It's been one of the most bad tempered elections seen in many a year. Opponents accused opponents of all manner of things as the contest itself descended into mudslinging and skulduggery. No, this is not the Gorton and Denton by-election but the vote for Your Party's Central Executive Committee, the results of which were announced on Thursday morning. The Jeremy Corbyn faction, For the Many, won 14 seats. The Zarah Sultana-backed Grassroots Left took seven seats, and the remainder went to independent candidacies. Corbyn and Sultana are also two of the four elected public office holders under the collective leadership arrangements, with Corbyn set to be YP's parliamentary leader.
Following the results, Corbyn released a mom and apple pie statement that said he wanted to build a "positive and inclusive party" and congratulated members on voting for a "mass socialist party that takes the fight to Starmer and Farage." Sultana likewise put out an emollient piece that emphasised the need to work together, but that calls for accountability and transparency "need to be respected". After the heat, may there be light?
Unfortunately for YP, it's likely this leadership election is going to leave lingering bad feeling. As late as yesterday Laura Alvarez, Corbyn's famously combative significant other, was absurdly musing about infiltration from Labour Together into YP. Which invited supportive comments that, in terms of tone, one might expect of a frothing conspiracy theory Facebook group. And this was typical of the standard of debate that raged across social media. There was precious little discussion about strategic direction, and a great deal of questioning the motives of those unwilling to extend Corbyn saintly status. Those supportive of the Grassroots Left were little better, as false character assassination and boilerplate Trot denunciations were flung in the opposite direction.
It might be possible to overcome the entrenching of divisions in YP this election has thrown up, but there remains significant obstacles to internal harmony. The first is the propensity of the nascent bureaucracy to trample over membership decisions. For instance, the instruction from conference was to allow dual membership with other parties (i.e. keeping YP open to other far left organisations), but it was down to the CEC to sort that out. This was ignored as "known" and "suspected" members of said outfits were barred from standing in these elections. A case of starting as they mean to go on? And then there was the edict that suggested people who served as officers in active unofficial YP branches would be ineligible to run for lay positions when they're finally inaugurated. A right recipe for the "inclusion" Corbyn waxed about in his statement.
And this is before we get to the main problem: how YP has spectacularly wasted its opportunity, and in so doing allowed the Greens to almost triple in size, become a true mass party and is now the vehicle for the political recomposition of the working class. A prize that was in front of YP's leadership cadre, but decided to pass it up for criminally petty reasons. That said, politics buzzes with volatility. If YP is able to stabilise, set aside its internal nonsenses, and start facing outwards it could build up a presence through consistent community, workplace, and street campaigning. And if it does, this would be a good thing for British politics. A small but viable presence could, in the spirit of socialist competition, act as a means of keeping the Greens honest. It could threaten swathes of inner city Labour-held seats where the Green presence is hitherto patchy, and a second strong radical force could work to tilt British politics as a whole further left. Cue a return to 2015-2020 levels of mainstream media hysteria and howls of outrage from politicians who treat their Commons sinecures as private property.
This is where YP can go. But it's now up to them - is this where they want to go, or is further recrimination and needless bloodletting more its style?
Image Credit
No comments:
Post a Comment