If you don’t wake up screaming tonight from a nightmare in which a BNP member who’d been hiding under your bed is about to hack you to pieces with a rusty axe it can only mean one thing. You were not one of the 150 or so people at the Convention of The Left in Brighton on Saturday.
Simple stupidity caused me to arrive an hour or so late which meant that I missed John McDonnell say the the Labour party is f#@ked, a statement confirmed by a couple of reliable sources. The post lunch session which I caught was “politics”. It was one of an alliterative set which also featured peace (i.e. war), people and planet. With such a vague title you could have made a contribution along the lines of “the politics of eighteenth century Denmark were really interesting and I want to talk about them at some length” and no one could have stopped you. Instead the discussion focused to a huge extent on what to do about the BNP. Do you throw eggs at them; beat them off the streets; ask the police to stop them being nasty?
Now you can’t really have a discussion about what’s happening in Britain at the moment without considering the rise of the far right. However it seemed to me that there was a bit of a tendency to work up a frenzy about the far right to avoid thinking more strategically. “The fascists are at the top of the hill! This is no time to talk about politics!” It made for a long an largely unsatisfying discussion in which a range of tactically options were explored and a number of uplifting anecdotes were retold.
The closing plenary was rather more useful. Martin Smith, who referred to the Left List and Left Alternatives as mistakes, and was pretty frank about things that had gone wrong, proposed that in areas where left candidates stand against Labour that they append “Left Unity” to show that socialists are able to present some form of united front in the upcoming general election. Bill from Permanent Revolution, and an occasional visitor to this site, offered the Chilean example of unions, parties and activists combining in a party. Rob Griffiths of the Communist Party said that they would be involved in son of No2EU while supporting some Labour some Bangladeshi and Pakistani Communist candidates and would stand a few of their own. Inspired by a train journey which seems to have been more stressful than mine he proposed that before the election that the left organise a day in support of taking the rail, water gas and electricity industries into public ownership. This was pretty well received.
What came out of the day? Probably not that much. A fairly wide spectrum of the Labour and non Labour left have fairly similar views on what’s wrong with the Labour Party. They showed that their social skills have progressed to the extent that they no longer feel the need to wag fingers and denounce each other. This is good and perhaps is the Convention’s main function.
Liam redux 
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