Losing Long-Time Labour Members

What a terrible week for Labour. The general secretary's heavy handed approach to Jeremy Corbyn's suspension from the PLP is nothing sort of disastrous, having adopted an approach almost goading the left into rebelling. The only saving grace is amid the solidarity motions passed in defiance of David Evans's orders, and the two CLPs supporting no confidence motions against him and Keir Starmer is how, curiously, the media are keeping well away. Between the summer of 2015 and the winter of last year, any obscure Labour councillor making the mildest of criticisms became major talking points on Newsnight, Peston, and the opinion columnists. Now? Not so much. A salutory lesson that it's not only the Tories who play politics on easy mode. For some comrades, the rising tide of rebellion in the party's ranks are a good reason why those toying with leaving should stay. For them who have left, the clunking shenanigans underline why they feel better off out.

Take my comrade and friend Scott Newton as an example. When he told me he was leaving Labour after 45 years of membership, I was saddened but not surprised. With a decline of 57,000 members since April, and repeated cack-handed moves and petty authoritarianism Scott was in the company of many. Yet there is an itch that needs scratching here. "Starmerism" and its direction of travel are becoming clear, such as a retreat from party policy and a reassertion of top-down managerialism. But the leader, his office, and his loyal support (yes, Starmer stans are a thing) are not the only agents active in Labour. Despite losses the left is larger inside the party than has been the case for decades. Socialist ideas rattle their chains in the night terrors visited upon bourgeois and Tory MP alike, and even Keir himself is, if we're honest, not a Blairite. Why, despite the strength of the left are some comrades jacking the Labour Party in? Especially when, like Scott, they managed the bleak 16-year stretch of Blair-Brownism?

Going back to an earlier discussion about conditional and transactional politics, the eruption of Corbyism and transformation of the Labour Party from a bureaucratised mess of petty tyrannies, mutual backscratching, get orf my land parochialism, and careerist networking into a battleground of political struggle changed the relationship many pre-2015 members had with the party. Think about the long slog of the Labour left from the 1980s onwards. It diminished under the impact of labour movement defeats and labour movement decline, and suffered internal defeats in the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock. And yet, there was still a case for hanging on. The party, warts and all, was still the party of the labour movement. Even after the ascension of Blair and his twin tracked travel to control freakery and marketisation of anything that moved, the institutional links and the interchange of personnel between the party and the wider movement were present, worth preserving, and convinced some that sticking around was better than the alternative. During this period, there was something of a tacit promise and one often echoed at constituency and branch meetings. We need unity to defeat the Tories. Disunited parties lose elections. Any Labour government is better than any Tory government. That, and the prospect New Labour and its dogmas would not last forever kept the fires burning.

The election of Ed Miliband in 2010 was the first sign this perspective was correct. Expecting to walk the leadership contest, continuity Blairism was surprisingly defeated and in came a hesitant politics half-way between accepting the Tory parameters of the so-called "national emergency" and a washed out embrace of soft left positioning. It was a political improvement on what Gordon Brown was offering in his swansong manifesto, and differed significantly to Dave and Osborne's programme, but it was weak sauce and ultimately satisfied nobody. Despite the odd grumble from would-be courtiers to the red prince denied, Labour remained largely united. And then came the 2015 leadership contest and Jeremy Corbyn. Like a rocket from a crypt, a new mass left took up residence in Labour and he was catapulted to the top of the party, upending every facet of political commonsense and acheiving an outcome most leftwingers either thought improbable, or only possible after a long period of attritional struggle. It might not have been anticipated, but the win confirmed the decades of trudging to CLP meetings was the right course. And then the disillusionment.

No one was prepared for the demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn and the concerted effort to delegitimise the left as a whole. For four years, the Labour right failed to spend a single day not thinking about how to undermine the leadership and the hundreds of thousands who charged into the party. You saw what happened, and no rewrites are going erase the active scabbing the parliamentary party, in the main, and their satraps and running dogs undertook. No trick was too low, no lie too outrageous. The right belittled, attacked, and thwarted the left with an energy and ruthlessness they never show the Tories. Worse, for comrades who had been in the party a long time, everything the right had said in the decades previously to keep the leafleters leafleting and the canvassers canvassing was shown to be a lie. The moment of reciprocation came, and virtually without exception they made it clear the only unity with the left they were interested in was of the electoral graveyard. Five more years of the Tories with everything this has meant is the price worth paying for restoring their pre-eminence in the party. After all, they won't have to do the coughing up.

Now Keir Starmer is the leader, it's almost like the past five years haven't happened. He won the contest by marketing himself as the unity candidate and wanting to put an end to internal strife. But true to Starmerism's style, this was conceived narrowly as not reckoning with the recent past - how Keir's parliamentary colleagues actively sabotaged his predecessor - and treating what is a political problem as a managerial issue. Meanwhile, the Labour right parade themselves again as the guarantors of electability and the same old shit from ages past, unite behind the leader, division helps the Tories, has been scooped up from yeterday's chip papers and warmed up with the considerable cynicism they can muster. Brass neck? There is no organisation as Foucauldian as the Labour Party, where at all times the truth is a mere effect of power. This might ne tolerable if the direction of policy was okay, but it's not. The trajectory evades the Corbyn-lite hopes with an empty suit at the front, but instead harks back to the watery gruel of 2015 that did such a good job of electrifying voters and mobilising Labour's new base.

Hence some comrades have had enough. The right broke the compact central to the party, have got away with it, and now demanding the left abide by it as a matter of course. No one does chutzpah like these jokers. To get one's perspectives, for having a raison d'etre confirmed and then cruelly defeated by those ostensibly on the same side, is it any wonder tens of thousands have found this too hard to stomach? Want to plug away for a few more decades for another shot where the same could happen again? Not the most edifying of prospects when energy might be put more usefully into other things.

This is not my view. If comrades can afford it, nothing is stopping them from doing other things while passively supporting those who remain active, but ultimately it's up to them. The big problem we have is we don't have decades to dutifully spend Thursday and Friday evenings shuffling back and forth to branch and CLP meetings. Right now the double whammy of the health and economic emergency is on us, and by the time they recede into nostalgic whimsies for the year we spent at home (if you're privileged and secure enough), climate change presents itself both as a problem to be addressed and a series of escalating disasters to be mitigated. Against what's coming, can anyone be blamed for refusing to stick with the politics of pissing around?

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