The tide has changed! The Labour right is being pressed back. The initiative is now with our movement to get Jeremy Corbyn re-elected as Labour leader.
Since the beginning of August Corbyn has held mass rallies across the country. Thousands heard Corbyn and Diane Abbot speak at College Green, Bristol. Many thousands more have heard Corbyn in Hull, Leeds, Liverpool, Swansea, Merthyr, Brighton and at Heartlands in Cornwall. Corbyn is being greeted by supporters with enormous enthusiasm. Queues to get into rallies have wound their way round city blocks. Tickets for rallies in huge venues have been immediately snapped up. In contrast Corbyn’s challenger, the right-wing backed Owen Smith, has held a few desultory, much smaller events.
As we go to press, Jeremy Corbyn has nominations from 133 Constituency Labour Party, against only 25 for Smith. When Corbyn received the backing of the 200,000-strong Communications Workers’ Union on 1 August he pledged to renationalise Royal Mail, end zero-hour contracts, introduce employment rights from day one and repeal the Tory anti-union law, the Trade Union Act.
CWU leader Dave Ward said, “Jeremy is a leader for the millions, not the millionaires, and the CWU is proud to support him.” Unite’s Len McCluskey rightly says, “Corbyn is a brave and principled man, better placed to address the crisis in Labour’s heartlands than any of his critics.”
On 8 August the six Momentum-backed candidates for Labour’s National Executive Committee were all elected. The hard-right Progress and Labour First slate of candidates all failed to get on to the Executive. The shift to the left in the NEC is welcome as the NEC was the body responsible for denying voting rights to many tens of thousands of Party members who had joined after mid-January 2016.
That NEC decision has been contested in the courts by a group of Party members. And on 8 August the High Court ruled against the Labour Party, saying new members should be allowed to vote. The Labour Party machine, acting against Corbyn’s wishes, says it will appeal against the court’s judgement. Corbyn’s ally John McDonnell MP said he was, “appalled by possibility of an unnecessary and costly appeal. It's unacceptable to use members’ money to stop members from voting.”
The assumption is that the big majority of new members will vote for Corbyn. The Guardian quotes an unnamed anti-Corbyn Labour MP as saying the combination of the NEC vote and court ruling is, “very, very, very bad news.” If Corbyn wins — and it now seems likely he will — we will have won a battle but not the fight. Our job is to renovate the labour movement to make it an adequate force to take on the Tories and the capitalists. We are a long way from completing that task.
The new Corbyn movement must broaden itself and contest for control at every level, starting with the most basic, the Labour ward. In every Labour organisation a political line must be drawn between those who want to build Labour as a mass, open, democratic political voice for the working-class — and those who want to hang-on to the Blair-Brown past. Labour councillors who have spent their time in office passing on Tory cuts must be replaced. The MPs who have viciously fought Corbyn — often being willing to break the rules, having their opponents expelled or barred from voting — need to be dealt with.
If Corbyn wins it is likely that there will be a breaking away of some of the right-wing Labour MPs and councillors. It is not clear yet what the political shape of that split will look like, or how extensive a split might be. 172 of the 229 Labour MPs voted for Margaret Hodge’s no confidence motion against Corbyn; only 40 backed Corbyn. Nevertheless it is also probable that we will still be left with many of those MPs who voted against Corbyn, or even some who bullied and attempted to break Corbyn.
If Corbyn wins there will be a lot of pressure for “unity” and for the left to forget and forgive these Labour MPs. As every good trade unionist knows, unity in a fight against the bosses is essential. The spontaneous, knee-jerk closing of workers’ ranks faced with a management attack is a wonderful thing. But “unity” here is a trap. Unity with the right-wing MPs would be unity with the enemy, not against the enemy! We should forget and forgive nothing. We accept the assessment of the anti-Corbyn Labour MPs, that they can no longer co-exist in the PLP under Corbyn’s leadership. But we draw the opposite conclusions: they should go, not Corbyn!
The right-wing, anti-Corbyn MPs should be condemned and wherever possible censured or “no confidenced” by their local parties. The membership should do to them what they did to Corbyn. And we should do so in the knowledge that if we don’t replace these MPs they will regroup and return to fight us in the future. Our basic question to, and political test for these MPs is, are they prepared to abide by democracy in the party and build Labour as a voice for working-class people?
What sort of MPs does Labour need? We need a Parliamentary party that is not dominated by the professional middle classes. We need a Party leadership dominated by working-class people with a record of struggle and sacrifice for our movement. We need people who listen to and are guided by the interests of the people they are elected to represent. We need people who respect the political decision making of the Labour Party. We don’t need people who use the Labour Party to promote themselves and their careers; people with their noses in the trough. We need leaders who are willing to fight for our class, the working class, as hard as the Tories fight for the rich.
Trust ourselves, not the courts
The High Court victory of the crowd-funded Labour members who have demanded the right to vote in the Labour leadership election is a blow to the Labour right. The Labour Party’s bureaucracy says it will appeal the court’s decision (in doing so the officials are going against Corbyn’s wishes) and so the case is not definitively settled as we go to press. Nevertheless, the court’s verdict seems a straightforward victory for democracy against those on the right who have sought to gerrymander the election.
No doubt the High Court judgement will encourage those who are tempted to think the left should or could use the courts to settle disputes with the Labour right. We think using the courts is a mistake for two reasons.
The first is practical. Using the courts often takes a very long time and a great deal of money. So the effect of using the courts is to take activists’ energy and cash away from campaigning for labour movement democracy. In this case we won. But the normal result is that we lose. And when we lose the right wing are strengthened, not us. Of course, if use of courts was just a practical matter our words, above, might simply amount to the argument: use the courts, but do so carefully.
But there is a second argument — an argument of principle — against using the courts for attempting to redress wrongs inside the labour movement. The fact that the left will normally lose court cases over labour movement procedure and democracy is not an accident. It is because the law, the legal system and the judges are all biased against us. The institutions of law are part of the capitalist state which is fundamentally hostile to us. The courts are very far from being fair and even-handed — it would be a serious mis-assessment to believe they are. We see that our job is to build an independent working class movement, resting on itself, and trusting itself alone.
Our movement is for us to regulate, and us alone. The capitalist state should stay out of our working-class movement. We would be accused of hypocrisy – and rightly so — if we made the argument: the capitalists’ state has no right to regulate our movement, except when we think we will win. So let’s put our faith in the only force we can trust: ourselves.
