British left

The term British Left can refer to a range of political parties and movements in Britain. These can take the position of either centre-left, left-wing or far-left.

The largest political party associated with the British left is the centre-left Labour Party, which is also the biggest political party in the UK with 550,000 members. The Labour Party has 262 seats in the House of Commons.

The largest left-wing party in Britain, by membership, is the Green Party of England and Wales. As of August 2016^[update], membership was approximately 53,000. The party has one Member of Parliament (MP).

The other two political parties on the left and with representation in parliament are the centre-left Scottish National Party (SNP) and the left-wing Plaid Cymru. The SNP are only active in Scotland and Plaid are only active in Wales. The SNP has 35 MPs and Plaid has 4 MPs.

The biggest left wing party in the UK in terms of members and representation is the Labour Party, which was formed as the Labour Representation Committee in 1900. With the party's rebranding as New Labour in the 1990s under Tony Blair's leadership, the party accepted a number of Thatcherite policy positions, causing it to be identified as neoliberal rather than democratic socialist, and no longer a party of the Left; Blair himself described New Labour's ideology as a "Third Way". When Ed Miliband became leader of the Labour Party in 2010, however, he realigned the Labour Party as "democratic socialist", pledging to clamp down on tax avoidance, introduce a wealth tax in the form of a Mansion Tax, raise income tax for higher earners and break up the banks. The party was subsequently criticised by some, including Blair, as straying leftwards from the "centre ground" of British politics, and that Miliband was a "traditional left-wing" politician. However, others disputed this view, and put Labour's loss of the 2015 UK election down to the party being too right wing.

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