Model motion in support of UCU - please put to Labour branches/ CLPs

An industrial dispute with the potential to be one of the most significant in the UK in recent years has reached a new stage. For details see here. Support throughout the Labour movement is essential.

This Branch/ CLP notes that after prolonged attempts to negotiate with Universities UK over proposed reforms to pensions, the Universities and College Union has voted to take industrial action in pre-1992 universities. This is likely to begin on 22^nd February. Central to the proposed changes is the abolition of defined benefit pensions.
 We believe:

• ·         That all workers are entitled to a decent retirement.

• ·         That defined benefit schemes are a good way to secure this.

• ·         That the attack on pensions in universities represents the latest front in an attack on public sector pensions.

• ·         That this is part of a process of levelling-down of pension provision that will have a negative impact on all workers, whether in the public or private sectors.

 We resolve:

• ·         To support UCU’s industrial action.

• ·         To liaise with the UCU branch at [LOCAL UNIVERSITY] and get details of picket lines; to inform our membership of these by email and to encourage members to turn up and support them.

• ·         To write to the vice-Chancellor at [LOCAL UNIVERSITY] expressing our support for the strike and urging the employers to negotiate reasonably with the union.

• ·         To contact [LOCAL MP/ LABOUR CANDIDATE] asking her/ him to both write to the vice-Chancellor and to communicate her/ his support to the UCU branch at [LOCAL UNIVERSITY]

  The motion will require alteration if there is no pre-1992 university locally.

 For details of the dispute, useful for correspondence, see https://www.ucu.org.uk/strikeforuss

Statement on the Labour left slate for the NEC

This was sent to me and I agree wholeheartedly with it. I'll be voting for the Momentum slate in the interest of left unity, but we need to do much better in future.

We feel that there should be a much more transparent and democratic process engaged in for the selection of the NEC Left Slate in the future. It is no longer sufficient that a handful of Executive members of Left organisations meet as the CLGA and choose who we are told to vote for: the grassroots members of these organisations should have the ability to choose who they want on this slate. Having the Executive members of the CLGA organisations select members to put forward for these positions excludes ordinary members from the process. The current system whereby a small group comprising the CLGA decides the final slate by “consensus” is no longer representative of the grassroots Left.

We are proposing that Momentum lead the democratisation within the Left by putting in place the following system for choosing the next NEC Left Slate:

Anyone who is a member of any one of the CLGA organisations and who is eligible to stand for the Labour Party’s NEC is able to put themselves forward for election. They must submit a brief bio and at least one nomination to indicate support from either a branch (or another local organisation) or the Executive of one of these organisations. To facilitate a fully democratic decision-making, all the CLGA organisations must circulate the details (bios & nominations) of all the candidates to all their members, as it is not simply the ability to vote for these candidates, but the opportunity to have full knowledge in which members are making informed choices.

The selection of the final slate is compiled by allowing each member of all the CLGA organisations to vote for the 9 candidates, using a Single Transferable Voting system. Since individuals may be a member of more than one Left organisation within the CLGA, the ballots are issued to members based on Labour Party membership numbers, so that an individual only gets one vote. The 9 candidates receiving the most votes are deemed to be the “left slate” and will be advertised by all the participating groups as such. This selection process should ideally be run by an independent scrutineer such as the Electoral Reform Society.

Momentum: Business as usual fights back

Just over a month ago I was posting about Momentum. As befits the organisation's name, a lot has happened in the time between now and then. A quick Google will fill the reader in if necessary, and I have no intention of using up pixels repeating what has been reported across the British left internet ad nauseam. The news in brief is that Jon Lansman has imposed a constitution on the organisation and that many members are not happy.

Over the coming days local groups will have to work out their positions on the coup, and on what to do next. I have my own view, as will be apparent from the way I'm writing, and I think it's important to defeat what I see as a power grab. But there's a caveat: the way we debate and interact within groups in the hours ahead matters as much as the outcome. Momentum, and the Corbyn movement more generally, is easily the most positive thing to come out of the British left for a generation. It cannot be allowed to go to waste. To this end, the necessary disagreements that lie ahead are ones that ought to be conducted in a comradely fashion, preserving the relationships on which practical solidarity depends, and keeping enough unity within local groups to go forward. This is especially the case because many people in Momentum are new to political action. Seasoned faction fighters would do well to bear this in mind.

If how we conduct the dispute is important, so is understanding it. This is a conflict about labourism, that peculiarly British way of doing working class politics, where the politics of the workplace is outsourced to the trade union movement, with the Parliamentary Labour Party keeping charge of the bulk of business. A strict separation of powers governs the labourist settlement, with trade unions straying into the 'political' being met with disapproval. So too, the PLP preserves its distance from the constituency activists who keep the Party ticking over at local level. If, on this model, political power is distant and insensitive to pressure from below, the devotees of this remote deity receive compensation in the form of the culture of labourism. The Labour Party and unions provide activities, friends and comrades, structure, purpose, and the possibility of office.

Labourism can be left-wing, just so long as it sticks to the rules of the game - politics is for parliament (and not for the streets, still less - God forbid - for 'political' strikes), MPs are important and to be treated with reverence, the 'Labour family' over-rides all other political loyalties. For all that he is the best leader Labour has ever had, and for all that his election would be a momentous step forward, Jeremy Corbyn remains squarely within the labourist consensus (by contrast, Tony Benn was set upon not least because he didn't).

The Corbyn movement, especially in the form of local Momentum groups, however, challenged labourism. It challenged it politically, organising and expressing solidarity with extra-parliamentary action, tying strikes into political agendas. Voices began to be raised about the deselection, and even mandatory reselection, of Labour MPs, turning the assumptions about power within the labour movement on their head. Scarcely less importantly, the movement challenged labourism culturally. More diverse culturally, ethnically and in gender and sexuality terms than anything the British left had ever produced it confronted a Labour establishment that in many localities is monocultural, white, and male.

Why am I writing about labourism? Because some people do well out of left labourism, those who get established positions in organisations, jobs with campaigning organisations or MPs, those who have just enjoyed being immersed in its culture and feel comfortable within it.

The Lansman coup is left labourism fighting back. It is because labourism, for all its undoubted achievements, can never deliver socialism that it would be good were the coup to fail.

Alas piffle Jones

The mere fact that something is a truism does not imply that it is true. One example is "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger", a thesis it would be interesting to test out on Polio victims. Another is "the pen is mightier than the sword". I'm not actually aware of any historical instance of a writer taking on a fencing master armed only with a Parker fountain pen, but if this did happen, I suspect it did not end well.

The point is, of course, supposed to be about the power of ideas, and to that extent there is a certain truth in it, which is a comfort to those of us who are far more comfortable inserting semi-colons into sentences than we would be thrusting rapiers into a foe. Amongst this legion of geeks I count myself. Still the kind of ideas with which I am concerned here, political ideas, are powerless in the absence of a political movement, and are only formed reliably in close critical relationship with such a movement. This is, understandably in the wake of the SWP rape crisis, the kind of talk which evokes nervousness on much of the left; yet it is often the most vital maxims that require the most careful handling. Whatever is meant by 'a movement', it has to be more than the whims of some central committee. But that is a matter for another day. When ideas come apart from a movement which they can inspire, and which can test them in the crucible of daily life, then they become lifeless things, phantoms and illusions.

Which brings me to Owen Jones. I am, I should say, angry about his intervention in the Labour leadership contest. The Labour left which gave rise to Jeremy Corbyn, and which is currently being tried in his person, also provided Owen with a hand up to his career as a commentator. I remember well him cutting his teeth in the pages of Labour Briefing and his early political days as a co-chair of the LRC's youth wing. He was born of the movement to which he has delivered a timed slap in the face. It is sometimes said that the Left speaks too easily of betrayal, and there may be something to this. Yet a sensitivity to treachery is the flip-side of valuing comradeship. If you are prepared to show solidarity with me, I should be similarly prepared to take you into account in making my own decisions. This might be uncomfortable talk for those for whom individual freedom, or career, or whatever else is the highest conceivable good. Others of us think that the freedom to shout lonely in the desert is no freedom worth having.

In what does the betrayal consist here? A political writer who views their writing as an intervention, as opposed to, say, a means to a better CV has to consider not only what they want to say but whether this is the right time to say it. There is much that could be said and asked about Corbyn and the movement around him; I have myself been far from uncritical. The time for articulating that is not, however, when the man is seeking re-election as leader of the Labour Party in the wake of a concerted attempt to wrestle the Party back into the hands of the Blairite cabal. There is a question we should ask ourselves before we ask questions of others. That is the question implicit in every picket line, "which side are you on?"; and the answer we give to that provides the context for our subsequent questioning.

Owen has chosen to lay bare his soul on the internet; that is his decision. I have nothing to say about it. Of more interest are the nine questions he asks at the end of his piece - without, one notes, offering much in the way of answers. Marx said that each age asks only the questions which it can answer. He might have added that the way those questions are understood, and for that matter framed, constrains the answers that are considered admissible. Nowhere is Jones' descent into a bland safe parliamentariansim more apparent than here, the sense he gives of what an acceptable answer to each of his questions would look like. I do not consider myself similarly bound by the norms of Westminster nicety, and for what it's worth I think that the primary reason the inhabitants of Westminster's famed bubble (amongst whom Owen must now be numbered) are disturbed by the member for Islington North is that he has refused to play the game of Westminster politics as normal. For all that, Corbyn is still a reformist, and some kind of answer to Owen's questions is probably needed, given that they have now been asked.

Here, off the top of my head, is a first attempt. 

1. How can the disastrous polling be turned around? Well, a few of us have been expressing concern about the polls for a good while. There's a lot that I would want to say about the need for forming a movement that works at community level to form 'public opinion', rather than receive it as a passive given. It is the model of politics as an exercise in customer relations, rather than social transformation that needs to be challenged above all else by any Left movement that takes contesting elections seriously. The point is not that we should not want to win elections, but that we need a new approach to how we win elections.

All of this said, Labour's polling really warrants the term 'disastrous' during the period since the EU referendum and the beginning of the relentless attacks on Corbyn from within the PLP. Outlandish though this idea might seem, perhaps Labour might do somewhat better in the polls if those attacks were to stop.

2. Where is the clear vision? I don't really understand the question. There is a reading of "clear vision" on which the phrase is as oxymoronic as "thoughtful Sun journalist". Vision is the stuff of motivating principles, big ideas, and utopian imagining. Vision is not meant to be clear in the sense that Owen seems to demand. The parable of the Good Samaritan presents a vision of how human beings might live, but it wouldn't necessarily be much use on the doorstep. It would certainly be a brave minister who gave it to a civil servant as indicative of the government's intentions. I think anyone who believes that Jeremy lacks vision in this sense hasn't been listening to him. Much of the British population has a good excuse for this, since much of what Jeremy has said hasn't been reported. If only there was, for example, a left-wing writer with a regular column in a national paper who could help on this front.

Perhaps, though Owen is concerned with policy rather than vision. Some of these have been forthcoming: think about John McDonnell's announcements on matters macroeconomic, providing a clear alternative to the Conservative programme. But there have been relatively few detailed policies, this is true. Is this a bad thing? It depends whether you are happy with what one might call the Thick of It model of policymaking: policies arising ex nihilo from the heads of special advisors and the cars of front bench politicians en route to press conferences. Once upon a time the Left argued that policy should emerge from the labour movement, through its democratic structures. If this is right then it is a good thing that there hasn't currently been much policymaking in Owen's required sense. Here we see the double bind in which Corbyn is being placed: if he doesn't do politics as usual, he is criticised; if he does do politics as usual, what is the point in Corbyn?

3. How are the policies significantly different from the last general election? See answer to previous question. Jones does accidentally touch on the interesting area of economics. Here McDonnell is quite right not concede to pseudo-Keynesian nonsense about the deficit. Yet in the background lurks a more troubling issue: capitalism can no longer afford social democracy. It's not simply a question of "the money being there", as the familiar leftist refrain has it, but rather of whether capital views the money being used for [insert favoured social spending here] is consistent with the reproduction of capital. This was the case during the long (and exceptional) post-war boom; this is in general no longer so. That doesn't mean nothing can be done - here again, I have not been uncritical. McDonnell is not, that criticism aside, not without good ideas - to with redistribution, investment, and productivity. Far more importantly, Corbyn's Labour is committed to setting working people free to fight for themselves, to do what the state can increasingly no longer do. The repeal of the Thatcher era trade union legislation is far, far, more important than anything a Shadow Chancellor can do.

4. What is the media strategy? Once again, the assumption of politics as usual pervades the question. "Most people", that most useful of demographic categories for a columnist with an axe to grind, don't get their news from social media. They get it from the mainstream print and broadcast media. This is probably right. It does not follow that it is written into the grain of the universe that this is so. What if people had more opportunity to talk about politics through the presence in their communities and workplaces of a real mass movement? 

At this point, I feel slightly as though I'm lapsing into John Lennon territory: you may say that I'm a dreamer. So let's allow that what is said in the mainstream media matters. As indeed it does; hence all those books by 80s Marxist sociologists on the press. It is a difficult question what a socialist electoral movement might do to get the best media coverage. Even putting it this way, though, assumes that the traffic between media and politics is one way. The media follow as well as lead; the Scottish Sun at crucial points cannot get away with carrying the same line as its southern cousin - witness the vastly differing attitudes towards the SNP and independence in recent years. Newspapers need to sell in order to survive, and political consciousness determines what they can say and still sell. Allowing even that, there's still some kind of question: how might we get nice things said about Jeremy in the papers? Again I can only express my wish that there was a reasonably well-known left-wing journalist about who could help in this respect.

5. What's the strategy for winning over the over-44s? Well, as the man himself says, pensioner poverty and social care are important issues. And I simply do not believe that the interview Owen describes is the first he has heard from Corbyn on these questions.

6. What's the strategy to win over Scotland? Labour needs a really big rethink on Scotland and the national question. With this proviso, it would be pretty easy to make the ad hominum point that the people who presided over Scotland's reduction to a solitary Labour MP, namely the Labour right are not likely to be the best people to win it back for the party of Keir Hardie. However, it's not clear that Labour needs to win over Scotland. It held a majority in England in 2005.

7. What's the strategy to win over Conservative voters? Liberals can be useful in spite of themselves because, much like stopped clocks, they sometimes tell the truth accidentally. Thus Bill Clinton, "it's the economy stupid". There is good evidence that a good number of swing voters opted for the Tories because they didn't trust Labour on the economy. An economic strategy of the sort McDonnell has in fact crafted is a good start here. The task now is to communicate it, a task from which this leadership contest is an unhelpful distraction.

8. How would we deal with concerns about immigration? It's not because of immigrants that you can't get a hospital bed, a job, a council house... Talk about immigration, but talk about it precisely in terms of its function to deflect attention from the Tories' attacks. To say this is to treat the electorate as agents, who can be engaged politically, rather than as passive consumers to whose "concerns" we need to appeal. I'm terribly sorry, I should say in passing, that Jones' dire liberal baby, the Immigration Dividend, went nowhere, but them's the brakes.

9. How can Labour's mass membership be mobilised? This is the crucial question. I'm not really sure that it's a question for Jeremy Corbyn, though. It's a question for all of us. Over to you, Owen.

1. 
   

Are you now, or have you ever been, a socialist?

Now, here's a thing. This email was sent out to CLP membership secretaries, at least in some parts:

Verification of new supporters

 During last summer’s leadership contest, we asked CLPs to assist in the process of verifying new members’ eligibility by raising any concerns about individuals who have applied to become a Labour Party member or supporter. 

The window for supporters to sign up as a registered supporter to take part in the Leadership election was open from 5pm on Monday 18th July at 5pm until Wednesday 20th July at 5pm. Each registered supporter application is subject to a validation process and CLPs' role in that is vital.

Should the Party consider it necessary, the applicant will be referred to a panel of the NEC who will make the final decision on whether their application will be accepted. Successful applicants must subscribe to the aims and values of the Labour Party and information on the criteria in which applications will be referred to the NEC Panel below.

In line with Labour Party rules, please could you promptly check the new supporters appearing in this report and submit any worries or concerns about a member’s eligibility, alongside any evidence you have, by emailing validation@labour.org.uk.

 Any queries, please contact your regional office who will be able to assist you.

 While the window for joining as a registered supporter has closed, we are still processing the applications so this first report includes only those processed so far.  These reports will come daily until all supporters have been processed, to ensure you are able to check all registered supporter applications. Later reports will also include details of new affiliated supporters for validation and we really appreciate your support and cooperation with this at this busy time. 

 Criteria to be considered when checking new registered supporter applications:

 Any applicants rejected in the 2015 leadership election

 If they were a candidate, agent or nominated a candidate in opposition to a Labour Party candidate in 2015 or 2016.

 If there is evidence that they have publically (sic) stated that they voted for a candidate in opposition to a Labour Party candidate in 2015 or 2016.

If there is evidence that they belong to, support or subscribe to an organisation whose aims and values are contrary to those of the Labour Party. This includes other political parties and organisations with contrary political aims and the evidence may include attendance at meetings or posting (more than once) on blogs or social media in support.

If the applicant has been party to membership abuse, such as not paying their own membership fees.

If they publically state or send any abusive comments regarding any candidate, any Labour representative or any other member.

If they have made any public statements including, but not limited to, racism, abusive or foul language, abuse against women, homophobia or anti-Semitism, or of an otherwise abusive and discriminatory nature.

 Applicants who have been auto-excluded or expelled and those who have been rejected as members within the last 2 years will be automatically rejected. In addition, all supporters are required to be on the electoral register and that check has taken place, so there is no need to check individuals against the electoral register. However, if you feel an individual listed below falls into one of those categories, please raise that by emailing validation@labour.org.uk

This speaks for itself, really. The powers that be at regional and national bureaucracy levels don't want supporters who voted for another Party, an approach to new interest slightly less welcoming than that of the Peoples' Front of Judea. And going to meetings of other political organisations? Wow. That said, we should be measured in our response to this. Apparently 'foul language' is enough to get you disenfranchised.

Fuck that.

On behalf of the mob

Intimidation in politics is no laughing matter. There are parts of the world where airing your political views will get you thrown in jail, beaten up, or worse. Westminster, it is fair to say, is not normally one of those places.

This makes events in the past 36 hours of Labour politics perplexing. As the most right-wing government in living memory was appointed - Britain now has a Chancellor who holds the general public responsible for the 2008 financial crisis and a Foreign Secretary who wrote a poem about the  Turkish president having sex with a goat* - the theatre of conflict in Labour's civil war moved to the NEC.

The NEC voted to place Corbyn on the ballot without requiring that he seek nominations. This much is good news. What is less fantastic is that this vote was conducted by secret ballot. Corbyn and others voted against having a secret ballot. They were right to do this: NEC members ought to be accountable to those who elect them, and this requires their voting record be public. Accepting this is part of what prominent elected office in a democratic organisation involves: it is not everyone's cup of tea, it inevitably attracts lobbying and criticism. It can be hard. But this is democracy in action: NEC members (or MPs, for that matter) do not hold their position by right. They are put there by members and accountable to members. Lobbying, arguing, disagreeing with representatives is part of healthy democracy. To subscribe to the idea that the people (the demos - those of us NEC right-winger Johanna Baxter called, in solid Burkean conservative tradition, the 'mob') get their input only at election time is not to take seriously what it is for the demos to rule.

This does not mean that anything goes. It hardly need be said that the putting of a brick through Angela Eagle's window is disgraceful, and the sharing of Baxter's own personal mobile number on-line should be condemned. However, there are channels to deal with this kind of behaviour: legal recourses and internal Party procedure. These exceptional cases are being used as cover for a broadening of the understanding of 'intimidation' to block avenues of accountability and undermine the Corbyn campaign. So, the Guardian reports of Baxter:

“A prominent journalist was texting members of the NEC, saying they had to vote for Jeremy, a union general secretary was phoning round members of the NEC telling them they had to vote for Jeremy,” she said. “It is intimidation and he endorsed it.”

It cannot be stated loudly or often enough: the described behaviour is not intimidation. It is lobbying. And it is legitimate lobbying, as Labour's ruling body preprared to meet to make one of the most important decisions that has ever fallen to it. The fact that an NEC member is seemingly traumatised at the thought of a union leader, in particular, intervening in the politics of a party called, well, the Labour Party, is a timely reminder of why we should elected a better NEC this year.

Lobbying is not intimidation. Nor is anything which makes someone feel intimidated automatically intimidation. Peoples' responses can be unreasonable, and the ruling caste of a Labour bureaucracy that have got used to a professionalised model of politics which isolates them from the concerns and passions of the mass of humanity seem systematically conditioned to respond unreasonably to political pressure. Add to this a culture in which a therapeutic cult of universal victimhood has increasingly substituted itself for proper politics and in which disagreement itself is considered pathological - for which someone's much-vaunted right to their opinion is translated as their right not to have their opinion challenged - and you have a recipe for wrapping New Labour in cotton wool and, absurdly, claiming that the political force which rained bombs down on Iraq is a delicate snowflake, in need of special protection.

You have, moreover, an excuse for the further privatisation of politics. Engaging with the leadership election is to be something that happens in the seclusion of one's living room, on the internet, with a solitary vote. Participation in a mass political organisation turns out to be akin to watching porn. The merits of the candidates cannot be debated at Party meetings, because there will be no Party meetings until the election is over. Members are, in a masterstroke of collective passive aggression, being intimidated into not lobbying representatives or arguing on behalf of a candidate, lest they be thought abusive.

There are victims in this country. They will sleep on the streets tonight, or will be struggling to feed their children on the few coins they have for the rest of the week, or are crying alone in detention centres. They deserve representation, and that is why we, the Left, should not allow ourselves to be intimated.

*A gaffe which, given recent allegations about the former Prime Minister, if nothing else demonstrates an impressive amount of Tory chutzpah.

There are many, many, more of us than you: 172 face thousands

Jess Phillips once remarked that if Corbyn messed up she would stab him, not in the back, but in the front. In spite of Corbyn not having messed up, spin and bluster to the contrary notwithstanding, 172 Labour MPs this evening carried through on that threat.

The battle begins now. It is not over, it has not even begun.

There are, you see, two models of democracy coming head to head. For one, basically a form of quasi-democratic elitism, parliamentarians need to be comfortable above all else. They are the experts, they are the ones who do the hard work, and they need to feel good with their leader. If their confidence goes, then so does the leader. The alternative, a democracy with a meaningful demos, was the motivating thought between those trade unionists who at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th century organised to get working people represented in parliament.

Democracy is nothing more than a hollow slogan, the uninteresting five-yearly choice between identikit media-performers, unless it is grounded in mass movements, connected to workplaces and communities. The direction of communication and accountability within a party, for this model, is from the bottom up. The members of the Labour Party choose the leader of the Labour Party. And, let the 172 think about this as they lie down to sleep tonight, it is the members of the Labour Party who choose Labour MPs.

If a model of democracy that gives the disenfranchised a sense of control over their own lives doesn't win over, in the form of a fighting, organised, growing, locality-based Labour Party, linked to revived trade unions and social movements, there are other supposed solutions on offer. They are from UKIP, and at the fringe Britain First. They don't care very much about democracy of any sort.

So get ready for a fight. I'm no doubt preaching to the choir here, but if you haven't already done it:

• Join Momentum (and go to its events)
• Join Labour (and go to meetings)
• In a few weeks, vote for the CLGA candidates for Labour's NEC

We need to keep our nerves. The strategy will be to dent your confidence. It is not about policy, they will say, but Corbyn can't win. Journalists and academics will be wheeled out to confirm this diagnosis. Commentators will use the word 'realistic' a lot. You will be made to feel like an oddball or a mischief-maker for supporting Jeremy. Do not fall for it. We are right, they are wrong.

This is the fight of our lives. Let's win.

There are weeks when decades happen

There's nothing like a popular vote to remind you where power lies in society; spoiler - not with popular votes. Thus, the hands of any British government wanting to operate within broadly mainstream economic constraints were today tied, not by the electorate, but by the ratings agency Standard and Poor, who cut the UK's credit rating. Expect others to follow. More generally, those most curious of creatures known as 'the markets' have not responded well to Thursday's Leave vote.

It would have been possible for a determined Leave campaign with a co-ordinated economic plan, prepared to stray beyond both mainstream constraints and the interests of capital, to manage a Leave vote in a way that didn't promise widespread poverty and public spending cuts whilst keeping the, uncertainty averse, forces of global credit capital and those irksome markets sufficiently content to spare it the coup de grace. However, that is not the Leave campaign we had: that was a monstrous concotion of xenophobes, British nationalists, economic reactionaries, and oddballs: an assembly of grotesque misfits wrapped in the Union Jack, who could only appeal to anyone on the basis of a widespread discontent, disaffection and desperation in search of an outlet. They had no plan, other than to 'Take Back Our Country' and 'Make Britain Great Again', all the while defending the sectional interests of a narrow part of British capital with no sense of a broader picture.

There is much still to say about the campaign, the EU, and the British economy. There is even more to say about what the referendum result shows about class. And there is still more to say yet about the petulant arrogance of much liberal reaction to the result. A strand of opinion in broadsheets, academia, and the Waitrose-shopping end of social media thinks that what last Thursday showed was that the swinish multitude should not be trusted with big decisions.

I will write about those things at some point. More urgent than any of them is the foul upsurge in open racism that has followed on the referendum campaign and result. Make no mistake, it wasn't that these things caused racism. Britain is, whatever the panglossians who inhabit Guardian columns might imagine, a racist society through and through. However, racism often lies buried - waiting nervous and Gollum-like in the shadows, consumed with self-hatred and unwilling to show its face. That it does is one of the greatest political achievements of recent decades. Yet, it's still there: hidden behind the remark that 'the area has changed', disguised as patriotism (if the two can ever be disentangled), implicit in a choice of friends. Once mainstream political discourse gets racialised, as it was by the immigration-focus of both main referendum campaigns, racists gain confidence. Things usually unsaid are spoken aloud. Combine this with the jingoistic upsurge that followed the result, the general flag-waving feel of Jubilee year, and most noxiously the ever-present threat of the far-right, and you have a toxic mix.

Jo Cox was its victim. There have been others. Since Thursday, racial abuse soared. Eastern Europeans were a particular focus: with cards reading 'go home Polish vermin' distributed outside a Cambridgeshire primary school. In West London, a Polish cultural centre was attacked. In East London two Polish men were beaten unconscious. The list of incidents goes on and horribly on:

But at least there's a political party in Britain, committed to equality and anti-racism, that will make the case strongly against racism, and build a cohesive movement in solidarity with its victims, right? Enter the Labour Party, glorious and ready to do battle against injustice and bigotry. Well, ordinary party members have been doing this. The PLP, however. Well, as the far-right roars and the economy falters, their priority is obviously to try to topple a popular leader who has increased Labour's share of the vote and presided over modest, but real, by-election successes.

The line is, of course, that Jeremy's weak leadership was responsible for the Leave vote. This is nonsense on several levels. Never mind the fact that Corbyn is not a weak leader - although this would not appear obvious to those whose idea of political leadership looks as though it has been cobbled together from a few evenings watching The Thick Of It - but that the bulk of the PLP don't want to be led by him, or by anyone with political ideas remotely similar to his. Never mind the fact that Corbyn was not in a position to persuade key Labour constituencies to vote Remain: one of Blairism's besetting sins is the reduction of politics to campaigns and soundbites, whereas all of those Leave votes in the north-east of England were about decades of feeling forgotten, being stripped of hope, crushed economically, and mocked culturally; not matters that can be set right with a broad grin. Never mind the fact that the only thing that would have been achieved by Corbyn going in all guns blazing on behalf of Remain would have been a Scotland-style meltdown in Labour support in parts of the north of England. None of this matters.

It is irrelevant because the coup is not actually about the referendum campaign or Corbyn's leadership style. It is about politics. A sizeable chuck of the PLP, Blairite clones imposed during the years when Labour had the imagination of Jeffrey Archer and the conscience of Dr Crippen, do not want a left-wing leader. You understand nothing about New Labour until you understand that it is about making the Labour Party permanently safe for capitalism. Most of its warriors, not being the most cerebral of souls, would be a bit hazy about what the word 'capitalism' means, preferring instead to wax lyrical about 'a dynamic, modern, economy'. For sure, New Labour is about winning elections, but not at any cost. Their lord and master Tony Blair let the cat out of the bag in this respect when he said that he would not take the 'route to victory' if it were a left-wing one.

In actual fact, the quisling tendancy in the PLP may not have to choose between power and principles. It is not inconceivable by any means that we will see some kind of National Government on a somehow-managing-to-Remain basis - composed of Tories, Lib Dems, and an SDPesque rump of Blairites - after an autumn election. Whether the split will come before or after this election will depend on the right's tactics, and whether they have the front to let unions and party activists pay in time and money for their election. (Incidentally: this scenario should be anticipated and pre-empted. Bold thinking about Scotland, up to and including the possibility of an electoral pact with the SNP in exchange for the promise of a second independence referendum, should be considered).

We cannot stop the right being right-wing. Nor can we make them loyal to the leadership: the strategy of a 'kinder, newer, politics' has been tried, in good faith, and has failed. The co-ordinated spotaneous resignations of shadow ministers throughout today put that beyond doubt. Now is the time to fight for the Labour Party. This, to be sure, should not be at the expense of defending communities against racism, nor at that of arguing for an alternative strategy on the economy. However, the remaining strangehold of the 1990s on Labour in parliament is a barrier to doing both these things. Words like 'accountability' and 'deselection' have now to be uttered openly. At constituency level the left has to plan so that the Labour Party in parliament in future looks more like the Labour Party at large.

The immediate priority is to support Jeremy. He is under attack, facing a vote of no confidence as I write. See Momentum here for a petition, and keep an eye out for more ways of offering support. These are desperate times within the Labour Party. Yet there is some hope. Here is Parliament Square this evening:

Corbyn and The Referendum Bind

Richard Seymour's book on the Corbyn phenomenon is well worth a read. Or at least, this is my judgement on the basis of having read two chapters earlier today. His take on the matter, which whilst being utterly supportive of the Labour leader is more pessimistic than is fashionable on the left , corresponds broadly to my own. 

That said, Richard brings out some genuine reasons for hope to which I think I've paid insufficient attention. The mere presence of Corbyn in the public sphere introduces left-wing ideas to a popular debate that has been dominated by neo-liberalism in recent decades. Meanwhile, his position as Labour leader and the related growth of groups like Momentum provides a context for a beleaguered British left to regroup and organise. We have more opportunities now, albeit ones we approach from a position of historic weakness, than we have had at any point in my adult life.

To state the obvious, this remaining the case depends to a large extent on Corbyn staying Labour leader. And there are people who have other ideas about that. From before his election as leader the knives have been out for him within the Parliamentary Labour Party and the structures and staff of the party. If the threat of a coup against his leadership seems less immediate after last month's election results (which, outside Scotland, were not too bad for Labour), this should be understood as a stay of execution, rather than a reprieve. Corbyn knows this; his parliamentary allies and advisors know this.

It is against this background that Corbyn's support for a Remain vote in this month's EU referendum should be understood. Let's be honest about this: he does not support the EU. Nor does John McDonnell. Nor does their most prominent media ally, Owen Jones, who is currently vocally advocating a remain vote. Jones has acknowledged the volte face: his line is that Labour must make the left case for a reformed EU and that the pro-Exit case will be dominated by anti-migrant racism. This does not wash: since last year, when he advocated exit, neither the prospects of a left reform of the EU (namely zero) nor the nature of the anti-EU forces in Britain have changed. Indeed, to the extent the left critics of the EU, like the Jones of Columns Past, have silenced themselves, they have gifted the pro-exit case to the nationalist right.

My point in saying this is not to accuse Corbyn and his circle of hypocrisy. They are in a genuine bind. Their support, lukewarm as it is, for Labour Remain is a calculated concession to the Right, much like their retreat on Britain's NATO membership. The hope is that by deferring to the post-Blair consensus on these issues they can broaden their coalition of support and secure their position. I do not share that hope.

The Labour leadership's advocacy of a Remain vote has been less than wholehearted. This matters because Labour voters could hold the future of Britain's EU membership in their hands and, if recent research is to be believed, hearly half of them are unaware of the Party's official position. Pressure is being put on Corbyn to be more vocal in his support for the Remain cause.

Whichever way the poll now goes, it will be used against Corbyn. If Britain leaves the EU, he will be blamed, and the indignation of the overwhelmingly pro-EU PLP stoked. On the other hand if, as is most likely, the vote is to stay this will be in spite of Corbyn. The Right will point to the example of the charismatic new mayor of London who, unlike John McDonnell (whose attitude on this will no doubt be that of a 'sectarian dinosaur'), was prepared to share a platform with the Prime Minister in defence of the national interest. He looks, they will say, like a leader in waiting.

Corbyn is in a double bind, and there is nothing he can do at this late stage. He will discover that he will never be able to concede enough to satiate his opponents in the PLP. But nor is he in any position to take them on directly; he lacks sufficient parliamentary support. If there is to be a future for this leadership, the task of fighting his corner rests with party activists and our ability to build a coalition of support for the leadership outside of parliament whilst exerting pressure on MPs.

Confessions of a confused socialist

It's a strange time to be active as a socialist in Britain. Hence, in part, the absence of much recent activity on this blog. I've written previously about my disquiet with the state of the left since Corbyn's welcome victory last autumn, and the uneasy feeling remains.

Back in December I think I saw the fundamental issue as being how we relate a bottom-up socialism that doesn't fetish parliament to the reality of a left-wing candidate having won the leadership of the Party. That is still at least of much of an issue as it was then. Fundamental questions have been asked: do we believe that capitalism is incompatible with human flourishing? If so, and if a socialist alternative is needed, how does a left-reformist Labour Party fit into with a strategy for moving in the direction of that alternative? Quite apart from this: what are we doing, individually, as a Labour left (organised in groups like Momentum and the LRC), and as the Labour Party to support the concrete grassroots opposition to Tory attacks? The junior doctors' strike is a prime example of something around which a good deal more organising should be happening

At the same time, of course, we can't ignore the reality of the Corbyn leadership, content in telling ourselves that the Labour Party or parliament don't really matter. If I believed that, I wouldn't be a Labour member; I won't bore you all on this Easter evening by rehearsing the reasons this is the case. The problem is precisely that these things matter, and that the left has, in an outcome slightly more antecedently improbable than Dapper Laughs turning out to be an expert in Jane Austen, won the leadership of the Labour Party. Its hold on this leadership is, however, at least as precarious as Laughs' actual grasp of Sense and Sensibility; if it loses that leadership, through pre-emptive backbench revolt or electoral failure, that will count against the intra-Labour left for years to come. "Your strategy has been tried and failed", the refrain will go, "now shut up, and listen to Dan Jarvis". And it may seem as though our critics would have a point.

The knives are being sharpened for Corbyn. Here's Jamie Reed's subtle Twitter account, for instance:

If the improbably named Rebel Alliance are not to have their way, the Party membership has to exert counter-pressure, making it clear to the PLP that we will not accept a coup. This will involve voicing our support to more sympathetic MPs, arguing the case with those who can be persuaded, and using mechanisms of accountability against those whose contempt for the membership is such that they want to reject last year's decisive leadership result. In this last respect, it is a serious tactical mistake for the leadership and elements of its organisational support to have downplayed talk of mandatory reselection. This is a basic democratic demand, whose time has come. Similarly, the present situation, where the left has the leadership and the membership without controlling the Party, is unsustainable. It's imperative that we organise to contest elections at CLP and other levels and, crucially, that we get Corbyn-supporting conference delegates sent this year: this conference will be a chance to consolidate his position, back left-wing policy, and set in motion democratic reform of the Party.

And the urgency of this task doesn't undo my initial point about not losing sight of the extra-parliamentary. There's a lot to be done.

Naught for your comfort

The only thing worse than not getting what you want, the saying goes, is getting what you want. Having spent my entire adult life wanting the Labour Party to have a left-wing leader, the months after Jeremy Corbyn's election have left me disorientated and strangely deflated, more fearful than revelling in victory.

Partly this is because of a sober recognition that, in spite of having won the leadership, the left is far from having won the Party. The British left loves its comforting stories, more so now that it can share them instantaneously through the perpetual emotional maelstrom that is the internet. Unable to distinguish support from sycophancy, hardly an hour passes without the self-declared Corbynistas birthing a new Jeremy-themed meme or Facebook group. Where once an activist might show her commitment to socialism by picketing, now she is more likely to do it by photoshopping. A left which once prided itself on possessing a certain amount of intellectual weight now communicates mainly through hashtags, declaring uncritical support for the leader of the Labour Party. One would be tempted to quote against this phenomenon the lines 'no saviours from on high deliver', were it not for the fact that those most in need of the message would be unlikely to get the reference.

There a decent argument to be had that uncritical support is no support at all. Corbyn deserves comrades, not worshippers. Any successful political movement, let alone one aiming at the radical transformation of society, requires a base that is critical and, to some extent at least, autonomous. This, however, is not a truth that sits comfortably with the mood music of the moment, which is driven by the relentless optimism of those who do not realise that the light at the end of the tunnel comes from a very fast oncoming train being driven by a maniac with nothing to lose. However much we murmur the mantras, 'decisive victory', 'mandate', and 'will of the party', the truth is that the hard work remains to be done. And here I'm talking about the effort we need to stand still, to retain the leadership. Winning the next general election is a different matter altogether.

Here again the absence of any tangible sense of reality is an obstacle to the change of gear the left so desperately needs. Once more the comforting tales get told: we won Oldham with an increased share of the vote. This was hardly a noteworthy victory for an opposition party a few years off a general election, but for parts of the Labour left the news was greeted with the near-orgasmic joy of a Tranmere Rovers fan learning that their side has pipped Barcelona to UEFA glory. Oldham perhaps seemed remarkable because Corbyn's opponents in the press had talked up the UKIP threat, but with the benefit of hindsight, it is a good deal less impressive. What is far more deserving of attention is the fact that Labour, already facing an uphill challenge in 2020 because of boundary changes, is tailing  miserably in the polls nationwide.

I must change tack at this point, because I'm in danger of subtly participating in the most worrying trend of the moment, an excessive focus on the parliamentary. It is a familiar criticism of socialists in the Labour Party that we focus on slinking our way through the corridors of power at the expense of class struggle beyond Westminster. It is also charged that we place the unity of the Labour Party above that of the working class, and certainly above that of the wider left. If any of these complaints were true, the only appropriate response from anyone with a claim to be a socialist would be to leave the Labour Party immediately. Our loyalty to Labour is not of the sort one might have for a family pet or a football team, whatever the modish talk of the Labour 'family' might imply. Labour is a means, not an end, and the end is socialism.

We're in danger of making the means the end. As a revolutionary socialist I do not believe that socialism will ever be handed down by a Labour government, which doesn't mean for one moment that I don't very much want a Labour government. It does mean, though, that I think a narrow Westminster focus is a mistake. Struggles outside parliament matter. The day by day fights against cuts and closures, for better pay and conditions - these ought to be bread and butter for socialists. I can't avoid the impression that we've taken our eyes off the ball in this area. Leftists who a few years ago would be boring the will-to-live out of their more Labour-orientated comrades with lectures on 'the importance of building the fight against the Tories in the workplace' have taken to following the latest shadow cabinet escapades with the resigned enthusiasm of the new junkie. Leaving aside the well-worn debate about reform and revolution - it could, after all, be that I am wrong - many battles won't wait four years. Take, for example, the current attack on our trade union rights: imagine what a difference would be made if the Momentum group made as simple a move as asking each of its several thousand members to join a union.

Ultimately there is no opposition between fighting austerity at grassroots level, on the one hand, and consolidating Corbyn's position and aiming at a Labour government, on the other. The truth is, as witnessed by the experience of Podemos and Syriza (remember them?), that the radical left wins political power not in spite of, but on the back of, movements that transcend the boundaries of politics as usual. Britain is far from having any such movement. The biggest mass-membership bodies with political potential and a significant presence in the working class remain the trade unions, strangely ignored by Labour's new left. There is a void here that needs filling. Instead, we're dancing over the precipice and falling into the darkness

The task that remains

...the whole history of the Labour Party has been punctuated by verbal victories of the Labour Left which with some few exceptions, have had little impact on the Labour Party's conduct inside or outside the House of Commons, but which have always been of great importance in keeping up the hopes and the morale of the activists              
     Ralph Miliband - Parliamentary Socialism

Miliband was writing in 1961. Little that has happened since gives us cause to question his account of the Labour Left's victories being pyrrhic affairs. The dust has now settled since Jeremy Corbyn's triumph in the leadership election. It is time to ask the hard question: will the election of the most left-wing leader in the Party's history buck the trend of purely nominal high-points for the Left? Or will something of lasting value come out of it? What could that even be?

False hope is a subtle enemy, so let's start by coming down to earth. Things do not look good. The fundamentals haven't changed since May's election defeat: there is not an automatic mass audience out there for the ideas on which Jeremy won the leadership. It simply isn't the case that Labour voters will automatically flock back to the Party now it has a 'proper Labour' person in charge (of course, with a nod to the elder Miliband, we should insist that Corbyn isn't a proper Labour leader; he's much better than that). We need to win the battle of ideas, and that's a job of work. Still less will Corbyn solve Labour's Scottish problem: indeed, the saddening truth is that his attitude towards Scotland has been unionist business-as-usual, an approach which fails to understand either the scale of what happened north of the Border, or the reasons that it happened.

Winning the contest of ideas is not easily done with a substantial proportion of the PLP openly hostile to varying degrees towards Corbyn. Senior MPs are regularly briefing against him, and front-benchers are distancing themselves from policies like nuclear disarmament. The plan is clearly to replace Jeremy as leader before the 2020 general election: I think it's likely the knives will come out as early as next year. Meanwhile, CLPs remain largely in the hands of the right - Corbyn may have won the leadership, his opponents control the party. True, there are thousands of new members who joined to vote for him. But even assuming that their politics are uniformly of the left - a dangerous assumption, I think - they are in the main inexperienced in Labour politics, and their resolve to fight the often brutal, and more often dull, battles that will be a feature of Party life over the next few years is untested. Certainly the failure of Diane Abbott to win the London mayoral candidacy and of the left slate to get elected to the Conference Arrangements Committee shows that we can't simply assume that intra-Party politics will now shift left.

So, two questions. What those on the socialist left of Labour expect from the Corbyn leadership? And how do we go about getting it? Three bullet points in answer to each

• Jeremy for PM! It may be a dream, but it's good to dream, and even better to fight for our dreams. A government based around Corbyn's programme, whilst it would meet with determined resistance from day one, would have great potential to improve the lives of the majority of people in Britain, and to provide a fertile ground for socialism.
• Developing a movement and ideas. The surge of support for Jeremy is a potential new activist base, which could be the foundation of a left movement for the next generation. The established Left can, and should, both learn from it and feed in socialist ideas born through political experience.
• ...which interacts with struggles outside parliament I do not think capitalism can be overcome by parliamentary action alone (there is a danger, which we have to acknowledge, that Corbyn's victory could fuel this illusion). So it's vital that the Corbyn surge feeds back into struggles outside parliament, in workplaces and communities.

Those are the things I think we should aim for. How to get them?

• Get involved in the Party Whether old or new members, we all need to get active in our local Labour Party, support Left candidates in internal elections, and argue for the policies on which Jeremy won. If you're new to the Party, learn about how it works. Join a trade union if you're not a member: unions are crucial to Labour's life, and to the defence of your rights. Subscribe to Labour Briefing which carries, from a Left perspective, news about what's happening inside the Party and how to get involved. Whilst I have concerns about its seemingly top-down nature, I also think it's worth being involved in Momentum, and seeing how it develops.
• Political education The established Left within the Party has to get its act together quickly on this one. We can't lose the new support. In an open and non-patronising way, we urgently need to communicate the nuts and bolts of Labour Party politics as well as putting across our ideas about socialism.  
• Don't ignore extra-parliamentary action. The focus on the Labour Party can't be at the expense of action outside parliament. In particular, the government's attack on trade unions has to be met.

Let's get cracking.

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.

The heart and the head

Talking to people about the Labour leadership election, a recurrent theme can be summed up as follows: "I'd love to support Jeremy; he's a great guy and I agree with his ideas. But realistically Labour won't win with him in charge, and the most important thing is beating the Tories in 2020". The heart says Corbyn, the head says Kendall.

The thought here seems to be that 'the public' won't accept a Labour Party led from the left. Raymond Williams once observed that there are no such things as masses, only ways of viewing people as masses, and much the same could be said about publics. The public -- this seething undifferentiated mass of reaction -- only exists in the minds of commentators and second-rate sociologists. Utterly staid in its thinking it selects between election candidates like a cliched British tourist abroad choosing from a menu. Unmoved by the prospect of exotic dishes, it maintains a studied indifference between egg and chips and ham and chips. For this way of looking at things, Jeremy Corbyn is the tabbouleh of the leadership context. Activists are not part of the public, on this account, nor are the five million voters lost by Labour since 1997. For that matter, the entire Scottish nation is dubiously public. In fact, the public turns out to look very much like a Progress intern's stereotype of a swing voter in a southern English marginal. It's a rather deflating take on the British population.

Crucial to the head versus heart move is an image of the electorate as passive consumers of political programmes. They are not capable of being convinced, persuaded by argument, inspired by campaigns, or transformed by struggle. If 'the public' thinks x then the only response of a serious politician is to find ways of delivering x to the public. Electoral politics becomes a perpetual sales pitch, a transformation describable in two words: 'New Labour'. Of course, the customer is always right only within limits. To misquote a misquotation of Henry Ford, she can have any colour she likes as long as it's blue. Should she have the audacity to believe in the nationalisation of the railways, as a majority of the British electorate do, she should be kindly ignored and directed towards other political wares. The politics of appeal to 'the public' has always been in fact about the creation of the public, their desires and their perception of political posibilities, by a nexus of media and politicians. It is like a worked example in the theory of ideology.

In any case, it's not as though an alternative way of doing things weren't staring us all in the face; if only mainstream political geography didn't stop at Alnwick. The fact that the SNP won an election in Scotland on the basis of an anti-austerity ticket whilst refusing to join in the mainstream assault on migrants (supposedly a practically inevitable bowing to the 'legitimate concerns' of the public), cannot be explained by Scots being somehow magically more left-wing than the rest of the UK's population (even though some Scottish nationalists and the odd jaded English leftist seem to think this is the case). There is racism in Scotland just as there is England. It's just that a party decided to say something different, to challenge that racism. It didn't, it is fair to say, obviously suffer at the polls as a consequence. And - who knows - some of the public may have changed their minds as a result of exposure to an alternative narrative.

But what if the nay-sayers are right? What if a Corbyn-led Labour Party would be un-electable? I'm reminded here of some words of Tony Benn's,

In Labour Governments we did our best to make capitalism work in a civilised way. And we failed. It never can work. It will always exploit and oppress people.

Those who think that the programme of  a Cooper, a Burnham, or -- heaven forbid -- a Kendall could ever be a sufficient balm for humanity's wound could remedy this by watching the news, or even by leaving their house occasionally. The homeless on our streets, to whom we have disgustingly become accustomed as though they were part of the scenery, as natural as the trees; the lives eeked out in poverty; the migrants dying in the sea; the creativity and talent sucked dry in jobs with no social purpose beyond the production of profit; the accelerating destruction of the environment -- these are not ills that can be set right by a little tinkering with the system here and there. The only strategy  that stands a chance of addressing them -- let alone the context of international injustice and inequality within which they sit -- is a socialist and internationalist one. Jeremy Corbyn at least begins to understand this.

For that reason alone -- for the hard-nosed pragmatic reason that only Corbyn sees the world as it is and recognises the immensity of transformation we need -- Jeremy deserves your vote. He is, contrary to the received wisdom, the only realist amongst the line-up. Because this is about so much more than 2020. This is about the future, about hope, and about socialism. It is the politics of the heart and of the head.

#Jeremy4Leader

This blog has taken a bit of a gloomy turn of late. I make no apologies for that. Things are rubbish, and a first step towards changing that is to see things clearly as they are. There's too much facile optimism on the left.

That said, it's nice to have something political to feel enthusiastic about. Jeremy Corbyn's candidacy for the leadership of the Labour Party is just this. It deserves your wholehearted support.

As I've said before, what we need is a counter-hegemony, challenging the austerity mindset that pervades our society. Jeremy's campaign is a chance to get alternative ideas out there and to challenge the consensus across all the main parties in favour of neo-liberalism. This is about much more than the leadership of the Labour Party, it is about our capacity to imagine another world.

It would obviously be very good indeed if Jeremy's name ended up on the ballot paper. For this to happen he needs nominations from Labour MPs. With this in mind - please pick a few MPs to email. Even people who are not natural left-wingers are worth targeting; argue that it would be good for the Party to have a proper debate about its future direction, and that this requires that Jeremy be on the ballot. An MP nominating him doesn't commit that MP to voting for him. Numerous MPs, including David Miliband, nominated Diane Abbott for the leadership in 2010 but didn't go on to vote for her.

If you're stuck about what to write, here's a sample letter from the excellent Red Labour.

Dear ___________

I am writing to you regarding Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to seek nomination for the Labour Party leadership. Jeremy’s announcement has undoubtedly electrified the leadership race. In the first 24 hours, he managed to secure the nominations of ten MPs, 2,800 people signed an online petition asking Labour MPs to nominate him and an incredible 10,000 people ‘liked’ the Facebook group ‘Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Leader’, more than all the other candidates put together. This is a clear indication that there is a thirst for a real debate amongst grassroots Labour Party members. It is now in Labour MP’s hands whether that debate takes place, or whether we have a leadership election where large swathes of our membership feels unrepresented and ignored.

As has been witnessed already, an election where the candidates broadly agree on the main issues only increases the public’s cynicism for the political process. It casts the Labour Party in a bad light after the shock of the general election not to be seriously discussing the issues raised by that defeat. For that honest, serious debate to happen, it is vital that Labour Party members, supporters and affiliates are be able to pick from a broad range of candidates representing the full range of opinion within our party. Jeremy will stand on a platform against austerity and in favour of a democratic economy which provides housing and services for all, while arguing for a fair immigration system and in favour of nuclear disarmament and humanitarian foreign policy. On those issues, Jeremy speaks for a substantial section of the grassroots of the party. If Jeremy is unable to overcome the substantial barrier to entry and make it on to the ballot, then we will not get that choice and the quality of the debate will suffer as a result.

It is in all of our interests to have an open and extensive leadership debate, one which is about the future of our party and how we move forward, stronger together towards the next General Election in 2020. Whether Jeremy is your preferred candidate or not, there is an overwhelming case for including a voice like his in this leadership contest. At this stage, it is not necessarily about who you are voting for - and we saw in the 2010 race how many MPs ‘lent’ their nominations to candidates in order to ensure a proper debate. That can be explained to both the candidate you intended to nominate and the wider electorate. In doing so, you will be putting the future of the party at the top of your list of priorities.

If you agree with me that a serious debate is needed and are able to offer your support to Jeremy’s campaign, I would very much appreciate it if you could let me know and cc in info@jeremyforlabour.com

Yours sincerely,

And if you want to be able to vote in the leadership election, become a Labour member or supporter. It only costs a few quid.