Category Archives: The left

The left

CLPD AGM, Saturday March 19, Conway Hall

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CLPD AGM, Saturday March 19 2016
11:30am, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL.

Labour Party Marxists urges its members and supporters to attend the AGM of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy.

Membership of CLPD is open to Labour Party members. If you are not a member already, you can join at the door. Individuals £20; unwaged and low-waged (under £8,000) £5; young members under 27 £3. (And members can bring friends to the AGM as participating observers.)

Further info about CLPD:
www.clpd.org.uk and www.grassrootslabour.net and www.leftfutures.org.
____________________________________________________________

Amendment to Resolution 5, proposed by Stan Keable:

At end of Resolution 5, INSERT:

The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy commits itself to returning the Labour Party to its organisational principles of federalism and inclusiveness. We must again become the umbrella organisation for all trade unions, socialist groups and pro-working class partisans.

It is quite correct to maintain rules barring from membership those promoting parliamentary or local candidates standing against the Labour Party. However, this should not be applied to the distant past or indiscriminately. For example, sitting councilors and other activists standing against Labour candidates committed to supporting imperialist adventures or imposing government cuts, etc, ought to be treated sympathetically.

Moreover, there should be no place in the Labour Party fof rules prohibiting organisations – and members of organisations – which have their own “programme, principles and policy, or distinctive and separate propaganda, or possessing branches in the constituencies”.

Such rules must be done away with or radically reformulated.

The CDLP will campaign for these ends and promote suitable resolutions to Party conference.
____________________________________________________________

LPM Broadsheet No8

An issue of LPM Broadsheet is being produced in time for the CLPD AGM, and for distribution locally to friends and contacts and at your CLP and Momentum events. The broadsheet is a free handout, and depends on your donations. Collect copies on Saturday, or send your contact details (name, address, phone and email address) stating how many copies you would like – preferably with a donation towards production costs and postage.

Your financial support is needed – please pay into the LPM bank account:
Sort Code 30-96-26, Account 22097060,
or send cheques payable to ‘LPM’ to: LPM, BCM Box 8932, London WC1N 3XX.

secretary@labourpartymarxists.org.uk
07817 379568
www.labourpartymarxists.org.uk

Democracy and the Labour Party, The left

Uncritical support for Corbyn

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David Shearer of Labour Party Marxists reports on last weekend’s LRC conference.

The February 20 ‘special general meeting’ of the Labour Representation Committee was a strange affair, not least because of the poor attendance of only around 150 comrades. The leadership had gone out of its way to insist that there could be no annual general meeting – the 2015 AGM should have been called in November – because of the election of Jeremy Corbyn.

The new circumstances apparently meant that no motions from members or affiliates could be entertained, and there could be no elections for the executive or national committee. But, apart from that, the meeting had all the features of an AGM – officers’ reports and constitutional amendments, for instance.

The reason why only the leadership’s own motions were permitted was obvious. You and I might propose an ‘extremist’ policy or course of action that might embarrass comrade Corbyn and his number two, John McDonnell, at a time when they are under constant scrutiny and attack in the media. So the membership was permitted only to move amendments to the leadership’s own motions.

Having said that, however, the NC’s statement – ‘After Corbyn’s victory – building the movement’ – contained some useful points. For example, it correctly stated: “While participating in, and encouraging, industrial and social struggles, at the present time the LRC has to emphasise the internal battles in the movement.” It also declared: “… we need to work at every level in the unions to encourage participation, democracy and transparency …” Once again, quite correct – although the leadership was not best pleased by the attempt of Labour Party Marxists to add some meat to the bones when it came to union democracy (see below).

However, there was certainly some ambiguity over the LRC’s original and continued purpose. The statement claimed that, unlike others on the left, the LRC had always accepted that “the radicalisation of working people will at some point attempt to create a mass left wing within Labour”.

However, NC member Mike Phipps usefully pointed out that the “origin” of the LRC actually lay in the possibility of an “alternative to Labour” during the days when the right was firmly in control. In fact I seem to recall comrade McDonnell himself hinting on more than one occasion that such a possibility was not ruled out. But let’s not talk about that!

Nevertheless, taking into account such an “origin”, what today is the LRC’s purpose, now that the mass-membership Momentum has come into being? The statement read: “There is no contradiction between the LRC participating fully in the creation of a national network of local and internet-based Momentum groups and maintaining the existence of our own organisation – for the time being.” Indeed it foresaw a time when the LRC “has outlived its usefulness”. This point was also made by comrade McDonnell himself in his address to the conference. He thought that “maybe in the future” there will be “just one organisation”, but apparently we are “not ready for that yet”.

Mick Brooks, in presenting the leadership’s statement, said that Momentum was a “genuine mass movement” and we “have got to be in there”. The LRC has a “critical political role to play”, he continued – it is our job to help shape Momentum’s politics, it seems (even though the NC wants to keep those politics within safe bounds – ie, bounds determined by the rightwing media and its eagerness to blacken the name of the new Labour leadership in whatever way it can).

As the statement put it, our aim is to “advance the Corbyn agenda in the party as a whole” (my emphasis). The overwhelming majority at the meeting favoured more or less uncritical support for Corbyn – there was a clear consensus that the most important thing was to get him into No10 in 2020. According to Jackie Walker, speaking for the NC in the afternoon session on Momentum, we should “go to meetings, knock on doors” to “get Jeremy elected as prime minister”. There were several other such comments. Many were couched in the language of socialism – including the Labourite ‘socialism’ of the 1945 Attlee government.

Despite this, the meeting accepted an amendment to the statement, moved by Sacha Ismail of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, which called on Corbyn and McDonnell to be “politically bolder” – it specified “taxing the rich, nationalising the banks, reversing all cuts” and explaining how such demands fit into a vision of a “different society from capitalism”. Within Momentum, the amendment proposed, the LRC should fight to go “beyond ‘progressive’ and ‘new politics’ towards a clearer political programme based on class politics, working class political representation and socialism”.

One comrade said the amendment “misunderstands where we are” – Corbyn and McDonnell are in a “precarious position”. We shouldn’t tell them “we know better”, that “they’re not being bold enough”. Our task is not to advise – “our task is to build”.

Together

While there were guest speakers from the junior doctors and Heathrow 13 campaigns, the star speaker was undoubtedly the shadow chancellor. John McDonnell was pleased to bring a message of “solidarity and thanks” from Jeremy Corbyn – who had, after all, been a “founder member” of the LRC.

Comrade McDonnell stated that the shadow cabinet was an example of the Labour “left, right and centre working together” – the implication being that this can only be a good thing. But the left was gaining ground: “When they realised we had momentum, they started taking some of our ideas.” According to him, most of the Labour right had now “bought into our idea of Labour becoming a social movement again”.

So Labour as a whole, it seems, is now attempting to “transform the social and economic system” and establish a “radically fairer and more equal economy”. And the LRC’s role should be “to the fore” – that of “campaigning to develop policy”. We should “aim for the election of a socialist government” in 2020. It was the “opportunity of a lifetime” – what he had been waiting for all these years: “Now it’s here, let’s grab it with both hands.”

Following a standing ovation, it was announced there would be questions from the floor, although only three were taken. In response, comrade McDonnell stated, among other things, that if there was a challenge to the Corbyn leadership, the left would “organise just as hard” as last time – but it would “do it in a way that holds the party together”. Answering a question from Pete Firmin on the party’s attitude to the European Union and the coming referendum, comrade McDonnell said that Labour should be “working with socialist and social democratic parties across Europe” in order to achieve “a workers’ Europe, a social Europe”. Otherwise we would be left with a “capitalist club”.

He ended by saying: “Now we are the Labour Party. We’re the mainstream!” Which earned him a second standing ovation.

Following this, Mick Brooks presented the leadership’s statement. He began by stating that we were attending a special general meeting, rather than an AGM, because it “was not a question of business as usual”. Since the 1980s Britain had been dominated by rightwing politics, where the situation for socialists was unfavourable. But now there is “radicalisation to the right and to the left”. In contradiction to McDonnell’s claim of a growing unity, comrade Brooks said that within Labour Corbyn is “surrounded by enemies”. Our job was to mobilise his potential support and “channel it into the Labour Party”.

Liz Davies spoke next from the platform. She was delighted to be “back in the Labour Party” after a couple of decades in organisations like the Socialist Alliance and Left Unity. Then she had thought that Blair and Brown had “changed Labour irrevocably”, but “I am delighted I was wrong.” Now Labour was once again opposed to the “wicked” Tory policies on welfare, housing, migration and so on.

Bolt-on

The first amendment to the NC statement was moved by Pete Firmin representing Brent Trades Council. This mandated the NC to “call the overdue 2015 AGM within three months”. The last AGM had been in November 2014 – when comrade Firmin himself had been elected political secretary – and there was no real reason why we should not now have a proper conference, where a full range of motions are heard and the leadership is elected/re-elected.

The excuses given by a range of NC and EC speakers opposing this were truly abysmal. The intention was to “call an AGM as soon after the Labour Party conference as possible” – didn’t comrade Firmin know that an AGM “takes time and money to organise”? It had been “a difficult year” and now was not the time for “the usual resolution-passing” (unless they are resolutions from the leadership, of course). It would be “an enormous distraction” to organise a “second major event”.

But Graham Bash, LRC treasurer and editor of Labour Briefing, was the most embarrassing: “For goodness sake, in the next three months there are local elections”, plus lots of local Momentum meetings, he said. Organising the AGM would “take the LRC out of politics” and we shouldn’t let such things “get in the way of the struggle outside”!

Other comrades, including Andrew Berry, pointed out that democracy was not a “bolt-on extra” and there was no reason why we could not fully engage in politics while preparing for an AGM. Although the amendment was defeated, the vote was close enough to necessitate a count – there were 35 in favour and 57 against.

This was followed by the LPM amendment mentioned above. This stated: “The fight to democratise the Labour Party cannot be separated from the fight to democratise the trade unions.” It was essential to ensure that both Labour and union officers are fully accountable and recallable, and are paid only the average wage of a skilled worker. The amendment put forward several other concrete proposals – we should, for example, aim to abolish the Bonapartist post of Labour leader.

In introducing the amendment, Stan Keable insisted that democracy must be seen to be implemented. Democracy was our best weapon against the class enemy, in that it could help to transform our movement into a genuinely powerful force. That applies to the trade union movement as well as to the Labour Party.

Once again there were some very weak arguments against such a basic proposition. One comrade said that it was “not for us to tell our affiliates how they should organise”, while another said that at last we have our own leader and yet here we have Labour Party Marxists making the “mad” proposal to abolish the post! Surely everyone knew it was our job to “get behind Jeremy’s agenda”? And you would have to be “bonkers” to expect him to get by on a worker’s wage.

LPM’s Jim Grant argued that if it was wrong for us to tell the unions how to organise, presumably we should not ‘interfere’ in their affairs by calling on them to support the junior doctors, for example. But it was to no avail: the amendment was defeated, with about 25 comrades voting in favour.

Unpleasant

After the lunch break NC members Michael Calderbank and Jackie Walker introduced the session on Momentum. Comrade Calderbank said that Momentum was “crucial to the Corbyn movement” and to “getting Labour elected” in 2020, while comrade Walker stated that the aim must be to double Momentum’s membership. She was very enthusiastic about her local Momentum group and its ‘consensus democracy’ – “and, you know, it works!” What is more, “If you say something unpleasant, we ask you to leave!”

Comrade Walker also thought it was better to have “more people who don’t have experience” coming into Momentum than members or ex-members of the organised left. But there were “too few blacks and too few women” – which was all down to people (like members of the experienced left, no doubt) “saying unpleasant things” and others (like herself, it seems) “being intimidated”.

In a similar vein Andrew Berry had raised a point of order in an earlier session objecting to the use of certain words – he specified “losers”, “mad” and “bonkers” – the last two having been directed against LPM. We don’t mind, Andrew, honestly!

The final session dealt with organisational matters, which revealed the poor state of the LRC. As Norrette Moore for the executive said, “Last August we got down to about £100 in the bank.” This was one of the reasons why the “very large national committee” had to be streamlined. The ‘streamlining’ consisted, amongst other things, of a constitutional change that would end the current two-tier structure, whereby the executive committee “takes proposals to a national committee”. Instead there would be a single national executive committee. The NC was proposing that the AGM (when it is eventually called) should elect not only the NEC, but eight individual officers (at least four of whom “should identify as female”), including a “treasurer”, “web manager” and “administrator”.

Our amendment called for all officers to be elected by the NEC itself, not the AGM. In moving it, I pointed out that very few LRC members knew which of those standing for election would make a good “web manager”, for instance. What is more, if the comrade elected turned out to be a total incompetent, then, under the current method of electing officers, there would be nothing anyone could do – they had been elected by the membership and could not be removed until the next AGM.

But comrade Moore said that if we elected the committee as a whole and gave them the job of allocating the various responsibilities from amongst themselves, that would make them a “clique”. No, I’m not sure how she worked that one out either. In any case, the amendment was lost, with, once more, around 25 voting for it.

 

The left

Gagging order

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Going to the Labour Briefing readers’ meeting in London last Saturday (December 12), I had hoped – against the evidence, I have to admit – to discover what plans are being hatched for the future organisation of the Labour left. After all, Briefing is the journal of the Labour Representation Committee, and the two most prominent figures in the LRC have always been Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, so LRC officers must surely be involved in the behind-the-scenes negotiations to construct a provisional steering committee to guide Momentum towards a conference – the only legitimate way to determine the politics of Momentum and the form its promised “democratic governance” should take.

No such luck, I am sorry to say. I left the meeting none the wiser about plans for the future of Momentum, nor of the LRC itself, and consequently no indication of how Briefing will be governed if the LRC decides to dissolve itself into Momentum. The LRC national committee had met only a few days earlier, and several NC and executive committee members were present, yet we were told nothing about what kind of future the NC is planning for the organisation. Why has the word ‘annual’ been dropped from the LRC’s February 20 conference (postponed from its usual early November slot), if not in anticipation of liquidating the LRC organisation into the Momentum network? So far, we are left guessing, and the LRC leadership has not used the pages of its own journal to enlighten its own members.

The problem vexing the ageing Briefing team is this: how come the Corbynite surge, which has doubled Labour Party membership to some 400,000, has left the uncritically pro-Corbyn Briefing with sales only slightly up at about 1,500 monthly, and left the burden of producing the journal on fewer and fewer shoulders? Of course, producing a monthly journal is no easy task for a few stalwarts, and the desperate need for young blood is nothing new. A proposal to ease the burden of work by scaling down from monthly to quarterly, or even to three issues a year, albeit in the context of upgrading the Briefing website, was thankfully rejected – it would have been a disastrous political retreat – but the problem of personnel remains to be solved. One obvious way to recruit new forces is to publicise the problem, as I am doing here – but strangely some comrades see the discussion of weakness as an attack, rather than an essential step towards a solution.

When I argued that support for Corbyn and McDonnell in the pages of Labour Briefing should necessarily include criticism where appropriate – best friends should always criticise, and comradely criticism should be welcomed – comrade Mike Phipps, a pivotal member of the editorial board, countered that there are already a dozen or so left journals critical of Corbyn, and Briefing is the “only” pro-Corbyn publication. So, there it is: no criticism will be tolerated, if comrade Phipps gets his way.

Then comrade Phipps went a step too far, and moved a vote of the 24 comrade readers present – which seemed to be carried, though no-one counted the votes – that the discussion on “organisation”, which I have described here, be not reported in the Weekly Worker (yes, the motion was explicitly about Weekly Worker). How silly. How counterproductive. How undemocratic, that our own press should be marred by the anathema of censorship. How ineffective must such a self-censored press be in the struggle for working class and human liberation.

Perhaps that gives a clue to Briefing’s failure to capture the massive Corbynite readership market: it’s not exactly “straight-talking politics” when it comes to our own affairs. The idea that the goings-on in the national committee of the LRC, or in a readers’ meeting of Labour Briefing, is a private matter which must be kept secret from the people we are trying to win over, is a self-evident stupidity.

The privacy of parliamentary debates was overcome in struggle long ago. Of course, we want transparency in the state and transparency in the debates in the Labour Party NEC. Thankfully, Pete Willsman, Christine Shawcroft and other NEC members provide reports of what goes on in that ‘private meeting’. In Unison, 22 NEC members are just now campaigning publicly to overcome the attempt of the rightwing NEC majority to keep the general secretary vote-rigging scandal under wraps. Briefing should stand firmly on the side of openness and transparency.

Publicity is healthy. As Lenin put it in a little piece entitled ‘Conversation’ (March-April 1913), “You really are getting like those people who are ready to condemn publicity because of some false information that has been published … But publicity is a sword that itself heals the wounds it makes.”

Stan Keable
Briefing editorial board member (coopted)

Democracy and the Labour Party, The left

Two years to take control

Gallery

The bureaucratic right is still running the show, but by 2017 all that could change, says Charles Gradnitzer of Labour Party Marxists.

Conference was a mixed bag this year; it was slightly more democratic than in previous years and noticeably less stage-managed. A regional organiser joked to me over a few drinks that those doing his job could relax this year, because the new leadership was not getting them to stitch up votes, so at least Jeremy Corbyn is upholding his promise of running a more democratic party.

Though comrade Corbyn won the leadership election on a massive 76% turnout, this was not reflected in the election for the conference arrangements committee, where Labour First’s last-minute candidates – former Eastenders actor Mike Cashman and former GMTV presenter Gloria De Piero – were elected on a much lower (less than 40%) turnout.

In May, Labour First pulled Tulip Siddiq and Ruth Smeeth as their candidates for the CAC in favour of De Piero and Cashman. De Piero sent out an email to all CLP secretaries at the beginning of June and within two months the slate managed to rack up nearly 140 nominations. In comparison Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance candidates Katy Clark and Jon Lansman received only 93 and 66 nominations respectively, even though they had been campaigning since February.

Gloria De Piero should not have been eligible to stand. In 2014 a rule change was passed which meant that when the Labour Party is in opposition members of the shadow cabinet are ineligible to stand for the constituency section of the CAC (Rulebook 2015: chapter 4, clause III, section B, subsection i). However, the term used in the rule change was “parliamentary committee”, which previously referred to members of the shadow cabinet, but now refers to the backbench liaison committee and so Gloria De Piero’s nomination was accepted.

Although many of us feared the worst, Labour First’s control of the CAC was not a complete disaster. The ‘four and four’ rule was properly observed, whereby there are four contemporary subjects chosen by the unions and four from the constituency delegates tabled for debate.

Of the 103 contemporary motions submitted to conference from constituencies, 68 made it to the priorities ballot and 35 were deemed not contemporary. This is in contrast to 2014, when around half were ruled out in this way. While more contemporary motions made it through this year, the CAC recommended that all the motions submitted on Trident were not contemporary, although some of them made it through on appeal and Trident itself went to the priorities ballot.

But the CAC had one more trick up its sleeve to exclude Trident from debate. Normally one would expect mental health and the NHS to be grouped together under the subject heading Health and social care, as they have been for the past several years, but the CAC decided they were two different subjects this year – obviously so as to maximise the pool of potential subject headings in the priorities ballot and prevent Trident from being debated. This was made more infuriating by the fact that only one CLP, Nottingham South, had actually submitted a motion on mental health, which led to the bizarre spectacle of a motion being debated with only one proposer and no seconder.

Though more contemporary motions were accepted this year, the same cannot be said of rule changes. Nine rule changes submitted by 17 constituencies were ruled out of order. The only one that was not was the Labour First rule change submitted by Colne Valley and Huddersfield CLPs.

Two were ruled out of order on particularly dubious grounds: the first would have allowed conference to refer back sections of the national policy forum documents and the second would have allowed Constituency Labour Parties to submit both a rule change and a contemporary motion.

The first was important, as it would have returned some sovereign powers to conference over Labour Party policy, which were taken away during the Blair years after the Partnership into power ‘consultation’. The national policy forum meets to consider submissions from the policy commissions. The NPF then presents a report to conference, which is almost always accepted unanimously without being read and forms the rolling programme of the Labour Party. Currently conference either accepts or rejects these documents in toto, which makes it impossible to remove bad policy from the documents by moving reference back of particular sections.

These rule changes were deemed out of order because of the three-year rule, which states that “when party conference has made a decision on a constitutional amendment, no resolution to amend the constitution or rules of the party having the same or a similar primary objective shall appear on the agenda of the three following annual party conferences” (2015 Rulebook: chapter 3, clause III, section 3, subsection B).

.The three-year rule was successfully amended in 2014 to add in the ‘no primary objective’ proviso to stop precisely this sort of vague interpretation of the rule book. In any case that point is moot, as Refounding Labour was voted on in 2011, four conferences before this one, not three.

Saturday saw the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy’s ‘Conference lift-off’ fringe. At this meeting Jon Lansman urged people to support the CLPD emergency motion on Syria, which sought to undermine the contemporary motion from Labour First by requiring any intervention in Syria to have a mandate from the United Nations. Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists pointed out that the motion did not really oppose intervention, but simply placed conditions on it. Lansman retorted that the motion de facto ruled out intervention and had been drafted to ensure the widest possible support.

Sunday

On the first day of conference an amusing addition to the raft of leafleters outside conference was Luke Akehurst and friends, who were distributing the Labour First bulletin. This featured the baffling headline, “Unite and fight the Tories – but say no to rule fixes”. Labour Party Marxists commends Comrade Akehurst for braving the scorching Brighton sun to puzzle delegates with his non-sequiturs.

Conference started with Harry Donaldson (GMB) moving the CAC report, after which delegates from Islington North and Mid-Bedfordshire CLPs took to the rostrum to refer the report back to the CAC on the grounds that the rule changes were unfairly ruled out of order. A point of order was also made that the chair – Jim Kennedy (Ucatt) – should take each reference-back separately. Yet again the chair chose to ignore procedure and took a vote on the CAC report as a whole. A card vote was called, but in the end the report was narrowly accepted by 57% to 43%.

In the priorities ballot Trident, masquerading under the name Britain’s defence capability, was not selected. Trident was edged out both because Health and social care had been split into two, as explained above, and because of the Becta/Musicians Union motion on the BBC licence fee, which was supported by the GMB precisely to stop the debate on Trident taking place.

Proving that many journalists do not know how a ballot works, this was reported in the news as 93% of conference voting to “reject” a debate on Trident, but if this is the case 93% of conference also voted to reject a debate on mental health, given that it came down to less than 1% between the two.

Monday

On Monday the CLPD’s Gary Heather was beaten onto the national constitutional committee by incumbent Judith Blake. The NCC deals with disciplinary hearings, so it is important for the left to win. Not so much to “purge” rightwingers, as media darling Simon Danczuk MP suggested, but for the left to protect itself when the inevitable rightwing backlash occurs.

Monday also saw the trade union section of the NEC elected. This year Community – the union that rightwing members of Labour Students join (and not because they fancy a career in the steel industry) – lost its place and the more radical and leftwing Bakers Union (BFAWU) saw their candidate, Pauline McCarthy, elected.

Progress complained that this was unfair, given the news of the Redcar steel plant liquidation – which seems a little cynical, as its members seem to have no problem crossing picket lines, particularly when it comes to delivering lectures on the life of Friedrich Engels.

Unfortunately Aslef ’s Tosh McDonald did not make it onto the NEC. Tosh, whose golden locks had Keith Vaz perennially referring to him as ‘Richard Branson’ from the chair, would have made a strong leftwing addition to the NEC.

Eight rule changes were voted on, two of which were quite important.

The first was Labour First’s proposal, which would have expanded the constituency section of the NEC from six members to 11, with each representing a region in England, plus one from Wales and one from Scotland. In order to preserve gender balance this rule change allowed the NEC to determine which regions would have to nominate women on a rolling basis. This was an attempt by Labour First to stitch up the NEC in its favour and change its composition to give CLPs parity with the unions. The rule change was defeated by 85% to 15%, with the unions block-voting 98% against.

The second was an NEC rule change, which expanded the leadership nomination process to the European Parliamentary Party. This means that any leadership candidate now needs 15% of the PLP and the EPLP to nominate them and any challenger to an incumbent leader needs 20%, so any challenger to Jeremy Corbyn now needs 50 Labour Party MPs or MEPs to nominate them rather than 46.

Tuesday

Tuesday saw the NEC statement on the railways passed. The NEC statement went one step further than Miliband’s policy of setting up a public operator to bid for rail franchises, instead promising to bring private franchises back into public ownership when they expire and accelerating the process using break clauses.

Tuesday also saw conference debate the vital issue of the BBC being responsible for free licence fees for the over-75s. It is obviously essential issues like these that the Labour Party really ought to be debating rather than trivial questions, such as the £100 billion doomsday device sitting off the coast of Scotland.

Though Trident was not debated, it did get an honourable mention in the leader’s speech. Comrade Corbyn said that he did not believe that spending £100 billion on nuclear weapons was the right way forward, that Britain should honour its obligations under the Non- Proliferation Treaty, but he also sought to protect jobs in the defence industry in order to reassure the GMB. This can likely be taken to mean that defence workers should be redeployed to socially useful industries. Corbyn also claimed that his victory was a mandate from the party for such a position.

Wednesday

Wednesday saw the motion on the refugee crisis debated. Twenty-two CLPs had submitted motions on the refugee crisis, and the bureaucracy – proving that it has a sense of humour – cobbled together a confusing, War and peace-length composite. There was also the completely redundant motion on the NHS, which was almost identical to the composites that have been passed every year since the beginning of the decade. In fact the motion was almost identical to the NPF final year policy document passed in 2014, not to mention the 2015 manifesto, from which entire paragraphs appear to have been lifted verbatim.

Emergency resolutions on Colombia and Syria were also debated. Both motions passed, which means that it is now Labour Party policy to oppose intervention in Syria unless there is a UN mandate to bomb only Islamic State targets, which is unlikely to happen. While Labour Party Marxists would have rather seen a more explicitly anti-war and anti-imperialist motion passed, this victory is still to be welcomed.

What now?

It is clear that if conference is to be more democratic the left needs to win the two constituency places on the conference arrangements committee, which will be up for election again in 2017. This will mean that conference will be able to debate rule changes and the priorities ballot will not be stitched up by the right to stop contentious issues like Trident being debated.

This is important because, although Corbyn has a mandate from the party, he is vehemently opposed by the Parliamentary Labour Party, who would like to get rid of him as soon as they can. We need to be able to pass rule changes that give conference more teeth, so that it can debate leftwing contemporary resolutions to give Corbyn a mandate that the PLP cannot ignore and block any rightwing policy coming from the national policy forum.

If the left does take the CAC in 2017, then rule changes can be submitted and tabled for the 2018 conference. Most importantly we must get rid of trigger ballots in favour of mandatory reselection. The current trigger ballot system is almost identical to Augusto Pinochet’s referenda and acts as a barrier to the party finding and electing new talent.

It is worth mentioning that the left (CLGA) won 25 seats on the NPF, as did the right (Labour First), along with five unaligned candidates. This means that the left performed no better than average in these elections and cannot really stop the NPF from producing the drivel we saw in 2014 – which led directly to the ‘Controls on immigration’ mugs and that ghastly plinth.

However, though the left is far from ready, it is beginning to get its act together. The 50,000-plus people who have flooded into the party since Corbyn’s victory did not do so because they were enthused by the Liz Kendall campaign. They joined to support the new leader. The left must mobilise to provide concrete, democratic structures for them to get involved in.

_____

 

Democracy and the Labour Party, The left

Lies, smears and dictators

Gallery

There were predictable reactions to the election of Jeremy Corbyn in the Middle Eastern media. Amir Parviz Pouyan reports

The pro-Saudi and Israeli press have been competing with each other in their scaremongering. The Times of Israel, under the headline, “Anti-Israel Jeremy Corbyn is new UK Labour leader”, claimed that the “far-left MP has empathised with Hezbollah, Hamas” and that British Jews were “alarmed by his ties to ‘holocaust deniers, terrorists and some outright anti-Semites’”.1

All false accusations, as explained by Jewish supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. For example, Jews for Jeremy, which has almost 300 members and was launched in response to what its founders say were “unscrupulous” attacks from the media, comments:

“Some members of the group live in Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency, some have worked with him on various campaigns, and many know him from his reputation and his tireless work for the disadvantaged in society, including migrants and asylum-seekers …. Members applaud his efforts to bring together opposing parties to many conflicts in dialogue in a constructive way, and are dismayed that in some cases this has been held against him.2”

The Jewish Leadership Council, which claims to represent more than 30 community groups, including Jewish charities, synagogues as well as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, has adopted a more cautious approach. It released the following press statement soon after the declaration of the votes:

“The Jewish Leadership Council will, as we always have, find ways of working with her majesty’s opposition on matters relevant to us. Over the course of the leadership campaign, we had a number of concerns regarding some of Mr Corbyn’s past connections, and his stances on policy areas of great significance to the Jewish community. It is important that the legitimate concerns of the community are addressed.
“We look forward to meeting with Mr Corbyn at the first available opportunity to discuss our concerns, but also ways in which the Labour Party and the Jewish community can continue to work together in a spirit of cooperation and understanding. We hope that the labour movement remains a welcoming environment for members of the Jewish community, many of whom have lifelong commitments to it.3”

For its part, the influential English-language daily, Arab News, which is published in London, relies on an article by veteran rightwing Iranian columnist Amir Taheri:

“Corbyn admires Ali Khamenei because he is supposed to be ‘standing against the Americans’. Corbyn could not have invited Mullah Omar or Saddam Hussein to dinner. If he sheds tears over their demise, it is because they fell victim to American ‘imperialism’. For Corbyn, Israel is a hate object not because it is Jewish or even ‘usurper of Palestinian land’, but because it is supposed to be an ally of the US.4”

Absolute nonsense. Jeremy Corbyn has no illusions about the Iranian clergy. In the 1980s he was the first and for many years the only British MP raising the issue of political prisoners in Iran and opposing the execution of leftwing activists in Iranian jails. He regularly met exiled activists and often raised the issue of repression in the Islamic Republic in parliament.

In the early 2000s he opposed war and sanctions against Iran, but he has no time for forces like Iran’s royalists, who advocate ‘regime change from above’, courtesy of Saudi, US and Israeli funds.

And Corbyn’s close ally John McDonnell has played a crucial role in supporting Iranian workers and political prisoners in his role as honorary president of Hands Off the People of Iran (Hopi).

In 2011 this is what he wrote in a joint call written with Yassamine Mather:

“At this current time of enormous political and economic crisis, continued UN sanctions and war threats, Iranian workers are in a very difficult situation. This is why it is absolutely vital that the workers’ movement in this country organises material and ideological solidarity with workers’, women’s and students’ struggles in Iran – they are our natural allies and a true beacon of hope for genuine democracy and freedom.5”

This is what comrade McDonnell wrote in 2011 on the launch of a campaign to free all political prisoners in Iran:

“We formed Hopi at a time when there was a real danger of imminent attack on Iran, right after the war on Iraq. While opposing any imperialist attacks, we positioned ourselves in clear, active solidarity with the people of Iran, who are fighting against their theocratic regime. That also led us to clearly oppose all sanctions on the country, because in our view that is just another form of imperialism attacking the people of Iran. I think we have successfully engaged others in that discussion ….
“However, at the moment there is a certain quietude. Partially this has to do with other activities in their spheres of influence that the imperialists are anxious about, for example, in Afghanistan. And there is an acceptance that, as long as the Iranian regime is quiet, ‘maybe we can turn a blind eye’. And that is why we have not had any major political leader in the west take on the question of Iranian political prisoners in a serious way …
“There is a certain acquiescence that the barbarity will go on and, as long as this barbarity in Iran does not affect the rest of the Middle East or the rest of the world, it is almost acceptable – very much in line with what goes on in other barbaric countries in that region. There is a real vacuum on the question of human rights in Iran, whereby those who look can easily discover the brutality of the executions, the hangings, the tortures, the arrests, the denials of human rights. But the media and mainstream politicians are not interested.
“Just as Hopi had to stand up and put forward a principled position against war and against the theocratic regime, we now have to stand up and fight for the freedom of all political prisoners. The responsibility falls on our shoulders, because nobody else is doing it.6”

In fact. with the exception of one rightwing newspaper, where a reporter compared Corbyn’s dress style with the refusal of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to wear fashionable clothes (!), the Iranian media have concentrated on Corbyn’s anti-war position and his support for the Palestinians. As far as I can see, unlike Amir Taheri, no-one within the Islamic regime is claiming Corbyn is a supporter, let alone an ‘admirer’, of the Iranian supreme leader, ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The pro-government news station, Press TV, reminds everyone of a short-term but well publicised association Jeremy Corbyn had with it in 2010, when he chaired one of its programmes. However, even Press TV cannot produce anything other than general comments about, say, the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

The Middle East Eye sums up the feelings of most progressive, secular forces in the region:

“Here’s the reality. Reality is four civil wars – four fires raging out of control, which are consuming Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya. Possibly five if security in Egypt deteriorates further. Reality is the strategic failure of every intervention since the first Gulf War. Reality is 432,761 refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean so far this year, already double last year’s total. Reality is the loss of power and influence of the US, Britain and France, not least over their traditional allies – Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt – who are taking decisions on their own. What is it about this reality that is worth preserving? The fact that it could get a lot worse? It already is.
“Credibility: the accolade is awarded to every leader who makes a ‘brave and principled stand’, but who subsequently does everything in his power to avoid accountability for his actions. David Cameron wants to force a vote in parliament which would allow the RAF to bomb Islamic State (IS) in Syria, despite his defeat on a similar vote to bomb Bashar al-Assad after the chemical attack in Damascus. British pilots have already been caught using US planes, and now RAF drones have been involved …
“Credibility or consistency is not a word often applied to policy. British government policy on Syria has lurched one way and then another. It started by encouraging the rebels to believe that Assad’s overthrow was imminent at both Geneva conferences. It has now morphed into one in which Assad could stay in a transitional government. Cameron’s policy on Egypt is to engage the dictator in power, without having any traction over him or any hope of moderating his rule. Abdel Fatah al-Sisi is going to be Cameron’s next guest in Downing Street.7”

Note early day motion 279 protesting against the Sisi visit. Tabled on July 9 2015 it calls on the prime minister to: “rescind the invitation, to put pressure on the Egyptian government to take immediate steps to demonstrate its commitment to democratic freedoms and human rights, including the revocation of all death sentences, and to stop licensing equipment for export to the Egyptian military and security forces.”8 Its primary sponsor is Green MP Caroline Lucas and amongst its five other sponsors we find the signatures of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell.

In other words, it is not comrades Corbyn and McDonnell who are on the side of dictators. It is David Cameron l

Notes

1. www.timesofisrael.com/jeremy-corbyn-claims
-victory-in-labour-leadership-race.
2. http://jewsforjeremy.org.
3. www.thejlc.org/2015/09/labour-leadership-result
-statement-from-the-jewish-leadership-council.
4. www.arabnews.com/columns/news/802576.
5. http://hopoi.org/2011/07/from-john-mcdonnell-mp-support-hopi-vs-lrc-cricket-match.
6. http://hopoi.org/2011/03/john-mcdonnell-mp
-free-jafar-panahi-and-all-political-prisoners.
7. www.middleeasteye.net/columns/corbyns-
ascension-no-accident-778799299#sthash.oO1p72rN.dpuf.
8. www.parliament.uk/edm/2015-16/279.

The left

Hoist by its own petard

Gallery

The right has given us a gift and we have used it. Charles Gradnitzer of Labour Party Marxists recalls how it all came about.

This article attempts to explain the previous left challenges to the leadership position and why they failed; the old electoral system and the manufactured scandal that changed it; the current state of the Labour left; and the opportunities a Corbyn victory presents to the left and the grassroots membership of the Labour Party.

As most people are aware, Tony Blair won the leadership election in 1994. He was standing against John Prescott and self-professed “moron” Margaret Beckett, so it is safe to say that there was no left candidate. In 2006, anticipating that Blair would be stepping down the following year, John McDonnell announced that he intended to stand as the leftwing candidate in order to ensure there would be a debate within the party and not simply a ‘coronation’ of Gordon Brown as Blair’s successor.

In 2007, a few months before Blair set a formal date for his resignation, Michael Meacher announced his intention to stand. Meacher had been in the Socialist Campaign Group with McDonnell until 1983, when he was expelled after he joined the shadow cabinet. He was a minister for 20 years (and even voted for the invasion of Iraq) until he fell out with Blair and returned to the backbenches in 2003. After this he began to move back to the left and attack Blair over Iraq.

So in 2007 we arrived at a situation where the left was fielding two candidates in a leadership election – presumably to make up for the failure to stand anyone at all in 1994. But with two days to go before the close of nominations Meacher stepped down and asked his supporters to back John McDonnell, who was relying on nominations from Meacher’s supporters and those of the centre-left deputy leadership candidate, Jon Cruddas. However, much of Meacher’s support came from MPs who did not see McDonnell, a rebellious backbencher, as a credible candidate and the Brownites subsequently pressured 14 of Meacher’s supporters not to nominate McDonnell. Cruddas supporters also failed to back him and in the end he fell 16 nominations short of the 45-MP threshold. This meant that Gordon Brown, with a total of 313 nominations, was elected unopposed and the leadership conference was reduced to the coronation McDonnell had predicted in 2006.

When Brown resigned as both prime minister and leader of the Labour Party after the 2010 general election, which resulted in a hung parliament, the Miliband brothers and Ed Balls declared their intention to stand, while comrade McDonnell also announced that he would stand again. But once again there was a second left candidate – Diane Abbott, a fellow member of the Socialist Campaign Group – and this time McDonnell dropped out, asking his supporters to back Abbott. However, she went out in the first round, having received the lowest vote of any candidate from the parliamentary and constituency sections of the electoral college (though she did head Andy Burnham and Ed Balls in the union and affiliate section). So it was ‘Red Ed’ who won the leadership election in 2010, narrowly beating his brother, David Miliband, thanks to the “pernicious influence” of the trade unions – a truly bizarre claim, given that the vote of a union member was worth 0.13% of that of an MP.

Experiment

What was interesting about the 2010 election was a little noticed experiment conducted by John Mann in his Bassetlaw constituency, the outcome of which would go on to drastically alter the course of Labour Party history.

Mann, convinced that there was a need to “widen democracy” and open up the leadership election to the public, identified Labour supporters in his constituency and conducted a ‘primary’ to determine who he should vote for in the leadership election. At a cost of several thousand pounds he worked with the Bassetlaw CLP and other volunteers to conduct a postal ballot of over 10,000 people who were said to be Labour supporters.

Writing for Progress magazine in July 2010, Andy Burnham – who was, of course, standing as a leadership candidate – praised John Mann’s primary. In his article he stated that membership fees were a barrier to participation, that he wanted to create an affiliate membership (ie, ‘registered supporters’), and that as leader of the Labour Party he would look to include registered supporters in future internal elections and selections. (To Burnham’s dismay Labour supporters in Bassetlaw voted for David Miliband in the primary and John Mann cast his ballot accordingly.)

Stephen Twigg, the chair of the rightwing Progress group from 2005 to 2010 and its current honorary president, wrote a contribution to The purple book, published by Progress in 2011. In his chapter, entitled ‘Letting the people decide: redistributing power and renewing democracy’, he stated:

“In 2005 only 1.3% of the electorate was a member of a political party, afallfrom4%in1983…The fall in membership has resulted in fewer people being involved in selecting Labour’s MPs. The average constituency Labour Party has around 300 members. This equates to a very small percentage of the local population. When candidates were selected by large memberships 50 years ago, it was easier to see how they reflected the wishes of the local population.

“How, then, could Labour seek to increase the influence of ordinary people over the decision of who represents them? One way would be to introduce closed primaries …”

He went on to advocate ending the automatic affiliation of union members in favour of an opt-in system; and abolishing the electoral college in favour of ‘one member, one vote’ (Omov) – “opening up access to the Labour Party and how it operates should be an important organisational goal”, he said.

When Ed Miliband became leader in 2010, he immediately set about reviewing the party structure – as Blair had done in 1997 – through a bogus “consultation” known as Refounding Labour. Party units and individual members were asked to make submissions to this review, but when the recommendations were published it was clear that the party had, at best, cherry-picked submissions – in all likelihood the recommendations were a foregone conclusion and the submissions were mostly ignored.

The end result of this review was the introduction of ‘registered supporters’. These did not have to pay a fee, but were largely election fodder. They were not involved in internal party selections – if they were involved in the party at all.

The Labour left saw straight through Refounding Labour: it was a step towards achieving the rule changes Progress wanted to make. Writing in Left Futures, Jon Lansman predicted that registered supporters “could be given votes in leadership elections as if they were affiliated members”.1 This prediction was not entirely hard to make, given that Progress had been pushing for primaries, using Mann’s Bassetlaw experiment as a case study on widening political engagement with the party.

Falkirk and Collins

With Progress gunning for opt-in affiliation and Omov to reduce the “power of the unions” in the Labour Party, the executive committee of the Unite union adopted a new political strategy in 2011 to “reclaim Labour”. The strategy consisted of three major goals: maintaining the union link; increasing the number of trade union or “trade union-friendly” prospective parliamentary candidates; and increasing the number of trade unionists in constituency Labour Parties in order to secure the success of the first two goals.

Though Progress had failed to get primaries, opt-in affiliation and Omov into the Refounding Labour recommendations, its opportunity finally arrived in 2013, when Unite’s political strategy blew up in its face. In July that year, Eric Joyce, the disgraced former Labour MP for Falkirk, accused Unite of rigging the selection process.

The Unite convenor at Grangemouth oil refinery, Stephen Deans, had become the chair of Falkirk West CLP shortly after Joyce had resigned after nutting a Tory MP in the House of Commons bar. Deans began to implement Unite’s political strategy in Falkirk, recruiting union members from Grangemouth into the CLP. While Deans was chair the size of the CLP doubled from fewer than 100 members to over 200.

Falkirk West had agreed to have an all- women shortlist, which would exclude the Progress candidate, Gregor Poynton. However, when it was discovered that the trade union-friendly Katie Myler was Unite’s preferred candidate, Progress went apeshit, with Peter Mandelson warning Miliband at the 2013 Progress conference that the unions were trying to “take over” the party.

In March 2013 the Labour NEC created a subcommittee to investigate claims that Unite had signed up and paid for members without their knowledge and the report was published in June that year. As a result both Katie Myler and Stephen Deans were suspended from the party and Falkirk was placed under “special measures”. The report was handed to the police in the hope that Unite would be charged with fraud, but Police Scotland concluded that “there are insufficient grounds to support a criminal investigation at this time”.

In one of the most infuriating examples of the pot calling the kettle black, the report revealed that the Blairite candidate backed by Progress, Gregor Poynton, had paid party subscriptions for 11 new members, which was actually against the party rules, whereas the report exonerated Unite of any wrongdoing.

In spite of the report and the police investigation, former Labour Party general secretary Ray Collins was asked to head a review to make recommendations for party reform. Collins, who had been assistant general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union until 2008, recommended most of the policies Progress had tried to push through in 2011: the abolition of the electoral college, the introduction of Omov, mandatory opt-in affiliation of union members, new rights for registered supporters, including the right to vote in the leadership election. In order to appease the Parliamentary Labour Party, Collins recommending raising the threshold for leadership nominations from 12.5% to 15% of Labour MPs.

The Collins review was put to a special conference, to which I was delegated in 2014. The Labour left vociferously opposed the recommendations, while they were supported by the centre and the right. In the run-up to conference delegates received numerous letters from Ed Miliband urging them to vote for the reforms. One such letter told the story of Paul, a lifelong trade unionist and figment of Miliband’s imagination, who finally joined the Labour Party after the reforms were announced – on the basis that “until now the party never felt democratic. It never felt like one I could join.”

The event itself was a stage-managed stitch-up. The first sign of this was that it turned out there had been no conference arrangements committee and therefore no CAC report. A number of CLPs had submitted emergency motions which were not on the agenda and, when this was pointed out to conference, Angela Eagle assured delegates from the chair that the CAC had met in January. But if it met in January it would not have been able to consider submitted motions or actually do any arranging, because the Collins review was not published till February.

The conference went on as planned. General secretary after general secretary stood up to denounce the reforms, but in the end it was all hot air. When it came to the vote, 96% of the unions (with the honourable exception of the Bakers Union) and 74% of the CLPs voted for the reforms, giving a total of 86.29% in favour and 13.71% against. The experiment conducted by John Mann in 2010 had borne fruit.

Labour left

In 2015 the Labour Party suffered a crushing defeat under Ed Miliband. In Scotland the party was all but wiped out. This defeat had major ramifications for the political composition of the PLP. Seven sitting Campaign Group and Left Platform MPs were wiped out by the Scottish National Party, and five Campaign Group MPs stood down and were replaced by candidates that are not leftwing.

The 11 left ex-MPs would have been enough to put Corbyn on the ballot without any nominations from MPs who later regretted it. In addition to this 18 Left Platform PPCs were stood in Conservative strongholds, continuing a tradition of parachuting centrist and right wing candidates into Labour strongholds while sticking socialists in unwinnable seats.

One of the most striking things about the Corbyn campaign has been that it reveals how badly the parliamentary party reflects the views and wishes of the membership and the unions. This is the result of NEC interference in constituency selections and the fact that the Labour right has been well organised for years. There is very little organisation of the ‘hard left’ or even ‘soft left’. There is no leftwing membership organisation that regularly meets, holds press conferences, tries to win important internal and parliamentary selections, and produces economic policy documents. In short the left has nothing analogous to Progress. A leftwing proto- Progress exists in the sense that the left does some of these activities, but it is not organised into one organisation.

Luke Akehurst, the secretary of Labour First, produced an interesting article on what he calls the “hard left” for his blog. The situation he describes is basically right: the ephemeral left organises through “networks” of Facebook groups, email lists, phone calls, and meetings of various established groups. However, his claim that these “networks” are an “experienced and highly motivated machine” is grossly exaggerated.

The Labour Representation Committee, set up in 2004, is not capable of organising anything on the scale that is needed. It has its conferences and some of its comrades sell Labour Briefing at meetings, but beyond that it does not really do a great deal. It is haemorrhaging members and looks like it is on the verge of collapse.

Andrew Fisher, who was joint secretary of the LRC with Pete Firmin, started the Left Economics Advisory Panel, which, as the name suggests, produces ‘leftwing’ (ie, neo-Keynesian) economic policy documents and press releases. Fisher has also written a book called Austerity: the failed experiment.

The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy tends to concentrate on internal party matters: electing people to the conference arrangements committee, the NEC, the national policy forum; submitting soft-left contemporary motions to conference and rule changes aimed at making the Labour Party more democratic and accountable to the membership.

A group not mentioned by Luke Akehurst is Socialist Action. Few people know who is in SA because when it split from the International Marxist Group it began to pursue a ‘deep entryist’ strategy. It is so secretive I would wager there will be members of Socialist Action who do not know each other. It does not organise openly. You can sometimes guess who is in it – if they once worked as advisors for Ken Livingstone when he was London mayor, for example, or today they talk about deficit reduction through investment rather than public-sector cuts.

Membership of these groups tend to overlap and they mostly stand for various positions under the banner of the Centre-Left Grassroots Alliance. A fact that did not go unnoticed by Akehurst, who points out how undemocratic this arrangement is. He notes that the name is ironic, given that one of the main groups in the CLGA is the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. The CLGA also has a website that carries reports from the CLPD about NEC and NPF meetings, conference, and other Labour Party internal affairs.

The Centre for Labour and Social Studies is also worth mentioning because when it was launched it was described in The Guardian as a “leftwing antidote to Blairite pressure group Progress”. Owen Jones describes it in similar, though less hostile terms, as the left’s answer to Progress. Considering it has Sally Hunt from the University and College Union and Sir Paul Kenny on its national advisory panel, I would question whether this think-tank could really be considered leftwing. The advisory panel also includes the former leader of Respect, Salma Yaqoob, so it is not really even part of the Labour Party.

In addition to this there is the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs of which Corbyn is a member. It was set up in 1982 as a split from the Tribune group after Kinnock and other members of Tribune abstained in the deputy leadership election in 1981, costing Tony Benn the job. Amusingly, Corbyn’s refrain that his candidacy is “not about personalities, but about policies” is exactly what Benn said in 1981 when he stood against Denis Healey for deputy leader.

Two other ‘groups’ worth mentioning are the Left Platform, which was actually the name used for a statement put out before the general election, signed by sitting Labour MPs and PPCs. The second consists of the 10 newly elected Labour MPs who, after winning the election, wrote an open letter committing themselves to anti-austerity politics. Among the list of signatories are Corbyn supporters such as Richard Burgon, Clive Lewis and Kate Osamor.

Nomination

The Left Platform is worth mentioning because its post-election meeting put the dire state of the Labour left into perspective. On May 12, it met in London to discuss the prospects of standing an anti-austerity candidate. John McDonnell, having failed to get enough nominations in the last two leadership elections, immediately ruled himself out. Comrade McDonnell and other MPs thought that they could get at most 16 nominations, due to the 2015 wipe-out of the Campaign Group and the lack of new socialist MPs.

At first there was a campaign to get Jon Trickett to stand. There was even a change.org petition to put pressure on him, but once it became obvious he was not going to put his name forward, the left started searching for an alternative. Some wanted Michael Meacher to stand as the anti-austerity candidate, given that he was one of the initiators of the Left Platform, but he had already indicated that he was going to back Andy Burnham. It was then that comrade Corbyn took up the mantle.

The best anybody on the Labour left was hoping for at that point was that Corbyn would get enough airtime to put forward an anti-austerity position before the nominations closed, but after his Facebook page exploded a campaign was mounted to secure him enough nominations to get on the ballot paper. The campaign argued that the inclusion of Corbyn would widen the debate and enfranchise thousands of members who would otherwise not engage with the leadership election. Elements of the centre and the right – including Luke Akehurst – supported his inclusion on the ballot in the hopes that Corbyn would be humiliated during the leadership debate and the “hard left” would be crushed and demoralised.

Tens of thousands of Labour members and supporters bombarded MPs via email and social media in order to get him on the ballot. It was clear from some of the responses that this pressure from the grassroots accounted for at least some of the support. Other MPs clearly nominated Corbyn in order to shield Burnham from claims that he was too leftwing and in the pocket of the unions.

The morning that the nominations closed it did not look as though he was going to make it onto the ballot – in spite of the optimistic editorial in the Morning Star and assurances from his campaign team that they had enough support from MPs. But that morning there was a last- minute surge of nominations and as the clock struck 12 he had made it onto the ballot.

The first sign that Corbyn was reaching out to people beyond the notoriously insular world of online leftism was at the Newsnight Labour Party leadership hustings on June 17. During the hustings Corbyn had the most audible support, even though he did not capitulate, as the other candidates did, to one particular chauvinist in the audience.

In July YouGov dropped a polling bombshell: Corbyn would win in the final round with 53%. At first this poll was dismissed, but to the terror of the centre and the right such findings kept on coming in. Poll after poll was putting Corbyn in first place. In addition to this the supporting nominations from unions and constituency parties were also rolling in. In the end Corbyn had the support of 36 MPs, two MEPs, six major trade unions, 152 constituencies, and two affiliated socialist societies, putting him ahead of the other three candidates.

The campaign has exceeded the wildest expectations of many comrades. He has been speaking to packed-out meetings across the country and the party has doubled in size. 160,000 people registered as members, affiliates, or supporters in the last 24 hours before the registration closed.

Opportunities

There are, as I see it, two opportunities here for the left: the first is democratic reform of the Labour Party to undo the damage Tony Blair did. The second is a serious regroupment of the left within the party.

To grasp the first opportunity, we must first understand what is undemocratic about the Labour Party. In 1997 the annual conference adopted Tony Blair’s changes to the way the party programme and manifesto were developed. This was known as Partnership into Power and it remains in place to this day. The changes introduced six policy commissions, the NPF and the joint policy committee, and used these new bodies, along with ‘contemporary resolutions’, to reduce the role of conference in determining the party programme.

The policy commissions – which comprise 16-20 members representing the government, the NEC and the NPF – produce policy documents for the national policy forum and the joint policy committee (JPC) to discuss. The JPC acts as a steering group for the NPF, and is made up of representatives from the cabinet, the NEC and the NPF itself. It determines what policy the NPF will debate and when. The NPF is made up of 194 representatives from all sections of the party – CLP members and trade union delegates have the greatest representation, but it also includes the entire NEC.

Each year the NPF produces a report and presents it to the annual conference. Conference votes on the document as a whole, which is several hundred pages long. Each report represents one of three stages of the policy development process: stage one is a single document that considers the “big challenges” of the day; stage two outlines specific policies to tackle them; stage three produces the draft ‘final year policy’ document. Once the draft FYP document is passed by conference, the party is then asked to submit amendments to it. These are taken to the final NPF, where they are debated, and the final version is agreed by consensus. This document is taken to the annual conference, and once it is rubber- stamped it becomes the party programme.

At the annual conference the unions and constituency parties are able to submit contemporary resolutions, which can only address matters that the NPF could not discuss in its reports, so they have to pertain to events that have occurred in the three months between the last NPF meeting and the conference (hence the name ‘contemporary resolution’). They are only added to the programme if they receive two-thirds majority support.

Once this bureaucratic process is complete, a ‘Clause V’ meeting is held, where various delegates from the cabinet, the unions, the backbenches, the NEC and the NPF select which bits of the programme will go into the party manifesto. It is widely know that much of the FYP documents and almost all of the contemporary resolutions are left out or, if they are included, they are often reworded. This has yet to be quantified, but the CLPD has commissioned a report in order to identify all the differences between the party programme and last year’s manifesto.

This process was supposed to widen participation in drafting the manifesto, but in reality it has shut members out of that process even more. Most delegates to conference do not know what is going on, and this lack of knowledge is compounded by the fact that the speeches in favour of the FYP document usually do not correspond to the contents of the document. And, even if delegates do understand what is happening, I would wager that only a tiny minority have actually read the FYP document. In the unlikely case that they have and they disagree with it, the only option they have is to vote for or against it: it cannot be amended or taken in parts at annual conference.

Neither is the national policy forum itself transparent or accountable. Nobody knows what goes on at the NPF: it is not live-streamed or minuted, and delegates do not give report-backs, so you cannot know how your delegates have voted. You do not know which amendments were even considered or on what basis they were accepted or rejected; nor do you know who voted for or against them. Even if you did, the Clause V meeting which determines the manifesto renders the entire exercise of creating a party programme redundant – the participants are appointed, not delegated, and the meeting is not exactly transparent.

This entire process has to be changed and Corbyn must commit himself to doing this. As previous leaders have done, he could organise a review – similar to Partnership into Power or Refounding Labour, only less reactionary – in order to simplify the process, as well as making it democratic and transparent. I am not sure that going back to cobbling together often contradictory policy from party conferences at a Clause V meeting is the best approach, but a simplified, accountable, transparent, representative body – with recallable delegates – that is responsible for drafting the party programme and manifesto would be a good start; the role of the party conference should be to debate, amend, insert and delete sections of the party programme and manifesto.

There is a whole raft of other measures that I would like to see: the abolition of trigger ballots, the ability of constituency parties to recall sitting MPs and councillors, the end of NEC interference in parliamentary selections, a serious campaign to get all trade unions and other socialist groups to affiliate to the party, and an end to bans and proscriptions of socialist groups.

The second opportunity is a serious regroupment of the left. Hundreds of thousands of people have flooded into the party since the general election. As many as two thirds of these people have joined in order to support Jeremy Corbyn. Currently a small proportion are meeting at phone banks in order to canvass for him. They are also gathering at meetings of local Red Labour groups, which were recently established and largely existed on social media until they branched out into the real world.

It would be an absolute disaster if the left failed to turn the waves of Corbyn supporters flooding into the party from an amorphous mass into something more concrete.

Notes

1. www.leftfutures.org/2011/07/refounding-la- bour-attacks-union-influence-and-will-disap- point-members.

2. The Guardian August 16 2012.

Democracy and the Labour Party, Inside the Labour Party, The left

Register for Corbyn

Gallery 4 Comments

The campaign to elect Jeremy Corbyn must be the start of the fight to transform Labour, writes Charles Gradnitzer of Labour Party Marxists

With only a few seconds to spare before the Labour leadership nominations closed at midday on June 15, Jeremy Corbyn secured his place on the ballot paper. This was the result of the pressure placed on MPs to nominate Corbyn by grassroots Labour Party activists and organisations, including the social media campaign run by Red Labour.

His performance during the hustings on Newsnight on June 17 demonstrated that he is the only supportable candidate. He drew a clear line between himself and the other candidates, never capitulating to anti-migrant chauvinism, putting forward a clear anti-austerity message, championing the welfare state and opposing imperialist wars.

When an audience member asked about immigration, the other candidates fell over themselves to engage in the sort of anti-migrant chauvinism they imagined people wanted to hear, with Liz Kendall reminding us of recent images from the Daily Mail showing asylum-seekers clinging onto trucks in Calais in order to live a life on benefits in Britain. Corbyn instead did the unthinkable by making a principled and impassioned speech in favour of the right to migrate, which was met with rapturous applause.

The other candidates also stuck to the official austerity-lite message, with Kendall telling a firefighter who had voted for the UK Independence Party as a “protest” against Tory and Labour cuts that she would continue with the ‘deficit reduction’ plan. Later, Andy Burnham became confused about whether he thought Labour overspent when it was in government, replying both “yes” and “no” at different points in his answer. Corbyn was the only candidate to oppose austerity, privatisation and the marketisation of public services – statements that were met with more applause.

The final and crucial difference between Corbyn and the other candidates could be seen in his statements in favour of party democracy. While he does not go as far as we in Labour Party Marxists would like, his proposal to be able to elect a leader every year and his criticism of Tony Blair’s destruction of party democracy are supportable and a step in the right direction.

Of course, you cannot gauge how popular somebody is from the reaction of the sort of people who would voluntarily travel to Nuneaton to participate in a Labour Party leadership hustings and it is also foolish to rely on polls. But it is safe to say that Corbyn’s message seems already to be resonating with a substantial section of the working class.

Smears

While the Newsnight audience seemed receptive to Corbyn, he has been attacked by the rightwing press, Labour Party MPs and an assortment of commentators

Alan Johnson, editor of the pro-Israel Fathom journal, tells us that Corbyn, as the “most leftwing candidate”, really “should” be getting his vote. But no, he will not be backing Corbyn because of his involvement in the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.2 Johnson’s article consists of a couple of quotes from Corbyn defending Raed Salah, a leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, followed by a list of unpleasant remarks from Salah. The intention being to smear Corbyn as an anti-Semite.

Johnson also criticises Corbyn for inviting the Lebanese minister of agriculture, Hussein Hajj Hassan, a member of Hezbollah, to launch the British section of the International Union of Parliamentarians for Palestine. There then follow several anti-Semitic quotes from Hezbollah’s founder, Hassan Nasrallah.

The article is incredibly dishonest for two reasons. Firstly Corbyn is not an anti-Semite or standing on an anti-Semitic platform and Johnson can only imply that he is; secondly Johnson, despite claiming to be of the left, would never support Corbyn unless he was a pro-Israel chauvinist like himself. Nevertheless, this slander has made it into the rightwing press, which is happy to join in the smears.

From within the party Corbyn has been attacked by rightwing MPs and councillors, though in some cases their criticisms ought to be taken as glowing endorsements. Simon Danczuk MP wrote: “It seems like there is a small group of MPs who would rather lose the general election, as long as they could say they had stuck to their principles” – as if principles are something to be ashamed of. Jonathan Reynolds, former aide to Ed Miliband, said Corbyn “would not ‘improve the debate’, but would shift the contest even further to the left”, when what the party needed was to “accept the world as it is, not how we’d like it to be”.

There is also a campaign from Conservative Party members to register as Labour supporters in order to vote for Corbyn. Ostensibly this is because they think Labour would be ‘unelectable’ if he was leader and the Tories would automatically benefit (if he actually won the leadership contest this would be used to cast doubt on the legitimacy of his victory, of course). No doubt the Tories do think that Corbyn is unelectable, or else they would not be Tories, but this is surely part of a campaign to make sure he has no chance.

The leadership contest is now a straight-up ‘One member, one vote’ affair, since the rules were changed at the special conference in March 2014. This was one of the few positive changes to the internal election system, as it drastically reduced the power of the Parliamentary Labour Party, which accounted for one third of the votes under the previous electoral college system.

If you are not an individual Labour member, but belong to an affiliated trade union or socialist society, then you can register as an affiliated supporter for free. If not, then you can become a registered supporter for a £3 fee.3 Remember, you must sign up before 12 noon on August 12 in order to have a vote in the leadership election.

If you are an individual member then your Constituency Labour Party ought to be holding a supporting nomination meeting, where the merits of the leadership candidates will be debated and the CLP can choose to give a supporting nomination to one of them. It is important for Corbyn to get as many of these supporting nominations as possible in order to highlight the schism between the PLP and the Labour Party membership as a whole. It could also bump up his list of nominations from the original 36 when the ballot papers are mailed out.

But the campaign to shift Labour left should not end in September when the new leader is elected. It needs to be the start of a more powerful movement to transform the Labour Party into an instrument for working class advance – an ally in the Marxist struggle for international socialism. To this end we encourage all those involved in the campaign to join us in Labour Party Marxists.4

Notes

1. See www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/06/17/conrad- landin/jeremy4leader.

2. http://leftfootforward.org/2015/06/an-open- letter-to-jeremy-corbyn.

3. http://support.labour.org.uk.

4. http://labourpartymarxists.org.uk.