After Momentum’s internal democratic structures were shut down in January 2017, its nascent youth wing was taken over by a small friendship group.
Momentum Youth and Students became obsessed with factionalism, lauding trade union leaderships (in the hope of gaining employment in their offices), and weird Stalinist iconography. It was mainly active on social media.
But the group’s cringeworthy over-use of emojis, paranoid factional gossip and pictures of Stalin has clearly embarrassed Momentum chair, Jon Lansman. On 8 January Lansman asked MYS to shut down all its online accounts.
It was sad that Momentum’s youth section, which had so much promise, was taken over by a clique. It is not good that one person feels entitled to shut down anyone’s a youth group’s social media accounts by fiat.
The answer to both problems is to build an open, democratic youth wing of Momentum.
