The Party Machine

I started with the intention of subjecting the labour party machine to a ruthless (academic) analysis, using Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void (2013) as a lever which might offer insights into the sorry state of the Labour Party. But, as usual, I got distracted first by Tom Nairn’s expose on The Nature of the Labour Party in 2 editions of New Left Review in 1964, then by Enzo Traverso’s Revolution – an intellectual history (2021) which took me to Leon Trotsky and to GDH Cole’s monumental study of the History of Socialism, running to 7 volumes. 

I had started the early draft of the post by arguing that political parties are 

a more or less successful device to:

• recruit political leadership

• represent community grievances, demands etc.

• implement party programmes - which may or may not be consistent with those community demands.

• extend public insight - by both media coverage of inter-party conflict and intraparty dialogue - into the nature of governmental decision-making (this is the theory – the reality is that most of the MSM titilate citizens with gossip, with social media….)

• protect decision-makers from the temptations and uncertainties of decisionmaking – being able to offer the excuse of the party whip to head off criticisms.

These days, however, elected officials probably perform only the first two of 

these roles which perhaps accounts for the public cynicism which Peter Mair 

explored in this 2006 article in NLR developed, with Mair’s seminal Ruling the 

Void book appearing posthumously in 2013. The two British parties are torn 

by profound internal divisions with the right-wing elements in both having so 

far won out. I have argued elsewhere that our society is hardly what one would 

call a participatory democracy. The term that is used - "representative" 

democracy – recognises that "the people" do not take political decisions 

but have rather surrender that power to one (or several) small elites - 

subject to infrequent checks  Such checks are, of course, a rather 

weak base on which to rest claims for democracy and more emphasis 

is therefore given to the freedom of expression and organisation 

whereby pressure groups articulate a variety of interests. Those who 

defend the consequent operation of the political process argue that 

we have, in effect a political market place in which valid or strongly 

supported ideas survive and are absorbed into new policies. 

They further argue that every viewpoint or interest has a more or 

less equal chance of finding expression and recognition. This 

is the political theory of pluralism.
A key question is: How does government hear and act upon the signals 

from below? How do "problems" get on the political "agenda"? The 

assumption of our society, good "liberals" that most of us essentially 

are, is that

• the channels relating governors to governed are neutral and

• the opportunity to articulate grievances and have these defined (if they are significant enough) as "problems" requiring action from authority is evenly distributed throughout society.

The inescapable reality is that the UK, European and US media 

are owned by plutocrats who impose their right-wing agendas on 

the public . Peter Oborne is an interesting journalist who, 

from an original right-wing background, now exposes in this 

short video the client-journalism of the MSM
Two years ago almost to the day, Al-Zeera showed The Labour Files – a 2 

part series, each lasting an hour and a half. This exposed the activities of 

the right-wingers in the Labour Party who had used the anti-semitic trope 

on – of all people – Jeremy Corbyn. They may have succeeded in their aim to 

remove him from the Labour Party but have done irreperable damage to the 

party in the process.  
Most people have probably forgotten the Forde Report which was asked by 

the party to investigate the chaos of these claims and counterclaims. 

I don’t consider The Guardian any more a fair reporter of these events 

(given its bias to Zionism) but this is how it covered the report. A more 

objective analysis is probably this one 

There are rumours that the Labour peer Lord Ali funded the plot to overthrow 

Corbyn. If you’re wondering why our politicians are so corrupt it’s because the ones 

who aren’t corrupt are removed from politics. This is how we end up with 

bastards who will do things like genocide if it’s better for them personally.