Should I stay or…

Owen Jones recently made a bit of a splash by announcing that, despite having voted for Labour at every election in the last 21 years and despite having family connections to the party going back two generations, he’s cancelled his membership.

We all have political red lines: mine is supporting what would amount to war crimes against innocent civilians, toddlers and newborn babies among them, then gaslighting the public over doing so.

It’s interesting that what seems to have been the last straw for Owen isn’t Labour’s current stance on Gaza or its current policy positions, woeful though both of those are:

ending the two-child benefit cap would lift 250,000 children out of poverty, and lessen the effects of poverty on a further 850,000, but Starmer backed keeping it anyway. … This is the same Labour party that has ruled out bringing back a cap on bankers’ bonuses or instituting a wealth tax. The same Labour party committed to Tory fiscal rules that lock the country into dismal austerity policies that have delivered collapsing public services and an unprecedented decline in living standards. The same Labour party that gutted its one distinctive flagship policy, a £28bn-a-year green investment fund, not because it came under pressure, but because it feared it might.

Rather, what tipped the balance seems to have been the unprincipled cynicism and mendacity of the current leadership, and (to judge from the rest of the article) their authoritarian and openly factional approach to the party they ostensibly lead. Both these unpleasant attributes suggest that the current leadership sees British politics in essentially presidential terms, and fairly debased presidential terms at that: what counts is getting Keir Starmer into Number 10 and, er, that’s it. If achieving that goal means abandoning Labour policies, treating Labour MPs like members of staff and alienating Labour members – and then swearing blind that none of this is happening – well, so be it; do you want to win the next election or don’t you? Owen takes the view that this isn’t a form of politics he wants to endorse to the point of remaining a member of the party, and it’s hard to disagree.

I’ve been thinking of writing about (possibly) leaving the party for a while, as it goes. I wouldn’t say Owen’s stolen my thunder, but he has forced my arm; if not now, when? And I agree that Gaza has shown Keir Starmer in a very bad light, both in the positions he’s taken and in how he’s taken them. I found the clip I commented on here particularly depressing:

I can see where Starmer’s coming from, if I squint. It’s certainly true that a broadly pro-Israel position will go down easier with the US and the EU – and, in Britain, with the particular bodies that Labour has chosen to identify as representative of “the Jewish community” – than an anti-Israel one. If you carry that reasoning far enough, I guess you can reach a point where it just isn’t realistic for a Labour leader to take a stand against genocide; not unless it’s actually in progress, at any rate. It’s not a train of thought I’d ever want to follow; the words ‘awful warning’ spring to mind. (Obviously I couldn’t call for a ceasefire back in October – be serious! Back then Israel had hardly had the chance to kill anyone!) But what I find most depressing isn’t how morally repugnant Starmer’s position is but how self-evident he appears to find it: it suggests someone far more attuned to how a policy sounds (to a particular audience) that what the policy actually is.

So no, the thought of continuing as a member of this party, united around the objective of making this guy Prime Minister, doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm. What are the arguments in favour? When I began thinking about this post I identified one possible reason as ‘being a part of something’, but rapidly realised that all the reasons I could think of were variations on that theme; the only difference is in the ‘something’ that we’re talking about being a part of. Let’s start big and work down.

If I stay in the party I can be part of…

…the party that’s going to form the next government!

I’m not indifferent to this argument. I argued a few years back that the supposed paradox of voting (if no one vote can ever be decisive, no one person’s vote matters – and if no one person’s vote matters, nobody’s vote matters) disappears if you take a retrospective view of elections:

the day after the election something will have been decided; we vote to bet on a particular outcome while making it fractionally more likely, because we want to have contributed to bringing that outcome about … every time we go to vote we’re saying that there is a result we want to bring about, and we want to be among the people who can look back and say they made it happen.

Similarly, and more so, for party membership. But… how much do I really want to be part of the effort to elect that guy and his party? (See above.) I wasn’t rejoicing on 1st May 1997, and I already dread almost all the possible outcomes next time round – a Labour landslide very much included. Apart from anything else, how much (more) damage is the current leadership going to do to the party’s democratic structures before they’re finished?

There is, of course, an argument that nothing we’re hearing from Labour in opposition is a reliable guide to what they’ll do in government (after they’ve been elected on the basis of what they’re saying now) – any more than Keir Starmer’s ten pledges were a reliable guide to how he would act as leader, after he was elected on that basis. There’s also an argument that a woman who’s been beaten up by her unfaithful fiancé should still go through with the wedding, because (a) how he acts when they’re engaged says nothing about how he’ll act when they’re married, and what’s more (b) he’s already shown he’s capable of changing (by becoming unfaithful and violent).

So it’s a No to that one. What else would party membership let me remain a part of?

…the process of forming the policies of the next government!

This would be a great thing to be part of. Unfortunately, membership of the Labour Party gives me about as much access to the party’s policy-making process as it does to the Garrick Club. Under the reorganisation implemented in the early days of New Labour (and never reversed), policy development is the responsibility of the National Policy Forum (NPF), a body with a membership of 200; 55 places are reserved for elected representatives of the party membership, five each from the nine English regions plus Wales and Scotland. You’d have a better chance of getting on Mastermind – and probably more opportunities to make left-wing arguments if you did. My region – Northwest England – currently has only two NPF reps, for whatever reason; both are long-serving Labour councillors. (There are also nine places reserved for Labour local government representatives.)

The NPF does periodically invite submissions from party members, of course – and there is, of course, still an annual Conference, where policy resolutions are debated. But in both of these cases the chances of getting a hearing for anything remotely left-field (in either sense of the word) is minuscule – and, crucially, in neither case does the leadership consider itself bound by anything emanating from below. (This change in leadership culture is also a New Labour legacy, and one that simultaneously complements the organisational change and makes it meaningless. New Labour was like that.)

Really, the lack of effective democracy within the Labour Party is hard to overstate. Even in a democratic centralist party – whose policies, once agreed, are binding on party representatives on all levels – there are some mechanisms for proposals to be fed upwards from the membership to the leadership. They’re liable to be heavily filtered on the way, and the process of cadre formation will ensure that very few of them are at all heterodox to begin with, but there’s still the chance for the leadership to be caught on the back foot (as the Socialist Workers’ Party discovered to its cost). The process of forming the party programme, and hence the policies of the next government, is owned by the leadership and whoever they may choose to listen to – a category that doesn’t include party members.

OK then, but how about being part of

…a movement within the party to change all this?

Have I considered, in other words, that I could not only stay but stay and fight? Well. To answer that question, allow me to quote a member of the radical autonomist A/traverso collective, commenting on the anti-repression conference held in Bologna in 1977 and its aftermath:

At the end everyone felt a slight sense of bitterness, disappointment, frustration as they went back to their own areas and the places where they lived and fought. Everyone was determined to carry on, to move forward, but nobody could ignore the crucial question: forward how? forward where?

Stay and fight how? Stay and fight where? I can stay and cast votes in internal party elections – I could vote for a Left National Policy Forum representative, or for Left candidates in the membership section of the National Executive Committee – but the effect would be extremely limited. Until recently there were six membership representatives on the NEC, with the numbers taken by the Left rising from 3 in 2012 to 6 in 2016; the Corbyn-era expansion of the section from six representatives to nine gave the Left nine NEC representatives in 2018, a bloc that would be worth voting for. However, this was effectively neutered in 2020 by the introduction of a preferential voting system, meaning that Left representation in the section went from 6 out of 6 in 2016 to 9/9 in 2018… and 5/9 in 2020.

The Left could stay and fight to take over individual parties, I suppose; I think a lot of ‘stay and fight’ discourse envisages this as the first step, as if the Left comes into being not as scattered individuals but as cohesive groups, each one large enough to swamp the local Right. Back in the real world, we have of course tried this – and had very limited success, even at the high-water mark of Corbynism. (Corbynism was great in lots of ways, but another time we are going to have to do better.)

Or might I want – thinking back to the ‘retrospective’ justification for party membership – to be part of

…the group who – at some point in the future, when the Left is stronger and the party’s internal democracy has been renewed – can say that they were here all along?

Well, no, not really. When leaving the party is being discussed, friends who have been in the party for longer than me often counsel patience, remind us that things have been a lot worse in the past and say that the party is going to be the best place to be when the current leadership falters and the Left revives again. The trouble is, I can’t see why that isn’t just an argument for joining the party when the Left revives again. Maybe I’d have difficulty rejoining then after leaving now; maybe new members generally would be barred from important votes for six months, as happened in 2016. But if the Left’s strong enough, they’ll be able to remove the obstacles its enemies have put in its path – and if (as with Corbyn) the Left ultimately isn’t that strong (or focused, or determined), well, better to know sooner than later.

In the mean time, though, don’t I want to be part of

…a community of like-minded people in the local area?

Dude, I live in Chorlton – this is a community of like-minded people. I don’t need to go to a local Labour Party meeting to find other people who read the Guardian and buy Fairtrade coffee, although I’ll certainly find some there.

I won’t find many socialists in a local Labour Party meeting, though, unless they’re people I know and we’ve gone along specially. The local Labour establishment held the line against the Left throughout the Corbyn period – even in 2017, when it was touch and go for a moment – and they’re holding it still. And holding the line, let’s be clear, means excluding the Left from any effective influence over the branch – even if that means having current office holders play musical chairs with the available positions. At the ward’s most recent AGM thirteen people were elected (to nineteen positions); ten of the thirteen had previously been elected on at least two occasions, eight of them four times or more.

I could understand it if the Left were a gang of Trots demanding the immediate nationalisation of leading local industries (Unicorn, Chorlton Cheesemongers and the Makers’ Market), and threatening to stop the party getting on with the serious business of building environmentally-conscious social democracy locally – and I think that is how the cliqueestablishment sees us. (At best – to judge from their contributions at party meetings, some of them just think we’re Nazis.) But if anything the opposite is closer to the truth. There was a contested election for Women’s Officer at an AGM a few years back; the Left candidate proposed campaigns on forced marriage, domestic violence and period poverty, to which the establishment candidate replied by proposing a picnic to celebrate International Women’s Day. The latter won comfortably; at the following AGM she was elected Chair of the branch.

All of that said, there is a local Left – an actual community of like-minded people, almost all of whom I met through the party in the Corbyn years; I’m still in touch with a lot of them through social media. But that’s not a reason to stay in the party, as an awful lot of them have either been expelled or left of their own accord – and even those who are hanging on in the party often focus their campaigning outside it.

That only leaves one reason to stay in the party – and it’s not actually a bad one (although it does sound quite negative when you first hear it). Do I want to be part of

…the group who persistently try to get left-wing motions through the local party hierarchy, even if the only real effect is to annoy the local cliqueelected leadership?

I’ve had a bash at this; I proposed that the party endorse the principle of allowing local parties to select their candidates instead of having candidates imposed or vetoed by the leadership, as advocated in 2020 by, er, Keir Starmer actually. The motion was carried at the branch, but ran into trouble at the CLP; arguments against included “this isn’t happening to any significant extent”; “it is happening, but everyone who’s been affected deserves it”; the baffling (and/or anti-democratic) argument that “party members aren’t elected by anyone, so they shouldn’t be selecting candidates”; and the all-purpose “we shouldn’t even be discussing this, it’s a distraction from winning the next election”. The last of these was particularly popular. (I would have thought a motion about selecting the best candidates for the next election had some relevance to winning the next election, but I’m not a Professor of Politics.)

Losing to some really terrible arguments was undeniably bruising, but up to that point it was quite fun – especially when I provoked one delegate from our ward into saying that letting local parties choose their candidates was just wrong, and if Keir Starmer had argued for it then Keir Starmer was wrong. (Implying that the Corbyn leadership was right when it imposed its chosen candidates. Hey ho.) Looking back I do regret making my submission in calm, conciliatory tones, having gauged the tone of the meeting (up to then) and scrapped my original plan of going in quite hard (“I don’t want to hear any nonsense about not caring whether Labour win”, etc). Being friendly didn’t obviously gain me any advantage, and it certainly didn’t gain me any votes.

That motion was never actually going to win, though, not in that room. The reaction of half – well, more than half – of the delegates to anything emanating from the Left was essentially

Image refers to experience of speaking to a motion from the Left at local constituency party.

It wasn’t a complete waste of time, though, even if you discount the transient pleasure of winding up people you don’t like. (It’s not personal; they’ve given me plenty of reasons not to like them.) Something I noticed on the night, but didn’t really think about until later, was that the delegates who voted against the motion I was speaking for – which I was proposing, at the CLP, on behalf of the ward party – included several delegates from my ward, who were thus voting against their own branch’s motion. If they’d all voted in favour, in fact, the vote would have been tied. Some friends raised this at the next branch meeting, and I’m happy to say caused some embarrassment. I was half expecting the clique to claim freedom of conscience, point out that the Labour Party isn’t a democratic centralist party and generally brazen it out, but I suppose this line would have been difficult to sustain in front of the branch – which had, as we remember, passed that motion in the first place. The principle that a branch’s delegates should probably vote for that branch’s motions was fairly readily accepted, although there was some foot-shuffling over the evident fact that this hadn’t happened; one member of the clique even suggested that some branch delegates might also have been there as a delegate of an affiliated society (although in this case they would presumably have voted in favour of the motion as well as against, which I’m pretty sure nobody did).

So say not the struggle naught availeth, eh. It’s just that the struggle is a struggle, and at the end of the day it availeth not terribly much.

There is one, final, reason not to leave, which is that nobody will notice if I do, or indeed care –

– a thought that makes the idea of staying on to make trouble for the clique particularly persuasive. Equally, if I do leave, it would be nice to make a bit of noise on my way out (as Owen Jones indubitably has). But I’m not at all sure that these are good enough reasons to remain a member of a party with the Butcher’s Apron on its membership card, a leadership that’s running interference for a state committing genocide and few identifiable policies that I actually support.