Just imagine: if Labour wasn’t so in thrall to economic bodies and their predictions, we might have a radical left of our own‘When you study the successful experiences of transformative movements,” said Pablo Iglesias of Podemos, the new party of the Spanish left, “you realise that the key to success is to achieve a connection between the reality you have diagnosed and what the majority actually feels.”This statement is more than bleedin’ obvious. It is crying out for a response that includes an expletive and Sherlock Holmes. Yet that’s what Iglesias has built: a successful, transformative movement. And in Greece, that’s what Syriza has built too, as demonstrated on Sunday, when a country that only a few years ago saw the rise of the fascist Golden Dawn party, went to the polls with a majority supporting the radical left. That, to a degree, is also what the yes campaign built in Scotland. So we know it is possible, to diagnose a reality that so many people actually feel. It should be possible, also, to decipher how these movements did it. Continue reading...