ideologues who are either paid by Putin or so ideologically- benighted they shill for him for free and there is an overlap between them and anti-NATO beliefs - but now a vital load bearing part of NATO is compromised by having a president who certainly looks like and can act like a Russian asset, so it's all a bit more complicated than it used to be.
Is it really a service to European defence for parties to pretend that problem isn't there? Perhaps there's some in-public 'appeasing' going on to gain time to privately work out how best to address the crisis but it's hard to tell. Certainly I wouldn't fault Polanski for mentioning the elephant in the room.
I'm not expert enough to.know what the best 'elephant' wrangling strategy might be.
And while on the one hand it's possible to see the utility of nuclear arms ( there's a reason countries who fear invasion really really want them), it's also striking that it's not enough these days just to have the weapons. Propagandise enough voters and you can decapitate a democratic nuclear power by putting one of your own assets in charge of deploying their arsenal.
So there is something 'hard nosed' and realistic in the social media propaganda soft power approach - I think we're seeing proof it can work in the way the US and increasingly the UK are being undermined by it.
I suspect there's more danger from Twitter-poisoned parties who appease racists and thus help Russian/ international fascist propaganda efforts than there is from the Greens vocalising what I think is a real and terrifying problem with defence policy centred on NATO these days- Trump and those behind him.
I think it’s unfortunate it’s been such a car crash, as a decent socialist party would be a good idea.
That said Corbyn wasn’t viable as a long term leader because of his age (he’s 76, well within the dropping dead or becoming unexpectedly incapacitated zone) and he’d be 80 at the time of next election. Zara Sultana has been proving a public liability for a while. However, Westminster politics and the media will be hard to negotiate without a named leader.
I did a bit of a google, I think only Gladstone starting his last term would be an older pm than Corbyn in 2029 and Sultana would be the youngest in well over 100 years. If you seriously want people to vote for you a s a mass movement and aspire to run the country - then leader seen as way too young or way too old is not an additional hurdle you’d want, but no leader at all is in some ways worse. What voter will want to know, is who will be PM if you win.
Agreed. I think non-standard leadership models are something that has worked against the Scottish Greens too. I've liked all their co-leaders and I'm not in theory against the principle but I dont think it plays out well with the current media and voters in practice. I think you can see a bit of that in how Polanski is faring compared to the Scottish Greens co-leaders (and I've nothing against them - they're both fine).
We had an avowedly Socialist party at the beginning of the Scottish Parliament- the Scottish Socialist Party. At one point they had 6 MSPs but the charismatic male leader turned out to be a perjurer (convicted) with terrible attitudes towards women.
The weird thing is, having terrible attitudes towards women/ LGBTQ+ people seems not uncommon in some segments of the old Left, who hide behind class and decrying 'identity politics' in order to be truly terrible socialist equivalents of Farage fans with more red flags (of the 'watch out - this one's a sexist creep!' type) than a Soviet May Day parade.
The various Greens seem to be doing not a bad job of removing these types from positions of power.
I'm not saying it's impossible to have a Socialist party which isn't riddled with dangerous social conservatives / misogynists but it seems weirdly hard in the UK.
They just seem in practice to do intersectionality really badly.
It might just be the way 'class' is conceived and used which seems to make make UK Socialist movements in practice very vulnerable to bad social justice behaviour which in theory shouldn't be the case? The various Greens seems to have less of that baggage. They tackled a lot of bigots in their movement.
Because we have a very obvious old Left beyond Labour in Scotland that I've seen close up for decades, I'm really not confident about good new Socialist parties emerging.
The universal assumption in much of the English left (not sure if it's the same in Scotland or not - I think it is in Wales from what I've seen) is that authentic working class = racist, homophobic and at very least heavily complementarian.
The universal assumption in much of the English left (not sure if it's the same in Scotland or not - I think it is in Wales from what I've seen) is that authentic working class = racist, homophobic and at very least heavily complementarian.
Yeah, OK, I overstated it, but I've seen so much of this around, and it does lead me to rather despair.
This goes against the Novara Media-esque element of the left, though even there, it's a slightly mixed bag.
The dichotomy, real or false, is between the "plastic" left vs. the "authentic" left. Whatever one may think of that, and it does seem rather odorous to me, it does sound like a horribly good start for a circular firing squid, and thus a flawed basis for success.
I dont know how you'd quantify it but there's an element of toxic beliefs about class that feeds into misogyny and other nasties - and weirdly at both ends of the Labour spectrum - at one end the Glasman Blue Labour faction have this weird fossil idea of the working class which is much like Thunderbunk describes, and at the other, eg.devotees of Mark Fisher's 'Escaping the vampire castle' had a massive blind spot on misogyny and sexism. (It lauded Russell Brand as a working class hero and decried the women who were already raising the alarm about him!).
I have an English left wing pal who thinks he's the most feminist feminist who ever feministed and he worshipped this damn essay and got drawn into transphobia, mistaking that for feminism, because it's the dreaded 'identity politics', that Fisher warned about, innit? These anti 'identitarian' left politics made him vulnerable to all kinds of obvious bad faith moral panic stuff from the Right about 'woke' students and freedom of speech - and he was getting that underlying vulnerability from having imbibed an intellectual left wing theorist writing about class, not Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson.
I can also think of some appalling very influential misogynist/ transphobic dinosaurs in the Scottish left but won't name names for legal reasons- some in very high standing in left wing circles - who again do the class v 'identity politics' thing or get intersectionality very badly wrong so they'll excuse attacks on women and LGBTQ+ people.
So it's hard to quantify and is subjective, but I've personally seen enough of it to think that there's a problem not being fully addressed that does show up in the socialist left beyond Labour, where you might not expect it, but it's there.
A slight tangent, perhaps. I lived in Portugal in the late 1970s, about 4-5 years after the Carnation Revolution who brought down the "Estado Novo" fascist regime of Salazar. There was, not unexpectedly, great political frenzy with many parties vying for power, mostly on the Left. The Socialist Party was the largest of these groups, with the Communists (who had, as I understand, a distinguished record of resistance to fascism) also garnering a large following. However there was a multitude of far-Left parties who found it impossible to work together.
My experience makes me wonder if such parties - such as "Your Party" - are made up of individuals with strongly-held ideological beliefs who are not prepared to compromise in order to work together. As such I think they are doomed to fragmentation and disintegration.
Mark Fisher's 'Escaping the vampire castle' had a massive blind spot on misogyny and sexism. (It lauded Russell Brand as a working class hero and decried the women who were already raising the alarm about him!).
Yeah, and AFAICT it was a reaction to Fisher getting in an online beef with some anarchist feminists who were pushing back on his support for Brand on this basis.
Agreed. I think non-standard leadership models are something that has worked against the Scottish Greens too. I've liked all their co-leaders and I'm not in theory against the principle but I dont think it plays out well with the current media and voters in practice.
There is a lot to be said for non-standard leadership models, and they can work well for parties that are aspiring to enough seats to have an effect but no one expects them to be forming a government, or even the opposition. When the party in question isn't going to need to have a first/prime minister or leader of the opposition then the hard work to explain that a team leadership can work to the media and general public doesn't need to be done. But, when parties get closer to being in the position where who their leader is becomes more significant because voters think they're voting for that individual to be first/prime minister (rather than voting for their constituency candidate and/or party for a regional list).
The current Scottish Green leadership model is a compromise between the Green principles of radical democracy, that includes leadership of the whole membership as a political version of Congregationalism, and the reality of a world where the media want to hear an individual leader talking and voters (and, far too many political journalists) who don't even realise that there's an alternative to a party leader who acts as a dictator within their party. The SGP has only had leaders for a few years, the joint leadership model was only introduced about 6-7 years ago, before that we had co-convenors (try to explain that concept to the average voter). GPEW has always had a more conventional leadership model than SGP.
My experience makes me wonder if such parties - such as "Your Party" - are made up of individuals with strongly-held ideological beliefs who are not prepared to compromise in order to work together. As such I think they are doomed to fragmentation and disintegration.
You do need a broad enough coalition, or large enough area of overlap in your Venn diagram to be able to get enough votes. What you are willing to compromise to get that is the issue.
I think the issue with Your Party is they have largely manifested in opposition to the British government’s foreign policy on the war in Gaza - that is such a specific issue that people’s views on a wide range of other social and political issues can be widely divergent.
The pragmatism vs principle balance is a nightmare.
I note Your Party is allowing dual membership with other parties - so I think it will die to entryism within a very short time. Or be absorbed by another political party - a bit like Labour and the co-op.
Multiple membership of different parties is a very unusual position - especially for parties that may be competing in the same elections. I can't think of a major political party that would allow members who are also members of another party; the closest would be that members of one Green party can be members of the Green Party of a different nation (eg: dual membership of GPEW and SGP). There's a probability that if anyone who's already a member of a political party joined Your Party they would be required to cancel their membership of their existing party.
Multiple membership of different parties is a very unusual position - especially for parties that may be competing in the same elections. I can't think of a major political party that would allow members who are also members of another party; the closest would be that members of one Green party can be members of the Green Party of a different nation (eg: dual membership of GPEW and SGP). There's a probability that if anyone who's already a member of a political party joined Your Party they would be required to cancel their membership of their existing party.
The social-democratic NDP in Canada forbids(or at least used to forbid) membership in other parties(*), but I'm not aware that other parties have ever done so.
(*) This was allegedly to prevent entryist tactics by Communists, though it didn't work against far-left groups who weren't organized as electoral parties, like eg. trotskyists.
Labour certainly won’t let you have membership of, or canvass for, another party. I would think the same is true for most mainstream parties.
Though their application is highly selective - you can have been a tory last week and all is forgiven; if you spoke to a left wing group a year ago that was later proscribed you're in deep shit.
I note Your Party is allowing dual membership with other parties
This is not quite accurate, the successful clause 4 states:
"Members shall be permitted to hold membership in other national political parties where they have been approved by the CEC as aligning with the Party’s values, to include those with whom the Party cooperates electorally. The approved list shall be subject to ongoing CEC review and annual ratification by National Conference."
"Electoral cooperation" carries a lot of weight there ... it's very unusual for parties to cooperate in elections, there's usually a lot to lose and no substantial potential gain. The only situation I can see electoral cooperation working would be an election under STV, and then with multi-member seats - an arrangement where party A ask people to vote for their candidate #1 and candidate for party B #2 (and, party B ask the reverse) increases the chances of both candidates being elected. Any other election then parties are competing for votes (and, almost by definition, as parties in a potential pact largely agree on policies they'll be after the same voters) and an electoral pact risks them getting less seats. Of course, if electoral cooperation gets too close then the Electoral Commission could rule them to be functioning as the same party and apply spending rules etc on them on that basis.
I hold little brief for Your Party despite mostly liking Corbyn as an individual - I think building a party around the war in Palestine as the biggest issue is incredibly dangerous, as we have seen wrt some of the founding members' views on LGBTQ+ issues - but it would be ridiculous to openly invite entryism by allowing dual membership with just any party. Obviously they aren't going to want eg Reform members to join, why would they?
When I said 'very short' I was actually thinking 'nonexistent'... and the other parties on it probably won't want to keep people with dual membership anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see a successful new left-wing party, but with the press gleefully pouncing on and magnifying all the in-fighting they have an uphill struggle: which they are not managing particularly well at the moment.
Question for English and Welsh Greens - if we have any - is the E&W Green party any good on Scottish independence? I'm not thinking just of a referendum but of abolishing Section 35 which allows Westminster to override democratic Scottish parliament decisions, and also about further devolution.
It's often forgotten that a key process for the British dominions getting independence wasn't through referenda but through the Statute of Westminster guaranteeing that the Westminster parliament would not override the decisions of parliaments in Australia, Canada etc ( hope I have this right).
If we had something like that in the UK for devolved parliaments we wouldn't need referenda- parliaments could just gradually diverge as needed and crucially could protect themselves from the largest electorate riding roughshod over them.
Is there any interesting constitutional thinking going on in the E&W Greens because I just despair of the state of things with Labour?
I'm not GPEW, but there are some positive noises being heard by SGP from the Green family south of the border. At our 2022 Conferences, SGP members voted to break formal ties with GPEW over both trans-rights and position on Scottish independence. The announcement yesterday to restore those formal ties reflects changes in GPEW over both those issues (though the media are very likely to only mention trans-rights, because that's what the media does).
So what Polanski is talking about it not withdraw from NATO just because, but recognising the instability of being reliant on the US. Something which seems to have been proven very much an issue.
If Canada, the EU, Norway, Iceland and the UK are in it it could still be called the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation... and I think everyone has realised that relying on the USA is a bad idea by now.
Just reading about Hannah Spencer's criticism of parliament's drinking culture.
Speaking as someone with a strong aesthetic aversion to alcohol and a mild disdain for drinking culture, these statements strike me as roughly akin to a Canadian MP complaining about fellow MPs cheering on violent hockey games in some downtown Ottawa sports bar. There might be a legitimate issue at stake, I'm sure, but it's function as a political rally-cry will be limited to critical-thinkers accustomed to regarding beloved national pastimes as potential sources of social harm.
IOW somebody who's probably already voting for one of the left-wing parties. As such, I suppose it could attract people of the "I've been voting Labour all my life, but now I'm starting to worry about their lack of action against drinking culture" bloc into the Green ranks. Though, extrapolating from my own personal experience in urban western Canada, those types are few and far between, and, at least in their more organizational forms, tend to be regarded as tiresome scolds, even on the left.
Farage, of course, is using all this to posture as the champion of "the afternoon pint", and sneak in references to what I assume is the asymmetrical issue of the Greens' supposedly permissive policies on heroin. But Labour seems to be lining up against Spencer's opinion as well. Personally, I don't buy the argument, made Spencer and/or her defenders, that since we don't allow surgeons to operate while drunk, we shouldn't allow MPs to vote while drunk. Seems like two pretty different situations, to me.
Emily Thornberry MP replied to Spencer with something like "The smell of fags and beer make parliament seem more like the real world."
Which is an elegant leap into populism, though I was surprised to see tobacco products, in particular, getting a positive mention, even if just in a "Hey, everybody's human" sort of a way.
Operating a vehicle may be unlike voting in Parliament, but I don't see why MPs voting while drunk should be defended - it seems to me to be an obviously bad idea.
Operating a vehicle may be unlike voting in Parliament, but I don't see why MPs voting while drunk should be defended - it seems to me to be an obviously bad idea.
In practice, I think it depends on the situation. If it's the kind of issue where his own vote was probably determined before he actually cast it in the Commons(eg. on a matter of uniform party policy), it probably doesn't matter how drunk or sober he is, as long as he votes the way he'd previously decided. In that instance, I might be more worried about any drinking during the build-up to formulating his stance on the relevant bill or motion, eg. if he were on a committee listening to testimony the public or experts about how the government should proceed.
Operating a vehicle may be unlike voting in Parliament, but I don't see why MPs voting while drunk should be defended - it seems to me to be an obviously bad idea.
In practice, I think it depends on the situation. If it's the kind of issue where his own vote was probably determined before he actually cast it in the Commons(eg. on a matter of uniform party policy), it probably doesn't matter how drunk or sober he is, as long as he votes the way he'd previously decided. In that instance, I might be more worried about any drinking during the build-up to formulating his stance on the relevant bill or motion, eg. if he were on a committee listening to testimony the public or experts about how the government should proceed.
Sorry but that's a ludicrous argument. People shouldn't be drunk or otherwise intoxicated at work, at all. That seems like a completely reasonable expectation.
Operating a vehicle may be unlike voting in Parliament, but I don't see why MPs voting while drunk should be defended - it seems to me to be an obviously bad idea.
In practice, I think it depends on the situation. If it's the kind of issue where his own vote was probably determined before he actually cast it in the Commons(eg. on a matter of uniform party policy), it probably doesn't matter how drunk or sober he is, as long as he votes the way he'd previously decided. In that instance, I might be more worried about any drinking during the build-up to formulating his stance on the relevant bill or motion, eg. if he were on a committee listening to testimony the public or experts about how the government should proceed.
Sorry but that's a ludicrous argument. People shouldn't be drunk or otherwise intoxicated at work, at all. That seems like a completely reasonable expectation.
Okay. I wouldn't want the chancellor of my university drunk when he's figuring out the budget numbers for the year, so to ensure that never happens, a rules-based order should probably also prohibit him from being drunk when he hands me my degree at convocation, even though the decision to grant me the degree was made a long time earlier, and by other people.
I think in calling for sobriety among parliamentarians, I personally would probably have just said "They shouldn't be drunk when they're doing their jobs", rather than singling out the specific act of drunken voting as a particular risk.
There seem to be very few occasions where drinking during working hours would be considered acceptable, almost entirely independent of where one works. The days of people going to the pub at lunch time are past. Even when we have visitors in and go to a local restaurant for lunch that would be almost exclusively accompanied by soft drinks, though if visiting for a few days then an evening meal may have a pint or glass of wine. Even a lot of drink at the Christmas party seems to be becoming less common. Being intoxicated is seen as unprofessional and reflecting badly on both the individual and the organisation. Of course, the increasing number of people who drive home is also a factor in reduced drinking during the working day.
Hannah Spencer isn't the first new MP to be somewhat surprised by the culture of Westminster, with the subsidised bars open most of the day being something that's often cited. A lot of MPs seem to find that the culture of the place is almost designed to be incompatible with family life - the location that means the majority of MPs need to find local digs to live while there is probably unavoidable (a move to, say, Birmingham would reduce the average journey but still leave most MPs unable to go home at the end of the day), the long hours are a result of the amount of work MPs are expected to do (and, trying to reduce that but moving more onto the civil service has issues over democratic accountability). It's the sort of working environment that does tend towards creating a drinking culture, maybe not during the day but when you work 'til late and can't get home to your family there's a tendency to join with others in the same situation for a social drink which can then become several drinks.
I think in calling for sobriety among parliamentarians, I personally would probably have just said "They shouldn't be drunk when they're doing their jobs", rather than singling out the specific act of drunken voting as a particular risk.
In context, the Green Party don't have a whipping system for MPs, voting is an act of individual consideration and judgement, and so I can totally understand why she specifically mentions drunken voting.
The other reference she makes is to harassment cases; and it's true that the parliamentary complaints scheme quite often reports that being drunk was a contributing factor, and the level at you'd start to get worried about judgement being impaired is a lot lower than that.
Emily Thornberry MP replied to Spencer with something like "The smell of fags and beer make parliament seem more like the real world."
Which is an elegant leap into populism, though I was surprised to see tobacco products, in particular, getting a positive mention, even if just in a "Hey, everybody's human" sort of a way.
Thornberry never saw a bandwagon she didn't want to jump on.
Nowhere else in the public sector is drinking on the job considered normal or even acceptable. I suspect most of the private sector is the same. Gone are the days of journalists spending their mornings nursing a hangover, having a three hour liquid lunch, and dashing off some copy before deadline and going to the pub. Heck, I suspect even the pro-vice chancellor 4 pint lunch at my alma mater has now been curtailed.
I think in calling for sobriety among parliamentarians, I personally would probably have just said "They shouldn't be drunk when they're doing their jobs", rather than singling out the specific act of drunken voting as a particular risk.
In context, the Green Party don't have a whipping system for MPs, voting is an act of individual consideration and judgement, and so I can totally understand why she specifically mentions drunken voting.
The other reference she makes is to harassment cases; and it's true that the parliamentary complaints scheme quite often reports that being drunk was a contributing factor, and the level at you'd start to get worried about judgement being impaired is a lot lower than that.
It's not just the boozing, it's the things they are allowed to claim on expenses and the attitude towards accepting gifts. The rest of the world has moved on: at my last job before I went freelance, you weren't allowed to accept so much as a box of chocolates from a client and expenses were tightly controlled. They too had rules against drinking (alcohol) during the working day. This was in a job where I spent most of the day sitting at a desk. Oh, and they didn't subsidise our food and drink either.
Parliament is stuck in the eighteenth century. Time to turn the Palace of Westminster into a museum and move the seat of government to a modern building. You'd never get the civil service to move it out of London though.
Parliament is stuck in the eighteenth century. Time to turn the Palace of Westminster into a museum and move the seat of government to a modern building. You'd never get the civil service to move it out of London though.
I agree, and this is borne out by the atmosphere at Holyrood being (apparently) totally different and a much nicer place to work - especially for women MSPs.
It's not just the boozing, it's the things they are allowed to claim on expenses and the attitude towards accepting gifts. The rest of the world has moved on: at my last job before I went freelance, you weren't allowed to accept so much as a box of chocolates from a client and expenses were tightly controlled. They too had rules against drinking (alcohol) during the working day. This was in a job where I spent most of the day sitting at a desk. Oh, and they didn't subsidise our food and drink either.
Parliament is stuck in the eighteenth century. Time to turn the Palace of Westminster into a museum and move the seat of government to a modern building. You'd never get the civil service to move it out of London though.
Maybe not the 18th century, at least on this point. But, maybe 50 years out of date - some of the subsidised food and work bar would be very similar to the days when businesses had a staff canteen (and, quite often a bar) that served food at cost or even subsidised, practices that have largely disappeared in the last 30 years. When I started here, the site had only recently changed from almost exclusively a government laboratory to the lab being privatised about a decade earlier and private businesses starting to move into empty space on the site. At the time we still had the laboratory canteen serving breakfasts and cooked lunches (with a room with table service for management) at prices significantly below anywhere in town, and a bar open at lunchtime and after work (cheaper than the pub next door). That's all gone, initially replaced by contracted caterers who couldn't make money at the reduced prices when it was in house and subsidised, then just a sandwich van, now we have an unreliable coffee van.
There probably is a place for a staff canteen arrangement in Parliament, the nature of politics is that talking things through over lunch is important and it's probably best to keep that inside the Parliamentary estate rather than have those conversations in a public restaurant. But, I don't see why that should be subsidised given MPs salaries, they should be able to afford lunch and dinner (and, pay for their staff too, who wouldn't be on such generous pay).
Many years ago, when my son started school he was in the same class as the daughter of the leader of the city council, who was preparing to stand for parliament. When our son and their daughter became friends, we got to know the family quite well (well enough to go round to their house for fireworks on Bonfire Night). The family seemed very happy and united and we liked them a lot.
A couple of years later, we moved away and shortly afterwards there was a General Election and this person became an MP. We were delighted for them. Sadly, a couple of years after that, we found out that the marriage had ended. This person went on to become quite an influential backbencher but the effects upon them were clear. Quite apart from a broken marriage, they gained a lot of weight quite rapidly and had the look of someone who was drinking too much.
I think that this is what can easily happen to anyone who becomes part of the House of Commons. You get separated from your family if you are spending most of your time in the hothouse of Parliament; you work strange and at times erratic hours; and there is food and booze readily available. Add to that the reality that there is still a culture in parliament that owes much to private schools and the Old Boy Network - where going to a private club to drink and have confidential chats with People Of Influence is pretty much taken for granted.
I think what I am saying is that it isn't simply a case of feckless people boozing too much on the job. The pressures and the underlying assumptions make being an MP quite difficult. What we need is a wholesale change of culture - but that is easier to state than to achieve. Even people of the best intentions are likely to find themselves drawn into this culture and starting to accept that "this is just how things are." Or else - if they don't adjust - they are likely to give up and walk away.
Comments
Yeah, I think George Galloway and maybe Jeremy Corbyn are guys who've made what seems to them a logical transition from "Hands off the USSR!" to "Hands off Russia!" But I'd imagine amongst the European centre-left, you've got at least a few people who went from thinking...
..."NATO is evil because Reagan is using it to drag us into a conflict with the peaceful Russians" to...
...in 1983 to thinking "NATO is bad because the Trump won't fulfill his obligation to stop the warmongering Russians" in 2025...
...without sensing much of a contradiction.
(And maybe there IS no contradiction, if one believes that there is, in fact, a qualitative difference between the USSR and Putin's Russia, in terms of the threat posed.)
I'm happy to stand corrected. Most of my knowledge of his position on Russia is second-hand.
This seems like an incredibly dodgy basis on which to base your knowledge of politicians in another country. On what basis does your informant think that he is pro-Putin? Corbyn has been a CND supporter for many years, his anti-nuclear stance has nothing to do with Putin.
Well, like I say, I'm happy to stand corrected. FWIW, the one complaint that comes directly to mind right now is that he was unjustifiably reticent about assigning blame in the Salisbury poisonings.
I will admit that, having read his most controversial statement on the matter, it did seem to me that he might just have been saying "Let's not jump to conclusions", which is always wise advice. I am also aware that statements of hesitancy can be used to dog-whistle apologia, but I wouldn't care at this point to debate what Corbyn was doing there.
You can consider my linkage of him with Galloway retracted. Apologies.
He didn't immediately jump to conclusions based on purely the pointing of a finger. The press, of course, ever the faithful tory lapdog, portrayed this as apologetics for Putin.
The worst Corbyn can be accused of (in both domestic politics and international relations) is a naïve belief that people are, at heart, decent and honest, and if only they could all sit down with a pot of tea they could sort things out.
Is it really a service to European defence for parties to pretend that problem isn't there? Perhaps there's some in-public 'appeasing' going on to gain time to privately work out how best to address the crisis but it's hard to tell. Certainly I wouldn't fault Polanski for mentioning the elephant in the room.
I'm not expert enough to.know what the best 'elephant' wrangling strategy might be.
And while on the one hand it's possible to see the utility of nuclear arms ( there's a reason countries who fear invasion really really want them), it's also striking that it's not enough these days just to have the weapons. Propagandise enough voters and you can decapitate a democratic nuclear power by putting one of your own assets in charge of deploying their arsenal.
So there is something 'hard nosed' and realistic in the social media propaganda soft power approach - I think we're seeing proof it can work in the way the US and increasingly the UK are being undermined by it.
I suspect there's more danger from Twitter-poisoned parties who appease racists and thus help Russian/ international fascist propaganda efforts than there is from the Greens vocalising what I think is a real and terrifying problem with defence policy centred on NATO these days- Trump and those behind him.
First Corbyn and Sultana & co have done the 'Popular Front of Judaea' sketch
(All together now - Splitters!)
Now the membership are onto 'Holy Grail'
I thought we were an autonomous collective!
That said Corbyn wasn’t viable as a long term leader because of his age (he’s 76, well within the dropping dead or becoming unexpectedly incapacitated zone) and he’d be 80 at the time of next election. Zara Sultana has been proving a public liability for a while. However, Westminster politics and the media will be hard to negotiate without a named leader.
We had an avowedly Socialist party at the beginning of the Scottish Parliament- the Scottish Socialist Party. At one point they had 6 MSPs but the charismatic male leader turned out to be a perjurer (convicted) with terrible attitudes towards women.
The weird thing is, having terrible attitudes towards women/ LGBTQ+ people seems not uncommon in some segments of the old Left, who hide behind class and decrying 'identity politics' in order to be truly terrible socialist equivalents of Farage fans with more red flags (of the 'watch out - this one's a sexist creep!' type) than a Soviet May Day parade.
The various Greens seem to be doing not a bad job of removing these types from positions of power.
I'm not saying it's impossible to have a Socialist party which isn't riddled with dangerous social conservatives / misogynists but it seems weirdly hard in the UK.
They just seem in practice to do intersectionality really badly.
It might just be the way 'class' is conceived and used which seems to make make UK Socialist movements in practice very vulnerable to bad social justice behaviour which in theory shouldn't be the case? The various Greens seems to have less of that baggage. They tackled a lot of bigots in their movement.
Because we have a very obvious old Left beyond Labour in Scotland that I've seen close up for decades, I'm really not confident about good new Socialist parties emerging.
Blimey, that's a wild assertion.
This goes against the Novara Media-esque element of the left, though even there, it's a slightly mixed bag.
The dichotomy, real or false, is between the "plastic" left vs. the "authentic" left. Whatever one may think of that, and it does seem rather odorous to me, it does sound like a horribly good start for a circular firing squid, and thus a flawed basis for success.
I have an English left wing pal who thinks he's the most feminist feminist who ever feministed and he worshipped this damn essay and got drawn into transphobia, mistaking that for feminism, because it's the dreaded 'identity politics', that Fisher warned about, innit? These anti 'identitarian' left politics made him vulnerable to all kinds of obvious bad faith moral panic stuff from the Right about 'woke' students and freedom of speech - and he was getting that underlying vulnerability from having imbibed an intellectual left wing theorist writing about class, not Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson.
I can also think of some appalling very influential misogynist/ transphobic dinosaurs in the Scottish left but won't name names for legal reasons- some in very high standing in left wing circles - who again do the class v 'identity politics' thing or get intersectionality very badly wrong so they'll excuse attacks on women and LGBTQ+ people.
So it's hard to quantify and is subjective, but I've personally seen enough of it to think that there's a problem not being fully addressed that does show up in the socialist left beyond Labour, where you might not expect it, but it's there.
My experience makes me wonder if such parties - such as "Your Party" - are made up of individuals with strongly-held ideological beliefs who are not prepared to compromise in order to work together. As such I think they are doomed to fragmentation and disintegration.
Yeah, and AFAICT it was a reaction to Fisher getting in an online beef with some anarchist feminists who were pushing back on his support for Brand on this basis.
The current Scottish Green leadership model is a compromise between the Green principles of radical democracy, that includes leadership of the whole membership as a political version of Congregationalism, and the reality of a world where the media want to hear an individual leader talking and voters (and, far too many political journalists) who don't even realise that there's an alternative to a party leader who acts as a dictator within their party. The SGP has only had leaders for a few years, the joint leadership model was only introduced about 6-7 years ago, before that we had co-convenors (try to explain that concept to the average voter). GPEW has always had a more conventional leadership model than SGP.
You do need a broad enough coalition, or large enough area of overlap in your Venn diagram to be able to get enough votes. What you are willing to compromise to get that is the issue.
I think the issue with Your Party is they have largely manifested in opposition to the British government’s foreign policy on the war in Gaza - that is such a specific issue that people’s views on a wide range of other social and political issues can be widely divergent.
The pragmatism vs principle balance is a nightmare.
The social-democratic NDP in Canada forbids(or at least used to forbid) membership in other parties(*), but I'm not aware that other parties have ever done so.
(*) This was allegedly to prevent entryist tactics by Communists, though it didn't work against far-left groups who weren't organized as electoral parties, like eg. trotskyists.
Though their application is highly selective - you can have been a tory last week and all is forgiven; if you spoke to a left wing group a year ago that was later proscribed you're in deep shit.
This is not quite accurate, the successful clause 4 states:
"Members shall be permitted to hold membership in other national political parties where they have been approved by the CEC as aligning with the Party’s values, to include those with whom the Party cooperates electorally. The approved list shall be subject to ongoing CEC review and annual ratification by National Conference."
via https://www.yourparty.uk/constitution-votes/
Why shouldn't it be?
Don't get me wrong, I would love to see a successful new left-wing party, but with the press gleefully pouncing on and magnifying all the in-fighting they have an uphill struggle: which they are not managing particularly well at the moment.
It's often forgotten that a key process for the British dominions getting independence wasn't through referenda but through the Statute of Westminster guaranteeing that the Westminster parliament would not override the decisions of parliaments in Australia, Canada etc ( hope I have this right).
If we had something like that in the UK for devolved parliaments we wouldn't need referenda- parliaments could just gradually diverge as needed and crucially could protect themselves from the largest electorate riding roughshod over them.
Is there any interesting constitutional thinking going on in the E&W Greens because I just despair of the state of things with Labour?
Speaking as someone with a strong aesthetic aversion to alcohol and a mild disdain for drinking culture, these statements strike me as roughly akin to a Canadian MP complaining about fellow MPs cheering on violent hockey games in some downtown Ottawa sports bar. There might be a legitimate issue at stake, I'm sure, but it's function as a political rally-cry will be limited to critical-thinkers accustomed to regarding beloved national pastimes as potential sources of social harm.
IOW somebody who's probably already voting for one of the left-wing parties. As such, I suppose it could attract people of the "I've been voting Labour all my life, but now I'm starting to worry about their lack of action against drinking culture" bloc into the Green ranks. Though, extrapolating from my own personal experience in urban western Canada, those types are few and far between, and, at least in their more organizational forms, tend to be regarded as tiresome scolds, even on the left.
Farage, of course, is using all this to posture as the champion of "the afternoon pint", and sneak in references to what I assume is the asymmetrical issue of the Greens' supposedly permissive policies on heroin. But Labour seems to be lining up against Spencer's opinion as well. Personally, I don't buy the argument, made Spencer and/or her defenders, that since we don't allow surgeons to operate while drunk, we shouldn't allow MPs to vote while drunk. Seems like two pretty different situations, to me.
Which is an elegant leap into populism, though I was surprised to see tobacco products, in particular, getting a positive mention, even if just in a "Hey, everybody's human" sort of a way.
In practice, I think it depends on the situation. If it's the kind of issue where his own vote was probably determined before he actually cast it in the Commons(eg. on a matter of uniform party policy), it probably doesn't matter how drunk or sober he is, as long as he votes the way he'd previously decided. In that instance, I might be more worried about any drinking during the build-up to formulating his stance on the relevant bill or motion, eg. if he were on a committee listening to testimony the public or experts about how the government should proceed.
Sorry but that's a ludicrous argument. People shouldn't be drunk or otherwise intoxicated at work, at all. That seems like a completely reasonable expectation.
Okay. I wouldn't want the chancellor of my university drunk when he's figuring out the budget numbers for the year, so to ensure that never happens, a rules-based order should probably also prohibit him from being drunk when he hands me my degree at convocation, even though the decision to grant me the degree was made a long time earlier, and by other people.
I think in calling for sobriety among parliamentarians, I personally would probably have just said "They shouldn't be drunk when they're doing their jobs", rather than singling out the specific act of drunken voting as a particular risk.
Hannah Spencer isn't the first new MP to be somewhat surprised by the culture of Westminster, with the subsidised bars open most of the day being something that's often cited. A lot of MPs seem to find that the culture of the place is almost designed to be incompatible with family life - the location that means the majority of MPs need to find local digs to live while there is probably unavoidable (a move to, say, Birmingham would reduce the average journey but still leave most MPs unable to go home at the end of the day), the long hours are a result of the amount of work MPs are expected to do (and, trying to reduce that but moving more onto the civil service has issues over democratic accountability). It's the sort of working environment that does tend towards creating a drinking culture, maybe not during the day but when you work 'til late and can't get home to your family there's a tendency to join with others in the same situation for a social drink which can then become several drinks.
In context, the Green Party don't have a whipping system for MPs, voting is an act of individual consideration and judgement, and so I can totally understand why she specifically mentions drunken voting.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4P1l9rKP5Wg
The other reference she makes is to harassment cases; and it's true that the parliamentary complaints scheme quite often reports that being drunk was a contributing factor, and the level at you'd start to get worried about judgement being impaired is a lot lower than that.
Thornberry never saw a bandwagon she didn't want to jump on.
Nowhere else in the public sector is drinking on the job considered normal or even acceptable. I suspect most of the private sector is the same. Gone are the days of journalists spending their mornings nursing a hangover, having a three hour liquid lunch, and dashing off some copy before deadline and going to the pub. Heck, I suspect even the pro-vice chancellor 4 pint lunch at my alma mater has now been curtailed.
Interesting. Thanks.
Parliament is stuck in the eighteenth century. Time to turn the Palace of Westminster into a museum and move the seat of government to a modern building. You'd never get the civil service to move it out of London though.
This.
There probably is a place for a staff canteen arrangement in Parliament, the nature of politics is that talking things through over lunch is important and it's probably best to keep that inside the Parliamentary estate rather than have those conversations in a public restaurant. But, I don't see why that should be subsidised given MPs salaries, they should be able to afford lunch and dinner (and, pay for their staff too, who wouldn't be on such generous pay).
A couple of years later, we moved away and shortly afterwards there was a General Election and this person became an MP. We were delighted for them. Sadly, a couple of years after that, we found out that the marriage had ended. This person went on to become quite an influential backbencher but the effects upon them were clear. Quite apart from a broken marriage, they gained a lot of weight quite rapidly and had the look of someone who was drinking too much.
I think that this is what can easily happen to anyone who becomes part of the House of Commons. You get separated from your family if you are spending most of your time in the hothouse of Parliament; you work strange and at times erratic hours; and there is food and booze readily available. Add to that the reality that there is still a culture in parliament that owes much to private schools and the Old Boy Network - where going to a private club to drink and have confidential chats with People Of Influence is pretty much taken for granted.
I think what I am saying is that it isn't simply a case of feckless people boozing too much on the job. The pressures and the underlying assumptions make being an MP quite difficult. What we need is a wholesale change of culture - but that is easier to state than to achieve. Even people of the best intentions are likely to find themselves drawn into this culture and starting to accept that "this is just how things are." Or else - if they don't adjust - they are likely to give up and walk away.