The bad music of the 1980s is making a return. That’s not a reference to Duran Duran or Boy George but the fact that we are hearing the same the howls of outrage from the Labour’s right wing as we heard before. They are objecting to Party members exercising their democratic right in selection processes, just as they did thirty years ago. This artificial outrage is orchestrated, as usual, by the Tory press who want nothing better than the destruction of Corbyn’s Labour Party.
Last week the London Evening Standard ran several features on the re-selection processes in the London Borough of Haringey. Although Corbyn supporters are making headway in many areas of London, and indeed nationally, Haringey is in the headlines because of its controversial Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV), which has been described by critics in the local party as ‘social cleansing’.
Under the usual lurid headlines, the Evening Standard announced that “Jeremy Corbyn’s Momentum group is poised to take over its first council after ousting sitting councillors and replacing them with Left-wingers”. All the obligatory language of “purges” is wheeled out. There is no “right wing”, of course. Labour is a chariot with a left, a far left and a “moderate” middle, nothing on the right.
One Haringey councillor who is standing down was quoted to refer to “ruthless attacks” and another to “intimidation”. In fact, the controversial HDV has been opposed by Labour members in Haringey for months and only passed through the Labour group on the council with the support of 29 out of 49 councillors. The HDV is a public/private partnership that involves transferring thousands of council tenants to a company 50% owned by the council and 50% by a private company. The deal is worth billions of pounds and is set to last 15 to 20 years. Many Labour members, including some who opposed Corbyn’s leadership bids, have opposed the HDV, so the de-selection of nine sitting Haringey councillors will tip the balance on the Labour council against the terms of the HDV.
But after this shock-horror revelation in the Standard, there followed an even more astonishing – and disgraceful – attack in The Guardian on the left by one of Labour’s ‘heavyweights’, Roy Hattersley. Roy claims that “The Labour party faces the greatest crisis in its history”. We will leave aside Roy’s historical amnesia – there were far greater crises in 1931 and 1981, when on both occasions former right-wing members of the Labour Party deserted, leading to Labour being out of office for years.
Hattersley trots out all the old slurs about the “far left” and “infiltration”. Even in Liverpool, he complains, “the old gang is back. All that has changed is that the Militants now travel to meetings with bus passes.” This is actually a back-handed compliment, showing that a few individual councillors and Labour Party members can be expelled from the Party (as they were in that city), but political ideas cannot be crushed, and the tradition of the old Militant runs deep.
But Hattersley’ main gripe is that right-wing MPs aren’t shouting loud enough about the changes in the Party. “Not one of those who resigned from the shadow cabinet in protest against Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership”, he complains,” has publicly condemned what amounts to a takeover.”
For Hattersley, the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of ordinary working class men and women – Labour supporters – into the Party is not something to be celebrated, but is a blight on the Party. “What amounts to an invasion should have been resisted from the moment that Jeremy Corbyn signalled that what was once called infiltration had become recruitment” To be described as unwelcome “invaders” is a disgraceful slur on those hundreds of thousands who paid their money on the nail to become members of the Party.
Incredibly, Hattersley associates Labour’s very popular election manifesto with “extremism”, glossing over the fact that the manifesto led to the biggest jump in Labour support, from 30 per cent to 40 per cent, since 1945. Polls show that despite the ongoing campaign of media distortion and disinformation, Labour is poised to win the next general election. In every age group under 50, Labour has a poll lead. Among under 30-year olds, the Tories command only 10 per cent support. For people like Roy Hattersley to rubbish Labour’s recruitment and its achievements since Corbyn won the leadership in 2015 is a disgrace.
If Roy Hattersley were to take off his 1980s blinkers for a moment and looked for the reason why Labour’s membership has grown and why Corbyn and Labour’s policies are so popular, it has nothing to do with “infiltration” or “invasion” of the Party. But it has everything to do with unending austerity, with record levels of poverty, low pay, job insecurity, housing insecurity and an NHS in crisis. Not one of these issues is addressed in all of Roy’s long diatribe against the left and Corbyn.
The deselections that have taken place in Haringey and elsewhere are in keeping with the political winds blowing through society and particularly through the Labour Party. It is absolutely appropriate that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership victories, first by 57% of the vote and then by 62%, are reflected in elections in CLP meetings and in selections for council and parliamentary candidates.
What the right-wing describe as a “purge” is nothing of the kind. The hundreds of thousands of new Labour Party members have the right to their own views and opinions and the right to express those views through internal ballots and elections. There ought to be no “selections for life” at any level in the Labour Party. No-one is being expelled from the Labour Party, although we might add, it is invariably left-wing members who are expelled or suspended by the right-wing. If being a ‘rank and file’ Labour member is good enough for hundreds of thousands of members, it is good enough for those former councillors who are being asked to stand aside.
There is an uneasy truce in parliament between Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters and his opponents. But the key word is uneasy. Let us not forget that 172 Labour MPs demanded that Corbyn stand aside after he was first elected. Then the second leadership election was arranged under different rules from the first, so it was effectively rigged in such a way that Corby was put at a disadvantage. Legal efforts were even made to stop Corbyn being on the ballot paper.
Yet he won his second victory by a greater margin and he followed this up with an election result completely unexpected to the right wing. If there is an uneasy truce in the parliamentary party today, it is only because the right-wing have no moral authority among members. But it would be making a serious mistake to believe they are reconciled to Corbyn and, especially, to the political ideas that ‘Corbynism’ represents. Labour’s policies “for the many, not the few” are tolerated by right-wing MPs for the moment, but when Labour is elected and there are any political or economic difficulties – and there will be – the veneer of support for the leader will evaporate.
It is a serious mistake to associate the current quiescence of right-wing Labour MPs with their being reconciled to a mass-membership and radical Labour Party. They are not. Appeasing these MPs will in the long run lead to disaster. That is why an essential part of the democratisation of the Labour Party must include re-selections, not only of council candidates, but also of parliamentary candidates. We repeat, there should be no “candidates for life”. We ought to trust Labour members to select the candidates of their own choice based on their own ideas, hopes and aspirations and not on the needs of this or that Labour Party member’s personal career.
December 5, 2017
