Category Archives: Democracy and the Labour Party

Trade unions

The Gerard Coyne danger

Stan Keable reports on debates on the Unite election, the Chatham House left and our criticisms of the LPM fraction

As readers will know, union branch nominations for the post of Unite general secretary closed on June 7, and voting will take place from July 5 to August 23.1

Four candidates – one rightwinger and three on the left – achieved the 174 nominations from more than two regions required to get a place on the ballot paper – that minimum equals 5% of Unite’s 3,474 branches. For a while, only the three left candidates had reached the threshold, but hopes of a left-only contest were dashed when rightwinger Gerard Coyne scraped through with 196 nominations. For the left, this changed the question from ‘which candidate do you prefer’ to ‘which two should stand down’, so as not to repeat the Unison debacle, where Dave Prentis’s continuity candidate, Christina McAnea, held the top post on a minority vote against a divided left.

The number of nominations becomes a secondary question once the threshold has been crossed. Coyne will be backed to the hilt by the press, the BBC and the Labour right. Back in 2017 Len McCluskey seemed to be way in front, with 1,185 branch nominations to Coyne’s mere 187. But Coyne gained 41.5% of the vote and was only narrowly defeated by McCluskey (45.4%) on a 12.2% turnout, although third-placed leftwinger Ian Allinson took 13.1% of the vote, so the total left vote amounted to 58.5%. So this time, if there were a single left candidate, Coyne would have an uphill struggle … but could still win.

The forces that support Coyne have already chosen Howard Beckett as their favourite demon. At the June 12 Labour Left Alliance organising group meeting the Labour Party Marxists successful motion – accepted by the LLA OG with just two votes against – calls on Unite members to vote for Beckett “as the best, or least worst, of the three ‘left’ candidates on offer”. It notes “the targeting of Howard Beckett by the BBC, the Murdoch press and the Labour right, including Tom Watson and Margaret Hodge, and his suspension from Labour Party membership for speaking out against Tory government deportations”.

In the LLA-organised hustings, Beckett pledged “to call out the witch-hunt against the Labour left and to support those who have been unjustly suspended and expelled from the Labour Party”. Good – but don’t hold your breath. “On the negative side,” the motion continues, “we note that he rejects the socialist principle of ‘a worker’s representative on a worker’s wage’ – that socialist trade union officials – and MPs – should live on a skilled worker’s wage … Howard Beckett is a product of the trade union bureaucracy, a well-paid, careerist, left bureaucrat.”

As for the other candidates, former Militant member Steve Turner has made clear his departure from left politics, while Sharon Graham’s key campaign slogan, “to take our union back to the workplace”, is probably code for downgrading Unite’s involvement in internal Labour Party struggles (enough to get her the SWP’s backing – textbook economism).

Speaking of former Militant members, the Socialist Party in England and Wales is giving a master class in tailism, when it comes to the election. SPEW’s preference for both Beckett and Sharon Graham and its gentle criticisms of Turner appear to be governed by diplomacy – by which left bureaucrat members and supporters have been working with. SPEW’s June 9 statement, after nominations closed, calls Coyne “a direct representative of big business and the Starmerites”, and notes Steve Turner’s “compliant approach both industrially and politically, reflected in him clearly not being prepared to challenge Starmer as Labour leader.” Consequently, “… we believe it is Steve who should step down as a candidate in favour of Sharon or Howard to carry the battle against Coyne.”

Daniel Platts

At the June 12 LLA OG meeting, 16 delegates from affiliated local groups and political organisations attended, to decide LLA’s position. Two motions in support of Howard Beckett were on the table. The LLA trade union group motion offered only uncritical support, which was why LPM submitted an alternative motion setting out a principled approach, which I am pleased to say is now LLA policy:

Trade unions limit competition between workers, thus securing a better price for labour-power. They represent a tremendous gain for the working class, drawing millions of workers into collective activity against employers.

Of course, left to itself, trade union consciousness is characterised by sectionalism. At best trade union consciousness attempts to constantly improve the lot of workers within capitalism. At worst trade union consciousness degenerates into business unionism and sacrificing the interests of workers for the sake of capitalist competitiveness and profitability.

We openly seek to make trade unions into schools for communism. We do this by always putting forward the general interest of the working class, by fighting for workers’ unity and by fully involving the rank and file in decision-making.

Bargaining is a specialist activity. Consequently the trade unions need a layer of functionaries. However, due to lack of democratic control and accountability these functionaries have consolidated themselves into a conservative caste.

The trade union bureaucracy is more concerned with amicable deals and preserving union funds than with the class struggle. Operating as an intermediary between labour and capital, it has a real, material interest in the continued existence of the wage system.

Within the trade unions we fight against bureaucracy by demanding:

  • Trade unions must be free of any interference or control by the state or employer.
  • No trade union official to be paid above the average wage of a worker in that particular union.
  • All full-time trade union officials must be elected, accountable and instantly recallable.
  • All-embracing workplace committees. Organise all workers, whatever their trade, whether or not they are in trade unions. Workplace committees should fight to exercise control over hiring and firing, production and investment.
  • One industry, one union. Industrial unions are rational and enhance the ability of workers to struggle. Given the international nature of the capitalist system and the existence of giant transnational companies, trade unions also need to organise internationally.

Daniel Platts of the steering committee proposed an amendment (which, thankfully was defeated, but gained four votes), replacing our description of the limits of “trade union consciousness”, with Daniel’s view of the limits of trade unions. He evidently overlooked, or did not understand, the well known Marxist formulation in the very next sentence: “We openly seek to make trade unions into schools for communism.” Here is his text:

At best trade unions can illustrate the power of the working class within society, by stopping the means of production against the wishes of the capitalist class. But rarely does this happen on any considerable scale, and usually the best they offer are merely attempts to improve the lot of workers within capitalism.

I can only recommend a visit to marxists.org and reading again – or perhaps for the first time – Lenin’s What is to be done?

Chatham House left

The LLA meeting started with a political opening by Roger Silverman on behalf of the steering committee. Comrade Roger reminded us that the right would “never repeat their mistake” of allowing a left leader of the Labour Party to be elected, and noted “calls for a new party” as a result – but warned of the long list of failed left splits from Labour. However, he spoke of a “huge explosion” of discontent building up around the world: “The counterattack is coming. That will be the basis for a left split.”

In the discussion, I argued against aiming for a left split, saying we need serious Marxist organisation now, to fight inside and outside Labour. Whether or not the left is forced out of the party, the need for a socialist programme and serious organisation stands.

LPM is, of course, an opposition faction within the LLA, whose conferences have twice rejected the aim of replacing capitalism with socialism and the aim of a classless, moneyless, stateless world. So I was truly (and pleasantly) surprised to hear Daniel Platts’s confession on behalf of the LLA SC: “Most of us realised pretty quickly [after the LLA conference] that we had made a massive oversight in not putting ‘socialism’ into the LLA’s aims.” Then Tina Werkmann interjected, quite rightly: “And a membership structure!”

Yes, an individual membership structure – an essential requirement for the effective democratic organisation of socialists – has also been rejected twice. Without either a Marxist political programme or a serious organisation, we believe the LLA will remain part of the failed official Labour left, which it was set up to replace. So we should look for opportunities to draw out and emphasise sharp lines of demarcation between principled positions which consciously uphold the long-term general interests of the working class as a whole, and unprincipled compromises which accommodate to short-term sectional interests – the career interests of the latest official left bureaucrat or MP on offer, for example.

This brings me to the second main item: the – secret – left unity talks between 25 or so groups under the title, ‘Future of the Labour left’, hosted by Don’t Leave, Organise. In respect of this, LPM had submitted a motion titled ‘Accountability’. The motion reaffirmed that, according to the LLA constitution, “the LLA officers and steering committee are accountable to the OG”, and complained that the SC minutes provided to the OG suggest that “full reporting of this activity was not happening”. The OG therefore requires SC representatives attending the talks to “produce a full work report for scrutiny at each meeting of the organising group”.

The two LLA representatives in the talks, at the three meetings which have taken place so far, were Tina Werkmann and Tasib Mughal. While the SC majority were clearly uncomfortable with the Chatham House rule – the ban on reporting – they supported comrade Tina’s view that it was better to have a voice inside, so as to know what was being decided and to influence the discussions, than to be kicked out for disobeying the gagging order. Comrade Tina’s seemingly innocuous amendment, replacing a “full” report by a “verbal or written” one, actually meant ‘verbal only’. She gave the reason for this explicitly: anything written “will end up in the Weekly Worker”, and – she believes – would be met by the LLA’s immediate exclusion from the talks.

For LPM, openness is a principle which the working class needs if it is to become the ruling class. So there should be no place for the Chatham House rule in the workers’ movement.

Criticism

Following the LLA OG meeting, the LPM steering committee has been critical of the position taken by the LPM fraction for not contesting unprincipled elements in the motions and amendments that were voted through.

For example, we should have insisted that the principled LPM motion for critical support for Howard Beckett was a replacement for the motion of uncritical support. The motions were not complementary, so we should have voted against the uncritical motion. The fraction should also have rejected the uncritical sentence praising Howard Beckett, in that he is “by far the best of the three left candidates to be our standard bearer”.

We should also have rejected outright the amendment from Tina Werkmann to LPM’s ‘Accountability’ motion, replacing the requirement for a “full” report by a “verbal or written” report. Finally, as well as requiring LLA SC representatives in the talks to report fully to the OG, the LPM motion should have gone further, and required them to publish a full report of each meeting.

  1. Official info is available at unitetheunion.org/who-we-are/structure/unite-2021-general-secretary-election; and secure.cesvotes.com/V3-1-0/unitegensec21/en/home.↩︎
The left

Chatham House ‘left’

Who stands for what and who says what – such basic information should not be treated as the private property of a select few. Derek James calls for openness

After over a year of ‘political lockdown’ following Labour’s general election defeat in 2019, the election of Keir Starmer as Labour leader and the continuing witch-hunt, the Labour left now stands at something of a crossroads. The ‘official left’, in the form of the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs and the left trade union officials, have largely kept their heads down, hoping perhaps for better days ahead. Wishful thinking!

The defeat of the Corbyn movement and the ascendancy of the Labour right has only produced demoralisation and disintegration on the Labour left. Leaving aside the expulsions and suspensions, thousands have left the party, either going into ‘activist campaigns’, such as ‘Kill the Bill’, or dropping out of politics altogether.

Groups that were established to organise the left in the Constituency Labour Parties and trade unions, such as the Labour Left Alliance, have also suffered from the same process of disorientation. In a series of online conferences, rallies and meetings since March 2020, comrades have come together to discuss how we might rally the Labour left and carry the fight to the right, but all that seems to have happened is a proliferation of networks and campaigns that have not gone very far.

It was in this light that the LLA’s organising group (OG) met on Saturday April 24, with ‘left unity’ high on its agenda. In particular, members of the OG were eagerly anticipating a report about recent developments and the news (first heard in March) that sections of the organised left in the party and trade unions had been meeting to discuss a strategy to reorientate and rebuild after the defeats we have suffered. From the start we in Labour Party Marxists had warmly welcomed these discussions and fully supported the participation of the LLA in any such initiative, especially if it aimed to develop a common left slate for future national executive committee and other internal party elections.

However, our hopes that this initiative might actually be based on the adoption of a serious and principled politics were dashed. The report from the LLA representatives who had attended the meetings and the discussion on the OG showed just how far away this ‘left unity’ project really is from such politics and – what was worse – how far the majority of the LLA leadership were willing to go along with it.

Everything that was reported back to the OG showed that this initiative, far from being a new beginning, is completely suffused with the restrictive political culture and bureaucratic methods of the official left. The meetings take place using the so-called ‘Chatham House rule’, which means that there can be no reporting of who attended and who said what.

Chatham House, also known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, is, of course, a bourgeois think tank that provides a platform for political insiders to express themselves with what for them amounts to a rare honesty. Current presidents are Baroness Manningham-Buller (former MI5 director), Lord Darling of Roulanish (former Labour chancellor) and Sir John Major (former Tory prime minister). The so-called Chatham House rule was adopted in 1927, and states: “When a meeting, or part thereof, is held … participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.”

LLA officers seem to have taken this to the point where the “information received” is itself to be guarded. Even the LLA’s own discussion on the left unity meetings finds itself going unmentioned in the OG’s official minutes. Unbelievable! Why the secrecy? Concealing political participants, political differences and political proposals from rank-and-file scrutiny is par for the course for the bureaucrats and careerists, but what has the authentic left got to hide? Why can’t we know who has been attending the left unity meetings and learn what they said? Reports are circulating that Shami Chakrabarti has chaired meetings, with leading trade unionists from Unite, the Fire Brigades Union, the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union and representatives from over 30 Labour left groups. The state and Keir Starmer certainly know who was there: why can’t the rank-and-file members of the labour movement know as well?

The Chatham House rule should have no place in the workers’ movement. The left must tell the truth to the working class: when it comes to politics we have nothing to hide; democracy requires knowledge and the open expression of differences, not privileged access to information, gagging orders and a secret inner-circle of unknown individuals. After all, knowledge is power. It enables everyone in a democratic organisation to understand what is going on, make judgements and take action on the basis of all the facts, not just what a select few wants to let us know.

The LLA was formed by leftwingers who rejected the control-freakery of Jon Lansman’s Momentum project. Yet now, by going along with the vow of silence imposed by the official left, the LLA leadership is effectively colluding in the same secretive politics and bureaucratic manoeuvring. This ‘left unity’ project is already repeating the deficiencies of the previous form of left unity it is meant to replace – the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance (CLGA), in which a stultifying unity is imposed from the top and from which the politics of the militant left are excluded. In last year’s NEC elections, the LLA rejected that position: why retreat now, by falling in behind the official left, when the need to assert an authentic left position is all the greater?

Principle

The cause of unity must go hand-in-hand with principle: if we simply repeat the compromises and bureaucratic politics of the past, this can only produce yet more defeats for the left.1 The authentic left should not be content to merely act as spear-carriers or voting fodder for the official left, but should instead put forward principled conditions for its support during any discussions about joint actions. In this spirit, supporters of LPM presented a motion to the LLA’s OG. Amongst its key sections was this argument:

The slate should have a clearly defined, principled basis, which all candidates must sign up to. While the specific demands can be defined during the discussions, they should include elements such as the rejection of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) misdefinition of anti-Semitism, and the re-admittance of comrades suspended or expelled during both the ‘first’ and ‘second’ waves of the witch-hunt, along with democratic demands, such as ‘a worker’s MP on a worker’s wage’ and the accountability of the Parliamentary Labour Party to the NEC and the party conference.

The motion also put forward a clear strategy that the LLA should adopt during any negotiations about a common slate. Bearing in mind the strong showing of candidates the LLA supported during the 2020 NEC elections, LPM asserted that the LLA should have a candidate on any common left slate in a winnable position, not just a token slot at the bottom of the list. The LLA should not just go along for the ride: as far as LPM was concerned, it should not be a case of ‘unity’ at any price – essentially a repeat of “the tried and failed politics of the past that resulted in unacceptable compromises and countless retreats by the official Labour left”, as our motion put it. It concluded with a clear, principled position that, if an agreement on these terms cannot be reached amongst the left, the LLA should stand its own slate of candidates on a principled platform.

In the discussion, the same tendencies to compromise quickly became apparent. Although there was no objection to the specific demands that the LPM argued should be “the clearly defined, principled basis which all candidates must sign up to”, setting “conditions for our support during these discussions” was too rigid and would tie the hands of the LLA leadership, should they be lucky enough to be offered a seat at the negotiating table. We had to be flexible and not impose demands, we were told. Furthermore, by being insistent at this early stage, ‘the red lines’ LPM demanded would alienate potential supporters.

In response to LPM comrades’ demands for a clear and principled position, supporters of the majority of the OG suggested that we were not serious about any negotiations for ‘left unity’ and that, if the LLA adopted the LPM motion, it might result in the LLA’s exclusion from any future meetings. All familiar stuff for comrades who have been around the Labour left for more than five minutes – except this time the arguments for taking things gently and not frightening the horses came not from careerist MPs or trade union bureaucrats, but from comrades in the LLA leadership, who think of themselves as principled, left militants! The amendment that watered down the LPM motion was carried by 8 votes to 5 (no abstentions), with the substantive, neutered motion being passed by 9 votes to 5, with one abstention. Needless to say, our LPM comrades voted against the motion.

It is clear that the LLA leadership will not be informing its supporters, or its affiliated organisations, about these secret negotiations. It seems happy to treat the Chatham House rule as a ‘superinjunction.’ LPM comes from a different tradition, the tradition of openness and gaining strength by seeking out the truth. As Lenin put it: “publicity is a sword that itself heals the wounds it makes”.2 We, therefore, expose all the shady manoeuvres on the Labour left – from the split that led to two similar monthly publications called Labour Briefing to Jon Lansman’s Momentum coup in October 2016.

This was an approach applied by our co-thinkers who founded The Leninist in 1981 and it is one that our political current has upheld in the various attempts to unite the left since the 1990s, such as the Socialist Alliance, Respect and Left Unity.3 It is one that we shall continue to adhere to. We are obliged to inform the rank and file about what is going on behind their backs, and to arm them with the principled politics needed to build a militant, principled and well-informed left.

  1. weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1340/getting-our-act-together.↩︎
  2. marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/apr/30.htm.↩︎
  3. For the article in The Leninist, see communistparty.co.uk/who-we-are/reforging-the-cpgb-1981-present/founding-statement-of-the-leninist/. See also the Weekly Worker archive, and labourpartymarxists.org.uk/2012/05/31/divisions-surface-and-split-beckons/; labourpartymarxists.org.uk/2016/10/30/jon-lansmans-coup-in-momentum/↩︎
The left

Focus on big questions

Tory commissioners should concentrate minds, writes Derek James of Labour Party Marxists

The announcement that Robert Jenrick, the housing, communities and local government secretary, was appointing commissioners to oversee some of the functions of Liverpool city council had been expected since the arrest of directly elected city mayor Joe Anderson in December.1 Although no-one has actually been charged, Jenrick’s statement has only added to the sense of crisis in the city and further fuelled the as yet unsubstantiated allegations of corruption, bribery and witness intimidation that have continued to swirl around the local authority.2

It would be too easy to dismiss the current situation as simply parish pump politics of purely local interest, or a product of Liverpool exceptionalism that is of only fleeting interest beyond the city. However, the nature of the allegations made in the report and Jenrick’s attack on local democracy point to much more fundamental crises in both the Labour Party and the system of local government that go beyond political machinations or the supposed corruption of powerful individuals.

The ground had been well-laid in the run-up to the announcement and so all the actors had their script off pat. Jenrick led the charge when he suggested that the government-commissioned Caller Report painted a “deeply concerning picture of mismanagement” and revealed a “serious breakdown in governance” in Liverpool.3 The report apparently revealed, he said, that the council had “consistently failed to meet its statutory and managerial responsibilities, and that the pervasive culture appeared to be rule avoidance”.4 In a damning comment, which made all the headlines in the local media, Jenrick argued that the report showed that there was an “overall environment of intimidation, described as one in which the only way to survive was to do what was requested without asking too many questions or applying normal professional standards”.5

The most important part of the local government secretary’s statement was the government’s decision to send commissioners in to Liverpool to run “certain and limited functions” of the city’s council for the next three years, including overseeing an improvement plan. In three key council departments – highways, regeneration and property management – all executive functions will now be transferred to the government-appointed commissioners.6 Jenrick also proposed to reduce the number of city councillors from 90 and replace the current electoral cycle with a whole-council election every four years.7

Labour MPs played their supporting roles to perfection and fell over themselves in rushing to back up the government’s attack on local democracy in Liverpool. In the Commons we were treated to a master class of ‘responsible opposition’ at its best – in other words, the most abject, supine cooperation, as we have come to expect from Starmer’s Labour leadership. Thus the shadow communities and local government secretary, Steve Reed, declared:

Labour both here and our leadership at the city council accept this report in full … We support [Jenrick’s] intention to appoint commissioners, not at this stage to run the council, as he says, but to advise and support elected representatives in strengthening the council’s systems. This is a measured and appropriate response (my emphasis).

Echoing the government’s line, Reed added that the proposals were not, “as some would put it, a Tory takeover”, but were simply a measure to put erring Liverpool back on the straight and narrow: he reassured us that the government commissioners would “intervene directly only if the council’s elected leaders fail to implement their own improvement plan.”8

The response of other Labour MPs was not much better, as they joined in the attack and supported the imposition of the commissioners. Even the comments of left Liverpool MPs Dan Carden and Ian Byrne were respectfully muted, as they sought reassurances from the Tories that the Covid pandemic response and other vital local services would continue to be resourced and supported.9

No surprise

The acute embarrassment of a Labour leadership now presented with such an alleged scandal in Liverpool city council is almost understandable. Having spent the last year trying to prove their responsibility and respectability, along comes a good old-fashioned municipal corruption case, which unhelpfully reminds voters of the bad old days – and in a city that is synonymous with militant leftwing politics to boot!

As was only to be expected, the local opposition to Labour in Liverpool, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, have made hay during the current mayoral and local council election campaigns by blaming the crisis on a ‘big city boss’ political culture and offering themselves as the anti-corruption candidates who can finally clean up the city.10 The local media have also been playing up the chances of Stephen Yip, an independent mayoral candidate, whilst the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (Tusc) also has a candidate in the field, who could take some votes away from Labour. Although the outcome of the election is, of course, uncertain, the fact that Labour may have a hard fight to hold on to the mayoralty shows the seriousness of the situation the party now faces in Liverpool.11

For many leftwingers in Liverpool the situation revealed in the Caller Report comes as no surprise. From the very beginning, the mayoral system was criticised as an anti-democratic and unaccountable concentration of power in the hands of a single individual and a small cabinet clique. The ‘political culture’ of intimidation and bullying, along with the opportunities for corruption and jobbery revealed in the report, are clearly always inherent in such a Bonapartist system.12 The potential to exploit contacts and contracts in regeneration and building projects for personal gain has always existed in local government. Whether in the small-town peculation in Mugsborough, satirised in The ragged-trousered philanthropists or in the real local government corruption revealed by the Poulson case in the 1970s, from Westminster to the smallest town hall, corruption and capitalism are inseparable throughout the political system.13

However, just as important as this systemic potential for financial corruption is the political corruption that it breeds – especially in the form of powerful and unaccountable local mayors. Our opposition to the imposition of the Tory commissioners on Liverpool and the defence of local democracy must be combined with a complete rejection of both the mayoral system and the political strategy of Labour rightists, such as Joe Anderson. His municipal strategy combined supposedly defending essential services through the politics of ‘the dented shield’ with ‘playing the system’ to make up for the budget cuts imposed by the Tory government’s austerity programme.14 This ‘new municipalism’ echoed Blair’s New Labour strategy and was based on a much-vaunted partnership between local government and capitalist developers, with the aim of encouraging private-sector investment and regeneration to both increase the local tax base and, through a convoluted form of trickle-down economics, improve the living standards of the city’s population.

It was, as Joe Anderson liked to boast in response to his critics, “the only game in town”.15 Now that Robert Jenrick has called time on that particular game and as the labour movement starts to mobilise against his attacks, the question goes beyond protest and opposition. We must think about the type of politics and strategy we need, if we are going to fight back in Liverpool and elsewhere. The experience of Liverpool city council and its fight with the Tories in the 1980s looms large amongst leftwingers in the city and for many comrades on the Labour left that type of municipal strategy and mass mobilisation remains the best way forward.

However, given the very different political and social context of the 2020s it is all too clear that we cannot simply wish such a movement into existence, so what strategy should the left now pursue in what are our very changed and straitened circumstances? At the moment the focus is on protest, but it will be these important issues of both local government and wider political strategy that inevitably come to the fore in the coming weeks, as the Liverpool labour movement’s campaign against the Tory commissioners starts to build up momentum.

  1. lgcplus.com/politics/governance-and-structure/breaking-jenrick-appoints-commissioners-to-liverpool-to-address-dysfunctional-culture-24-03-2021.↩︎
  2. For the background to this story see ‘Abolish the mayors’ Weekly Worker January 21 and ‘Careerism on the Mersey’ Weekly Worker March 11.↩︎
  3. independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/liverpool-corruption-government-robert-jenrick-b1821765.html. For full details of the findings see assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/972756/Liverpool_Best_Value_inspection_report.pdf.↩︎
  4. independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/liverpool-corruption-government-robert-jenrick-b1821765.html.↩︎
  5. See, for example, front-page splash, ‘FAILED’, in Liverpool Echo March 25 2021. The story focussed on the allegations about the council’s toxic culture, climate of fear and wholesale neglect of the city’s interests.↩︎
  6. lgcplus.com/politics/governance-and-structure/breaking-jenrick-appoints-commissioners-to-liverpool-to-address-dysfunctional-culture-24-03-2021.↩︎
  7. theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/24/commissioners-to-help-run-dysfunctional-liverpool-council.↩︎
  8. labourlist.org/2021/03/labour-supports-jenrick-as-commissioners-appointed-in-liverpool.↩︎
  9. Ibid.↩︎
  10. liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/liverpool-councillors-set-showdown-first-20250326.↩︎
  11. liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/liverpool-labour-council-candidate-quits-20004173.↩︎
  12. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/972756/Liverpool_Best_Value_inspection_report.pdf.↩︎
  13. R Tressell The ragged-trousered philanthropists London 2004. Obituary: independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-john-poulson-1470735.html.↩︎
  14. tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/extras/cutsnorthwest.pdf.↩︎
  15. lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/march/the-only-game-in-town.↩︎
Democracy and the Labour Party

Getting our act together

Derek James of Labour Party Marxists welcomes the coming together of the Labour left. However, the cause of unity must go hand-in-hand with principle

After what has been a frankly disastrous year for the Labour left since the election of Keir Starmer as party leader, reports that the leaders of most of the organised left groups within the party and trade unions have met to discuss the way forward are positive.

In the wake of the retreats and compromises of the official left, from the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs downwards, and the resulting disorientation and demoralisation in Constituency Labour Parties, news that the Labour left might at last be getting its act together will clearly be welcomed. Equally important is the fact that the Labour Left Alliance was invited to attend and did so, along with members of Momentum, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD), the Labour Representation Committee, Jewish Voice for Labour, Red Labour and leading figures from the trade union left. It seems that the meeting took no firm decisions on the future strategy of the Labour left and instead established a working group (which did not include any members of the LLA) to report back to a future meeting on areas such as slates for national executive committee elections and ‘left unity’.

Rather than waiting for the outcome of these deliberations, comrades in the LLA should urgently discuss the crisis now facing the Labour left and develop the alternative strategy needed to build a real fighting left current in the party. A good way to start is to understand the recent history of the Labour left and its various interventions in National Executive Committee and other internal elections. The main ‘left’ electoral grouping in the party, the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance (CLGA), emerged in the late 1990s in response to Blairite remodelling of Labour. Made up of the CLPD and various other small ‘left’ currents, it claimed, as the name suggests, to give the party’s ‘grassroots’ members a voice on the NEC. In the face of Tony Blair’s attacks on party democracy, the CLGA argued that the ‘left’ was too weak to stand by itself and so deliberately reached out to the ‘centre’ when selecting candidates.

Even following the mass influx of leftwingers into the party and the election of Jeremy Corbyn, this unprincipled strategy of appealing to the ‘centre’ remained, and was if anything reinforced by the emergence of the Jon Lansman-led Momentum and its role within the CLGA. Two major criticisms can be levelled at the CLGA: firstly, its strategy of reaching out to the largely mythical ‘centre’ means that many of its candidates could hardly be defined as ‘left’ in any real sense of the word. These ‘broad front’ politics really are a dead end for the left. Indeed, when elected to the NEC, so-called ‘left’ candidates have actually joined the witch-hunt rather than defend the left from attack!1

Secondly, the selection process for candidates is undemocratic and involves horse-trading by various ‘left’ fixers and careerists jockeying for position behind the scenes. As with the current nomination process for the conference arrangements committee, the national constitutional committee and the national women’s committee, a list of candidates miraculously ‘emerges’ and the whole Labour left is enjoined to unquestioningly nominate and vote for it.2 In practice this means that important sections of the Labour left are deliberately excluded from both the process of choosing the left’s candidates and the final recommended lists suggested by the CLGA.

This type of gate-keeping was very much in evidence during the 2020 NEC elections. The LLA approached all of the major left currents, including the CLGA, in an attempt to secure a common left slate. These attempts were rebuffed, and the LLA supported its own slate of candidates, whilst also calling for a vote for the CLGA candidates. During the campaign some supporters of the CLGA argued that the LLA was ‘splitting the left vote’ and would hand NEC seats to the right. The operation of the PR system used in the election was deliberately misrepresented by these comrades as part of a campaign to undermine the LLA-supported candidates and thus maintain their electoral monopoly over the Labour left.3 In the event, not only was the left vote not divided, but the leading LLA-supported candidate, Roger Silverman, secured a creditable vote and showed that there are still comrades in the CLPs who will back authentic left candidates.4

Conditional

Perhaps it was the strength of this vote that produced the invitation for the LLA to take part in these discussions amongst the left, but, if reports of the meeting are accurate, it is clear that the official left still wants to keep a tight rein on future developments. Even so, it is important to stress that this meeting could be the start of an important initiative and, as such, Labour Party Marxists strongly supports the LLA’s participation in it.

However, the next stages could turn out to be decisive for the success of this project as a fighting campaign that the authentic left within Labour can wholeheartedly support. There is nothing wrong with different groups on the left negotiating about the composition of electoral slates or reaching agreement about which candidates we can support.

What turns that quite normal form of politics into unacceptable and unprincipled ‘horse-trading’ or an undemocratic ‘stitch-up’ is when important sections of the left are excluded from the discussions and there is no principled basis for the agreed slate beyond getting particular individuals elected. Too often in the past ‘left’ slates in NEC elections have been about cosying up to very unreliable ‘soft lefts’ or securing the careers of aspiring professional politicians. Given the leadership’s continuing attacks on party democracy and the purging of the CLPs, we are not prepared to be just spear-carriers or voting fodder for the official left.

Supporters of LPM will back LLA participation in any discussions on a united left slate for next year’s NEC elections, along with proposals for a campaign against the witch-hunt and in defence of party democracy. However, the LLA should set conditions for its support during these discussions. The slate should have a clearly defined, principled basis which all candidates must sign up to. While the specific demands can be defined during the discussions, LPM thinks that they should include elements such as the rejection of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association misdefinition of anti-Semitism, and the readmittance of comrades suspended or expelled during both the first and second waves of the witch-hunt, along with democratic demands such as ‘a worker’s MP on a worker’s wage’ and the accountability of the Parliamentary Labour Party to the NEC and party conference.

LLA should also argue that, given the strength of its showing in the 2020 NEC elections, it should have a candidate on any common left slate for the next elections in 2022 in a winnable position – not just a token slot somewhere down near the bottom.5 The LLA should participate in any meetings and discussions about political and electoral strategy in good faith and with a desire to see such a common, principled position emerging.

It is not a case of ‘unity’ at any price – that would simply be a repeat of the tried and failed politics of the past that resulted in unacceptable compromises and countless retreats by the official Labour left. So, if agreement on these terms cannot be reached amongst the left, the LLA should be prepared to stand a slate of candidates on a principled platform of its own. Such a campaign would galvanise the authentic left in the Labour Party and show the clear distinction that exists between genuine left militants and the compromisers and careerists of the official left. Principled politics is the key to building a real united and fighting left in the party.

Although at an early and somewhat tentative stage, these discussions amongst the organised Labour left are encouraging and give us the opportunity to argue our case for the building of a real left current within Labour that will fight for class politics and the socialist transformation of society.

  1. ‘Another victim of the witch-hunt’ Weekly Worker March 28 2019.↩︎
  2. labourlist.org/2021/03/labour-left-groups-release-candidate-slates-for-internal-labour-elections.↩︎
  3. For details of the elections and the various arguments advanced by the LLA and other left groups, see ‘Candidates, slates and votes’ Weekly Worker October 8 2020; ‘Cutting through the cant’ Weekly Worker November 19 2020; ‘Cowardly fake left peddles lies’ Weekly Worker October 22 2020.↩︎
  4. labour.org.uk/activist-hub/governance-and-legal-hub/ballots-and-nominations/internal-ballots-2020/nec-and-treasurer-elections-2020-results.↩︎
  5. In STV elections the position of a candidate on the slate is decisive in securing the required number of preferences and transfers to get elected. For example, in the 2020 NEC elections Momentum told its supporters to vote in a specific order of preference to maximise the vote for the candidates it supported. This was organised regionally and was effective in securing strong votes and the necessary transfers for left candidates.↩︎
Democracy and the Labour Party

Careerism on the Mersey

James Harvey reports on the manoeuvrings and stitch-ups that have happened in the wake of the arrest of elected mayor Joe Anderson

Following his arrest on charges of conspiracy to commit bribery and of witness intimidation, Liverpool’s elected mayor, Joe Anderson, withdrew from the elections scheduled for May this year.1 The news of the arrest, Anderson’s withdrawal and allegations of corruption threw the city’s Labour councillors into confusion, out of which three possible candidates – current acting mayor Wendy Simon, former deputy mayor Ann O’Byrne and ‘lord mayor’ Anna Rothery – tossed their hats into the ring to be Labour’s mayoral candidate.2 All three began energetic campaigning, with Rothery positioning herself as the candidate of the official left and picking up the support of many local Labour activists. She also got the backing of Jeremy Corbyn, who hailed her as a “deep rooted” campaigner and hoped that she would be the city’s first black woman mayor.3

So far, so good – until Labour announced that it was “pausing” the selection process and told party members that all three candidates had been ruled out.4 Out of this debacle a new shortlist of two emerged – councillors Joanne Anderson (no relation) and Anthony Lavelle – which is now being put to a ballot of party members ending on March 29.5 Not even their best friends would describe these two as experienced campaigners or heavyweight candidates. Neither of them are even vaguely on the left: their main qualifications seem to be those of rather uninspiring careerist councillors who toe the party line and will not rock the boat.

The response of local party members has been one of outrage. There have been calls for emergency Constituency Labour Party meetings to discuss protest motions and demand that the mayoral candidate selection process be suspended until the decision to remove Simon, O’Byrne and Rothery from the ballot is reversed. Even the officially sanctioned candidates have had to acknowledge the questions that remain about “the difficulties” surrounding Labour’s mayoral selection process.6

The feeling that the whole process is a political stitch-up by the Starmer leadership is widespread in Liverpool and beyond. In a letter of protest to Keir Starmer, left Liverpool MPs Dan Carden and Ian Byrne were joined by other MPs such as Clive Lewis, Richard Burgon, Belle Ribeiro-Addy, Zarah Sultana, Ian Lavery and Claudia Webbe, along with left union leaders and black activists, in criticising the way the selection process has been handled by the party bureaucracy and calling for the excluded candidates to be restored to the ballot papers sent out to party members.7 The latest instalment in this sorry tale was this week’s news that Anna Rothery’s legal action in the high court to force Labour to reinstate her on the mayoral shortlist had failed.8 However, this is far from the end of the story. Even if Starmer gets his way and eventually railroads the Liverpool CLPs to his carefully chosen shortlist, serious questions remain.

Democracy

The first concerns the nature of local government in Britain and the mayoral system itself. The left has always been opposed to Bonapartist offices like mayors and presidents, arguing that, even if elected, these offices are actually the antithesis of political democracy: whether in Europe or the United States, Marxists historically have advocated elected councils in local government, and national assemblies and parliaments, rather than concentrated executive power, as the essential republican, democratic form.9

The relatively new post of elected mayor in Britain deliberately copies the big-city boss politics of the US or the local powerbrokers in French and German cities. Building on ‘the Heseltine model’ developed under Margaret Thatcher, the elected mayors and cabinets introduced by the Cameron government were designed to concentrate power and decision-making, and so further undermine the few remaining democratic and accountable elements in local government.10 In addition, another negative feature of these elected mayors is their role in providing a useful launch pad for aspiring Labour careerists or former ministers trying to rebuild their reputation and powerbase. Thus, for most of the candidates involved in the current Liverpool shambles the position of elected mayor is just the next – rather lucrative – step in their ‘political career’. So, the one clear answer to this selection mess which will get wide support in the Liverpool Labour Party is: fight for real local democracy – abolish the mayor!11

The most immediate issue, however, remains the nature of democracy within the Labour Party itself. At all levels the nomination process is thoroughly undemocratic, with Labour’s national and regional bureaucracy having the power to decide who will go through to the shortlist without giving any reasons for their decisions. Speculation and rumours continue to surround the decision to remove Wendy Simon, Ann O’ Byrne and Anna Rothery from the shortlist, but it is likely that the Labour leadership’s main fear was that the candidate identified with the left, Anna Rothery, would win and that someone bearing Corbyn’s imprimatur would eventually become the mayor of Liverpool.

This carefully controlled and effectively closed type of ‘candidate selection’ is as far from open democracy as you can get. It is all of a piece with the ever-tightening controls that Starmer and the Labour bureaucracy are exerting throughout the party. The uproar and opposition that this has caused in Liverpool and elsewhere is only to be expected: Labour Party members have the right to decide who shall be the party’s candidates, not the appointed officials acting on the instructions of Keir Starmer. These elementary democratic demands for accountability, open selection and recall have long been a staple of the Labour left since the 1970s.

However, these issues take on a new urgency in the light of stitch-ups like that of the Liverpool mayoral selection. The purging of socialists from local authority candidate panels, the closing down of political debate and the suspension of CLP officers who allow critical motions to be tabled are simply part of a wider attack on the left and the democratic structures of the Labour Party. The response of the left in the Liverpool CLPs has been justifiably strong, but, to date, only two of the city’s Labour MPs – Dan Carden and Ian Byrne – have joined in the opposition to the manoeuvres of the leadership, and the majority of Labour councillors have kept a strict silence, as they wait and see which way the wind is blowing.

This type of diplomatic silence is only to be expected of the careerists and place-seekers who predominate in the Labour group on the council, but many supposedly ‘left’ activists have also kept their counsel too. As the witch-hunt has shown, careerism and opportunism are not confined to the Labour right: the official left has more than its fair share of collaborators and traitors, who are willing to aid the right. Many of these former leftwingers have secured comfortable positions in the Labour bureaucracy as trade union officials or working for MPs, from where they join in attacks on the left and work with the Labour right to shut down opposition and stifle democracy.

According to Skwawkbox, the panel that barred Anna Rothery included a number of such former left ‘fixers’ and ‘aides’ with links to local Labour MPs Kim Johnson and Paula Barker.12 Similarly comrades on Merseyside will be aware of the role of the former leading member of Workers Power, Mark Hoskisson – now chief of staff to Mick Whitley, Labour MP for Birkenhead, who initiated the attacks on the Wavertree Four that resulted in their initial suspension and the later expulsion of two comrades from the party.

The role of these former leftwingers in the witch-hunt and the attempted stitch-up shows that our battle for party democracy must go much further than ensuring a real mayoral selection process in Liverpool. We have to take our battle to both the Labour right and their fake left allies if we are to stand any chance of defeating Starmer’s purge and defending even the most basic democratic standards in the Labour Party.

If we fail to stop these attacks in Liverpool, it will simply encourage the leadership to open up more assaults on democratic selection procedures and accountability throughout the party as a whole.

  1. theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jan/01/liverpool-mayor-joe-anderson-withdraws-from-elections.↩︎
  2. liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/labour-liverpool-mayor-contest-shortlisted-19748249.↩︎
  3. skwawkbox.org/2021/02/09/corbyn-endorses-fantastic-rothery-in-labours-liverpool-mayoral-contest.↩︎
  4. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-56168822.↩︎
  5. labourlist.org/2021/03/labour-unveils-new-selection-shortlist-of-two-for-liverpool-mayoral-contest.↩︎
  6. itv.com/news/granada/2021-03-10/labour-liverpool-mayoral-candidate-if-we-carry-on-divided-we-face-the-consequence-of-losing-this-election.↩︎
  7. liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/labour-mps-urge-keir-starmer-19951943.↩︎
  8. morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/anna-rothery-loses-high-court-bid-against-labour-over-her-removal-mayoral-candidate.↩︎
  9. marxists.org/archive/draper/1974/xx/democracy.html.↩︎
  10. ‘Abolish the mayors’ Weekly Worker January 21 2021.↩︎
  11. Interestingly, all three of the original shortlist favoured abolishing the post of mayor and returning to an elected leader of the council.↩︎
  12. skwawkbox.org/2021/03/04/exclusive-the-panel-that-barred-rothery-and-selected-new-shortlist-and-panellists-links-to-mps-and-north-west-fixers.↩︎
Democracy and the Labour Party

Still not prepared to fight

The readmittance of suspended members does not mean that the right is in retreat, argues James Harvey

Reports that 50 suspended Labour members have been readmitted appear, on the face of it, to be only a rather small concession in the battle currently going on in the party. However, both the reinstatement and the reaction to it are significant.

Amongst the initial responses to the news were suggestions that the Starmer-Evans regime had backed down in the face of a combination of threatened legal action and pressure from the Unite leadership. Others, however, saw the reinstatement of a tiny minority of the thousands suspended as simply a Machiavellian manoeuvre by the party leadership to further divide and rule over the left. So, amidst this confusion, what can we learn from this reinstatement about the current balance of forces within the party?

Most importantly, this small retreat by the leadership does not mean a halt to the witch-hunt. Far from it. As many leftwingers noted on social media when they heard that the 50 had been readmitted, what about the rest who have been purged? When will they be reinstated? Asking the question answers it. Starmer will continue with his campaign to consolidate his control over the party and tame the left. There will be no let-up to the suspensions and the attempts to stifle opposition and party democracy – that much is clear.

But if the leadership uses the more obvious forms of coercion and disciplinary measures, more insidious are the attempts to police thought and control political debate by ruling certain ideas and criticisms as unacceptable. This is what lies behind the rulings of the general secretary and the party bureaucracy about ‘competent business’ and their threats to close down Constituency Labour Parties and suspend their officers if they step over the mark.

The reinstatement does not mean they have given up on that: the letter that was sent to the readmitted members asserts the right of the party machine to act as a thought police. Thus, it argues: “The NEC … has the power to issue guidance and instructions to subordinate Labour Party units” and claims that it was “grossly detrimental to the Labour Party for elected officials deliberately to act in opposition to the direction and guidance of the general secretary” (my emphasis). Furthermore, it issues a written warning about future good conduct and toeing the leadership’s line – in effect a threat of further action, which will hang over these readmitted members for a year!

So, if Starmer has not given up on the right’s clampdown on opposition, does this mean that he wants to drive the entire left out of the party, as some comrades argued at the recent Labour Left Alliance conference? Whilst Starmer’s witch-hunt has been severe and indiscriminate in many ways, his strategy has not been particularly systematic or consistent. For all his forensic training and supposedly judicious approach to politics, he appears to have no master plan beyond reacting to events and media pressure. Thus, there is no symphonic score: he is simply playing it by ear.

This is not to downplay the viciousness of the witch-hunt and outrageous slanders launched against the left by the Labour right and their allies in the media. Comrades who have been on the receiving end will neither forget nor forgive what has been done to them – and neither should the left as a whole. But if the allegations and lies about anti-Semitism give this witch-hunt an especially venomous form, such attacks by the pro-capitalist leadership of the Labour Party on the left have a long historical precedent going back to the foundation of the party. Consequently, not only is the current situation far from unique, but, given the nature of Labour as a bourgeois workers’ party, purges of this kind are inevitable on this site of class struggle.

Whilst battle continues to be joined in this way, the final outcome and the future trajectory of Labour still remains uncertain. However, if history is any guide, an important factor in shaping the direction the party will take is the response of the Labour left. Given its central strategic focus on the election of a left Labour government as a prerequisite for ‘socialist transformation’ and the absolute imperative for maintaining party unity at all costs, the Labour left has historically been organically bound to the Labour right, and thus always, in the last analysis, completely subordinate to the pro-capitalist wing of the party.

The compromises and capitulations that this entails have determined the response of the official Labour left to the current round of suspensions and expulsions. It also goes to explain the helpfully convenient distinction they make between a so-called ‘first’ and ‘second’ wave of suspensions and expulsions, which many on the official left, taking their cue from the right, argue are qualitatively different.

The second wave refers to the suspension on ‘procedural grounds’ of CLP officers and others who protested at Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension from the Parliamentary Labour Party, whilst the first wave concerns those disciplined on groundless charges of anti-Semitism and other trumped-up nonsense. The second wave only dates from November 2020: the much larger first wave, however, can be traced back to 2015 and the right’s first attempts to undermine Corbyn’s leadership of the party.

This difference is important, because it allows the official Labour left to set up a distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ – distinguishing those they wish to defend from those they are prepared to throw under the bus. It was this false distinction that operated in the cases of Chris Williamson, Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone, Tony Greenstein, Marc Wadsworth, Moshé Machover, and countless others. From Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell down, the official left either stood quietly aside or even shamefully joined in when good leftwingers were falsely accused and driven out of the party. Furthermore, the faintly triumphal tone of the official left, and their camp followers in the Momentum leadership, in response to the reported reinstatements shows that this distinction remains. It still seems that some purged comrades are deemed worthy of support, whilst others are clearly not.

This distinction tells us something fundamentally important about the official Labour left. Its retreats are not simply the product of disorientation and demoralisation in the face of the unremitting attacks from the Labour right and the media. Neither are their equivocations and failures to stand up to the witch-hunt merely the product of individual weakness. Rather this failure to mount a principled defence of leftwing victims of the purge flows inevitably from the nature of the official left’s politics of compromise. In presenting this small success of reinstatement as a major victory, they effectively abandon the vast majority of purged members to their fate.

Behind the rhetoric of solidarity and militant struggle, this response shows that their real aim is not to take the fight to the right, but rather to maintain their cosy position as party loyalists and their role as tame, officially licensed ‘critics’ of the leadership.

Democracy and the Labour Party

Labour Left Alliance | Facing both ways

Last weekend’s conference ended up adopting two totally contradictory positions. James Harvey of Labour Party Marxists reports

If you want to understand the confused politics and contradictory strategy of the Labour left, the January 30 online discussion conference organised by the Labour Left Alliance was a good place to start. Everyone who spoke at the event – entitled ‘Labour in crisis: what next?’ – argued that we urgently need a strategy to organise an effective fightback against Starmer and the Labour right. The picture they painted was of a real attack on party democracy and freedom of debate by the leadership, and the resulting widespread disorientation and demoralisation on the left.

The majority of comrades who attended and spoke clearly regard themselves as the real, militant left in the Labour Party – in contrast to the tame official left, represented by groups such as the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs and Momentum. Indeed, everyone was at great pains to stress this distinction and place themselves firmly in the camp of extreme opposition to the Starmer regime. However, if all were agreed that Labour is facing a huge threat from the right, there was no real agreement about either the character of this crisis or the strategy that the left needs to adopt.1

Roger Silverman of the Workers’ International Network (WIN) and the LLA organising group set the tone in his political opening by suggesting that the one-sided civil war unleashed by the Labour right had finally reached boiling point. The split, initiated by Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner, was already underway, he argued, but the official left lacked both the policy and the perspectives to fight back. In the context of this major crisis, comrade Silverman believed that the conference could prove to be “a landmark” in the struggle for a “mass workers’ party – a socialist Labour Party rooted in the trade unions”.

Unfortunately, it failed to live up to this billing. It was far from the landmark event Roger promised. Instead of clarity and coherence, what the conference actually revealed was the political and strategic muddle that lies at the heart of the Labour left. The dominant moods of the conference appeared to be of compromise, consensus and contradiction. This was most clearly exposed in the final section of the conference, which discussed how to “transform Labour into a party of the class”. Here participants, when presented with three very different analyses and strategies, finally managed, by clear majorities, to support two of them!

The first successful resolution called for “building a socialist alternative inside and outside the Labour Party” (my emphasis). Its argument, framed in rather apocalyptic terms, suggested that “the acute nature of the economic and social crisis of capitalism … meant the ruling class has had to resort to increasingly autocratic methods”, which included closing down free speech and democracy in political parties. In moving the motion Matthew Jones recognised that historically the left has been subordinate to the right within Labour, but he argued that we are now in a “qualitatively different situation”, in which the Starmer/Evans leadership wants to drive the left out of the party altogether. Given this situation, and with thousands of left activists now leaving the party, there was already a de facto split and so, comrade Jones suggested, it was necessary to “promote the self-organisation of the left inside and outside” Labour.

Although the resolution seemed to hedge its bets, the clear implication was that Labour was finished as any type of vehicle for the left. This was an unparalleled crisis and in these ‘end times’ for social democracy there was no longer any perspective of transforming Labour in any form. However, during the debate comrades who supported building such a socialist alternative “inside and outside” the party failed to clearly define what such an alternative would entail. The suggestion seemed to be that it would encompass the ‘entire left’, with the programmatic basis of any such a new formation deliberately left vague. This left the strong suspicion that the “self-organisation of the left” would simply be yet another recycled ‘broad front’ of lowest-common-denominator leftism, similar in form to the Socialist Alliance or Left Unity. Whether they understood it or not, comrades who supported this motion are transitioning out of the Labour Party, although the discussion showed that for many of them the final destination still remains elusively and deliberately just beyond the horizon.

In or out?

Just as these comrades seem to be on their way out, the movers of the successful Rotherham Labour Left motion were digging in even more deeply. Influenced by Socialist Appeal, this motion opposed the setting up of any new formations outside Labour, calling instead for LLA comrades to “keep organising in the Labour Party” and “avoid support for ‘competitors’ to avoid being ineligible for membership”. Although critical of Corbyn’s appeasement of the right and the failure of the official left to stand up to the witch-hunt, their Labour loyalism – and belief that the existing type of ‘traditional’ organisation of the working class provides ready-made instruments for the socialist transformation of society – coloured their analysis of the way forward for LLA supporters. The motion’s focus on rule changes for leadership elections, the demand for a recalled party conference and a new clause four were clearly designed to keep the troops safely busy within Labour rather than straying away for presumably more fruitful pastures new outside.

Both the historical experience of the Labour left and its contemporary self-imprisonment as a tame official left show the ultimate bankruptcy of such positions. As explained by the movers of the Rotherham motion, this strategy of Labour loyalism fails to deal with the contradictory nature of Labour as a bourgeois workers’ party – a failure further compounded by their sowing illusions that the parliamentary strategy and the election of a ‘socialist Labour government’ is the only way to socialism in Britain. But perhaps even this is now too much for these comrades to hope for, given that the height of the ambition of these latter day Millerandistes seems now to be limited to getting a ‘Marxist’ MP into the shadow cabinet – “a coup” in the words of Rotherham Labour Left’s Daniel Platts!

The Labour Party Marxists motion dealt with both the defeatism and loyalism of the two successful motions in its central argument that the transformation of Labour requires a Marxist party. Stressing that Labour remains a bourgeois workers’ party, the motion argued that Corbynism “acted to divert mass discontent away from what is objectively needed – the urgent superseding of capitalism”. Its strategy was to “draw the sharpest line of demarcation between the socialist left and the official Labour left”, especially on socialist participation in capitalist governments or capitalist shadow cabinets.

However, this explicit rejection of the coalitionist road to socialism does not mean that LPM is turning its back on Labour. It called for a struggle for the complete transformation of the Labour Party, forging it into a permanent united front of the working class – a process that can only be realised if socialists are organised in a mass Marxist party. Such a party, the motion argued, would seek to transform Labour, but the creation of such a mass Marxist party remains its central objective, and its strategy for achieving socialism does not rely on Labour.

Despite the very clear political differences between all three motions the resulting discussion was very confused, reflecting the different experiences of the participants. Some comrades, who had only become involved in Labour during the Corbyn period, were frightened by the very idea of ‘Marxism’ and worried that such radicalism would alienate our potential supporters. Even those comrades who claimed the title of ‘Marxist’ were rather defeatist and determinist in their assessment of both the current economic crisis and the future trajectory of Labour, playing down the possibilities of conscious socialist politics and a developing class struggle. In contrast to the clear politics and strategy advanced by LPM, many speakers in the discussion, whether they advocated remaining in Labour or building a socialist alternative outside, argued for the softest forms of broad front and compromise as the way forward.

LPM had called for this conference as a way of clarifying the political and strategic differences within the LLA, especially given the capitulation of the official Labour left and the growing demoralisation and disorientation of the left in Constituency Labour Parties. Unfortunately, however, the conference failed to really bring out these differences. As the votes for two rather contradictory motions showed, this discussion conference ended up facing two ways – one foot in and one foot out. There was no real analysis or taking stock of the failure of the Corbyn project: whilst the official left was rightly condemned for its complicity in the witch-hunt, its organic and symbiotic relationship with the Labour right was glossed over. But, above all, the conference failed to adopt a clear direction or present a strategy for the way forward for the LLA.

This could be charitably ascribed to the technical limitations of online Zoom discussions, but the format devised by the conference arrangements committee certainly did not help. LPM had argued for a conference with the space and time to fully explore the different political and strategic positions within the LLA. In particular, this would require more developed position papers rather than 400-hundred-word motions, and longer contributions than five-minute introductions and three-minute interventions from the floor. That this more expansive and serious type of conference format failed to be adopted was not a purely technical issue, but is rather a very significant political question of how we understand the best way to debate and clarify important political differences.

Moreover, in framing this debate about the crisis of the Labour left in the way that it did, the LLA illustrated all the political and strategic weaknesses that the left has acquired over the past 30 years or so. LPM will continue to argue its case within the LLA and other organisations of the Labour left, but, as this conference has shown, we are under no illusions about the scale of the task if we are to successfully rebuild and rearm our movement by developing a serious and coherent Marxist current within Labour.