A report from the London Borough of Waltham Forest by Ray Goodspeed (Co-Secretary, Leyton and Wanstead CLP – personal capacity)
Living in my part of East London, it is sometimes hard to know what campaign to throw yourself into next. The last couple of years have seen an explosion in struggles in workplaces, against landlords, against sexism and in communities in or near our area.
Yet at the same time the internal world of local Labour politics, and the cynical machinations of the clique that controls it could not provide a starker contrast for those of us engaged with the real world.
Unions on the march
In early March cleaners, catering and security staff who were outsourced to Serco and working for the Barts Health Trust, won a fantastic victory with their union UNITE. After a two-week strike, with the most upbeat and vibrant picket lines you will ever see, the Trust agreed to bring all of the 1,800 staff back in-house at the end of April 2023 as full NHS employees on equal pay, terms and condition. This will constitute a substantial pay rise for staff, who were demanding a 15% increase.
These staff were mainly African, with some East European staff, and mostly women. My CLP, Leyton and Wanstead, collected £350 from members for the strike fund and provided help and advice. Labour party members from the borough were a permanent fixture on the picket line at Whipps Cross Hospital, either with the CLP banner or as members of East London Unite Community (ELUC) branch. ELUC, comprised of both Labour members and others, is one of the most active branches of Unite Community.
Over the last two weeks, ELUC were out again, turning out at 4 am to block the Hackney Council refuse lorries at the depot. They can do this when the actual strikers can’t, as ELUC members cannot be victimised or disciplined. They did manage to delay many vehicles before the police were called out to prevent us.
The strike involves 200 Hackney UNITE members in refuse, building services, and bus drivers/assistants for disabled people and children with special educational needs, who have been offered an insulting 1.75% pay rise, when inflation is running at 8.2%, and massively higher for energy costs and food. This follows 11 years of pay austerity that have seen real wage levels fall by 22% (see title photo).
Epic strike
Last year, from July to November, the Leyton and Wanstead CLP members and banner were present on the picket line virtually every day of an epic strike by teachers in the National Education Union (NEU) at Oaks Park school in neighbouring Redbridge, a directly-managed Council comprehensive school, against a culture of bullying and the victimisation and sacking of a union rep. The local Labour Council, meanwhile, supported the head (see more here).
Though the rep was not reinstated and is still pursuing the issues through an Employment Tribunal, some concessions were gained and the strike was a life-changing experience for many teachers involved. Seeing the radicalisation of some young teachers who were completely non-political before the strike was a moving experience.
Early in 2022, I surprisingly found myself on another picket, this time outside a fee-paying independent school in my own borough or Waltham Forest. Both unions, the NEU and the National Association of Schoolmasters / Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) went on strike and successfully prevented the school from taking them out of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme.
Since then, several other Council or Academy schools have been in dispute or on strike in Waltham Forest, including teachers and classroom assistants. During the Covid crisis the local NEU branches have recruited large numbers of new members and courageously used the s.44 notices to refuse to work in unsafe conditions (the issue that led to the victimisation of the staff rep at Oaks Park School). Our CLP has offered support to all these disputes.
In the last year or two our CLP has supported strikes by staff in Council nursery schools in Tower Hamlets Borough (one of whom is our CLP chair). We also supported a strike by young, new, freshly-organised members of UNITE, working as IT tech support workers at a landlord agency, Goodlord, on the edge of the City of London, who refused to accept a “fire or rehire” pay cut of £6,000 a year. Again, though the workers did not get their jobs back, a financial compromise deal was struck and a number of new keen trade unionists in their 20s have been created by the experience of struggle and the solidarity they received. These lessons will be carried into future battles.
Not just workplace struggles
On top of workplace struggles, our CLP organised local Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, from which a more permanent campaigning group, “Many Faces, One Community” was formed. Back in November 2019, we organised a public meeting on the Kashmir emergency, which was extremely well-attended by members of the local Kashmir community. Ours is a major area of Kashmiri settlement and we had moved the emergency resolution at the 2019 Labour Party conference.
Our new and active CLP Women’s Branch also took the lead in organising local protests around male violence against women, the Sarah Everard murder and the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill.
Labour Party members in Waltham Forest, together with ELUC (again!), and Momentum have supported the excellent work of the Newham and Leytonstone branch of the London Renters Union, including mass action to prevent evictions, both by private landlords and attempts by local (Labour!) councils to evict families from temporary accommodation and send them all over the country for rehousing.
Finally, we have supported campaigns against two damaging projects. The first is the extension to the waste incinerator in Edmonton (Enfield), just over the River Lee from Waltham Forest, planned by six borough councils in the North London Waste Authority (NLWA), which is chaired by the Labour Deputy Leader of Waltham Forest Council. The second is the proposed Silvertown road-tunnel under the Thames.
The incinerator plans have been condemned by the local community surrounding the development, climate campaigners and very many experts in the field. They have also been opposed by the Labour Mayor of Greater London, an all-party panel of MPs, the local Labour MP for Leyton and Wanstead and even Iain Duncan Smith – Tory MP for Chingford and Woodford Green. Yet the NLWA is adamant that the scheme goes ahead, billowing pollution into the air of North-East London and increasing global warming.
The officers and members of Leyton and Wanstead CLP see their role as supporting these campaigns, practically, financially and politically. Our meetings regularly feature speakers from striking trade unionists and others campaigners. Leyton and Wanstead was a traditionally left CLP even before the Corbyn phenomenon kicked off in 2015. We were one of Corbyn’s first nominating CLPs. We have also worked well with other principled, local members who do not see themselves as “Corbynistas” as such. Visitors to our meetings often remark how friendly and welcoming they are.
Iron grip
Sadly, that cannot be said for the whole borough. Walthamstow CLP is currently firmly on the right of the party, based around their high-profile Labour MP, the liberal-feminist Stella Creasy, and her family (who run the party). It is known for the iron administrative grip of party officers whose commitment to inclusive democracy and welcoming new recruits, might, shall we say, be open to question.
Members tell me that attempts to raise issues that are not approved of can lead to people being shouted down, slandered and hectored in meetings, in an atmosphere of naked factional bullying that has driven members away from attending, preferring to devote themselves to other campaigns. Walthamstow CLP, as such, is entirely absent from any of the struggles I describe above.
Chingford and Woodford Green, which, like Leyton and Wanstead, also straddles two Labour boroughs (Waltham Forest and Redbridge), was always more finely balanced. It was the scene of the legendary general election campaign in 2019 to elect socialist Faiza Shaheen. Hundreds of activists, from schoolkids to pensioners, threw themselves into the campaign, which achieved the only other swing to Labour in London and came within 1,262 votes of beating Iain Duncan Smith.
The right took control last summer after some CLP officers were suspended (and then, much later, reinstated) and officers lost the right to contact their own members. Many good local people had dropped out of activity through demoralisation with the new direction of the party.
Leadership clique
It is sometimes said that those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. You have to wonder when you examine the squalid farce of our local council candidate selections and the “trigger-ballot” process for our Labour MP in Leyton and Wanstead. It is amazing where a mixture of incompetence and factional spite can lead you.
The main powerbase of the right is the Waltham Forest group of Labour councillors, where the left has not been able to translate its support in the membership into selecting left councillors. The tricks that the Council leadership clique have got up to in order to perpetuate their control have been described in more detail in previous Left Horizons articles (see here and here)
Good socialist candidates, or indeed, any candidates who were perceived as not toeing the line of the Waltham Forest Council leadership, were refused the chance to stand by a very questionable assessment panel process. This included a sitting senior councillor who had come within three votes of being elected Council leader a few months earlier!
The tortuous appeals process, not just in my borough but all over London, dragged on all though December and January. In Waltham Forest, just a handful of candidates were reinstated, leaving a list to choose from which barely covered the available Council places.
Less subservient
It was not until February that the actual shortlisting and selection meetings could be held – for an election in on May 5th! In the Leyton and Wanstead CLP area of the borough, some changes were made, with a few councillors standing down, and others deselected and replaced. While this cannot be described as a marked shift to the left, it does represent a move towards council candidates who may take a more independent line and be less subservient to the leadership.
The Deputy-Leader, the one determined to push through the expanded Edmonton incinerator scheme, only hung on as candidate by 50 votes to 45 in a huge turnout of members in one ward. We were left ruefully noting that if just a few of the good socialist members in that ward had not cut up their party cards, a major victory could have been achieved. Another sitting Council member and Cabinet member, chose to stand down after a dossier was presented in which serious allegations, yet to be answered, were made about whether he had lived in the borough or not for the last few years.
We did not get the full list of candidates until the very end of February – or so we thought! A further piece of nonsense was yet to come. Just days before the closing date for nominations, in early April, a Labour candidate was suddenly re-interviewed by London Region and her endorsement was removed, on spurious and, indeed, disgraceful grounds. As her signed nomination papers had already been submitted, she was put under intense pressure to withdraw by London Regional Officials, but correctly refused to do so. She was promptly expelled. Her appeal has been submitted.
We therefore have only two official Labour candidates in a three-seat ward, even though the third will still appear on the ballot paper as a Labour candidate. The instructions came down that no leaflets with three names, nor with just two, could be delivered, and no canvassing could take place. A generic “vote Labour” leaflet is being delivered to previous Labour promises in this last week of the campaign. The issue has been highlighted by the main, LibDem, opposition, and the party looks a complete laughing-stock. And all this is supposedly when the “adults are back in the room”!
Chaotic nonsense
A rational person might suppose that all this chaotic nonsense would be enough for one area, but no! In the middle of all this, London Region Labour tried to force the Leyton and Wanstead CLP officers and the Executive Committee to initiate the “trigger ballot” process for our MP, John Cryer, to run during the selection meetings for councillors and in the couple of weeks before the official election period. We refused, of course.
After weeks of constant pressure from regional officials, they decided to take control of the process from the CLP entirely and to run the timetable (normally eight weeks) in 10 days over the last few days of March – holding nine branch meetings on three days! Laughably, this included holding the branch meeting in the area with the largest Jewish population on a Friday night. These meetings were widely boycotted by members. It is now May – and we have yet to receive one official word about the result of that process and whether our MP has been reselected or not.
It is no surprise that combined with the attacks on the left at national level, these ridiculous manoeuvrings have led to minimal enthusiasm to campaign in the London borough elections. All councillors are under a three-line whip to neglect their safe seats and to spend their time canvassing in a couple of marginal seats in Chingford, but beyond them, very little interest has been shown by local members.
Frankly, it is hard enough to persuade some party members even to vote Labour, never mind actively campaign for it. There is a real sense that the party under Starmer should not be allowed to get away with their attacks on the left and there is an urge to punish it at the polls.
To be clear, while fully understanding the frustrations of ordinary members, Left Horizons calls for a vote for Labour. Given the ability of the Tories to set themselves on fire on a daily basis, it is likely that some gains will be made, even under this lacklustre national leadership, but the priority for socialists must be to build the strength of working-class organisations, in workplaces and the wider community.
This in turn will be reflected in the Labour Party under the pressure of events and lead to the growth of a consistent Marxist current inside and/or oriented towards the Party.
