Non-parliamentary sources of social power

JVL Introduction

A timely reminder that Labour Party politics is not the be-all-and-the-end-all of political life.

The author provides a critique of the thinking of right-wing organisations like Labour First, riding high in the party machine and convinced they know how to win the next election.

They don’t and they won’t. And they are exacting  a terrible price as the author makes clear.

But the article is also an affirmation that while the battle in the Party matters, it is not where most progressive political activity in Britain is taking place.

This is extra-parliamentary – in movements against racism, football fans’ support for food banks, campaigns for renters’ rights, climate change activism, support of asylum-seekers, defending the NHS, and so much more besides.

The left’s role is to build these movement and to generalise their political implications.

This article was originally published by Colonel Despard’s Radical Comment on Wed 19 Jan 2022. Read the original here.

The left must recognize non-parliamentary sources of social power

The right wing of the Labour party likes to present itself as an authority on how to win elections. Luke Akehurst, secretary of the rightwing faction Labour First, obsessively cultivates this myth. Although he admittedly displays a comprehensive knowledge of opinion polls and electoral statistics in many constituencies and council wards, this didn’t help him predict the result of the Shropshire North by-election, when he maintained that the Liberal Democrats had no chance of winning. They won by a majority of 5,925, while the Labour vote collapsed. He was so spectacularly wrong because his narrow conception of politics made him tone-deaf to the political moment.

In the bigger picture, it is apparent that many voters today are distrustful of parliamentary parties in general. But there is plenty of politics going on in the country, if we expand our conception of politics to include the movements against racism, football fans’ support for food banks, campaigns for renters’ rights against unscrupulous landlords, climate change activism, resistance to the exclusion of asylum-seekers, and protests against the running-down of the NHS. Only in particular circumstances is this condensed into electoral terms, so it doesn’t enter into the thinking of the Labour bureaucracy.

Akehurst’s regular articles in LabourList  construct an ideological narrative based on a restricted understanding of politics that routinely blames the left of the party for electoral failure, while never acknowledging the strategic mistakes of the right. In his latest piece, he writes that the party has to “rebuild an election-winning organisation that was hollowed out during the Jeremy Corbyn years, both through the removal of key experienced party staff and the political purging of experienced local activists and CLP officers.” Is he referring to the “experienced party staff” who actively campaigned against a Labour victory in 2017? And the only local activists and CLP officers who have been purged are those on the left – anyone to the right has got away with multiple complaints of discrimination and bullying.

He attacks MPs “who have caused the party huge reputational damage,” presumably referring to MPs like Claudia Webbe who the party abandoned after she was found guilty in an extremely contentious accusation of harassment. It’s unlikely he means MPs like Chris Leslie or Gavin Shuker, who defected to form the “Change UK” party. He also targets NEC and Young Labour candidates, hoping they will have a “positive attitude to getting the party electable again”, implying that the incumbents’ scepticism about the leadership means that they don’t. The key point of his piece is a preemptive warning on the election of constituency conference delegates, “where we need a pro-leadership majority so that this vital pre-election conference is a real showcase for Labour’s next government.” Party conference in Akehurst’s conception should not be a policy-making body, but instead an orchestrated display of support for the leadership.

Unfortunately for Akehurst, the electoral incompetence of the party administration has been made transparently clear by the fiasco over candidate selection for  local elections in May. Nearly all London boroughs have elections coming up, but the selection process has been badly delayed, including in key Labour-controlled councils Lewisham, Barking and Dagenham, Waltham Forest, Haringey, Brent and Southwark. LabourList quoted one organizer saying: “Our opposition are out campaigning with candidates already in place for months – we don’t even know when our selections will begin. We are having to plan out literature to be sent out without knowing when we will have candidates to put in them.” Blame has been placed on poor communication from Labour’s regional office. One Southwark member said the local campaign forum “received no answer for weeks from region when it asked them to approve the timetable proposed by the local party.”

The reticence of the London regional office can be explained by a complete funk over the loss of membership data. Labour no longer has an accurate list of members in arrears, beyond the start of December 2021. Labour informed members in November of a “cyber incident” on an outsourced third party handling members’ data which resulted in a “significant quantity of party data being rendered inaccessible on their systems”. According to LabourList, that third party is the digital marketing agency Tangent, and the “cyber incident” was a ransomware attackSources say Tangent refused to pay the sum demanded by the hackers, which prompted the attackers to corrupt the data and to permanently remove Labour’s ability to access it.” The party’s database will now need to be rebuilt, involving a huge amount of work – but the cash-strapped administration is laying off employees and cutting wages for the rest.

Since CLPs are required to check whether members are up-to-date with their subscriptions before allowing them to vote on candidates, selection meetings are in chaos. In one constituency, a member tasked with performing eligibility checks said that they were forced to ask for screenshots showing payments to the party as proof that members were not in arrears. Moreover, the funds due to be returned to constituencies from the central collection of membership dues, intended to finance local activities, are not being paid in full.

The data breach has had such a debilitating effect on the party’s campaigning potential, the general secretary has a lot to answer for. Who decided to play fast and loose with members’ data and not pay the ransom demand? Was it an executive of Tangent, or was is a Labour official? The Labour right itself is dependent for its social base on its presence in local government, ever since the party loosened its ties to the trade unions. The upcoming elections may see many constituencies without campaign literature, let alone enough volunteers from the disaffected membership, to achieve any chance of success. A series of local government defeats would be a setback for Labour and would certainly undermine the ideological grip of the right.

The Labour right thought it had won a great victory by stitching up the Brighton conference so as to confirm David Evans as general secretary and pass rule changes that strengthen the PLP and bureaucracy against the membership. But can anyone seriously believe that Starmer can offer political, moral, and intellectual leadership to the groundswell of opposition to the ruling Tories? Starmer’s offerings to the public – already ruling out a rational solution to energy price hikes through nationalisation of energy companies – are based on an appeal to the ideological construct of the “traditional” Labour voter who voted Tory in the last election.

The job of the left is to participate in and spread extra-parliamentary political struggles and local campaigns, helping to generalise their political implications. Strikes and protests are multiplying and becoming more successful, as the cost of living is set to skyrocket. It also needs to break from the mindset of an exclusively parliamentary orientation to social change and recognize other sources of social power. It will be aided in this process by building on the gains of the Corbyn era that are embodied in the 2017 and 2019 party manifestos.

Comments (7)

  • Steven Taylor says:

    In Starmer’s own Constituency (Camden) the hard right have removed anyone who disagrees with them from the list of potential Council candidates. The cull has included sitting Councillors, former Mayors, moderates who have dared to oppose property deals, and obviously, anyone who is remotely a socialist …. if only Starmer’s acolytes could convince more Tories to join them, they wouldn’t have run out of candidates for the local elections

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  • rc says:

    Camden is the BOROUGH , containing two parliamentary constituencies: Hampstead and Kilburn (which is not all in LB Camden), and Holborn and St Pancras ,long represented by Frank Dobson, left-centrist who had no time at all for ‘political correctness’ or Right sectarianism/

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  • Cormac Kelly says:

    A very interesting analysis. Electoral politics are not important at the moment. In my town, Huddersfield the ‘just deliver’ labour force has been on strike. Small but significant industrial action is happening all over the country.Supporting these actions is essential for socialists. Local election work for worthless Labour councils such as Kirklees is irrelevant to the lives of ordinary working people.

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  • Stephen Richards says:

    The bourgeois assumption that ‘Football is racist’ because it is a ‘working class’ game rears its ugly head again. Association Football has been taken away from the lower classes by elites who import 70% of playing staff from overseas (including managers) & a MSM (BBC & SKY) who will only feature elite Premiership games; the rest of football can go to hell. Any prospect of a working class kid playing for his local club has been massively diminished .
    I am 72 years old & have played many sports, including football at a professional level. There is no more racism in football than there is in any other sport, but it gives bourgeois journalists a never ending story to write about, another moral panic, like AS, promoting ‘liberal morality’ & intensive virtue signalling.

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  • Vaughan Melzer says:

    Even without reading this horrific list of failures and collapse within the LP organisation, I have wondered for a long time if the Tories have planted people in the LP; if people are not who they say they are politically. Using antisemitism, the Party has been purged of the very people who would always have put in ‘the work’ to get the LP elected. It doesn’t take brains to see that the LP is committing suicide.

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  • BRLambert says:

    “The right wing of the Labour party likes to present itself as an authority on how to win elections.” Right. So leaving aside the last three general elections, two of which were winnable but Jeremy Corbyn was undermined by the right of the PLP and the apparatchiks in control of the party machine (remember all the delays with election leaflets, posters and candidate selection) let alone Starmer’s promise that Remain would be included on and ballot on the outcome of Brexit negotiation, and the disgustingly filthy accusations of antisemitism directed against Jeremy Corbyn and so many others by what we can only describe as an advance in anti-Palestinian activity by external groups, some known, some not.

    I agree we need to organise outside parliament in community activities whenever we find an opportunity. One opportunity is to start building up our canvassing lists for our use which arise out of our charitable activities.

    I cannot see the charmless Starmer even beating Johnson at the moment. He’s got too much dirty laundry: the whole antisemitism business for one. And on taking office immediately breaking his promise to advance the Party’s policies which had scarcely been touched on during the campaign because most of the electorate thought we were the remain party despite the fact that we had prepared a very strong message that we were not. We were the party who could secure a strong and beneficial deal for the British people. But having the political neophyte Starmer as a negotiator was just not a good look. And as a potential prime minister? Not a good look at all.

    And it still isn’t.

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  • Doug says:

    GB News has something called ‘Free Speech Nation’ get in touch and ask to appear
    It’s a win win if they refuse

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