Anticipating certain comments, this is not the LRC – a movement inside the Labour Party campaigning on a left wing platofrm – rather Compss is a think tank arguing broadly for centre left ideas. Unlike the LRC – whose motion to include activists from other sectarian swannywaddles I opposed – this could present the opportunity for Labour activists on the left to show Greens and (this new beast) progressive Lib Dems that perhaps there is more to politics than splitting up and forming meaningless parties in lieu of majoritarian leftwing representation in the Labour Party.

“Labour, Greens, Liberal Democrats and people of no party”

I hope members of Mebyon Kernow, Plaid and the SNP will be equally welcome.

Let’s see how it develops. I agree with Carl. I won’t be resigning just because of this move.

I hope members of Mebyon Kernow, Plaid and the SNP will be equally welcome.

Perhaps they’ll be too sensible to bother.

*Whistles innocently.*

@ 3 Sunny

“Let’s see how it develops. I agree with Carl. I won’t be resigning just because of this move.”

Wow, I’m sure they’ll be so happy about that…what with you being such a long standing stalwart of the Labour movement….

….oh wait…..

@ 1 Carl

“….this could present the opportunity for Labour activists on the left to show Greens and (this new beast) progressive Lib Dems that perhaps there is more to politics than splitting up and forming meaningless parties in lieu of majoritarian leftwing representation in the Labour Party”

How typical that the knee-jerk response from some people is the patronising assumption that there is only one true path, and that (naturally) anyone who doesn’t agree with them must be subject to some form of false consciousness.

It would almost be worth joining Compass just to disabuse you of your condescending wrong-headedness.

@ 1 Carl

“……and (this new beast) progressive Lib Dems…”

This is too funny… however let down one might feel about the LD’s and their decision to get into bed with the enemy, are your SERIOUSLY going to try and argue that the Labour party (still LESS New Labour) were a shining beacon of radicalism and progressive politics between 1997 and 2010?

You must think we have awfully short memories!

Labour it may be suggested faces a difficult struggle over the next five years as it now appears that it will have to fight two party’s both the Orange Book Liberals and the Conservatives. For it is almost certain that the far right Orange Book Liberals will support the Conservatives in future elections.
The changes to the electoral boundaries, the proposed system of AVand electoral pacts will help both the Conservatives and the Orange Book Liberals to gain more seats thus Labours uphill struggle starts to become a mountain. The answer to Labours dilemma may come in the form of further electoral reform by supporting Full PR. The Open List System will allow every vote to count and may gain massive support from electors who have been disenfranchised for decades under the current system and who have been treated unfairly by boundary changes.
If Labour were to support the Open list system then this might unbalance the Liberal Democrats and drive a wedge between them and the far Right Orange Book Liberals. Disaffected Liberal Democrats may even join Labour as they realize That a commitment to a PR system if Labour were elected could create a vacuum with The Orange Book Liberals and Conservatives on the far right and Labour, The Green Party,rebel liberal Democrats and others filling the centre left.

Labours best weapon it may be suggested remains the transparency and honesty of a binding Commitment to Full PR within six months of office should they be elected.

(I’ve just sent my resignation in.)

“I hope members of Mebyon Kernow, Plaid and the SNP will be equally welcome”.

Am sure they will be. Please join!

@ 9 Chris Brooke

Hmmnn…perhaps that’s for the best?

The departure of those ultras who opposed the Opening Out might actually encourage more people to join!

@Carl @Galen10 indeed how typically patronising and tribal!

Perhaps by opening up to other parties, and with the whiff of (moderate) electoral reform in the air, Compass members will get a taste for collegiate cross-party politics?

Maybe you’ll become more familiar with the work of some of our devolved administrations and local councils where Labour has worked quite well with other parties?

It’s possible you’ll discover that some of those smaller parties have achieved meaningful political change

Who knows, a rare rash of mutual respect might break out between people who all care about politics, agree that electoral politics is important and admire work done by other parties?

I don’t think I’ve ever been called an ultra before, Galen10, so thanks for that.

(Not-very-tribal tribal Labour is my usual political self-description.)

@13 Chris Brooke

Apologies if I have misconstrued your position, but resigning in a fit of pique at the success of the Opening Out ballot seems about as tribal Labour as one could get, no?

@ 12 Tom Chance

Who knows indeed? Handsome is as handsome does I reckon… so given the experience of New Labour, it’s probably right to remain cautious about any newly found appetite for progressive, radical politics within Labour; one can but hope of course!

No fit of pique at all, Galen10.

I joined Compass in 2003 because I liked the idea of a democratic membership organisation operating politically inside the Labour party, and in general the political line of Compass was one with which I was more or less in sympathy, and Compass people seemed to me generally be saying more or less sensible things.

Since the general election, however, things, for me, have changed. I thought the management committee’s call for a progressive coalition government after the election was quite misguided — it could never have worked. I didn’t like the way the organisation has handled the matter of large payments to Neal Lawson. And now a 2/3 majority of the membership has agreed with the management committee that it wants to become a very different organisation to the one that I’ve wanted to be a part of over the last eight years.

So, yes, this vote is for me the final straw (as I said in my resignation note to Gavin Hayes), but leaving now isn’t a fit of pique: this parting of the ways has been on the cards for quite a while now.

A whole 520 people voted?

You mean, you mean, Compass is as important as a local council election on a wet winter Thursday?

Look upon my works ye mighty….

@ 16 Chris Brooke

Fair enough, the back story makes it look less like a fit of pique; I’m happy to retract 😉

I have to say that the current decision probably makes it more likely that I would join, altho’ I probably need to do a tad more research to convince myself it’s worth it.

I did hear about the issue of payments to Neal Lawson; it may even have been discussed on here I think. Have the aims and political line really changed that much over the past 8 years? I’m genuinely interested in your take on how and why.

For what it is worth, I think your take on the post election calls for a progressive coalition is dead wrong; the tragedy is that New Labour made it impossible. The baleful influence of New Labour cling-ons is what makes me fairly pessimistic about the chances for a progressive coalition, because I don’t accept that New Labour was (or could ever be rendered) progressive.

It’s not as if there is a great deal of choice at present sadly

The parliamentary arithmetic made a cross-party anti-Tory coalition impossible, not anything to do with New Labour (unusually!). And, even if it weren’t, for an already-battered, exhausted Labour Party to try to continue as the largest party in a coalition government after being on the receiving end of an electoral pounding would have been to invite political disaster.

I don’t pay close enough attention to the content of Compass publications, so I don’t want to comment on how I think the underlying political line may or may not have changed over time. Like much of Compass, I was always an Ed Miliband supporter in the leadership election campaign, so I don’t actually think there’s too much space between, say, me and the centre of political gravity inside Compass in general.

But, as I say, there are differences, and the differences have now reached a point where I’d rather be outside the organisation than in it.

@19

I’m less convinced by the parliamentary arithmetic argument (hard, but by no means impossible) than by the argument that Labour ween’t in the right place. Whether that was by dint of exhaustion is open to debate. The tragedy is that elements within New Labour were certainly determined to scupper any deal; another good reason not to trust Labour until the brand is de-toxified.

As dizzycrest suggests @ 8 above, it would be a good start if Labour adopted a commitment to further electoral reform…. but I won’t be holding my breath.

I’m a member of the Green party, and am suspicious of Compass given it’s new Labour background. I also don’t feel any affinity to ‘centre left’ politics, I’m just left, so I guess that lets me out anyway.

http://haringeygreens.blogspot.com/

Galen10 do you ever have anything interesting to say other than screech at other people?

@ 21 Sunny Hundal

I’d say my comments stand on their merits Sunny, which frankly is more than can be said of some of your contributions.

Of course, I wouldn’t expect you to appreciate the fact that some of us might find it more than a tad ironic that you’ve gone all “holier-than-thou” about opening up Compass to non-Labour party members, despite being a relatively recent convert.

Whether others find my contributions screeching I’ll leave them to judge. I wouldn’t take your word for anything mutch.

On general principles, I’d like to weigh in here and say that I normally find Galen’s contributions to be interesting and not at all screechy.

So: nyaah.

@23 Chaise Guevara

Why thanks. Hopefully more people here will agree with you than with Sunny!

I had to go and look up those payments to Neal Lawson. Hadn’t heard about that before.

I think we need to get Richard Murphy on the case.

As a “consultant” Lawson will obviously be claiming self employment. Certainly Compass won’t have been paying NI or with holding income tax.

But if Lawson has, as he says, been working 24/7 for Compass for two years, then he’s quite clearly not self employed. Thus NI should be charged, PAYE collected and he shouldn’t be self employed (with all of the other tax advantages that has) but an employee.

Is our man a tax avoider? Abuser?

The parliamentary arithmetic did not make an anti-Tory coalition impossible, it just meant that it would have needed a broader base than that envisioned by people who think that there are only three political parties at Westminster.

@26

We hear the line that “the parliamentary arithmetic just didn’t add up” an awful lot, particularly from the LD’s and some in Labour.

In fact the real responsibility for the failure of a progressive coalition post GE lies at the feet of New Labour. The reason this is relevant to the current debate about Compass, is that it speaks to the sincerity and ability of those inside Labour to attract people on the left who are still deeply suspicious of them.

New Labour’s bovver boys were queueing up on election night to strangle any progressive coalition at birth. Leopard’s don’t change their spots, so it is hardly surprising that they made it impossible to construct a progressive, radical alternative because of course they are more or less indistinguishable from the Tories in so many respects.

Ed Miliband is a trimmer; if he can’t see the need for a “night of the long knives” to eject the New Labour rabble, then he’ll just go down in history as the person who failed to de-toxify the Labour brand.

@27

“Ed Miliband is a trimmer; if he can’t see the need for a “night of the long knives” to eject the New Labour rabble, then he’ll just go down in history as the person who failed to de-toxify the Labour brand.”

How do you suggest he accomplish this given that the Shadow Cabinet is elected by the PLP? For better or for worse, the Shadow Cabinet represents what the PLP regard as the cream of the crop…

@21,22,23,24

It is true that Galen10 and Chaise Guevara often post the stereotypical “stick it to the man” lefty lines here – however, the fact that Sunny once proposed those lines himself, and despite there now being a “reckless” government in power that wants to “tear up the welfare state” (all his words), he is triangulating on plenty of issues, including opening up Compass to the broader centre-left, and that’s why he can’t abide Galen and Chaise’s best buddy left purism. At least they’re consistent in their wrongheadedness.

@28 Ryan

That’s his problem. He either has the necessary power and guts to reconstruct Labour, or he doesn’t. I doubt he has either to be honest; there has been precious little evidence of it thus far. When all is said and done, most of the current PLP are hopelessly compromised by their participation in, and in many cases cheerleading for, the New Labour project.

Some of them might be keeping pretty quiet about it, and trying to downplay the extent to which they were “true believers”, but most of them wouldn’t know progressive, radical policies if they were bitten in the arse by them.

There IS an appetite for such policies, the sad truth is Ed and Newer Labour aren’t responding to it because they basically accept the policies being carried out now, they only cavil at the speed and depth. They are as bereft of a real alternative as they are of a realistic chance of bringing the Coalition down.

A left of centre Coalition spreading from the Lib Dems to the Greens, SNP, PC and others would have been interesting. However the 2010 general election result would have handed the whiphand to tribalist Labour MPs and they would have made sure that such a coalition was not viable. Even during the negotiations Douglas Alexander made it a precondition to exclude the SNP from such a coalition.
An objective observer would have noticed that the Tories were more open to pluralism than Labour was. Labour insisted in going ahead with National ID cards, yet almost as soon as they were in opposition they dropped the policy. Clearly they saw the negotiations as a trial in strength, even insisting on policies they no longer believed in.

@31

That’s the problem with the New Labour cling-ons, and the “lite” version being pedalled by Ed Miliband; they actually believe in Blair’s looney dictum that the reason they lost was that they weren’t New Labour enough. Sadly, there wasn’t any one person or group with the cojones to stake them all through the heart at the time. Pretty tragic really.

Galen 10 – I’ve been a member of Compass for several years.

As for calling me holier than thou – it’s an easy charge to make but quite lame. I’ve been critical of Labour for several years and remain as such as and when. But your “criticisms” don’t really hit anything other than trot out the kind of cut-and-paste stuff that really has little relevance to the discussion at hand. It’s just repetitive. And it’s like a broken record. FFS at least make it relevant to the discussion at hand

@34 Sunny Hundal

Or perhaps it’s an easy charge to make because it’s true?

My criticisms appear to have a lot more relevance than your hissy fit about “FFS at least make it relevant to the discussion at hand”. The discussion above flowed naturally out of dicussions relating to Compass, and your attempts to pull the ladder up after you had climbed it.

The ideological gymnastics involved inter alia in your move from first calling for people to vote LD last year, to then joining the Labour party, and to now supporting Continuity New Labour in keeping non-party members out of Compass tell most of us all we need to know about whether the earlier criticism of your view was lame or not. Thankfully your position was decisively rejected by the Compass members who voted; you must be getting used to being on the wrong side, so why does it bother you so much?

I suspect the reason you aren’t engaging with that one is because it touched a nerve. Henri IV of France thought Paris was well worth a mass; I wonder what your price was?