The Nye and Owen Show

The greatest of thinkers stand on the shoulders of giants. Owen Smith, it is fair to say, is not a great political thinker. Still, he tells us that he is standing on the shoulder of one the labour movement's giants. Debating with Jeremy Corbyn on television he said:

I want to be a force for good in the world. Therefore, you need to achieve power. Nye Bevan, my great hero, said it’s all about achieving and exercising power. I’ve devoted my life to that.

(Stolen from Left Foot Forward)

I'm a little confused about this, I must confess. Is the Nye Bevan being spoken about here the same Nye Bevan who said this?

The Right Wing of the Labour Party would rather see it fall into perpetual decline rather than abide by its democratic decisions.

What about this, given that people have been expelled from the Labour Party recently for saying far less barbed things?

That is why no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. 

Then there's this, a Bevan quote favoured by today's self-professed moderates, but in actual fact a neat statement of a basic of historical materialism:

Freedom is the by-product of economic surplus.

Let's face it, Nye Bevan would have been expelled from today's Labour Party. Because the Compliance Unit would know all too well who would be getting his vote.

Dispatch Dispatches

There are times when you can't escape realising how far your opinions lie from that dullest of social constructs that goes by the name of mainstream opinion. The current public notoreity of Momentum is a case in point.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that my issue with Momentum, of which I am an active member, is that we are not left-wing enough. That is to say, we're not - at a national level - sufficiently resigned to the inevitability of fights within the Labour Party (still, in spite of it all, I hear hopes for 'Party unity' being expressed), and the need to organise to win these, and win them decisively. Nor are we doing nearly enough to form the new generation of activists which is likely to be the lasting legacy of the Corbyn surge.

A Momentum activist - still from tomorrow's documentary

Quite incredibly, it seems that the makers of Dispatches don't share this outlook. The programme, to be broadcast tomorrow, targets people I know and like. It also makes the bizarre claim that Momentum is a hotbed of Trotskyist entryists, an accusation from which the organisation alas distances itself. On the on hand, the claim is too ridiculous to warrant an answer; on the other, even if it were true, the Labour Party has always contained Marxists - starting with the plodding second internationalist Marxism of Hyndman's SDF, compared to which the AWL represent a distinct improvement. In fact your host here is a Marxist.

Still there is a comforting familiarity about journalists seeing Leon Trotsky lurking within every GC. This, at least, is standard issue reds-under-the-bed fare. Altogether more disturbing, albeit hardly without historical precedent, is the focus on  selections, deselections, and mandatory reselection.

I leave you with one question: since when is the ability of members of a political party to choose who represents that party in elections something sinister?

Shadow Cabinet Elections

On a day when the forces of entitlement scorned took to the streets to articulate the demand of Brecht's Writers' Union that we dissolve the people and elect another, I should start by saying that I am heartily in favour of democracy. One of the many problems with capitalism, whether run from Brussels or London, is that it is not nearly democratic enough.

So, then, I support the demand of some Labour MPs to restore Shadow Cabinet elections, right? Well, as it happens, no. At least not in the terms in which they're being requested.

The internal democracy of the Labour Party is about the democracy of a movement or it is a hollow sham. The Labour Party I am interested in being a member of is about the political representation of a mass of working people and their allies, not least as organised in trade unions. Labour MPs matter in as much as they are the parliamentary expression of this movement, but they are not the Labour Party. We are, all of us.

In the heady days of the late 70s and early 80s, the Labour Left supported Shadow Cabinet elections in combination with a raft of measures designed to secure the accountability of the PLP to the wider Party and the election of the leader by the entire Party. Subsequent history has brought us a situation in which there are no Shadow Cabinet elections, the PLP is packed full of MPs more right-wing than the Party at large, and yet Jeremy Corbyn is - and in all likelihood will still be at the end of the month - Labour leader. In this context the demand for the PLP to elect the Shadow Cabinet is not a democratic demand. It is all about a right-wing PLP blocking the ability of a leader supported by the mass membership to implement policies supported by that membership. And it should be opposed.

However, electing the Shadow Cabinet isn't a bad idea in itself. Why not allow every member of the Labour Party and its affiliates to participate, holding elections at the same time as NEC elections?