A few small updates

Recent writing and some ideas

A few small updates from me.

I’ve been cheating on New Party, Old Problems a little and writing for other publications. For Novara I wrote up Zohran Mamdani’s strategy to deal with anti-semitism attacks, and suggested how some of it might work for Zack Polanski. For the Guardian I’ve been writing about the Greens, on the debate inside the party about being radical and popular — no surprise, I think we can do both — and also on empathising with socialists of all parties, gently suggesting that there are good reasons to hedge our bets across different organisations, although I’ll admit, the sympathetic treatment of Your Party hasn’t stood the test of time.

We’ve also been lovingly recording our fortnightly episodes of Life of the Party, a podcast on socialist organisation and the party that I cohost with my comrades Jonas Marvin and Shanice McBean, with recent episodes on the meaning of Andy Burnham; six months of Mayor Mamdani; the failures of Your Party; the origins of the Socialist Workers Party; how the party should relate to the unions and how the Greens should deal with anti-semitism attacks.

We’ve got our first London live event in a couple of weeks and it will sell out — this is actually true, I’m not just saying it — so get your tickets here if you want to come.

There are a bunch of other things in the works: two longer articles on the Belgian Workers’ Party for US publications; an investigation into what happened with Enough is Enough; a longer essay explaining the Greens for an international audience; maybe something deeper on La France Insoumise later in the year if I can find the time — I’ll share updates on here and as ever, if you have reading recommendations get in touch.

The difficulty I’m finding though, if I’m being completely honest, is that the news cycle and trying to get paid for writing — I know, I know, a stupid endeavour — pushes you towards short form commentary, lots of 800 - 1500 words articles isolating specific angles and aspects of the political situation, written in a way that’ll attract clicks and share well.

There’s value in this for sure, but what I’d love to spend more time on and feels far more urgent, is longer, more free-wheeling essays and strategies that try to break the impasse of the current moment — not that our moment is particularly impassible, there is a clear flow into the Greens, but that there are always stuck energies lacking the organisational form to express themselves, and there’s effort needed to work out what those organisational forms are.

This is where New Party, Old Problems came from, following a long essay I wrote for Prometheus called ‘Maybe a Party, Definitely an Organisation’ back in 2024, just after Starmer got elected, long before Polanski announced he’d run for leader, attempting to find expression for the party energy as it was in that moment. Next I wrote a longer series about what building a left populist party would mean in Britain right now; namely a focus on populist comms, a clear democratic socialist core, extra-parliamentary organising and party democracy that actually felt good.

Similar efforts are important now. Most obviously, we need to articulate what an eco-socialist Green Party would actually look like and how that transformation might occur, so we have far clearer roadmap and a criteria against which to judge our efforts. Another effort is scoping out whether a non-electoral socialist organisation that we all actually want to be in, open to socialists of all political parties or none, is still viable and necessary.

The problem — and this is where the Bernie Sanders-style begging letter comes in — is finding the money to make the time to do this work. It’s very humbling that a number of people have signed up as paid subscriber of New Party, Old Problems already without me ever asking. But I guess now I’m asking.

If you have the means and want to help answer these questions, or if you’ve found my writing helpful in the past, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you can’t or won’t, that’s okay too. You can still join the party.

More soon!