Photo by Karls Kamera
According to Wikipedia, the oozlum bird is a legendary creature found in folk tales that, when startled, will take off and fly around in ever-decreasing circles until it manages to fly up itself, disappearing completely.
After reading this account of goings-on within Left Unity and this piece on relations between them and TUSC I am pretty sure the definition applies equally to the hard Left.
30 years ago, when I was briefly a student member of the now utterly discredited and irrelevant SWP, it was much the same. Then it was ‘us’ versus the WRP, Militant, RCP, IMG and a whole alphabet soup of teeny-tiny groups, all arguing over paper-thin differences of interpretation of what Trotsky said at some conference in 1937. Like anyone cared.
Now it’s LU versus TUSC. And even worse, within LU itself, the ‘Socialist Platform’ versus the ‘Communist Platform’. The party is less than a year old and already it has a disputes committee. Does anyone think this sort of thing is remotely appealing to the rest of the world?
In the recent mayoral election TUSC got less than 2% of the vote, despite standing against a Labour incumbent with a depressingly right-wing record.
Unless and until the non-Labour Left gets its collective head out of its arse and focuses its energies on engaging real people in the real world about the real problems they face it’s doomed to decades more of irrelevance.
forestgatedotnet 