Around the World: The Trump Insurgency

Donald Trump chose the Republican Elephant as the mount for his insurgent populist campaign that has ridden the divisive politics of the far-right deep into the American political system.

With the two main parties having settled - which might be an almost too painfully apt expression - on their respective candidates, it is now established who will stand, and for what they will stand, in the 2016 US Presidential Election.

Hillary Clinton will face Donald Trump - but only on the surface will it be a contest between Democrat and Republican. Beneath the party façade the Presidential race reflects a struggle that is a clear pattern emerging across the Western world, seen clearly in most of the recent elections in Europe, between the mistrusted mainstream and a Far Right insurgency.

Whether it was the Brexit referendum or the French regional elections, in this time of crisis progressives have found themselves having to wrestle with a difficult proposition: whether to oppose an imperfect mainstream at the risk of inviting in the Far Right, or to stand with the hated establishment, itself struggling for legitimacy against authoritarianism and sectarianism.

In the US, Bernie Sanders and his supporters tried to capture control of the mainstream Democrats so that the Left might lead from the front. Having failed, they're now left struggling with what to do in the face of Trump's mirrored insurgency succeeding in its capture of the rival Republicans. Despite Sanders' endorsement of Hillary, many of his supporters remain unconvinced.

Trump's insurgency has increased the sense of urgency, if not yet panic, across the Centre and Left. With no hint of irony, despite the hyperbole, even moderate commentators are expressing genuine fears for the future of American democracy (Finchelstein, 2016; Noah, 2016; Collier, 2016) - perhaps a part of which is an attempt to motivate the Left to fall in behind Hillary by stressing the seriousness of the fight ahead.

Political sensibility suggests that moderacy will ultimately win out - that Trump will eventually, whatever his rhetoric, have to bow to political realism. But that sensibility is cold comfort.

The most dangerous thing Trump has done is to force the coalescence of a constituency, previously scattered and with no common identity, that is persuaded by and supportive of authoritarian values (Taub, 2016). Trump himself, whatever his reactionary verbiage, is less of a concern than what this organised political movement, given common identity, might yet be used to accomplish.

The Republicans, the Grand Old Party (GOP), had already been through the long slow process, from Lincoln's time onwards, of coming under conservative control. But since the 1960s, conservatives have decisively consolidated their control over the party - including inviting the influx of Southern Democrats spurned by the embrace of the civil rights movement by the Democrats.

The consolidation definitively moved the GOP away from the Republicanism of Lincoln toward something more resembling the Republicanism of Jefferson - a parochial populist anti-establishment, or rather anti-elite, politics, with a strict and restrictive adherence to the constitution. Recent decades saw that combined with a sectarian Nativism and a politicised Evangelism.

What Trump has now rallied about the Republican Party is support for a popular authoritarianism able to cut across the distinctions, separating members of the coalition headed 'Republican', with a methodology: signified by a language that is brash, abrasive and often violent.

It is not surprising in the face of Trump's rhetoric that people have drawn connections between him and fascism. The theme of violence against others, against opponents, violence and conflict as decisive social positives, was a crucial tenet of fascism and has been inherited by its more 'democratic' successor populism (Finchelstein, 2016).

The Left and Centre getting behind the mainstream to oppose the rise of these violent ideologies is only the first step. Defeating it at one election is not the end of the matter. It does not address the reasons why people would seek out an abrasive, anti-establishment, anti-elite, strongman leader in the first place. The concerns of those voters must be understood, contextualised and addressed with positive solutions.

The angry, authoritarian-supporting, voters who would back a man like Donald Trump are not the enemies of progressives. For the most part they're victims of economic conditions, looking with misguided hope to strength and might for deliverance. The job of progressives is to extend a hand, show a better way to build a society and to expose the Far-Right programme for the fraud it is.

Road to Super Tuesday: The US Presidential Primaries have so far been a tale of outsiders rocking the establishment

Texas, with the most delegates, will be the key battleground come Super Tuesday. Photograph: Texas State Capitol in Austin from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

Tuesday 1st of March marks a key moment in the long and winding US Presidential election. So-called Super Tuesday will see more than ten states, including key state Texas, declare their choices for Democratic and Republican candidates for the Presidency (Weiland, 2016).

Going into Super Tuesday, the primaries for both parties are much closer than previously predicted. The tight races are largely thanks to their being contested by the outsider candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, who are upsetting prior expectations and putting the old two-party system to the sword.

The 2016 US Presidential race was supposed to be a straight race between two clear favourites - one from each party. From amongst the Democrats there was Hillary Clinton, while from the Republicans there was Jeb Bush.

Hillary was a former First Lady, as wife of Bill, and in her own right Secretary of State and a long time Senator. Jeb is the son of one President and the Brother of another, with executive experience as Governor of Florida. The rest appeared to be a formality.

Contrary to first impressions, however, the supporters of neither party where in the mood for a coronation. There were, from the first, insurgent candidacies, but they were paid little heed and given long odds.

Commentary watching the Republican nomination race, in particular, found something between fascination and amusement in how long the list of candidates for the GOP nomination was becoming (Gabbatt, 2015). Where analysis fell on the respective lists in depth, some where given more credibility than others.

Early runner Scott Walker was one such candidate. The Governor of Wisconsin has a controversial record that has proven popular with fiscal conservatives in the GOP (Pilkington & Sullivan, 2015) - including spending cuts and confrontations with unions.

Walker's run for the Republican Party nomination certainly made a lot of sense. As one part of a Wisconsin trio, along with GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan and GOP Party Chairman Reince Priebus, that are trying to set the agenda for the modern Republican Party (Balz, 2011; Healy & Martin; 2015).

The Democrat's version was Martin O'Malley - who was famously the inspiration for the Baltimore-based TV show The Wire. O'Malley entered as the third runner alongside, and 'moderate' alternative to, democratic socialist Sanders and the scandal mired Clinton, clearly hoping to be seen as someone more acceptable to a broader middle ground of voters (Tabor, 2015).

However, all bets were upset by Trump and Sanders.

There is little to be said about Donald Trump from a progressive view, other than to note the apparent popularity of his brand of being offensive to people from almost every demographic group.

Bernie Sanders started the Democratic race with isolated support in only a few Northeastern states and lay nearly 60 points behind Clinton (Daily Kos, 2015). Yet by the Nevada caucus the Vermont Senator was just 5 points adrift (Lewis et al, 2016).

Yet both outside runners still face barriers beyond the Democratic-Republican establishment itself.

Trump's divisive message has kept him stuck in the mid 30s in the percentage polls - although in Nevada on Saturday he did break the 40% barrier (The Guardian, 2016). Meanwhile the more 'mainstream' candidates have together pulled in over 50% over numerous polls.

Coming from almost the opposite direction, Sanders has struggled to get his message out beyond his core of young and working class voters. South Carolina showed this with abundant clarity as Hillary Clinton won 74% of the vote and overwhelmingly with voters who were not white (Walsh, 2016). Clinton, backed overwhelming by the party elite, has campaigned smartly and is so far holding back the rising popular tide.

Regardless of the barriers in their way, the outsiders have none-the-less shaken up the establishment.

This is demonstrated most clearly in the Republican race where mainstream favourite Jeb Bush's campaign ended in complete failure in South Carolina (BBC, 2016), when he dropped out with little to show for millions in fundraising. Marco Rubio, the next to be annointed by the GOP mainstream, inherits a deficit to Trump that it will take huge momentum to overhaul (Stokols & Palmer, 2016).

Super Tuesday will give the first major indications of whether the insurgent candidacies will have the momentum to topple their respective party establishments. Even if the party elite see off the challengers, there doesn't seem to be a positive outcome likely for them.

At best for the Democratic-Republican establishment, it will likely see off a strong opposition run only to be fatally undermined. As seen elsewhere, like in France, the mainstream will limp on hounded by outside forces that sense weakness and opportunity. At worst, the two-party system that has governed the US will not have been broken apart, but rather hacked and hijacked.

Labour need to start winning battles on the airwaves if their anti-austerity policies are going to win on the ground

At some point John McDonnell has to turn his academic focussed New Economics tour into well publicised campaign events, for audiences both live in the flesh and live online, if his counter-narrative is going to take hold. Photograph: John McDonnell MP with Grow Heathrow in London in 2012, by Jonathan Goldberg/Transition Heathrow (License) (Cropped)

Yesterday evening, Labour Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell made the latest stop on his New Economics tour at the London School of Economics (Kirton, 2016). As with previous events, the audience was packed out to hear his arguments, not just against austerity but for an alternative.

The first New Economics tour stop saw Mariana Mazzucato argue, at the Royal Society, for a smarter state (Mazzucato, 2016) - defending the state as an often abused innovator that takes the risks that the private sector won't, but which shares little of the rewards. The second saw several speakers tackle how technology will affect work in the future (Srnicek et al, 2016).

At the LSE event, McDonnell spoke directly against austerity as an ideologically motivated policy - as a choice made by Conservative politicians in pursuit of a their own political goals (Kirton, 2016). The Labour Shadow Chancellor said that his priorities were to put democracy and decentralisation at the heart of his economic approach (Sheffield, 2016) - and positive statements that Labour were giving serious consideration to backing a basic income (Sheffield, 2016{2}).

What has been missing, however, is promotion. Beyond those in the loop or paying close attention, there has been little pomp and ceremony to draw attention to the Shadow Chancellor's efforts. In the face of apparent media hostility to the Corbyn-McDonnell project, the low key approach might well be understandable.

The trouble is that these are precisely the battles that Ed Miliband lost as Labour leader. Labour lost control of their own message, of their own identity, and left it to others to define them.

Economics has been the outstanding issue. The key to getting Labour back in power, according to many commentators both internal and external over the last six years (Umunna, 2015; Eaton, 2015), is to rebuild Labour's reputation as an effective and reliable manager of the economy - to regain their economic credibility. The Shadow Chancellor himself has acknowledged that reality (The Herald Scotland, 2016).

John McDonnell's idea of bringing on the world's most famous, rockstar, anti-austerity economists as advisors was a bold move. Taking them on tour to make their arguments, to build a counter-narrative in opposition to austerity, was bolder still. But the low key, low profile, approach can only reach so far.

Right now, the Corbyn-McDonnell team is fighting battles within small circles of onlookers. Scrapping for party policy positions, introducing an alternative narrative by increments to interested and sympathetic audiences at cosy events. Yet, sooner or later, the boots of campaigners will have to hit the ground and bring them face to face with the voters who live far outside of those circles.

The Corbyn-McDonnell team have shown that, within their own party, they have a pitch that appeals to a broad cross-section of society - from young to old, from poor to wealthy (Sayers, 2016). As with Bernie Sanders in the United States, there is the potential for a winning coalition. But that won't automatically translate into public sympathy.

To reach those people, New Economics will have to start winning battles on the airwaves. Promotional ideas like the New Economics tour will have to be prepared to put a spotlight on its rockstars, promote them and get them playing to bigger crowds - crowds that are maybe more sceptical and who need the grand ideas distilled and condensed.

John McDonnell and his advisors are presenting a compelling vision of a very different, more humane, economy and society - not least in their acknowledgement of the basic income. The next step is to turn up the volume and stop conceding control over the airwaves.

Iowa Caucus: How did the establishment Democratic-Republican system lose control of the 2016 US presidential election?

Abraham Lincoln was the first President from the Republican Party. A liberal and a centrist, whose party believed in civic responsibility, individualism and a liberal reading of the constitution. Photograph: Statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

The Iowa Caucus, tonight, will mark the true beginning of the 2016 US Presidential Race as the point at which there will finally be some real data. So far the Presidential campaign has been a strange and controversial affair, with much to be set straight by the nominations process in Iowa.

On the Democratic side, there is now a two-way race where the nomination had looked like being little more than a formal hurdle for Hillary Clinton  (Jacobs, 2015). That was until Bernie Sanders, Senator for Vermont and a self-described democratic socialist, entered the race.

Quietly at first, starting some fifty or sixty percentage points behind Clinton, Sander's campaign has gathered momentum as thousands have turned out to hear him speak (Roberts, 2015; Roberts, 2015{2}). While support for Sanders - beyond a few high-polling constituencies - has been doubted, he has nonetheless been developing into the Democrat's anti-establishment candidate (Silver, 2015; Karp, 2016).

On the Republican side, they too are experiencing an anti-establishment insurgency. With an initial list of more than a dozen candidates, the process of holding debates was complicated enough (Gabbatt, 2015). Yet Donald Trump's candidacy quickly turned the nomination race into something not far short of a farce.

The potential candidates have struggled for air time, even split across two debates in the shape of an undercard and a main contest (Taylor, 2015). As the so-called moderates have struggled, Trump has stood out as the loudest and clearest candidate - even if he has been repulsive and offensive (Lewis, 2015).

Trump represents the toxic stew that the Republican Party has become, with the extreme Religious Right seeming less offensive by comparison with Trump. So deeply have the Republicans become embroiled in acquiescing to their own loudest and most deeply partisan supporters that, as put by one of the early establishment favourites Jeb Bush, it might almost be necessary for a Republican to lose in the primaries in order to win the general election (Mishak, 2015).

For both parties, insurgent figures are upsetting what was supposed to be a slick machine. Yet the fact that the United States' Democratic-Republican establishment is so deeply ingrained into the fabric of the political system, as to be virtually unshakeable, seems to have invited this situation.

Various movements, unable to muscle in alongside those two elder statesmen, seem intent on seizing control of those parties themselves first as an entry point. The big question is, what opened the establishment's back door in the first place?

The Party of Lincoln

Photograph: Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

From its founding, the Republican Party dominated American politics, right up until the New Deal coalitions of the 1930s. For most of that period Lincoln's party, in European terms, where Liberals. They stood for individualism, free markets, a constitutionalist stance consistent with the liberal belief in the rule of law, public education and were brought together as abolitionists, wishing to bring an end to slavery (Wheare, 1948). They also carried an interest in state action in the form of tariffs and public investment, inherited from their Federalists and Whig predecessors.

As a result, their members and supporters were a diverse group. From African-Americans, both free and liberated, to businessmen, small business owners and factory workers, to the white working class (Cornwell, 2016) - of a number of backgrounds including protestants and Germans who had come to the United States following the defeat of the radicals, republicans, suffragists and revolutionaries in Europe's Springtime of the Peoples uprising in 1848 (Rapport, 2008).

But the party of Abraham Lincoln were also centrists. Lincoln in particular believed deeply in civic virtues. His party leadership and Presidency were typical of those values, as he sought balance and compromise between progressive and conservative positions, between the popular will and individual rights, in order to hold together his party's divergent factions - ranging from radical abolitionists to constitutional conservatives.

Yet when Lincoln was murdered, only ten years after the founding of the party, the equilibrium was lost. The radicals sought to punish the South and pressed on with reconstruction, enforced by the military, while the conservatives sought a swift reconciliation. That internal divide came to an end with the diminishment of the radical faction due to corruption, splits, an economic depression and a disputed election that led to a tawdry compromise - ending reconstruction and abandoning the South, along with many freed former slaves.

The party then settled down to supporting business with high tariffs, encouragement for industrialisation and modernisation and investment in infrastructure like railroads. Yet the party was never far from the latest row between progressive and conservative factions - such as on prohibition, which drove less pietist Protestants out of the party, or Theodore Roosevelt leaving to found the Progressive Party, which proposed forward-thinking reforms like women's suffrage and comprehensive social security.

The New Deal Coalition

What must have seemed like a clear run to the Presidency, has become for Hillary Clinton a complicated game of placating popular discontent from her position within the establishment. Photograph: Hillary Clinton speaks at a rally at UW-Milwaukee by WisPolitics (License) (Cropped)

The Great Depression brought the era of Republican dominance to an end. It also signalled the beginning of a dramatic shift for the Democrats. Over the next thirty years the party would go from being dominated by deeply conservative, nationalist and sectarian - to outright segregationist - forces in the South, to the new home for all progressives, from liberals and centrists to social democrats and trade unionists.

In order to provide a positive and interventionist response to the Great Depression, Franklin D Roosevelt assembled a grand coalition that combined the Democrats' core support - white, southern and conservative and including many extreme nationalists, with whom the New Deal did not rest easily (The Economist, 2013) - with many groups. At the heart of it all, though, where the working class (The Economist, 2011).

Roosevelt, by reaching across political boundaries, started a shift that opened up the possibility of the Democrats reaching new voters which broke the party out of their dependence upon their narrow conservative base (Jenkins, 2003). That in turn would make the Civil Rights Act feasible, as the Democrats could afford to alienate and effectively cast out the toxic political support of the white, racist, Southern Democrats.

Embracing the role of a progressive party is, however, not without its drawbacks. It comes with high expectations. And like elsewhere in the world, mainstream progressives, like the social democrats in Europe, have often faced criticism for being too tight with the establishment and too slow to bring about reform.

While part of that is surely the logjam that is the American political establishment, there is plenty of legitimate criticism of the Democrat's failure to argue for a better alternative for America (Jones, 2016). Those disappointments lead to disaffection, which can lead to anti-establishment movements.

As a big tent, with little alternative for those seeking change, all of those hopes and all of that energy is funnelled through the Democratic Party. So when a candidate like Bernie Sanders emerges to give those frustrations a candidate and a voice, the traditional party hierarchy has to start trembling - as happened with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour Party leadership, where the establishment backed candidates struggled to inspire with their calls for practical politics in the face of a hopeful and optimistic message from an insurgent candidate to enthused supporters.

Much as Corbyn's opposition were seen as the heirs of the New Labour establishment, Hillary Clinton, as the partner of a former President, a long time Senator and Secretary of State in the Obama Administration, is undoubtedly - despite being a woman - seen as a member of the establishment (The Guardian, 2016). Finding a way over that hurdle will likely come to dominate her Presidential campaign.

The Southern Strategy

The struggling campaign of the so-called moderate Jeb Bush is symptomatic of a Republican Party hijacked by narrow, hard right interests. Photograph: Former Governor Jeb Bush speaking with supporters at a town hall meeting at the FFA Enrichment Center in Ankeny, Iowa by Gage Skidmore (License) (Cropped)

The success of the Democrats in shaking off, with affirmative action, the chain around their necks that was a history of association with slavery, segregation and the suppression of rights, would become the roots of the problems for the Republicans today.

Seeking short term political advantage, the Republicans sought to appeal to those voters and interests who felt they had been abandoned by the Democrats over the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Nichols, 2014). The Republicans isolated, alienated and drove out most of their remaining liberals to open themselves up to be the party of reaction.

That move has, after a century of the conservative faction attempting to assert its control, instead left the Republican Party as little more than a hollowed out shell. When the Republicans sought to pander to extreme, southern Christian Nationalists, welcoming them into the party in leadership positions, they killed off what little was left of the legacy of the Party of Lincoln.

Conservatives, in their short sighted pursuit of electoral gains, allowed the Religious Right, Christian Nationalists, to hijack the party in the long term, using the party's credibility and colours to promote their extreme causes. That extremism has begotten extremism, stoking up anger and division - only for candidates to then have to satisfy it later for the right to stay in office - driving the party ever further to the Right (Frum, 2011).

The result has been moderates, who are not really that moderate, struggling to even get a hearing at debates. Jeb Bush, for example. His immigration policy has shades of his moderate father's call to bring people out of the shadows, to stop making it illegal for decent people to work hard within the law or to have their children educated (Bush & Bolick, 2013; Lee, 2015).

But so-called moderates like Bush, or Marco Rubio, are outflanked and forced into a race to the bottom by candidates like Ted Cruz, a member of the Religious Right who has called for a bombardment of the Middle East (The Economist, 2016), or Carly Fiorina, who with no political experience and a questioned business acumen has compared herself to Margaret Thatcher (Lewis, 2015). All this does is force Republican candidates to put the narrow interests of party before the broader ones of the country.

That approach didn't work for Mitt Romney. As Barack Obama's challenger in the re-election year of 2012, Romney won soundly amongst the conservative and Evangelical Christian base of the modern Republican Party (Rove, 2015). Yet his narrow focus on helping the wealthy over the rest, his focus upon the party base over the country, dropped him short of the line (Scheiber, 2012).

The 2016 Election

Bernie Sanders is the heir of the Democrat's shift to embrace progressive politics through the 1930s and 1960s, and of modern progressive discontent with the establishment. Photograph: Bernie Sanders speaking at Hec Edmundson Pavillion in Seattle by Tiffany Von Arnim (License) (Cropped)

The Republican Party have turned a long way from the civic republicanism of their origins and it has helped fan political extremism - which looks likely to leave the established order in American politics weak and threatened. Not least from Donald Trump who looks likely to leave the Republican Party in the dirt just soon as he's done with them, having levered the party apart in the process.

In the Democrat camp, Clinton is hard pressed by the popular support for Bernie Sanders. Sanders is the only candidate in the race standing for a truly progressive alternative, earnestly wanting to create a more just, more equal America, in a country which is not open to such ideas. That is worthy of tremendous admiration. Yet it will also no doubt frighten the hard right.

For Clinton to top the polls in Iowa would be business as usual, crisis averted for the establishment. Likewise if a moderate candidate is able to step up for the Republicans. For a progressive alternative to break through the establishment, and get past hard right partisanship, would be a tough ask. As elsewhere around the world, the Presidential race looks like ultimately being a struggle between the establishment and an insurgent far right.

Labour's woes continue as the party splits over welfare cuts - where is their unifying idea?

The Labour Party is in the midst of an identity crisis. Two election defeats seem to have completely sapped the party of self-belief and bold ideas and now the party is divided over the merits of the Tory Chancellor's cuts (Perraudin, 2015).

Labour are struggling to come up with a convincing alternative narrative to the one George Osborne is using to bulldoze his way through the public sector. That struggle is pulling the party apart into distinct factions.

Yet a big internal squabble might actually be, in the end, rejuvenating.

The factions in that fight a pretty familiar. There is the New Labour mainstream - a majority of which seem to be more Brownite than Blairite, following the school of Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband. These are the moderates and modernisers, represented by Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper in the leadership race.

To the Right of the mainstream modernisers there is a faction that has gone under several names, Blue Labour and One Nation Labour in particular. This is the wing of the party, represented by Liz Kendall in the leadership race, that wants Labour to embrace working class conservatism, along with the Far-Right themes of anti-immigration and clampdowns on welfare.

It is also clear that there is a small but significant number of Labour MPs, at the moment with Jeremy Corbyn as their ringleader, who are significantly to the Left of the Labour mainstream. They have stood here against welfare cuts here and Corbyn's leadership campaign has firmly embraced the broader anti-austerity movement.

How this division is healed will depend upon a lot of factors, internal and external to the party. But it is a state of affairs that must ultimately be settled. Labour's determination to be a big tent has largely suppressed or alienated voters on the Left, driving many of them away - particularly in Scotland.

If the moderate or Right-wing faction wins out, how much longer will its Left-wing remain bottled? If the Left-wing wins out, will the mainstream fall in line?

In the face of these issues, there are predictions that Labour faces an extended stay in the wilderness (Moss, 2015). One of the few ways back would encompass a major change of direction: embracing the proposed progressive pact in England and embracing electoral reform that can ensure representative government, showing that Labour is finally working to work co-operatively with others on the Left.

Yet for many progressives, who would have been taking hope from Caroline Lucas' progressive alliance proposal (Lucas, 2015), there will have been an ironically collective sigh of despair when Labour's tendency to give in to populism struck again - this time in the form of Harriet Harman (Wintour, 2015):

"We cannot simply say to the public: you were wrong..."

Why not? What exactly is the point of an opposition party, many on the Left will be asking, is if it isn't going to oppose?

If the party are just going to argue for the same policies as the Tories, differing only on who is better equipped to administer them, then are Labour and the Conservatives anything more than two squabbling factions of essentially the same party?

And if the party is just going to be a reflection of popular opinion, then does it even stand for anything? Where is the belief, the ideology, the theory?

That only produces an image of a Labour Party more interested in power than standing for something. It wants to build trust through sycophancy, not through ideas, theory, facts and reason.

While in the US, Bernie Sanders is proposing a push of support for trade unions, worker-owned co-operatives and the living wage (O'Hara, 2015), Labour are getting themselves in a political twist over whether or not to support Conservative cuts to welfare set to have a disastrous effect on the poorest (White, 2015).

Labour's next leader has to find a way to navigate these splits, these contradictions and the party's overall idealistic emptiness (Hawkins, 2015). There are internal rifts to heal and the Centre-Left of the political spectrum filled with alternatives to navigate. The leadership race itself, with its warts and all exposure of the party's factions is a helpful start in the process of reconciliation.

For the external matters, co-operation is surely Labour and the Left's best hope of opposing the Conservatives on big progressive issues like human rights and electoral reform. For the party's internal struggle, the answer can only be found by digging deep. By looking for the roots of what unites Labour supporters of all stripes and all those allied to the socialist and democratic movement.

To, humbly, get the ball rolling, here one word that offers a place to start: Justice.

Liberals have liberty. Greens have sustainability. With these words, and the ideas they represent, they can construct coherent tests for any policy. Labour seem to lost their connection to a simple and fundamental idea that would underwrite social democratic and democratic socialist analysis, and so their ability to construct a meaningful and consistent narrative.

The new leader of the Labour Party, to be announced in September, has to reclaim a unifying idea - like Justice - if they are to lead the party back out of the fractious wilderness.

Recognition: The People's Filibuster

I hope that many of you were fortunate enough to witness Independent US Senator, and self-avowed Socialist, Bernie Sanders' filibuster on Friday evening (GMT). While the attempts of Mr Sanders, a staggering 8 hours and 34 minutes on the floor at the age of 69; in the end were unable to derail the bi-partisan tax cut extension plans of the US Government and Republicans in the house, he has most certainly earned himself much respect and probably a fervent following.

Mr Sanders demonstrated great fortitude in embarking on what he knew would be a doomed venture. It is a testament to how much he cares about the wellbeing of his Vermont constituents, and all Americans, that he would make this stand.

I feel that protesters in this country could learn something from this stand. So far each subsequent protest has been mired by violence perpetuated by some minority groups that have infiltrated the larger peaceful protests. It comes to mind that maybe those organising such marches in future need to think very hard before continuing with protesting tactics that are allowing their ranks to be so easily infiltrated by violent troublemakers.

Mr Sanders has set a very good example. Oratory still has the power to move, especially when you speak so passionately for almost 9 hours uninterrupted. If protests are to continue in Westminster, why not set up a small podium and see if you can talk for near 9 hours in support of University fee reform.

Better yet, why not gather together every book, academic paper and speech made in Parliament in favour of truly progressive University reform; every willing speaker you can find; every leader, academic and personality who is able; and see how long you can keep a people's filibuster going.

While people are talking and everyone is listening, it makes it much harder for infiltrators to stir up violence without being more conspicuous than they have so far been brave enough to be. I think it would be a far more civilised and resonant way to make your elected members understand your feelings than smashing up things that the Taxpayer has to pay to repair.

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References:
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+ The Beginning of Mr Sanders' nine hour filibuster speech;

+ Michael Tomasky's 'The significance of Bernie Sanders' filibuster';

+ James Rainey's 'Why Sen. Bernie Sanders can single-handedly filibuster tax cuts for rich';

+ Craig Howie's 'Bernie Sanders filibuster turns Twitter-buster';

- For more from Mr Sanders:
Bernie Sanders' Wikipedia Profile;
http://twitter.com/senatorsanders
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5OtB298fHY; December 1st 2010;