That’s absolutely true. I know a lot of people who focus exclusively on electoralism. I’m happy to use it pragmatically for harm reduction and shifting the Overton Window.

The Tories were successfully shifted from central right to far far right in the last decade, not from within, but by Farage and UKIP and the BNP.

I don’t think that’s really true at all. Tory ideology hasn’t really changed that much over the last couple of decades except for the EU and accepting defeat on a few token social issues. The shift towards Euroscepticism was largely driven by events - Black Wednesday and the Maastricht Treaty caused outrage on the right and led directly to the creation of UKIP and the ERG, then there was the wave of immigration from Poland, then the endless wrangling over the EU Constitution/Lisbon Treaty, the euro debt crisis, and then finally Cameron’s decision to try and ride the surging anti-EU sentiment by promising a referendum.

I know it’s easy to pick out terrible things they’re doing and argue they’ve got worse, but they’ve always been doing terrible things. Twenty years ago they were still fighting to keep Section 28 and some of their MPs would openly attend mask-off neo-Nazi meetings that used the pre-1994 South African flag as a centrepiece.

There’s no reason a similar thing can’t happen with Labour. I’m not sure exactly what a left wing version of Farage would look like, but I think we need one.

The Greens have been doing a pretty decent job, but the problem is it’s extremely easy for the other parties (even the Tories) to pretend that they care about the environment and human rights and stuff. Leaving the EU was a very clear-cut, straightforward policy goal, so it was impossible for any governing party to somehow pretend they were already doing it.

Yeah and the left needs to engage in a decade long effort to build out alternative media.

Electoral politics are still valid and valuable within the UK. There is absolutely zero possibility of a non-electoral victory in an unarmed nation where socdem is the furthest left viable position. We need to elevate class consciousness to achieve that and a victory within the labour party to give company shares to workers spearheading workplace democracy and a massive boost in the material interests of workers sparking that consciousness is that path to do it.

With that aside. There is an argument for an insurrectionary-lite movement of the north after Scotland leaves, but those are only likely to feed back into the electoral politics and we need control of a party when that ship starts to sale.

They haven’t even sent me my ballot yet. Perhaps this is an insidious plot to rig it, then again probably just shitty technology and messy bureaucracy.

There are a number of things within the party that the left is actually very strong at taking. The Youth position is decided by electoral college made up of 50% unions and 50% youth members, the older membership can’t vote in it. The same for the new disabled position but for disabled membership instead of youth obviously.

Getting anyone into a position that is for open-selection is exceptionally valuable even if they’re not a leftist, open selection will prevent libs getting into seats as MPs and then never ever being possible to replace. The existence of Labour MPs everyone popularly hates who sit there for decades is a product of not having open selection, we can get rid of half the terfs if we have it by selecting a different rep for their seat.

We don’t need hard leftists to do things that are going to benefit us in the long term. People like Laura Pidcock are extremely valuable even though she disagrees with everything else we want because she does want open selection.