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In the first section of a two-part article, a senior figure from the labour and trade union movement joins the debate about Left Unity
Left Unity is the motherhood-and-apple-pie of socialists. The unspoken (and sometimes spoken) assumption is that if only the left could crack the unity problem – the Rubik’s Cube of political intervention – then anything is possible, up to and including the relevance that has long eluded most of the left for many years.
As a result, there is from time to time a modest flutter around the issue, and this is one of those times. The reasons for this renewed interest in Left Unity include the reasonable and the nonsensical. In the former category comes the agonising but inescapable fact that, five years into an enormous capitalist crisis, the left in Britain has made negligible political impact.
This is allied to a widespread and understandable disgust at Labour’s record during its 13 years in government until 2010, and at its continued hesitancy in moving away from New Labour positions, most obviously in relation to issues like welfare and privatisation, on which the old Blairite positioning still predominates. There is an argument that Labour no longer represents the broad progressive coalition that it once did to at least a limited extent, having become both less democratic and more bourgeois over the last generation. That is not an argument that should be dismissed.