Editorial

Left Unity’s first national meeting has elected 60% of women to the directly-elected section of its new National Co-ordinating Group, reports Kate Hudson. During an enthusiastic and exuberant – and occasionally fraught – first national meeting, Left Unity agreed the composition and procedure for electing its first National Co-ordinating Group, and promptly elected a majority […] Read more »

A report from yesterday’s first national meeting of Left Unity local group representatives by Stuart Watkins from the Leamington Spa group. Back in March of this year, the film maker Ken Loach issued an appeal in The Guardian newspaper for a new party of the left – one that would fill the gap in Britain […] Read more »

Ken Loach’s open letter discussing a new mass party of the left, and the response it has received, is impressive, says Ben Wray from the International Socialist Group in Scotland. It confirms what has become increasingly obvious in recent years: the failure of the left to make a significant ideological and political breakthrough since the […] Read more »

Murray Smith responds to the European dimension of the ‘flutter’ articles. He is a member of the anti-capitalist party déi Lenk in Luxembourg, and of the Executive Board of the Party of the European Left. Having followed with sympathy the emergence of Left Unity and the possibility of a new party of the Left being […] Read more »

Doncaster activist Louise Harrison challenges Labour to put up a fight. Interesting. This argument for me encapsulates everything I’ve heard over the last two years from Labour Party Unite members who argue that the Labour Party is like it is because people like me aren’t in it pulling it to the left. In reality it’s […] Read more »

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 […] Read more »

The second section of a two-part article from a senior figure in the labour and trade union movement who joins the debate on Left Unity and urges those involved in Left Unity to consider that we might be wrong. Impact of the Crisis However, it could well be argued that the economic crisis changes the […] Read more »

I am not sure who coined the phrase “a UKIP of the Left” as something that is urgently required, but whoever it was, they got it dead right. The voting on Thursday may have been predominantly rural rather than urban, but the absence of a serious left challenge allowed the xenophobes to cash in on […] Read more »

  On Friday 29 people met in Liverpool for the first meeting of Left Unity It was largely a word of mouth meeting with no leaflets or mailing list so the organisers were both pleases and surprised. It had started off just as a meeting of three people to discuss geographical divisions in the Merseyside/ […] Read more »

Scunthorpe Left Unity had our first meeting on Saturday, there were eight of us and some sent apologies. A great mix of ages, a pretty good gender balance and a spectrum of political backgrounds. The discussion was extremely positive, key issues were around our relationship with the Labour Party and what we do locally to […] Read more »