The clash between the Trotskyists (Laura Murray’s term) and the ‘alt-Stalinist’ (the Trotskyists’ term) within Jeremy Corbyn’s outrider group Momentum has come to an ugly head this week. Murray, in founder Jon Lansman’s camp, has come out swinging for Jill Mountford of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. The accusation is their apparent intentions being that they are preparing Momentum to be an alternative political party. Some would say they are ‘asset stripping Labour’. I could not comment.
But the argument that is being propagated by Lansman – and his media supporters Owen Jones and Paul Mason – is that Momentum minus the AWL would be totally fine. This is not true.
First, without the AWL there would be other ‘sectarians’. There is Jackie Walker’s faction and the so called-Labour Representation Committee, Red Labour (which Paul Mason tells Daily Politics is a front for his former group of choice, Workers Power), and Nick Wrack and his acolytes. But it is not just far left groups, but the general secretary of a now Labour affiliated union, the Fire Brigades Union, too. It seems Matt Wrack (yes, brother to Nick) is to Momentum, what Len McCluskey is to Labour.
Second, even if all these ‘sectarians’ were rooted out you would be left with the those outside Labour from a very different parts of the left – those in and around the Stop the War coalition. Andrew Murray (father of aforementioned Laura) is* formerly a longstanding and senior member of the Communist party of Britain and there are others around Corbyn that are former Respect and remain incredibly close to George Galloway. Of the groups and intellectual traditions outside Labour, the AWL are far nicer than any of anti-imperialists. Laura Murray’s own attack on the AWL proves this.
Third, with or without the AWL, the rest of the sectarians and the anti-imperialists, key people in Momentum are hell bent on deselecting Labour members of parliament. Even when chief whip Nick Brown is the keynote speaker at the Momentum North conference the delegates ignore his call for ‘unity’ and demand a change to make it easier to deselect Labour MPs – Brown included I imagine.
All Labour-family groups have a website and aim to get stories in the media. Most have an elected board and some even have staff. But national delegate conferences organised almost entirely along constituency boundaries to determine an agenda different to Labour’s is something else. When you take out the spin from the various factions – and it seems founder and owner Lansman is winning – what do we know about Momentum? While the party is told to shut up and get on the doorstep, Momentum – as our deputy editor Conor Pope pointed out on the Daily Politics – is rowing about a conference due to be taking place in the short campaign.
Playing expectations
‘People said we would lose out deposit – we didn’t. People said we would come fifth [behind an independent] – we didn’t’ are not the remarks of a party ever thinking about power. They are however the unattributed comments of those in the leader’s office trying to win a silly expectation game about Labour slipping from second to fourth in the Sleaford and North Hykeham byelection.
What cannot be spun is the latest YouGov poll. Mike Smithson reports that ‘just 51 per cent of general election Labour voters tell YouGov that they now would vote for [the Labour] party’. That is 4.5 million lost living voters in 18 months.
United on grammar schools
Next week the government’s schools consultation closes. Labour can show a united front on the error of their ways. To this end Angela Rayner, Lucy Powell and Estelle Morris lead the pack of speakers at the Progress rally against grammar schools. It is open to all Labour members and those beyond our party that oppose these regressive proposals.
In our favour is the fact Tory ideas for more grammar schools are met with indifference from voters in general and parents in particular. This is in no small part because of Labour’s academy programme. Even John McDonnell agrees. The vast improvement in state schools, especially for those in areas of historic deprivation and underachievement, has reduced the demand of middle-class parents across the country for grammar schools or private providers. In rediscovering our reforming zeal Labour can leave the Tories standing on grammar schools, stop the proposals in parliament (because some Tories will vote with us) and stand up for every child giving expression to the Labour value – no child left behind.
Reaching out to the MSM
Keir Starmer pulled a blinder this week. It is not clear who is the clear victor over the particulars of opposition day motion and the government amendments but what is clear is Theresa May did not want to have to deal with any of it and the alibi she needed for an early election – that you cannot trust this parliament with Brexit – has well and truly been removed.
Last week Corbyn spoke at the Party of European Socialists conference. A Spanish delegate Paula Schmid asked our leader: ‘You cry wolf about Brexit now but where were you during the campaign?’ The reply, according to Kevin Peel, who was there, was ‘I campaigned loads but the media didn’t cover it.’ That old chestnut.
So this week the shadow secretary of state for justice Richard Burgon headed to the MSM to put Labour message direct to the electorate. ‘Yesterday in parliament’ he told the BBC Question Time audience, ‘Labour MPs forced Theresa May to put her plan for Brexit before the British people.’ Funny how the frontbench claim credit for the work of all Labour MPs but do nothing to stop Momentum, an organisation founded by Burgon among others’ pursuing the same Labour MPs for deselection. All MPs are equal, some are just more equal than others.
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Richard Angell is director of Progress
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* The original piece stated that Andrew Murray is ‘not a member of the Labour party’. Following an email from the Unite press office it has been changed as they inform us Murray is now a member of the Labour party
This site badly needs a proofreader or a sub-editor.
I have my doubts about Momentum; but I am sure that we need to remove millionaire-backed cult groups like Progress from the Labour party. We need to return to being a party which is paid for and supported by real working people, not Blair cultists and Establishment careerists.
Yes, I piggyback by turning up to Momentum’s events and so forth. But what is now happening is why I, and many others including key figures around Jeremy Corbyn, have never joined it. We fully support its central aim of making Jeremy the Prime Minister in 2020. But we knew what else would happen in the organisation, and we are being proved right.
There have always been extremely few Trotskyists in Britain. But this is possibly the only country where a moderately well-informed member of the voting public would know the word “Trotskyist”. Ken Livingstone won the 2000 London Mayoral Election against the full might of Tony Blair’s pre-Iraq machine, and against an official Labour candidate who was a former Cabinet Minister.Who did the donkey work for that? Who do you think? And they were rewarded.
As late as 2007, three years after Livingstone had graciously permitted the Labour Party to readmit him rather be humiliated by him for a second time, the Evening Standard‘s list of the 25 most influential people in London contained no fewer than four members of Socialist Action. With the man who had appointed them to their various positions, those members of that tiny Trotskyist organisation comprised one fifth of the total list.
Now, say what you like about Livingstone’s London, but it was hardly Trotsky’s Kronstadt. It was, however, the biggest powerbase that Trotskyists have ever had, anywhere in the world. Eight years running London in the early twenty-first century. But then, three of them had sat overtly as Members of Parliament in the 1980s and early 1990s, although there were more of them than that on the Green Benches at the time. A sitting MP until her retirement in 1997 was married to Trotsky’s bodyguard, who as her husband presumably held a parliamentary pass.
The All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation, which made no bones about being the Militant Tendency, brought down Margaret Thatcher. Don’t take either my word or Militant’s for that. Read the extremely bitter account of it in her own autobiography. All other attempts at explanation are fig leaves that she herself refused to wear. To her, as to Militant, she was removed in order to abolish “the Community Charge”, and that abolition was the biggest concession that the British State ever made to the Far Left. After all, that abolition did happen as soon as she had been deposed. On Europe, while the rhetoric changed a bit, the policy did not change one jot.
And now, Momentum has more members that UKIP, including far more Members of Parliament. Few of the former, and probably none of the latter these days, are Trotskyists. But you, dear reader, know the word, don’t you? Only in Britain, kids. Only in Britain.
I have been hanging with the wrong crowd since before many members of Momentum were born. I was the only attendee at last week’s Newcastle conference to have been a paid contributor to The American Conservative and a blogger for the Daily Telegraph.
So I am telling you for a fact that across the political spectrum and around the globe, the fire of hope was lit when an undisputed opponent of neoliberal economic policy and neoconservative foreign policy became the Leader of one of the two main parties in the G8 and P5 country that bridges Europe and the English-speaking world.
If Jeremy Corbyn goes down, then there will never be another mainstream platform for any alternative to neoliberalism and neoconservativism in this or any other advanced country. Those at the heart of the Corbyn project need to be aware of their awesome responsibilities. Unruly youths need to be directed by the grown-ups in the room, who in turn need to act their age.
The idea that Corbyn is mainstream is ludicrous. He’s massively unpopular with the voters (and can still fall further when they actually hear some of his “ideas”). He’s the left’s ineffectual answer to Farage – a pub bore who loves the sound of his own voice and fails to notice the majority of the British people quietly edging away from him. Corbyn isn’t the fire of hope – he’s the last embarrassing fart from the corpse of amateur hour Socialism.
The voters rejected Tory-lite Labour in 2010, 2015, and throughout Scotland. Maybe you should just join the proper Tories?
That lot are economically well to the right of Theresa May, who is also probably far less trigger-happy in international affairs than they are. They remain devoted to a man who is such a pariah that even Rupert Murdoch has banished him.
Labour wasnt Tory lite in 2015, when Ed milibnd became leader in 2010 a bloke said to Kinnock “we’ve got our party back” that would mean Ed Milibnd wasn’t new labour