Challenge: Create a moderately successful left of Labour Party in the UK and

Germany has Die Linke, Spain has Podemos, Greece has Syriza, France has Front Gauche ect, nearly every Western European Country has some left of centre party active within its politics, obviously Britain is generally a more Conservative Country and FPTP hamstrings more extreme parties, I have a few ideas but I'm not sure how feasible they are.

1) A bigger Labour split over Iraq, leading to more anti-war MPs defecting George Galloway style.
2) Labour NEC forces Corbyn off the ballot in the 2016 leadership election, Corbyn leaves taking with him a handful of loyal MPs, and a large chunk of the membership, possibly forming a new party either alone or with the help of some more fringe parties like TUSC.
3) Labour shifts to the right much earlier causing a left wing gang of four in the 80s rather than a moderate one.
4) An entirely new grassroots movement pops up.

What are people's thoughts?
 
The second option is probably the POD for the most successful project, but we're only a year on from it IOTL so it could very well die like all other left wing (and right wing) splits on the broad left. The crucial thing is how many MPs come with Jez - if it's the entirety of his loyalists in shadcab, we have a ballgame. If it's just John and Diane, there's good odds the latter defects back to Labour before 2020.
 
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The second option is probably the POD for the most successful project, but we're only a year on from it IOTL so it could very well die like all other left wing (and right wing) splits on the broad left. The crucial thing is how many MPs come with Jez - if it's the entirety of his loyalists in shadcab, we have a ballgame. If it's just John and Diane, there's good odds the after defects back to Labour before 2020.

Lets assume a majority of Corbynite MPs, roughly a dozen MPs, plus Jez himself
 
I think easiest may it remove FPTP, I know LLyod George propsed to have some form of PR around 1918, maybe that passes and we have a culture of coalitions so there the Labour Party as the main center left party and the ILP as the sort of radical cousin for more left wing Britons. Another POD for left wing party with first past the post would be a serving Common Wealth Party, my suggestion would be that Labour wins the 1950 election with a greater majority and becomes the de-facto party of government and become gradually more centerist and people on left get a bit sick of government so Common Weal attract more of the Bevanite type of members. When Labour goes out of power, Common Weal is its default opposition in many of its more core areas.
 
On option (3) would certainly have been possible if factors varied, particularly if Thatcher's relationship with the wets somehow came too unstuck and you tried to bring the monstrous ideological homunculus that was Michael Foot's Shadow Cabinet or its functional equivalent into actual power (lots of serious lefties, odd ducks like fire-eating anti-European Peter Shore who was to the right on everything else, the practically Tory David Owen, old like high-functioning Liberals like Bill Rodgers or a comeback from Woy, Labour Right stalwarts like Healey and his proteges like Hattersley, and so on.) I have a nugget in a TL I'm working on now with a Thatcher govt from the mid-Seventies that gives out over a different foreign-policy crisis in '79 and stuff... happens wrt Sunny Jim so he's out of the picture, and from the back benches clamoring as the voice of "the common Labour supporter" Mrs. Castle herownself plays the various not-Healeys off each other until she builds a wafer-thin victory under the old MP-vote system claiming to be the only one who can hold this body of the left that's no longer really an ideologically coherent party together. This results in a Labour government of all ideological stripes -- people like Benn and Eric Heffer have significant though not Four Greats level briefs, rightists like Hattersley and Varley are also mid-level strivers, you have Healey as deputy back at the Exchequer, Shore as IOTL's shadow world Foreign Secretary busy trying to get the hell out of Europe, Owen at MoD threatening fire and brimstone if they take his SSBNs away (though he'll tolerate some trimming of the "gravity" bombs), and a party that once they're over the initial national hump that brought them in (by a coup d'état confidence vote staged by wets trying to human-wave Thatcher like Caesar's assassins) is absolutely ready to tear itself apart over every issue -- liberal versus state economics, Europe versus protectionism, Ulster, Polaris, democratizing (sorry, "democratising", must remember the audience here) the unions, what to do about Militant, on and on. And in that case Owen leads a small walkout that effectively doubles the Liberals and as talks for bilateral arms reduction stall with a reactionary Soviet government (who don't want these puffed-up would be socialists disarming because it just means Washington will take it as an excuse to escalate its nuclear options and unbalance the balance) and there are issues with the economy, Benn gets in a snit and leads people like himself and Heffer and Skinner and Atkinson etc. out to a "Democratic Socialists" party (eh? eh? Parallelism all week, tip your waiter ... *taps mic* is this thing on?) Could very easily have happened at any number of points that you had right and left hive off of the whole. And all things considered it was likelier that you'd have a small but more durable presence to the left depending on constituency-party dynamics (especially through the Eighties and into the early Nineties because these particular constituencies are then going to be absolute honey pots for entryists.) Otherwise it's mostly the hard-core folk on the right abandoning for the Liberals directly without a Social Democratic phenomenon and indeed, just perhaps, more chance of people of that disposition (paging Mr. Ashdown...) joining in and rising in the party and keeping the neoliberal entryists like Tony et al. from dominating the coming generation.

Also you could have an outbreak of "green realism," a kind of "Green Right" that posits some level of baseline defence spending, qualified support for certain kinds of liberal interventionism (ex. Rwanda) and so on, but that otherwise becomes the socially-ultra-liberal, environmentally driven, functionally socialist alternative to an essentially Blairite Labour, pulling a lot from the left (but keeping a watchful eye on "personalities" like Skinner and Livingstone, who could be wreckers if let loose in the mechanisms of party governance and alienate potential voters) but also from the more social-democratic Lib Dems as well, and growing towards a sort of ungainly but decently-populated amalgam of the German Greens and Canada's NDP.

I could see either of those really, "Green Pragmatists" winning lefty converts from Labour and Lib Dems as they go on their "but my dear friend Peregrine told me The City is simply top drawer" neoliberal jag, or instead an Eighties fragmentation with a fundamentally Bennite, Campaign Group-based party splitting off the left just as the Gang of Four did from the right.

ETA: Die Linke is perhaps the best contemporary analog to the "Eighties option." You've got a mix of "soft" Marxists from the old DDR, a mixture of doctrinaire socialism and cultural populism preached in particular by an extremely talented and combative former leadership figure of the SPD (Oskar Lafontaine) frustrated in both this policy goals and his dreams of longer-term leadership when he was dished by Schroeder, forming a party out of the hard SPD left and those further out and promising to be more ideologically "pure" than the more pragmatic Greens. Sounds about like the BennsorryDemocraticSocialists to me.
 
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I mean the vehical is sort of there in the form of the TUSC, you just need to find a way to get a large chunk of the left wing vote to move to them
 
I mean the vehical is sort of there in the form of the TUSC, you just need to find a way to get a large chunk of the left wing vote to move to them

Option 2 could work for this with Corbyn splitting of and forming a new Left Wing party and absorbing smaller left wing parties such as TUSC and Respect, similarly to WASG and PDS merging to create Linke in Germany, Corbyn could be a British Oskar Lafontaine
 
Option 2 could work for this with Corbyn splitting of and forming a new Left Wing party and absorbing smaller left wing parties such as TUSC and Respect, similarly to WASG and PDS merging to create Linke in Germany, Corbyn could be a British Oskar Lafontaine
You'd need to dump Respect overboard I suspect. Some of its more peculiar views would scare people off
 
You'd need to dump Respect overboard I suspect. Some of its more peculiar views would scare people off
TUSC, a party with a considerable number of Trotskyites in it, is just as likely too scare people off. If a left of Labour Party was to have genuine success today, it would have to be an alliance of the Greens and Labour left, incorporating the far left would be a barrier to electoral success, its not as if they can bring much to the table to start with.
 
TUSC, a party with a considerable number of Trotskyites in it, is just as likely too scare people off. If a left of Labour Party was to have genuine success today, it would have to be an alliance of the Greens and Labour left, incorporating the far left would be a barrier to electoral success, its not as if they can bring much to the table to start with.
Trotskyists and militant trade unionists aside??
 
You'd need more than just a left-wing walkout (one in the 1980s isn't plausible anyway, in my opinion). What of the situation of Britain that nurtures a left-wing outflanking of Labour?
 
Germany has Die Linke, Spain has Podemos, Greece has Syriza, France has Front Gauche ect, nearly every Western European Country has some left of centre party active within its politics, obviously Britain is generally a more Conservative Country and FPTP hamstrings more extreme parties, I have a few ideas but I'm not sure how feasible they are.

1) A bigger Labour split over Iraq, leading to more anti-war MPs defecting George Galloway style.
2) Labour NEC forces Corbyn off the ballot in the 2016 leadership election, Corbyn leaves taking with him a handful of loyal MPs, and a large chunk of the membership, possibly forming a new party either alone or with the help of some more fringe parties like TUSC.
3) Labour shifts to the right much earlier causing a left wing gang of four in the 80s rather than a moderate one.
4) An entirely new grassroots movement pops up.

What are people's thoughts?
1) I actually had an idea for something like this happening, with the PoD being Ken Livingstone doesn't rejoin Labour a month before Respect is founded and joins up with them instead. The party gets a handful of defections from the Labour left, and the Iraq war in 2005, followed by the financial crisis in 2010, would give it opportunities to expand their vote. The difficulty is that Respect was an anti war party with some pretty shady links to Islamists that I can see limiting the parties ability to grow much beyond a dozen or so seats where that community is highly concentrated. Its scope for growth would always be limited why that remained the case.

2) I can't see Corbyn leaving, he and his oldest allies have plenty opportunity to jump ship before and haven't done so, they would stay in the party if he was kept off the ballot, because even with that the left would be in a strong position to win enough support to take control of the party machine and retake control.

3) You run into the same problem as with number 2, why would the left leave when the grassroots had shifted in there favour? You would need a massive PoD to prevent the factors that led to their strength within the party, the drift away of moderate supporters and there replacement with more radically left wing ones both in the party and the unions. The key players like Benn and Foot wouldn't leave either, so such a party would be handicapped from the start, and they wouldn't have the Liberals to ally themselves with. It would be difficult to see them last in the long run under FPTP, but maybe it is just about possible if the Labour Party is in government during the 1980s, so the new party can rally support against deindustrialisation in working class communities, though I am not sure how far it would get with that.

4) Possible, you could always see a party born out of some mass protest movement as with Podemos, but that would have to be in response to a crisis of the kind the UK has not seen in the post war era.

I definitely think there are several viable bases of support out there for a left of Labour party, depending on the nature of it, but the difficulty is having it grow whilst FPTP is still in place. You'd almost certainly see one emerged if PR was implemented at any of the various points in the past century when it was genuinely considered, but aside from that, I'd also suggest a few plausible scenarios of my own:

-Have one of the various leftist parties that existed in the first half of the twentieth century survive into the present day. Perhaps you could get the ILP to survive past World War 2 by shoring up its membership and funding a bit better, but I am not sure how that would be done. If you could somehow get a more successful Communist Party going, which would win half a dozen or more seats at elections, then maybe it could have formed the basis of a viable party if it turned Eurocommunist and evolved into a broad church leftist party, as many of its counterparts on the continent have.

-Have a more successful Green Party establish itself, most likely in 1989, or in 2010-2015 if it chose a better leader for that time who could perform well at the debates, I could see them pulling in 10% of the vote. If English devolution is passed with PR it might give them a platform from which to build it support too. If the Greens started to look like they were the real deal, its possible some from the Labour left might jump ship and form their own party in alliance with them, and the novelty of a new party could push them to around 20% support in the short term if they play their cards right, and they could become a genuine third force in British politics.
 
The thing peculiar to Britain is that the Labour party was formed by a vast majority of the Trade Unions and hence has the the almost unquestioned support of the Union movement. This contributed greatly to Social Democracy trumping Communism from the start. Where as France, Spain, Greece and Germany have unions affiliated to various parties, take Frances last lot of strikes, those Unions are primarily influenced by the French Communist Party, Greece has many Unions affiliated to the KKE.

So what you need in Britain, in essence, is the Communist Party in the 20's - 50's to have breathing space to either have the ability to lure Trade Unions away from the Labour Party, or, have Britain's Labour party not be created by the Unions as a parliamentary platform, have it created as a straight up Social Democratic party.

This way you can have a chunk of the population be more at ease with left of centre politics, so with the collapse of the Soviet Union the CPGB either remains a large player, like the KKE, or, it evolves into an inheritor like Die Linke or whatever.
 
1) I actually had an idea for something like this happening, with the PoD being Ken Livingstone doesn't rejoin Labour a month before Respect is founded and joins up with them instead. The party gets a handful of defections from the Labour left, and the Iraq war in 2005, followed by the financial crisis in 2010, would give it opportunities to expand their vote. The difficulty is that Respect was an anti war party with some pretty shady links to Islamists that I can see limiting the parties ability to grow much beyond a dozen or so seats where that community is highly concentrated. Its scope for growth would always be limited why that remained the case.

2) I can't see Corbyn leaving, he and his oldest allies have plenty opportunity to jump ship before and haven't done so, they would stay in the party if he was kept off the ballot, because even with that the left would be in a strong position to win enough support to take control of the party machine and retake control.

3) You run into the same problem as with number 2, why would the left leave when the grassroots had shifted in there favour? You would need a massive PoD to prevent the factors that led to their strength within the party, the drift away of moderate supporters and there replacement with more radically left wing ones both in the party and the unions. The key players like Benn and Foot wouldn't leave either, so such a party would be handicapped from the start, and they wouldn't have the Liberals to ally themselves with. It would be difficult to see them last in the long run under FPTP, but maybe it is just about possible if the Labour Party is in government during the 1980s, so the new party can rally support against deindustrialisation in working class communities, though I am not sure how far it would get with that.

4) Possible, you could always see a party born out of some mass protest movement as with Podemos, but that would have to be in response to a crisis of the kind the UK has not seen in the post war era.

I definitely think there are several viable bases of support out there for a left of Labour party, depending on the nature of it, but the difficulty is having it grow whilst FPTP is still in place. You'd almost certainly see one emerged if PR was implemented at any of the various points in the past century when it was genuinely considered, but aside from that, I'd also suggest a few plausible scenarios of my own:

-Have one of the various leftist parties that existed in the first half of the twentieth century survive into the present day. Perhaps you could get the ILP to survive past World War 2 by shoring up its membership and funding a bit better, but I am not sure how that would be done. If you could somehow get a more successful Communist Party going, which would win half a dozen or more seats at elections, then maybe it could have formed the basis of a viable party if it turned Eurocommunist and evolved into a broad church leftist party, as many of its counterparts on the continent have.

-Have a more successful Green Party establish itself, most likely in 1989, or in 2010-2015 if it chose a better leader for that time who could perform well at the debates, I could see them pulling in 10% of the vote. If English devolution is passed with PR it might give them a platform from which to build it support too. If the Greens started to look like they were the real deal, its possible some from the Labour left might jump ship and form their own party in alliance with them, and the novelty of a new party could push them to around 20% support in the short term if they play their cards right, and they could become a genuine third force in British politics.
Keep the Common Wealth party going?
 
The thing peculiar to Britain is that the Labour party was formed by a vast majority of the Trade Unions and hence has the the almost unquestioned support of the Union movement. This contributed greatly to Social Democracy trumping Communism from the start. Where as France, Spain, Greece and Germany have unions affiliated to various parties, take Frances last lot of strikes, those Unions are primarily influenced by the French Communist Party, Greece has many Unions affiliated to the KKE.

So what you need in Britain, in essence, is the Communist Party in the 20's - 50's to have breathing space to either have the ability to lure Trade Unions away from the Labour Party, or, have Britain's Labour party not be created by the Unions as a parliamentary platform, have it created as a straight up Social Democratic party.
Perhaps a more successful Social Democratic Federation?
Keep the Common Wealth party going?
That's another possibility, though a less likely one. Of the three leftist parties in the Commons in the post war era, they strike me as the least likely to survive. There ideology Libertarian Socialism just seems a bit too niche to survive FPTP, and also makes them poorly suited to allying with the ILP or the Communists, who they might view as too statist.
 
The Corbynites are pursuing the most effective method, taking over the Labour Party and booting out (de-selecting - via Momentum controlled local parties) the moderates and Blairites (closet Tories) of the Party.
Snag is - for them - the electorate isn't buying it. Unless the economy goes 'pear-shaped' as a result of Brexit - Labour Party MPs will become an endangered species until the next Election!
 
The thing peculiar to Britain is that the Labour party was formed by a vast majority of the Trade Unions and hence has the the almost unquestioned support of the Union movement. This contributed greatly to Social Democracy trumping Communism from the start. Where as France, Spain, Greece and Germany have unions affiliated to various parties, take Frances last lot of strikes, those Unions are primarily influenced by the French Communist Party, Greece has many Unions affiliated to the KKE.

So what you need in Britain, in essence, is the Communist Party in the 20's - 50's to have breathing space to either have the ability to lure Trade Unions away from the Labour Party, or, have Britain's Labour party not be created by the Unions as a parliamentary platform, have it created as a straight up Social Democratic party.

This way you can have a chunk of the population be more at ease with left of centre politics, so with the collapse of the Soviet Union the CPGB either remains a large player, like the KKE, or, it evolves into an inheritor like Die Linke or whatever.
An idea I've toyed with before (necessitating a POD in 1880s) is the creation of such an explicitly Marxist 'social democratic' (the distinction not yet in existence, of course) party that manages to retain the budding politicians and trade unionists of the late Victorian era within it. The SDF, as @JDrakeify points out, is one such party that existed and could be used for such a purpose (but that would mean getting rid of Henry Hyndman and having a more... mature leadership in place to attract Victorian socialists).

Such a party could only be sustainable with, almost paradoxically, the failure of practical socialism. By that, I mean the particular case of trade union success in the 1880s and 1890s that saw a lot of the intellectual socialists of that era come to support the trade union movement as a vehicle for change rather than an explicitly parliamentary socialist movement. Having the OTL successes of the Bow matchgirls, Beckton gasworkers and their docker allies removed from history in some way would set the unions (and, most importantly, the 'New Unionism' movement) on the backfoot and possibly provide an opening for a parliamentary social democratic party like the SDF to come through as the only viable path to political power. Running candidates in municipal elections (like Sidney Webb in Deptford in 1892) would gain such a party some much-needed experience of elections and local representation. From then, a path to power is possible and the idea of a 'labour party' might never go further than a few disaffected leaders of the Trades Union Congress unable to reconcile with genuine British Marxists.
 
The Corbynites are pursuing the most effective method, taking over the Labour Party and booting out (de-selecting - via Momentum controlled local parties) the moderates and Blairites (closet Tories) of the Party.
Snag is - for them - the electorate isn't buying it. Unless the economy goes 'pear-shaped' as a result of Brexit - Labour Party MPs will become an endangered species until the next Election!
Which means it isn't really effective is it? That would imply that they aren't going get wiped
 
The Corbynites are pursuing the most effective method, taking over the Labour Party and booting out (de-selecting - via Momentum controlled local parties) the moderates and Blairites (closet Tories) of the Party.
Is that really the most effective way of transforming a party? Right now it doesn't seem to be, the left of the party has a 0 for 8 record in parliamentary selections. I don't wish to diverge into current politics too much, but if you want your ideology to become dominant in a party, the model used by Thatcher seems to have the best track record- work with your opponents to win elections, which ensure a stream of your supporters become MPs, plus, when your policies appear to be successful, even your opponents will begin to buy into them, meaning your original opponents in the party end up working to maintain the status quo you established.
 
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