Gah ok this is just the thoughts I’ve woken up with & im going to try to express them without pissing everyone off but it seems unlikely I will succeed. I think a lot of the problem on the left might be that we have weak membership of civil society movements. I’ve worked & campaigned in civil society all my life & not in political parties maybe as a result. These are the spaces where debates that shape & move political understanding & build protest movements & so on belong. The strategy for a movement or a campaign group is different (often far more radical, experimental & idealist) to the strategy for a political party, which exists by necessity in the formal political structures of the state. But one feature of our British civil society is that a lot of it is dominated by charities, which do enormous good, but are not allowed to be expressly political. So maybe there’s a gap there where things that should more comfortably feed into one another actually don’t. Certainly since I’ve been freelance and not bound by the charity commission rules I’ve been able to work much more directly with politicians & have learned a lot about strategies for influence in a more parliamentary setting & how these synergies can be built with community-based movements. Basically I think something about the lack of synergy between civil society and political parties might be in some way to blame for the former’s lack of influence in some cases. And that means people often see the space for real change as coming not from our communities, but from party politics. This can mean people treat parties as vehicles for strategic aims that they’re not suited to, that belong in civil society, in communities and on the streets. Because the purpose of a political party is to gain power, and I’m sorry but that literally is the case. There are different (not, ideally, opposed but different) strategies & priorities for a political party and a civil society movement. People should maybe grapple with that a little more. Work out what it is we want and whether we are in the right forum to achieve it or just creating a mess. None of this - I’d hope obviously - is meant to imply that political parties shouldn’t have radical policies or should be less progressive & less keen to shape the agenda & move people with them. It’s just they should do that in a way that suits a political party, not a social movement necessarily. Knowing the difference & how to make the two work effectively together is the trick. As you’d expect that brings me back to the need to put more power & energy into civil society movements. The space I feel most comfortable & believe should be taken more seriously & more widely supported. These organisations that are the backbone of our democracy are struggling for funding & access more than ever fyi.