News from the New Party

Progress

Politics today is fought on narrow grounds with little room for fresh ideas and even less room for new parties.  Insofar as new parties do gain any support, it tends to be those that appeal to narrow prejudices and simplistic solutions.  The space for rational and progressive politics is extremely limited.

Our task is to expand that space in order to become the party that we all need.  But it is a difficult and expensive task.  We are now making some changes in order to help the party become a more effective advocate of progress.

We have decided that the priority is to focus on winning the battle of ideas, thus looking outwards to building potential support rather than inwards to building and sustaining the machinery of a political party.  For this reason we are bringing in a much more flexible structure aimed at both reaching out to new pockets of support and encouraging active involvement rather than paper membership.  We will from time to time support candidates who stand for election but we are not seeking at this time to have a full slate of candidates.

The situation varies in different parts of the UK:

• In Scotland, we have decided to put our support behind the Scottish Progressives.  We would encourage our Scottish members to join the Progressives and work with them.  The website address is: http://www.scottishprogressives.org
• In England and Wales, there is no equivalent party behind which we can coalesce but we will focus on our own campaign work under the name ‘Progress’, as described below.
• In Northern Ireland, the situation is complicated by recent developments and we have no substantial presence there.  For these reasons, we are not organising specifically in Northern Ireland at this time.

Essentially, the New Party’s future campaigning will operate via two distinct entities:

• A small central team tasked with setting out the arguments, vision and ideas that we need for a new party.  We will call this the ‘Project for a New Party’.
• A broad network of affiliated local groups and organisations who subscribe to our ideas but who operate autonomously and campaign on their own priorities.  We will call this the ‘Progress’ network.  The network of affiliates will enable us to harness the enthusiasm and activism of local campaigners to achieve practical local improvements, in the process of building a genuinely effective party, rather than diverting attention into trying to build branches for their own sake.  The region and branch structure will cease to operate in the interim but branches can turn themselves into affiliate groups if they so choose.

See our section for Progress