Saturday 28 November 2020

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?

Image Credit

21 comments:

David said...

I like what you say; I need to see these words again and again, like a daily infusion, just so I can remain not exactly enthused but at least remain gasping for the air of socialism. Where else am I going to go? Trouble is, my party doesn't seem to want me, so I guess I'll keep my head down and wait to see what happens.

David said...

I like what you say; I need to see these words again and again, like a daily infusion, just so I can remain not exactly enthused but at least remain gasping for the air of socialism. Where else am I going to go? Trouble is, my party doesn't seem to want me, so I guess I'll keep my head down and wait to see what happens.

Jenny said...

It's an excellent analysis. What are you hoping for by remaining in the Labour party? Westminster politics atm with the class war Tories, Neo libs team B aka Labour , Neo libs team C aka LibDem seems pointless.

Braingrass said...

I think this is a good analysis, but people overestimate the right. They have no ideas, no policies and nothing to offer the future. In the end this is why they will be defeated.

Anonymous said...

"continuity Blairism was surprisingly defeated"

Not by Labour members it wasn't - they knew the price of power. Instead the unions chose the wrong Milliband and harkened at least 15 years of Tory rule and Brexit (which would never have happened without Corbyn).

But incredibly you're still feeling just great about it because at least it was better than dirtying your hands in reality. And you wonder why you lose.

John said...

The trouble is many activists will not have much choice about leaving. Tens of thousands gave already left, but these, in the main, although left supporters are not activists. The hard right are happy to see them go, but they know the left activists who stay are the ones who will cause them problems. Hence the dictaks from the GS. Who will stand up for members rights? Left wing CLP/Ward chairs & secretaries and as soon as they allow a 'not competent' motion to be discussed they are suspended & expelled (or at best prevented from standing for office). At a stroke left activists removed. What a choice for left activists officers do as they say & shut down debate or risk expulsion.

John said...

Seconds after posting the above I was reading reports that Angela Rayner at the JLM conference was saying that "There is no debating the EHRC report, and if we have to expel thousands of members we will".

Karl Greenall said...

You are right except for one thing.
The right have only one policy: to obstruct and defeat the left.
All flows into and from that.
That is why we are where we are.

Phil said...

I joined the party in 2015, and if I had been a member when Blair took over I would have left. In that sense I haven't got a point of comparison in the way that Scott has - ISTR you yourself joined the party post-Blair, if not post-Brown. Still, I think there are two key differences between Starmer and Blair. The most obvious is that Starmer followed Corbyn - we were so close to electing a radical Labour government! As Corbyn's changes to the party are variously rolled back, memoryholed or demonised, you can understand people thinking that that chance is never going to come again. Secondly, Blair wasn't Old Labour, and as such he wasn't of the Old Labour Right. He had something he wanted to achieve - his project was alien to the Labour Party, but it was a project nevertheless. Under Evans (despite his Blairite roots) it feels more as if the old Right is in charge: no ideas, no principles and no project beyond defeating the Left, which at time of writing they're succeeding in rather well.

(I'm hanging on, though, for now.)

Blissex said...

«"Starmerism" and its direction of travel are becoming clear, such as a retreat from party policy and a reassertion of top-down managerialism.»

Personnel is policy, and the composition of the shadow cabinet, certainly not a "unity" one like J Corbyn's first one, told us everything very soon.

«even Keir himself is, if we're honest, not a Blairite.»

Well, blairites should be called mandelsonians (originally T Blair himself was not fully a mandelsonian), and K Starmer's politics share with mandelsonian politics the most critical aspect: the desire to appeal to thatcherite voters with thatcherite policies.

«The election of Ed Miliband in 2010 was the first sign this perspective was correct. [...] was a political improvement on what Gordon Brown was offering in his swansong manifesto»

G Brown was attacked by the Mandelson Tendency for losing the 2010 election by moving too far to the left, and E Miliband was also attacked for moving even further to the left, risking becoming an ally of the scrounging SNP, and being close to antisemitism (he supported palestinian rights to peace and security in a two state solution).

«No one was prepared for the demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn and the concerted effort to delegitimise the left as a whole.»

Some people remembered the "demon eyes" campaign against T Blair himself, so not much of a surprise there. But the ferocious backstabbing and frontstabbing from within Labour itself:

«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.
»

That was not the "Labour right": that was the Mandelson Tendency entrysts faithful to Liberal Thatcherism, people like K Starmer who resigned from the frontbench during the "chicken coup". The Labour right, in practice the brownistas, people like A Burnham and even J Ashworth, did dissent politically from J Corbyn, but were not running a campaign of sabotage and stabbing.

for all this, Labour, whether as itself or New Labour, or New, New Labour is an unavoidable vehicle for the centre-left and the left, and socialdemocrat and socialist activists should still fight within it instead of abandoning it to PASOKification, which is the goal of the Mandelson Tendency.

Dr Zoltan Jorovic said...

@Anon "But incredibly you're still feeling just great about it because at least it was better than dirtying your hands in reality. And you wonder why you lose." LOL.

Not sure what you mean by "dirtying your hands in reality" although it sounds very much like the sort of thing the Tory Councillors love to say to us when we propose policies they don't like. Translated it means "if you don't buy in to the status quo, which is neoliberal capitalism with all its inequality, instability and environmental destruction, then you are a head-in-the-clouds-tree-hugger/hippy/marxist/looney-leftie/fantasist/radical/subversive/[insert preferred pejorative term here]".

I am not a labour member, nor have I ever been a supporter of any far-left party, but I read Phil's blog for intelligent, insightful analysis and I think he absolutely hits the nail on the head here. I didn't vote for Corbyn, and didn't think much of him as a leader, but I could see how he was treated was deliberate, calculated and wrong. I could see that he represented a movement and a genuine wish for real change to sweep aside the failing status quo and break the establishment grip on power. To succeed you would have needed a truly exceptional leader, a lot of luck, and the right circumstances - you had none of those. Instead every dirty trick and every tool in the box was employed to undermine him, destroy his credibility to the populace at large, and break his support. They succeeded in the first two, but not in the third. So I salute those who stayed loyal, and suggest you keep going from inside - illegitimi non carborundum.

Blissex said...

«Instead the unions chose the wrong Milliband»

The "detail" that the thatcherite wing of New Labour always seem unable to explain is why the LibDems, with their perfect "centrist" programmes, based on "centrist" thatcherism, sold by lifelong "centrist" politicians, and their championing “aspirational voters who shop at John Lewis and Waitrose“ don't get the votes of the "vast majority" of "Middle England" voters, who of course are "centrists", consider the latest 3 elections:

* In 2015 the LibDems had proven their "centrist" credentials, with 5 years of "responsible government", supporting every "Middle England" friendly policy, fitghting against the "greed" of wage worker and the "scrounging" of benefit claimants, Why did not they win?

* In 2017 not only they had their "centrist" record in government to boast of, but also their absolute commitment to cancel the result of the 2016 refendum, and as Tony Blair argued, they would get the votes of the 48% and not just those of "centrist" voters from "Middle England". Whu didn't they get a landslide?

* In 2019 not only they had their "centrist" record of responsible government, and their commitment to undo the consequences of the 2016 referendum, but they had in their front bench a very popular "centrist" leader like CHUKA UMUNNA himself. How comes that despite Tony Blair's assurances such a perfect "centrist" combination did not reduce Conservatives and Labour to less than 100 MPs each, getting the votes of that vast majority of "centrist" europhile voters?

If their central policy centred on "centrism" did not work for the LibDems, why should it work for New, New Labour?

Ian Gibson said...

Absolutely spot on, the most trenchant description of the behaviour of the right of the party I've read anywhere. And the dilemma is real: I can't see a way of saving our world from the existential issues threatening it (most notably climate change and environmental destruction, but also the death of capitalism, which will take millions with it if it dies the kind of death it's heading towards now) other than socialism - but, given the last five years, I increasingly don't believe there's any parliamentary route to socialism which will be allowed to succeed. So, what to do? Is my meagre membership fee worth it for my meagre vote in NEC elections and similar? For now, I'm staying just out of cussedness, But I don't know if I will continue to do so.

Steve Laughton said...

Leaving the party is what the mandelsonians want the left to do. The left should be intelligent enough not to do what the right wants it to do . We don't have proportional representation. The labour party which must operate as a political party and a movement outside of parliament is the only vehicle for change. If it weren't the right wouldn't be trying so hard to get the left to leave it.

Anonymous said...

Starmer is strategic insofar as he wants power, to win the next election and to be the next Prime Minister. Members are useful insofar as they fund the party and put out leaflets for Members of Parliament and candidates.

Anonymous said...

I don't think Starmer is a pro Saudi, pro privatisation market liberal like the Change UK ingrates were, and I do think much of the Labour right that is left it the party (other than those who nominated Jess Phillips) are not of the neoliberal / corporate wing.

Coupled with the fact there are still a lot of left wing members in the party, Starmer's pledges are being highlighted continually, the fact that the unions have now started kicking off and that some of the new left such as Nadia Whittome are making waves, things are much more healthy than they were under the Blair era.

Anonymous said...

Yes members should watch how much free labour they give.

Mick Hall said...

For a start the Starmer neoliberals don’t give a fig if comrades stay in the party or leave their aim is to castrate the left from having real influence in the decision making process and in this they have already succeed. Nor would the LP left become a sect if they left in an orderly and cohesive way to form a new party, let’s get rid of this old chestnut. The problem is the left in the party doesn’t have a plan B as without a doubt the current strategy isn’t working. To say as Phil did it was much tougher for the left in the Blair years may have been true so far, however, someone with a prefix Sir to his name would never have been elected LP leader back then. This shows just how far the party has moved to the right today. If comrades stay in the LP today all they will be doing for the next four years is tilting at silent windmills.

Deviation From The Mean said...

“but I could see how he was treated was deliberate, calculated and wrong.”

While this is clearly true, the beginning of this anti Semtism witch hunt came after Israel’s murderous assaults during operation cast lead. For the time in the UK popular opinion had sided decidedly with the Palestinians. The Zionist lobby and the ruling class threw everything behind a concerted campaign to criminalise the struggle of the Palestinians. Palestinians baiting has become a national sport in the UK.

The Zionist lobby did this for obvious reasons and the ruling class did it for obvious reasons too. The thing with this is, with the descent of the left down the rabbit hole (exemplified by Boffy and Denham) they can’t understand why the ruling classes of the imperialist core would so enthusiastically side with a racist apartheid settler state. But what do you expect from that part of the world whose primary worry is if their Amazon order turned up on time!

“For a start the Starmer neoliberals don’t give a fig if comrades stay in the party or leave their aim is to castrate the left from having real influence in the decision making process”

Again true enough. The thing about Blair, which is why I stopped voting as soon as he came into power, is that he was an out and out Tory. The economics of Blairism has been described as third way. This is simply a distortion of the truth. Third way would imply some economy wide approach but third way only ever applied to the Public Sector, so Third Way was simply another tem for extending Privatisation. I suspect it was a marketing term designed to appeal to the old centre right labour idiots, such as Prescott, Beckett. It should be noted that no private company was compelled, expected or even asked nicely to go third way!

Blairism was a capture and was a coup. Corbyn is probably just another careerist politician. I can’t blame him, they make a hell of a lot of money you know.

Anonymous said...

I was an elected member so I guess I should know. Patronage is important. Trade Unions, Regional Directors etc. There is a lot of elevated mediocrity. Who you know not what you know alas. Many people in regular jobs work harder and have so much more talent. At least I got that. For those still in elected positions please use it for more than just yourself. You can if you wish. You are very lucky.

Anonymous said...

We want them politicians to be so much more than they are. Perhaps it is projection. Perhaps it is hope. Is there a parliamentary road which will help the majority? I certainly hope so. Maybe they will rise to the challenge. Perhaps I am still a fool? Anyway enjoy reading this blog as it always has something to say which is worthwhile. Thanks Phil.