Please read Tribune's latest attack on the #ProgressiveAlliance - it contains all the vacuous counter-arguments you are ever going to need... let's demolish them one by one... jacobinmag.com/2021/06/uk-pro…
1/ Labour is already too much like a #ProgressiveAlliance because it contains too many Remainers and social liberals... that's really the nub of the Lexiteers arguments but as materialists surely British social-democracy "is what it is"... 
2/ ...and the logical concomitant is we should be prepared to face "decades out of power" as the price for expressing working class interests. Yet the majority of working class people *are* socially liberal....
3/ ... the #ProgressiveAlliance is just a rerun of Brexit, because the "Libdems are not that progressive". Fine, let's just have the alliance with Greens, SNP and Plaid... we can't reserve a place for the lib bourgeoisie in the defence of democracy if they don't want it, but...
4/ Liberalism and socialism are products of the Enlightenment, and that's what we are defending against the new "alliance of elite and mob" -we would find out who's in, who's out by laying down a common programme for government...
5/ Then we come to the "working class" definition. Its never clear who the Lexiters/sectarians mean. For me you are working class if you are exploited by capital and can't live off asset/rental income...
6/ Labour is, exactly as David describes it, a party of socialist, syndicalist and liberal *workers* - its liberal component is deeply rooted in the labour movement since the 19th century; if you want to break it into DieLinke/SPD/Grunen, fine but I'd rather keep it broad...
7/ There is absolutely the danger, as in Italy, that a move to PR places permanent pressure on Labourism to become left liberalism. But Blairism was only a response to the same pressures - ie not being able to win under FPTP....
8/ Why not come out and say: let's endure a permanent Tory government for the sake of avoiding the "risks" outlined in this article. The moment the orthodox Marxist left can explain to me how Labour comes to power with one more heave I'm all ears...
9/ The loss of young voters to the Greens, Muslim youth angry over Gaza to Galloway/abstention, young Scottish progressives to the SGP/SNP is not a tragedy for class consciousness - so the PA addresses that problem...
10/ I'd like to know the objections to our other main point: a government of the centre and left could - if we make it do so, as the French workers did in July 1936, open the path to mass resistance to capital...
11/ Finally, there is no point fighting for PR unless you also do constitutional reform, and democratise Labour. Who fancies their chances on a list system controlled by Southside? Not me. Plus, ultra finally...
12/ Ed Davey's hubristic outburst, the Greens in Stroud taking down a good left Labour MP etc, all show that if we want a #ProgressiveAlliance we have to devote our own socialist hearts and minds to it first, as the PCF did (with some difficulty) in 1936...
13/ As I say, David's article is well worth reading because the objections are so clearly fragile, and the premises not rooted in sociological fact: jacobinmag.com/2021/06/uk-pro…
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