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Paul Mason

28 Mar, 10 tweets, 4 min read

I could see today's anti-left briefings coming from within the PLP a mile off - here's what's driving it 1/ The social-democratic centre left is a theoretical deadzone ... it has no explanations for its own failure... newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…

@meadwaj

2/ ...So it's always a "failure to communicate" rather than the strategy itself.... The real problem - as I, @meadwaj and others point out - is that the Tory project has morphed radically... newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…

3/ The Tories are now a machine for staying in power by throwing money at individual communities, demographics and problems... the central bank will subsidise that until the UK becomes a one-party state... newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…

4/ But - and here's where the PLP never get it - politics is no longer what happens in parliament. We are facing a mass, plebeian movement of racists and violent misogynists - they are dictating the public agenda... newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…

5/ Labour's way back is through narrative, vision and policy. You can't have any of that if you've got a Treasury team that won't say, right now: we'll borrow £200bn and spend it on X... (X being the GND and massive infrastructure and skills upgrade)... newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…

6/ The basic challenge for Keir Starmer is to hold the disparate sections of the Labour Party together with a single substantive project ... you can't do that without a policy offer, because there is no shared vision between left and Blairism newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…

@PeoplesMomentum

7/ The same goes for the left. It is divided over Brexit, Syria, trans rights, you name it... what it can unite around is policy, as with the @PeoplesMomentum policy primary, which as I write here is a great initiative.... newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…

@AnnelieseDodds

8/ The arrival of masses of young people onto the streets is the best sunlight to be shone onto the people briefing against @AnnelieseDodds - and even claiming Starmer's LOTO has "appeased the left"... newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…

9/ The fact remains: without an enthusiastic left, prepared to mobilise the energy we saw in 2017/2019, Labour is left with a dull, bureaucratic social-democratic machine with bad taste in graphic design... newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…

10/ We need: an end to purges against the left; the left fully represented in Shadow Cabinet; Corbyn back in the PLP; a fiscal expansion offer circa 10% of GDP and totally centred around decarbonisation; more party democracy... newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…

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Paul Mason

@paulmasonnews

13 Mar

Contents of the Integrated Review are being drip-fed to the Times this weekend. Get ready for 2 weeks of hubris and bullshit about Britain as a "global power" operating in the Pacific and space, while the army is cut by 10,000. Thread 1/ ... thetimes.co.uk/article/defenc…

2/ The IR is both a review of foreign policy and defence: on the foreign policy, it's set to open up the first truly partisan situation in UK politics in a lifetime. Why? Labour will oppose the "tilt to the Indo-Pacific" - and so does Joe Biden... see below...

3/ The army is getting cut because its chiefs refused to play the game of the IR, which is talk about AI, space, cyber and then build hi-tech platforms with no resilient industry behind them in times of crisis...

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Labour's @RachelReevesMP has written an important strategic article in the @NewStatesman which I assume reflects frontbench thinking ... it has implications for the left that need to be decoded... newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20… 1/ Here goes... (thread)....

2/ The Tories haven't just borrowed some Corbynist policies, they too have moved back from the individual to "community" as the basis for politics - so this is Base One of Labour's strategy: begs the question of how communities are defined and imagined...

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The Budget: a rapid response thread 1/ Sunak broke with the Tory austerian decade to extend the short term stimulus. But he's promised £68bn of fiscal austerity between 2023-26, mainly tax rises...

2/ The aim is to trap Labour into a position where it cannot promise fiscal expansion during a Labour govt, and to tee up a snap election before April 2023....

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Paul Mason

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Ahead of the budget, what would the left do faced with OBR's likely fiscal projections: 1/ Don't stop borrowing. Signal major strategic fiscal expansion over the next 3 years and get the BoE into line for continued support... medium.com/mosquito-ridge…

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Paul Mason

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2 Mar

@rosalux_global

R is for Rosa, a project in collaboration with @rosalux_global is three short documentaries about the ideas of the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg... in Episode 1 she dives into the 1905 revolution, ends up in jail, and writes The Mass Strike...

Episode 2 finds Luxemburg teaching in the SPD party school with a bunch of old reformists ... check out the archive shots to see how happy that made her feel... she writes a major work on economics, and then the war breaks out...

Episode 3 begins with Rosa in jail in Breslau... writing her diatribe against Lenin over democracy... she rushes to Berlin as the war ends, forms the KPD and is murdered by the Freikorps...