Democracy and the Labour Party, The right

Something for everyone

Gallery

Readers of Margaret Beckett’s report on the general election defeat see only what they want to see – and miss the big picture, argues Jim Grant of Labour Party Marxists

It can sometimes seem nowadays that the Labour Party is divided into two internally united and violently opposed camps – the left and the right, with the suitability of the party’s new leader as the issue of principle on which they are divided.

In fact, the upper echelons of Labour have always contained a morass of centrists: grey people who worship government office above all else, and will pull behind those who promise it. It so happens that those promises are most compellingly made by the right in ‘normal’ times (we shall see why later), and so we find such people most often under the right’s magnanimous care. They include former rightwingers left behind, somewhat bewildered, by the aggressive Toryward trajectory of the Blair years; high-profile and basically apolitical ‘safe pairs of hands’ (Jack Straw, say); and a rump of also-rans and sometimes-weres.

Among the latter, we might name Margaret Beckett. Beckett picked up a few front-line roles in the Blair years, becoming Britain’s first female foreign secretary, for those who keep track of that kind of thing. Yet she has been quiet for the last few years, after being sidelined by Brown. She got back in the news last year as one of the “morons” who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership; but by that time, presumably, she was already compiling her most recent ticket to the front pages – a 36-page report on how Labour can have been so blindsided by defeat last May – on the say-so of interim leader Harriet Harman.

As befitting her political profile, Beckett has produced a report regarded as most amenable by, well, almost everyone. The left will be reassured that Ed Miliband’s periodic ‘left turns’ produced his team’s most popular policies – a freeze on energy prices, the mansion tax, the gentlest nudges against the corrupt bonanza of privatised rail transport. The right will find their catch-words in there too, in Labour’s failure to make the case for its economic competence, and its failure to close the gap with the Tories over touchy subjects like immigration. Stephen Bush rather acidly notes on the New Statesman website:

A failure to win trust on “issues of connection” – ie, welfare and immigration – is blamed in part for the defeat, but whether that involves a harsher tone or “winning the argument” for either high immigration, higher social security or both is left unclear. Labour divides into four quarters on this … None of these groups can say with any honesty that the Beckett report provides them with any clarity as to which approach to pursue.1

Quite apart from giving warring camps within Labour something new to squabble over, Beckett’s report has been met with the usual potluck of cherry-picking and outright mendacity from the press. We were right all along, they say: nobody “trusted” Labour on the economy, nobody “trusted” Labour on immigration, and nobody could see Ed Miliband as prime ministerial material – you know: his teeth, his bacon sandwiches, etc.

Thus findings on the popularity of Miliband’s anaemically leftwing policy platforms are, of course, ignored. It does not fit into the prevailing narrative of ‘economic trust’, though we note that this phrase can mean an awful lot of things, depending on who you ask and how. Democratic primary voters in America, for example, ‘trust’ the reformist-socialist, Bernie Sanders, over Hillary Clinton on economic matters – presumably meaning that they trust him to actually make Wall Street bankers’ lives a little more difficult, rather than just huff and puff a little under pressure (however naive this trust actually is).

The bigger lie, however, is a sneakier one. All these problems have one thing in common (alongside their vagueness and artificiality): they are all matters of perception. Yet they are being presented as if the Labour Party’s fate last May was entirely in its own hands. Miliband could have been more ‘prime ministerial’. ‘Economic trust’ could have been restored.

But this is not how political perceptions work. There is another agent in the process that has a big impact on how policies, politicians and so forth are perceived. This agent is, of course, the very same media currently crowing about their correctness.

Believing their lies

So to return to ‘economic trust’ for a moment – the claim, again, is that the Labour Party was not able to shake the perception that it was at fault for creating the post-2007 mess. This is a truly fantastical notion at face value. There was a global financial crisis, for heaven’s sake. Britain was not one island of disorder in a calm ocean of prosperity. Yet this absurd accusation was hurled about by Tory frontbenchers as if it were self-evident. Given that they did so, it would be quite simple for the lowliest hack on a national newspaper to demonstrate how risible the line was every time it was trotted out.

This, obviously, did not happen – even The Guardian and the like were often too busy aiding Blairite manoeuvres against Miliband to point this out with much force. Most other papers repeated such horseshit in every other editorial. What is true of ‘economic trust’ is true also of the immigration issue, and most especially the doomsday scenario of a Labour-Scottish National Party coalition government – Rupert Murdoch played a devilishly clever game by having his papers simultaneously support the SNP in Scotland and whip up chauvinist hysteria against them in England. The crowing of the Mail, Times and company thus amounts to the following statement: ‘Labour lost the election because people believed the lies we told them repeatedly over the course of five years.’ Any Labour politician who repeats any of these question-begging non-explanations for Labour’s defeat is thereby exposed as a traitor and an enemy agent.

For what this whole rigmarole amounts to is nothing short of a protection racket – in fact it is worse. The mafia will take your money in return for not burning down your restaurant; if you pay, they will at least keep to their end of the bargain. When it comes to the press, however, they will demand genuflection before their interests, and in return they might choose not to ridicule you at some later date. Those who urge Labour to make the necessary payments can promise nothing, and if it does not work the prescription will be the same: give more ground, bend the knee further, still with no guarantee, or even reasonable expectation, of success.

Our centrists will, of course, be concerned that this is the only game in town – even if the house always wins. Indeed, it is – at the moment. We in Labour Party Marxists are often ridiculed for not encouraging the formation of ‘left governments’ under conditions where they will lead to disappointment, and many of these same critical comrades were holding their noses and voting for Miliband in May. Yet what if Beckett’s report had been unnecessary, and Ed had triumphed (with or without nationalist support)? Where would we be now?

Stuck with an unpopular Labour PM in pell-mell retreat, obviously enough. That energy price freeze would not have made it to Christmas. The Tories would not be in government, but they would transparently be a government in waiting, no doubt with someone worse than Cameron in charge. And at the grassroots? Would we have a 400,000-strong Labour Party, replenished overwhelmingly with leftwing recruits?

The point of this digression is simple: for the working class under a bourgeois political regime, the pursuit of government at all costs drags politics as a whole to the right. This is why we find the likes of Margaret Beckett more comfortable with Tony Blair than Jeremy Corbyn – Blair’s promises of power have a truer ring to them, what with Rupert Murdoch singing backing vocals and everything.

We need to escape from this bind, and that means changing the rules. We do not need a Labour government in 2020 nearly as much as we need an effective opposition now. Many Labour left groupings, from the likes of the marginal Labour Representation Committee, through Momentum, up to Corbyn’s inner circle itself, like to talk about making Labour into a great mass movement again. That is a correct impulse. The trouble is that they invariably fail to see that this aim is in contradiction with the exclusive veneration of getting into government, and even more sharply the belief that any Labour government is better than any Tory government. Look at the threadbare state in which the Labour Party was left by Blair and Brown – that is where 13 years of ‘sensible’ government gets you.

If, on the other hand, we become an effective opposition – that is, one that stands for an alternative form of society, for the rule of the working class – then we can change the rules l

Notes

1. www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2016/01/beckett-report-wont-help-labour-win-next-election.

The left

Gagging order

Gallery

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)

Momentum

Turn the Momentum inwards

Gallery

As the hard right readies for phase two of Operation Discredit Corbyn, James Marshall outlines the tactics and strategic goals of Labour Party Marxists

Labour’s civil war is ongoing and intensifying at every level.

Using the agenda-setting power of the capitalist media, the Blairites are sniping, leaking and throwing accusations at every possible opportunity. Quite possibly a planned operation, with strings being pulled deep within the establishment.

A small sample. Lord Alan West, Labour peer and former security minister, condemns Jeremy Corbyn over his disrespectable failure to sing the royal anthem at the St Paul’s Battle of Britain service; a ‘private’ paper written by Lord Peter Mandelson comes to the barbed conclusion that electing Corbyn is like “putting two fingers up” to voters; shadow defence minister Maria Eagle rounds on Corbyn for staying true to his life-long opposition to nuclear weapons; the Nigel Farage-admiring Simon Danczuk announces he is willing to serve as a ‘stalking horse’ candidate against Corbyn; various grandees, including Chris Leslie, former shadow chancellor, condemns Corbyn over his refusal to advocate that the British police should shoot first and ask questions later; John Mann denounces Corbyn’s appointment of that “appalling bigot”, Ken Livingstone, to co-chair the party’s defence review; Chuka Umunna noisily demands that Corbyn should allow a free vote over bombing Syria; Lord John Reid declares Corbyn neither “competent, “coherent” nor “sensible”.

The first stage of the operation is pretty obvious. Discredit Corbyn. Make him appear in the popular mind a combination of prize idiot and terrorist-loving monster. The underlying assumption being that you can fool most of the people most of the time.

And so far Operation Discredit Corbyn seems to be working. According to The Times, three out of five people believe “he should stand down now”. Furthermore, only 28% want him to lead the Labour Party into the 2020 general election. Welcome news for the Tories. A recent ComRes national poll puts them on 42%, with Labour trailing badly at just 27%. A 15-point lead – the highest recorded by any pollster since 2010.

However, within the party, the right’s unremitting attacks on Corbyn have predictably backfired. It is the hard right that is being blamed for the civil war … and traditional Labour loyalists do not take kindly to anyone damaging Labour’s chances with the electorate.

Less than a fifth of Labour members and supporters think Corbyn ought to resign as leader. Even worse for the right, YouGov reports that two thirds of the party’s full members, registered supporters and affiliated trade unionists “approve of Corbyn’s performance”. This rises to 86% among those who voted for him. An approval rating that is higher than the 59% who voted for him. And the YouGov poll also reveals that he has impressed 49% of Andy Burnham’s supporters and 29% of Yvette Cooper’s. As The Times gleefully comments, this makes it “almost impossible” for rightwing MPs “to remove their leader”. All that would happen is that Corbyn would be re-elected with an even bigger majority.

Furthermore, the “present cohort of Labour members and supporters” back automatic reselection, which would undoubtedly lead to “waves of mainstream MPs” being ousted. Nearly two in five said that there should only be a vote if the MP “fails badly or is very unpopular”, while 52% agreed with automatic reselection of MPs in each parliament.1

Not that we should bank on the hard right going for a breakaway. Yes, today’s gang of ten – Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall, Chuka Umunna, Chris Leslie, Tristram Hunt, Emma Reynolds, Shabana Mahmood, Mary Creagh, Jamie Reed and Rachael Reeves – have in effect constituted themselves a shadow shadow-cabinet. Despite that, a 21st century version of the 1980s Social Democratic Party should be discounted. Unlike the early 1980s, the political centre is not enjoying a sustained revival.2 Eg, at the last general election the Lib Dems were decimated. They remain marginalised and widely loathed. Except as an antechamber to the Tory Party, a breakaway has nowhere to go. And, of course, minor all-Britain parties tend to suffer “significant under-representation”.3 So, given the punishing logic of the ‘first past the post’ election system, an SDP mark two outcome, no matter how welcome for us on the left, is not to be expected. The abject failure of Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers is surely instructive.

It is probably true that “more than two” Labour MPs are considering defection – either to the Tories, the Lib Dems … or Ukip.4 Nonetheless, political suicide remains an unattractive proposition for most Blairites. Constituents would probably turf them out at the first opportunity. Instead of the glories of high office it will therefore be the musty corridors of the House of Lords. That is why the hard right is determined to stay firmly put and fight till the bitter end.

We should therefore expect Operation Discredit Corbyn to enter its second stage. When a Labour candidate succeeds, or otherwise does well, that will be in spite of Corbyn. When a Labour candidates fails, or otherwise does badly, that will be because of Corbyn. A case of ‘Heads, the right wins; tails, Corbyn loses’. Eg, if rightwinger Jim McMahon maintains Oldham for Labour, but – as is almost certain, even in the best-case scenario – he does so with a substantially reduced majority, this will be blamed on Corbyn.

For many in the party, and not only on the right, the sole purpose of being in politics is getting elected. “The worst Labour government is better than the best Tory government” – a well worn phrase that just as easily trips off the lips of Luke Akehurst5 as Owen Jones6. The idea of a good Labour opposition, a Labour opposition committed to socialism, being better than a bad Labour government, a Labour government committed to running capitalism, simply does not occur to the reformist left.

Unless our candidates go from one election triumph to another, which is just not going to happen, then the well prepared clamour will begin. Corbyn is a loser. Corbyn is a liability. Corbyn is hopeless. Corbyn must go. Replace him with a responsible, election-winning Blairite – a man, or woman, who can finally kill off the Labour Party as a labour party.

Of course, if – and in my mind it is highly unlikely – Corbyn leads the Labour Party to a victory in 2020, there is always the nuclear option. After unleashing a ‘strategy of tension’, MI5 – the institution that John McDonnell wants to grant “additional funding” for7 – will oversee the surgical removal of Corbyn from office. A state of emergency declared by the monarch or the privy council, charges of high treason, a fatal road accident … or maybe even blackmail and a diplomatic illness, as imagined by Chris Mullin, the former Bennite, in his A very British coup (1982). Whatever its exact form, the nuclear option will be hatched with the active involvement of the CIA, while the military high command, key leaders of the opposition and the top judiciary will give it their full cooperation and backing.

Corbyn’s much publicised admiration for Karl Marx, his campaigning against US-led imperialist wars, his opposition to Nato, Trident and nuclear weapons, his commitment to increase the tax take from transnational corporations, the banks and the mega rich, his republicanism – all mark him out as “a danger for Britain” (Financial Times editorial).8

Vital

The civil war is not only being fought out in parliament and the national media.

The hard right’s Labour First says it is getting reports from up and down the country that the left is now on the offensive.9 The AGM in Lewisham Deptford saw narrow victories for the hard right in officer elections and a 23-23 draw on Trident. Walthamstow’s AGM had mixed results – the left made gains, but some hard-right officers hung on. In Portsmouth there were three votes for the chair. Labour First complains that the left is “running full slates for every position, including positions like fundraising officer”. This shows “that every vote at every meeting is now vital.”

What is true for the hard right is true for the left too.

This bring us to Momentum. Launched in October, the organisation boasts well over 60,000 members. Despite being committed to making “Labour a more democratic party”, Momentum activists claim not to want the deselection of MPs. Instead the emphasis is on campaigning against austerity and turning outwards.10 And, funnily enough, when they turn up at Momentum meetings, Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party in England and Wales and Left Unity members serve to reinforce this orientation. Typical contributions go along the lines that the PLP is dominated by the right, Corbyn is isolated and the ‘real class struggle’ is about demonstrations and strikes. Not ‘boring stuff’ like parliament, constituency Labour Party meetings, annual conferences and party rules.

No-one on the left would want to downplay the importance of fighting austerity. However, as well as street work, getting people onto the electoral register and supporting this or that action called by the People’s Assembly, Momentum needs to be firmly directed towards winning the civil war in the Labour Party. Not that members of the SWP, SPEW or LU should be turned away. But they should be encouraged to join the Labour Party and stop standing aloof from what is a concentrated form of the class struggle.

We have argued that Corbyn’s election as leader gives the left the historically unprecedented opportunity to fight the pro-capitalist hard right both from above and below. While Labour Party Marxists want the abolition of the Bonapartist post of leader, we welcome the fact that for now Corbyn has decided to keep the dictatorial powers long favoured by past Labour leaders. After all, these are extraordinary times. It is therefore worth noting that Corbyn seems to be using his position as leader to exert control over the national executive committee, supposedly with a view to “giving the party back to its members”.

Peter Willsman’s report of November’s NEC makes interesting reading.11 Amongst its decisions was to “develop a Labour Party code of conduct in relation to the use of social media”. News of this produced a rabid Daily Telegraph headline proclaiming: “Labour MPs who criticise Jeremy Corbyn online to be ‘silenced’.”12

There are also going to be “wide-ranging” party reforms covering the national policy forum, gender representation, bursaries for working class candidates, political education, youth review and the implications of the Trade Union Bill. A working group will begin meeting before Christmas and is due to report to every NEC meeting. It will be jointly chaired by Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson and be open to all NEC members. The actual members will be Angela Eagle, Ann Black, Jennie Formby, Johanna Baxter, Andy Kerr, Cath Speight, Alice Perry and Jim Kennedy. Comrade Willsman stressed that the NPF should be “accountable to the NEC”, as it once was. He further argued that the “NEC must be restored to its central position in the party that it held for some 80 years before it was downgraded and sidelined by Tony Blair”.

Showing the Corbyn effect, general secretary Iain McNicol reported that, while in November 2014 membership stood at 192,707, now it is almost 400,000, with some 1,000 joining last week alone. This makes Labour bigger than all the other UK parties put together. The largest increases in membership being in London, the north-west, south-east and south-west, and the largest increase by age are those between 20 and 29 and those between 70 and 79. I would guess that most of the 20-29-year-olds are new members, while the 70-79-year-olds are mainly returnees. McNicol also told the NEC that the “conversion rate” of registered supporters to full members is something like 30%-40%.

Finally, comrade Willsman assures us that the NEC was not “locked in combat” over the issue of Andrew Fisher. Corbyn’s political advisor was suspended because of a light-hearted tweet “supporting” Class War in the May general election. Rest assured, the matter will be “satisfactorily resolved very shortly”.

However, all is not well. Both Corbyn and McDonnell have been in full retreat over a range of symbolic issues. Refusing to sing the royal anthem, praising the bravery of IRA fighters, not bowing before Elizabeth Windsor – all have already been sacrificed on the altar of respectability. Indeed, burdened as he is with an unstable left-centre-right coalition cabinet, there is a distinct danger that Corbyn will have his whole agenda set for him by the need to maintain unity. Put another way, in the final analysis the centre and the soft right set the political limits and therefore determine the political programme. Why? Because they are quite prepared to walk.

Reorganise

So Momentum needs to respond to the hard right’s civil war independently of Corbyn. Support him against pro-Tory MPs, yes. Support him against a hostile capitalist media, yes. Support him against a coup organised by the secret state and the establishment, yes, yes, yes. But do not support his conciliationism.

Tactically, Momentum should, at least for the moment, concentrate its fire on the soft right in the shadow cabinet. ‘Blairites, out’ should be our slogan. The mass of Labour members clearly trust the Corbyn-McDonnell leadership, but they have an instinctive distrust for those who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, those who are closely associated with Tony Blair, those who threaten to quit over this or that. An obvious target is Lord Charlie Falconer.

Certainly MPs proven to be in the pay of big business, MPs sabotaging our election campaigns, MPs who vote with the Tories on austerity, Trident and bombing Syria – all should face the threat of deselection. We should take full advantage of our current rules. The ‘trigger’ mechanism allows local party units, including both individual members and affiliated organisations, “to determine whether the constituency holds a full open selection contest for its next candidate, in which other potential candidates are nominated, or reselects the sitting MP without such a contest”.13 Ironically, if it happens, both David Cameron’s proposed reduction in the number of MPs from 650 to 600 and the expected boundary changes, due to be announced in October 2018, could prove a golden opportunity for us. We should deselect hard-right MPs and democratically select tried and trusted leftwing replacements.

If that results in a smaller PLP in the short term, that is a price well worth paying.

Meanwhile, obviously, we need to set our sights on “wide-ranging” party reforms that go far beyond anything being considered by the NEC at the moment. The Labour Party must be radically reorganised from top to bottom. We need a new clause four, we need a sovereign conference, we need to be able to easily reselect MPs, MEPs and councillors.

Clearly, it is going to take time to change the political make-up of the PLP and subordinate it to the wishes of the membership. But, with force of numbers, tactical flexibility and ruthless determination, it can be done.

Notes
1 . The Times November 24 2015.
2 . From a 2.5% historic low point, the Liberal Party saw a revival in the 1970s, which saw it win 19.3% of the popular vote in the February 1974 general election.
3 . A Blais To keep or to change ‘first past the post’? Oxford 2008, p66.
4 . www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34305994.
5 . Progress February 15 2012.
6 . Left Futures March 2 2011.
7 . The Guardian November 19 2015.
8 . Financial Times November 21 2015.
9 . Labour First November 20 2015.
10 . www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34609114.
11 . Left Futures November 23 2015.
12 . The Daily Telegraph November 23 2015.
13 . www.grassrootslabour.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=200:how-labours-trigger-works&catid=43:forum&Itemid=60.

Momentum

Momentum – through the looking glass

Gallery

Jim Grant of Labour Party Marxists wonders if the bourgeois press thinks their readers are sheep 

We are barely two weeks into Momentum’s existence, and already the British media is terribly excited – bringing to bear the fearless pursuit of truth, attention to detail and scrupulous fair-mindedness for which it is famed.

There is, of course, nothing more suspicious than a group of persons associating together in pursuit of common political objectives. There must, surely, be some hidden agenda. And our brave hacks have done a stand-up job assembling as much evidence as possible to demonstrate that all those participating in Momentum have, unbeknownst to themselves, joined a lunatic Trotskyist cult.

Representative of this tendency is, first of all, Dan Hodges writing in The Daily Telegraph. Hodges cut his teeth as, according to his former byline in the paper, a “Blairite cuckoo in the Brownite nest” at the fag-end of the last Labour government; though he no longer calls himself a Labour member, his agenda has not significantly changed since departing (which really ought to tell you something about how closely his ‘values’ were aligned to the labour movement in the first place).

Anyway, for Hodges, “Momentum [is] spelt M-I-L-I-T-A-N-T”.1 It seems you cannot turn over a rock in the Labour Party without finding some swivel-eyed, ranting leftie beneath, and Hodges is fixated on one Jon Lansman, associated with such sinister ventures as, er, his blog (Left Futures) and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. Hodges’s ‘smoking gun’ is an article by Lansman noting that Jeremy Corbyn’s rightwing opponents have not gone away, and it will be necessary to defend the leftwing leadership “when they strike”. Very militant-sounding, of course – but surely little more than a statement of fact. How dare the Corbynistas not abandon their leader to the carnivorous affections of his enemies!

Momentum is thus described rather grandly as Corbyn’s “Praetorian guard”, when – inasmuch as it has any success getting off the ground – it will resemble not some elite military unit, but rather the same bundle of naive, excitable human material that so spectacularly swept aside the cynical Brewers Green machine people this summer. If one were so minded, one could call such an agglomeration a ‘mob’; and, indeed, Hodges comes close when he declares mandatory reselection of MPs to be a “protection racket” (how dare those little people in branches and CLPs presume to interfere in promising careers!). Praetorian guard, not so much.

It paints a pretty picture, though – on one side, a vast invading force of hardened warriors (or, otherwise, a Mafia family – if only Hodges could make his mind up); and the other, a rag-tag militia of simple-hearted Labour ‘moderates’, with only parliamentary salaries, corporate backing and the entire bourgeois press to defend them. Will our plucky heroes survive, against all the odds?

Hodges is not the only journo with Militant on the mind. While he can only manufacture silly conspiracy theories about Jon Lansman, however, The Sunday Times at least managed to find some kind of tenuous connection – in the person of Dave Nellist, former Militant MP, and still a leading light in Militant’s modern incarnation, the Socialist Party in England and Wales.

The first sentence – which, as any journalism course will tell you, is the most important, since it is the most likely to be read – reads: “Trotskyists are being urged to join a new group for Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in a fresh effort to purge moderate Labour MPs and shift the party further to the left.” Those who make the effort to read a little further are rewarded with the subtle clarification that comrade Nellist supports … mandatory reselection, “which moderates fear will lead to a purge”. By “moderates”, they mean rightists; by “fear”, they mean ‘are telling the press’; by “purge”, they mean a reckoning with their treachery. Other than that, entirely fair and accurate.

Lest the reader imagine that this sort of fanciful material is restricted to august mainstays of the rightwing press, we cite, finally, the Huffington Post: a terribly modern, web-only bunch of liberal clickbait peddlers. Breaking with the pattern observed so far, HuffPo’s Owen Bennett discovers the hidden hand not of Militant, but the Socialist Workers Party. What’s the skinny here? That the SWP’s Party Notes – forced into the open by this paper – calls for its members to attend Momentum meetings, make their political affiliation clear and see if any of those present would be interested in attending the Next Really Important Demonstration.

SWP national secretary Charlie Kimber was happy to offer a few ‘damning’ quotes to Bennett (who, somewhat ungratefully, calls him “Mr Kimble” for most of the piece – whoops!), suggesting that the SWP might perhaps consider standing candidates against Labour “when you have a rightwing Labour council sticking two fingers up to Jeremy Corbyn”.3 Displaying an uncharacteristic sense of caution, “Mr Kimble” insists that any such action would have to be considered “very carefully”. Very wise – not that Owen Bennett is able to judge.

Wrong for 20 years

In truth, none of the far-left bogeypersons advanced by the media are really plausible. We may return to SPEW, née Militant: it would be a wonderful thing, truly, if it were leading its members decisively into battle against the poor beleaguered souls of the Labour right. It is, alas, doing no such thing. It is plain enough at this point that its leadership has come round – grudgingly – to the idea that the fight is worth having. Very good.

However, it has spent the last two decades committed more staunchly than anyone to the idea that the Labour Party is dead and it is necessary to break all remaining pro-working class forces from its allegiance, to form a new workers’ party in the idealised image SPEW has of old Labour. Instead of merely admitting the plain truth – that, in the light of newly available evidence, those 20 years were spent committed to a wrong theory – SPEW instead chooses to contort reality, claiming that it was correct all along, and a full and final victory for Corbyn would represent in reality the founding of the new workers’ party it had always envisioned!

This is a notably lithe theoretical dodge, but advancing it among people who have not already drunk the Kool-Aid will provoke laughter at best, and a discreet phone call to the men in white coats at worst. The confusion does not stop there – SPEW has called for affiliations to be opened up to its like, but still opposes the re-affiliation of the RMT and FBU unions, and still insists that it will run candidates against Labour in the next local elections – SPEW supremo Peter Taaffe is evidently not as circumspect as “Mr Kimble”.

In short – ladies and gentlemen of the press – Militant is not back from the dead, and is not presently the danger you remember it to be. But without Militant running things in secret, and without SWP infiltration, just what is there left to be scared of? Fortunately, Sam Coates – deputy political editor of The Times, no less – has discovered another insidious threat.

Labour Party Marxists has published a six-point plan to ensure that Mr Corbyn’s agenda is widely adopted: “As the hard right begins its civil war, the left must respond with disciplinary threats, constitutional changes and reselection measures,” it said.

Indeed, we did – and do. These people are traitors, and need to be ushered – politely but insistently – out of the Labour movement. This is not their place. It is not clear how many people are listening to us, if that matters. We do not exaggerate our influence in the wider movement; after all, we have the deputy political editors of eminent daily papers to do that for us, apparently.

There are three possible explanations for these egregious stupidities. The first is that they are honest, if severe, mistakes. The deputy political editor of The Times has mistaken our small propaganda group for a large organisation that will rise, rampant, should mandatory reselection be placed on the Labour Party rulebook. Its Sunday sister is genuinely under the illusion that the modern successor to Militant still has the wherewithal to take over city councils and get people onto the Labour benches. (Simple error, if nothing else, almost certainly accounts for the “Mr Kimble” business.)

Number two: these papers are actively and deliberately lying. Their activity is equivalent in substance and form to the forged ‘Zinoviev letter’ – a cynical and dirty trick to delegitimise the Labour leadership.

And finally, the middle way: the elementary errors of research and fact are to be explained by an indifference to the truth of the matter. This is the mode of communication defined by philosopher Harry G Frankfurt as “bullshit”.4 The bullshitter cares not if what he says is true; only that it convinces enough people enough of the time.

The common thread among all three is contempt for the readership. Either these stories are deliberately deceptive; or they are advanced in the confidence that nobody will check either way; or those commissioned to write them are incompetent. None of these options shines glory on the papers concerned. The condition for any of them working is uncritical acceptance of untruths by the people they purport to keep informed.

Well, if anybody is curious enough to find this article as a result of all this free publicity, and patient enough to read all the way to the end – socialism is, above all else, about not treating the general population like morons. It is this dangerous idea that rankles both the careerist technocrats of the Labour right and the demagogues of the press.

Notes

1. The Daily Telegraph October 10.

2. The Sunday Times October 18.

3. www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/10/16/momentum- swp-jamie-reed-entyists_n_8312330.html.

4. HG Frankfurt On bullshit Princeton 2005.

 

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.

_____

 

Refound Labour as a permanent united front of the working class

Share