Momentum: The transformative socialist agenda CLPs should bring to conference

It’s been a great week for us in the Labour Party, following huge Conservative losses and substantial Labour gains in the local elections.

It’s clear that with public services on their knees, the NHS in crisis and a Government offering nothing but stigmatisation of minorities in a cost-of-living crisis, the country has simply had enough of the Tories.

Yet we also saw the pernicious effects of Tory rule, too, and the threat it represents to British democracy. As campaigners prepared to peacefully protest the coronation of our unelected Head of State, King Charles, they were pre-emptively arrested by an out-of-control Metropolitan Police, under the draconian Public Order Bill rushed through by the Government.

It’s not the only Tory attack on the fundamental right to protest in recent years. The Police Crime and Sentencing Bill, the Covert Human Intelligence Source Bill, the Overseas Operations Bill – we have seen our democratic freedoms undermined, and police handed ever wider powers, even as public trust in them erodes, embodied most starkly in the Met.

Nor was this the only threat to democracy on show, as the voter ID laws introduced by the Tories made headlines. Shamefully, many voters were refused a vote for not having the appropriate identification. With evidence of electoral fraud next to zero, and an estimated 2 million voters who do not have the correct ID, the reality is, as Labour has pointed out, that this is nothing short of voter suppression.

Labour rightly opposed the Police, Crime and Sentencing, Public Order and voter ID bills. But worryingly, the Leadership has consistently refused to commit to repealing them. The claim that a new Government doesn’t repeal harmful legislation doesn’t hold water: Angela Rayner has already confirmed that Labour would, rightly, repeal the Tories’ dreadful bill effectively banning public sector workers from taking strike action.

Labour must repeal Tory protest, refugee, citizenship and voter ID laws

This is why, as Momentum today announced the policies we are pushing for Labour Conference 2023, we are making the repeal of repressive Tory legislation a central pillar of our demands. Whether it’s ensuring fair treatment of refugees (endangered by the Illegal Migration Bill), defending citizenship (undermined by the Nationality and Border Bill) or protecting the rights to vote and to protest, repealing these dangerous Tory laws is essential to protecting democracy in Britain, not a sideshow.

But we also know that the inequality searing the country, the sheer extent of poverty in modern Britain, and the massive crises looming over us, from climate to the NHS, demand so much more. That’s why we are asking Labour members to pass a wide array of transformative policy motions in their CLPs to bring to Conference 2023, likely the last before the next election: policies from the many, for the many.

Publicly owned utilities, free school meals, council houses and no tuition fees

Amidst an ongoing water scandal, where shareholders laugh their way to the bank while the rest of us swim in sewage, Momentum is calling for public ownership of water, alongside other key industries including energy and mail, ending a privatisation experiment whose failures are plain for all to see. With huge public support and backing from members and trade unions, it should be a no-brainer for Labour.

So too should free school meals for primary school children, while four million kids are living in food poverty, a policy already taken up by Sadiq Khan in London and by Welsh Labour.

And with the Tories giving up any pretence of tackling the country’s huge housing crisis, we’ll be campaigning for Labour to advocate for mass council house building and rent controls, another policy enjoying support from devolved and regional Labour figures.

The list goes on: renationalising the NHS, establishing a publicly-owned National Care Service, abolishing tuition fees and raising the minimum wage to £15 an hour.

Wealth taxes to raise tens of billions

All these policies enjoy widespread public support, representing investment in a country impoverished by years of Tory austerity, and a new economic model serving the many, not the few.

Undoubtedly they will require substantial public spending – you can’t fix a broken country on the cheap. Central to Momentum’s demands, therefore, is a motion on wealth taxes, raising tens of billions of pounds, imperative given soaring inequality and rampant profiteering, as exposed by Unite.

The charge will come that such policies, popular as they might be individually, are electoral kryptonite. Our response is unambiguous: the data disproves it. Not just the huge surge in Labour’s support that we saw in the 2017 campaign, but the success that bold, ambitious Labour councils are seeing right now.

Municipal socialism: Setting the bar for a Starmer government

From Preston to Broxtowe to Worthing, where my fellow co-chair Hilary Schan was elected as a councillor, Labour councils committed to community wealth building, to democratic ownership and public investment, are reaping the rewards at the ballot box. In these crisis-ridden times, transformative policies help, rather than hinder, electoral chances.

We are not naive, however, about the political direction of the Labour Leadership, or Keir Starmer’s refusal to abide by the democratic mandate on which he was elected. Nonetheless, it is vital we leverage every tool at our disposal to campaign for transformative policies, from the National Policy Forum to Labour Conference, even as we continue to build our bases locally in pursuit of municipal socialism.

In campaigning for socialist policies, we can extract and defend important concessions, like public ownership of rail, while setting the bar for what the next Labour government should do. And by keeping up the pressure to repeal repressive legislation, we can help empower workers, unions, campaigners and social movements to fight for more.