Labour's new mass members need to organise

Submitted by martin on 2 October, 2016 - 4:09 Author: Martin Thomas

Peace within the Labour Party is unlikely. The right wing, the MPs, and the unelected party machine inherited from the old regime are still out to stop the left-wing surge at rank-and-file level, and they still have great power.

Most Labour Party members and trade unionists hoped that the Labour Party conference in Liverpool (24-28 September) would be a means of reuniting the labour movement behind Jeremy Corbyn, who as expected was re-elected leader with a bigger vote and a bigger majority.

Labour now has about 515,000 members. After being reduced to a husk in the Blair-Brown years, it is now the biggest political party in Western Europe, and bigger than all the other political parties in Britain put together. A big majority of members voted for Corbyn. Owen Smith could get even his minority vote only by pretending that he was as left-wing and socialist as Corbyn.

Yet the right wing staged a coup at the National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting on the Tuesday before conference, and then at the conference itself, by slamming through fifteen last-minute rule changes.

The conference remained heavily controlled by the machine. The fifteen rule changes were - contrary to previous practice and to democratic principle - voted on as a bloc. Moves by the TSSA union to stop that procedure, and then to get a card vote, were suppressed.

In the one major vote for a Party position taken at conference, right-winger Maggie Cosin defeated left-winger Chris Williamson 53%-40% for a seat on the National Constitutional Committee.

The new members will want debate, discussion, democracy. They will collide with the right wing entrenched in the party machine and among the MPs.

Despite some sweeteners, like decision-making ability for Labour women's conference, the new rule changes shift the balance of the NEC to get an anti-Corbyn majority. They also make Labour Party rules echo Tory cuts policies by making it contrary to rule to do what Poplar and Clay Cross did in their day and defy Tory budget limits.

The right wing are now pressing for the MPs to elect all or some of the Shadow Cabinet, hoping for an anti-Corbyn majority there, too.

Motions from many local Labour Parties about the wave of expulsions and suspensions during the leadership contest - surely the biggest in the entire history of the Labour Party, and many on "charges" not revealed at all, or relating to old posts on social media - were ruled out of order. Even if the wave subsides for a bit after the leadership result, the conference was so managed as to suppress calls for a comprehensive review or amnesty.

Local Labour Parties suspended or in "special measures" stay that way.

The right wing are signalling that they may tolerate Corbyn for a while, but only as a prisoner. They will work relentlessly to limit him on policy and stall all moves to reverse the Blair counter-revolution in Labour Party democracy.

In 2015 there was uproar about the conference not debating motions against Trident renewal. This year Trident renewal got nowhere near the conference floor. Pro-Corbyn shadow Defence Secretary Clive Lewis, who in 2013 wrote that Trident renewal "should be unthinkable" wanted to promise in his conference speech that Labour would not change pro-Trident policy before the general election; he was pushed by other Corbyn allies only to the statement that "current policy stands".

After a year in which hundreds of thousands of new left-wing members flooded into the Labour Party, the 2016 conference was less sparky than 2015's. It broke a trend: 2015 was in part only a continuation of a pattern established since 2010 for Labour Party conferences to become a bit livelier year on year.

The main reason was the right wing's efforts. Another reason was weakness on the left. The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy made its usual effort with rule changes and contemporary motions. Stop The Purge and Momentum NHS made efforts.

But there was little distinct left-wing presence on the floor of conference. One Labour right-winger commented: "You [the left] have taken over the Party, so why aren't you here taking over the Party?"

The Corbyn Leader's Office did nothing to encourage left-wing initiative. It did not even take up a valuable set of democratic rule changes formulated by TULO, the consortium of unions affiliated to the Labour Party. Between 1983 and 1992, Neil Kinnock's leadership campaigned steadily and successfully to swing Labour conferences to the right. The officials grouped around Corbyn are not doing the same to win, rally, and consolidate Labour's membership around left-wing policies.

The Blairite conceit that "policy development" means an office of clever people, aided by "task forces" of experts, concocting schemes and then presenting them for the members to applaud - rather than debate, democracy, and decision-making at all levels of the party - still has a grip, even in the "higher ranks" of the left.

Tom Watson tried to tell Labour conference: "Capitalism is not the enemy". Colin Talbot, once a leader of the International Marxist Group and now professor of government at Manchester University, has summed up the thinking of the Labour right and soft left: "The reason for the absolute fracture inside Labour now is simple: it has seen a massive influx of people who think it is, or can be, a genuinely 'socialist' party when most of its MPs and long-standing activists know that is fantasy politics".

But the new members have much less fantasy in their thinking than do tired ex-radicals like Talbot, for whom a little sage advice to government from clever folk is the most that can be done to counter world capitalism's spiral into ever-increasing inequality, xenophobia, and economic insecurity for the majority.

They will fight for socialist policies and for democracy. The task of the already-organised left is to help them do that with maximum clarity and effect.

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