Momentum: nice organising, shame about the politics

Factionalism has historically been a minority hobby among Labour Party members. Most members have had a healthy independence of spirit which means they like to pick and choose candidates for internal office from different slates or no slate at all, rather than following a “line”. Ditto on policies. People don’t like being put into boxes and told that because they are Hard Left or Soft Left or Old Right or New Labour they have to sign-up to a whole list of beliefs. And everywhere outside a few inner city boroughs there have never been enough Labour activists full stop to risk falling out with each other over national politics. If only one person can reluctantly be persuaded to be CLP Secretary, or councillor, or even parliamentary candidate, there isn’t much scope for being picky about their politics, so long as they are somewhere in the Labour family. And who wants to block or beat someone for some obscure committee if the collateral consequence is that you just lost the only other guy in the ward who helps you deliver leaflets?

At most perhaps 10,000 out of a total of 200,000 pre-May 2015 members are in any way affiliated with an internal faction, current, network, campaign or think-tank.

So imagine if you had spent the last 30 years organising Labour’s Hard Left, sustaining the venerable Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) as a volunteer churning out delegate briefings, model motions and rule changes, lists of who to vote for at regional conferences.

It’s a noble calling, and helps internal party democracy by informing members of the broader politics of the candidates they are faced with. As someone who plays the equivalent role on another wing of the party (as secretary of Labour First), I’m glad CLPD and LRC (Labour Representation Committee) exist, even if I don’t like it when my allies don’t win.

This summer CLPD and LRC’s cosy and small world of patient, painstaking cottage garden organising changed beyond recognition.

Suddenly they found themselves as the support base for the Leader of the Labour Party, and sat on data from tens of thousands of his enthusiastic new supporters, many of them new members, who had opted-in to receive further Corbyn communications after the leadership election.

And they faced a problematic political scenario, because winning the leadership doesn’t mean you have automatically won the rest of the democratic structures of the Labour Party. Corbyn sits at the top as a leader from the Hard Left, with 121,751 members out in the country who backed him (and some new joiners since his election) but in between are a Shadow Cabinet, a PLP, councillors, an NPF, parts of the NEC, Annual Conference, even the CAC, each with their own democratic mandates and very many of them with a profoundly different analysis of where Labour needs to go to get back into power to Jeremy’s.

The simple answer, the organiser’s answer, the campaigner’s answer, is to look at how to turn that immense block of 121,751 votes into a campaigning force inside the party that will over time use resolutions, rule changes, selections and internal elections to fundamentally reshape all those other bodies, Shadow Cabinet, Parliamentary Labour Party, councillors, National Policy Forum, NEC, Annual Conference, even the Conference Arrangements Committee (CAC), so that they come into line with Jeremy’s political vision. And if you are a bit paranoid about the willingness and enthusiasm of all these other bodies to campaign to deliver the election wins that Corbyn needs to consolidate his leadership, or the single issue campaigns that you think will inspire non-voters, you can also mobilise those 121,751 people though your own network, let’s call it a social movement, to deliver that momentum. In fact you can even call it Momentum.

The only problem is that whilst this might make organisational sense it is politically a stupendous own goal.

The left of the party are still in the mentality of being a minority faction agitating for change, when they need to start acting like their guy is now Leader, and that means leader of the whole Labour Party, not just the people who voted for him.

Labour members hate division. We like to fall in behind the leader and give them a fair crack at taking on the Tories. We are happy when we are united and singing the Red Flag together. We are depressed when our leading politicians fall out among themselves. There is tremendous good will in the wider party to make any new leader a success.

So we feel pretty gutted when one of the first acts of the people who campaigned for the new leader is to attempt to smash the unity of the party with a wholly unnecessary debate about a really divisive issue at party conference. Which is why conference voted not to debate Trident.

And we feel doubly gutted when a fortnight later, a new factional initiative is launched that is implicitly about carrying forward the divisions and animosity of the leadership contest into a period when we thought we would all be working together for a Labour victory.

Even the name sounds threatening. Momentum. We ain’t stopping at the leader, we are coming after your seats on the Shadow Cabinet, PLP, councillors, NPF, NEC, Annual Conference, even the CAC. Victory will be total. Resistance is futile. All of your base are belong to us.

But this isn’t Star Trek. This isn’t an arcade game. It’s not Bugsy Malone where one gang throws custard pies at another gang.

People have literally put their whole lives, all their spare time, into the Labour Party. They have spent decades and decades volunteering for the party, delivering leaflets, stuffing envelopes, canvassing. Evening after evening serving the public at council committee meetings. And that’s before you get to MPs for whom it is their working life, and one which with almost no exceptions they work their socks off at.

And the people who are being defined as not part of the “new politics” because we were part of the 50.41% of full members who did not vote for Jeremy look at Momentum and we see a purge coming. We see the political equivalent of a horse’s head in each of our beds – fall in with the new boss, or wake up wearing a pair of concrete boots, ‘cos we got the numbers and they are coming soon to a deselection meeting near you. We are not stupid, we know the key operatives running this new organisation have been proponents of political deselection of MPs and councillors for four decades, and we know the way the same people behaved in the 1980s the last time they held significant power in the party.

It’s an understandable concern that the warm words on Momentum’s website saying it will “Encourage those inspired by Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign to get involved with the Labour Party. Assist members in making their voice heard in Labour Party debates.” are actually code for using the vast amounts of data and contact details obtained during the leadership campaign to mobilise factionally within Labour, both to win internal elections and selections and to deselect moderate MPs and councillors who are not judged “politically correct”.

Instead of building bridges with and a unity of purpose and affection and maybe even love between the 50.41% and Jeremy and his 49.59%, this Momentum initiative has created an atmosphere of fear, distrust, animosity. It has needlessly burned much needed political capital.

What needs momentum – with a small m – is the Labour Party.

We are facing a tough, tough set of elections next May in London, Scotland, Wales, and a set of council seats where we are defending gains made in 2012 which was Ed Miliband’s best year.

The injection of energy and enthusiasm and activism from tens of thousands of new members is needed in reinvigorating Labour’s branches and CLPs, out on the Labour Doorstep engaging with voters, not diverted into a parallel organisation with its own branding and its own campaigns and its own democracy and chains of command, or as a stage army to be brought on to terrify MPs or councillors into reciting the new orthodoxies. The “Momentum” website says it will “Organise in every town, city and village to create a mass movement for real progressive change.” I thought that was the role of the Labour Party itself not a parallel structure!

Labour branches and CLPs need to be able to engage with new members as individuals, humans who we want to become our friends and comrades who we will be working with for the rest of our political lives, not as a factional phalanx.

The media has had a field day talking about Labour divisions and factions and deselections instead of us talking about what unites us.

It was absolutely obvious to anyone that launching such an organisation with this branding with such a fanfare so soon after a leadership battle would generate this negative publicity.

After the leadership election Labour is craving unity. Real electoral and political momentum will come when we feel we are one party again, where everyone is respected and has a voice and a stake, whether they were Jeremy, Liz, Andy or Yvette supporters; Brownite, Blairite or Bennite; Old Labour, New Labour, or just Labour; old politics or new politics.

Two stories of division, Trident and Momentum, is two too many. These self-inflicted wounds need to stop.