Purge away

"Politics is all about struggle", so began the first lecture on political ideas I attended as a new undergraduate. The lecturer, a brilliant amalgam of Marxist and anarchist, took a deep breath before delivering his punchline: "This is what Tony Blair doesn't realise; hence the inane grin on his face".

It was a good line. As a Labour Party member in the mid-90s I knew however that, like many good lines, it was untrue. The Blairite project, that partially successful push to capture the Labour Party for big business, was about nothing if it was not about struggle. The generation of Labour staffers, hacks, and aspiring student politicians (one Jim Murphy was particularly prominent at the time) needed no lessons from the far left on this front. Elections were rigged, candidates parachuted in, leftists denounced (the word 'Trotskyist' during this period lost any meaning other than 'someone more left-wing than me'), and the Party gradually staffed with people on board with the gospel according to Blair. In the rare eventuality that these measures failed to secure the desired end, there was always the last resort of brute diktat: witness Liz Davies deselection as candidate for Leeds North East.

I tell you this not by way of reminiscence but in order to, as kindly as possible, point out that Blairism was never going to roll over and die. It was born out of a struggle for the soul of the labour movement, and will kick and bite until its last breath. Corbyn has been leading the polls for weeks, seemingly unstoppable, his meetings packed, and his campaign gaining momentum. The spads and hacks, a good number of whom make up the PLP, were hardly about to shrug their shoulders and tut 'well that's that, then' before giving up politics in favour of gardening. Over two decades Blairism gained near total control of the party machine, both at the level of full-time staff and of officers in many CLPs. It was inevitable that it would use that positional advantage in an attempt to stop Corbyn.

This is what is happening at the moment. Social media is awash with stories of left-wingers having their applications for supporter status, or even membership, refused. People who campaigned for Labour in May have been turned down, as have some who have gone to the super-rogatory extreme of attending CLP meetings. Attempting to defend the purge, right-wingers make vague noises about people "campaigning against Labour", a charge that often seems to amount to little more than having tweeted something unfavourable about the party leadership. In some cases the grounds are even weaker:

Heard a woman was barred from voting in the leadership because the Labour employee doing the purging knew her to be left wing. #LabourPurge

— Ellie Mae O'Hagan (@MissEllieMae) August 20, 2015

The right is actively soliciting the details of people which it thinks it can get away with barring from voting:

The catch-all email sent out to the purged states that the Party has "reason to believe" they do not share Labour values. In many cases, people have interpreted this as meaning that they have supported non-Labour candidates, however much in the distant past that may have been. One notes that a similar rationale isn't applied to floor-crossing Tory MPs, whom Labour has always greeted with open arms. Nor were the membership applications of scores of ex-SDPers, some of them central to the Blair project, at least one of them (Polly Toynbee) a very active anti-Corbynite at the present moment, who have joined since the Blair years.

The Blairites are in full counter-attack. The left must stand our ground; so much is at stake. If you have been purged, don't just drift off in a sulk: that is the intended effect of this. Challenge it, make a noise about it, and register your details here.

The best form of defence, of course is attack. And if nothing else, the events of the past few days should convince us that winning the leadership is not enough. To undo the Blair project, we have to oust it from CLPs, the party machine, and the PLP. The CLP left, dormant for far too long, has to wake up, contest positions and vote in trigger ballots. It's not always clear to me that the need for this kind of action - which will inevitably be pretty tough and uncomfortable - at times has sunk in. There is a lot of talk at the moment about consensus building. This is no doubt well-intentioned, but seems to be grounded in an out-of-date analysis of where the Labour left is at: the Corbyn surge renders the project of winning the hearts and minds of a shrinking Labour centre irrelevant, for the time being at least.The sad truth is that consensus is not always possible. Two utterly incompatible visions for the labour movement are coming head to head. And one of them must lose.