This can't happen again. Support the CLGA slate for the NEC

The events of recent days have made it very clear why it matters that Corbyn supporters get elected to Labour's National Executive Committee. That body very nearly kept the leader off the ballot, and when it voted to include him it did so by means of a secret ballot. It has banned local Labour parties from meeting for the duration of the contest, prevented new members from voting and has introduced a £25 charge, prohibitively high for many, to register as a supporter.

We need a better NEC. So please, if you have a vote, vote for the CLGA slate:

Ann Black

Christine Shawcroft 

Claudia Webbe

Darren Williams

Pete Willsman

Rhea Wolfson

Lies of the Labour leadership contest 2: A journalist was intimidating NEC members

Lie 2:

Johanna Baxter, as reported by the Guardian, and quoted yesterday on this blog:

“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.”

Bollocks because:

The actual "intimidating" text, as disclosed on Jones' own Facebook page:

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.

Lies of the Labour leadership contest 1: It's not about policy

The first in an occasional series


Lie 1:

This isn't about policy, it's about Corbyn's inability to perform in parliament, win the electorate, or unify the Party.

Bollocks because:

Are we supposed to believe that if a standardly charismatic, uniformly popular socialist were leading the Labour Party right now, the likes of Chuka Umana and Margaret Hodge would be getting on with supporting them and advocating their policies? Is it a coincidence that the MPs who non-confidenced Corbyn are generally those who voted for benefit cuts and, where relevant, the Iraq war? This is political through and through. 

Words and expressions

Realistic - What are realistic policies? Social democracy of the old school is not realistic, even in its own terms. Capitalism can no longer afford it. We live in a world where people starve, die from preventable disease, lie homeless on the streets, and are threatened by war and other forms of violence in their millions. To even begin to address this questions will involve a politics well beyond the bounds of normality. That is realistic. The thought that a firm, pragmatic, hand on the rudder will make the world, liveable, let alone better than that is naive utopianism.

Electability - Give the people what they want, as though you were selling a product. Even people who sell products don't do this. They tell the people what the people want but don't know that they want yet. Hence advertising. But politics isn't a product. Peoples' political beliefs, generally a confused bag, are generally pretty right-wing in contemporary Britain. That much is true (although on some questions they are well to the left of, say Angela Eagle). However, this is not a fixed thing. Political beliefs are fluid, changed by on the ground movements, the experience of politics. That is already happening to an extent. And it needs to happen, because of what is realistic (see above).

Government or Protest - This is a false dichotomy. The labour movement historically wanted government in order to express protest. What is true, however, is that no socialist should want to use government just as a ready-made tool to serve their own ends. The state, and its instruments, is far from neutral. Thus Ralph Miliband on the effect of office on Labour. In governing, a socialist party which genuinely provided political representation to the working class would need to transform government itself. Fear of this possibility, dimly perceived, is part of what is behind the current Labour coup.

Unity - Of whom? To which ends?

A tale of two leadership contests

So the waiting is over; Angela Eagle has declared that she will stand for the Labour leadership. Unkind commentators might comment that if one of the problems with Corbyn is supposed to be his lack of charisma, viewing Angela Eagle as the solution is like pushing for Wayne Rooney to host Mastermind on the grounds that John Humphrys lacks intellectual gravitas.

This would be to misunderstand what is going on. Eagle is either a stalking horse or a sacrificial lamb - pick your favourite zoological metaphor. Her function is to instigate a contest. There is no thought amongst those who are presently cheerleading her that she will actually end up being the Labour leader. Instead, the plan is that some equally dull, but better known and supposedly member-friendly figure - Alan Johnson or Tom Watson - will be the benefactor from the coming bloodletting.

All of this is actually pretty boring. There is little to say about it that hasn't already been said. Eagle's statement makes it clear that she doesn't understand the Labour Party as extending beyond the bounds of the PLP. The same can be said about the widespread bluster about 'Party unity' from within the PLP. The present composition of the PLP is a boil that needs lancing for the Corbyn leadership to prosper; but this has always been the case.



More fascinating is the Tory leadership race. The party of Family and Order not only use women to bring about leadership contests, they are even open to having a woman as leader. Whatever one might say about the authoritarian Teresa May or the gibbering idiot Andrea Leadsom, they are undeniably both women.

This was enough to get Guardian columnists excited and have people chattering about 'feminism'. It is good, they argued, to have women in prominent positions. To be indifferent simply because one such position is that of being Tory leader is to be unflinchingly dogmatic, to prioritise other concerns over women's liberation. Similar sentiment lurks behind the insistence that Margaret Thatcher should be admired as a 'strong woman' or campaigns to get more women onto the boards of FTSE100 companies.

Admittedly, the feminist credentials of one of the candidates have taken a bit of a knock since it became clear that she believes having had sex with a man and having functional ovaries makes her better suited to being Prime Minister than her opponent. Yet there are more fundamental reasons to worry about the trend towards seeing examples of liberation amongst the ranks of the powerful. For one thing, it's not clear where the limits lie: would the election of Marine Le Pen as French President be a step forward in the war against sexism? But more fundamentally, whenever you hear that something is 'good for women', you should ask yourself which women?

It is perfectly true that the relative absence of women from the Tory benches and the boardrooms is a product of patriarchy. Tory MPs are disadvantaged because they are women: however that disadvantage expresses itself and is experienced in a way that reflects their typical class, racial, and religious backgrounds, and their prominent position in a right-wing political party. Compare their situation with that of a lone mother, going without food to feed her children on ever-reducing benefits. Would the ascendence of either May or Leadsom - both enthusiasts for austerity - be good news for her? What about a woman who gets paid less for doing the same work as her male colleagues? A black woman facing deportation? A Muslim woman victimised by anti-terror laws? Should a lesbian, bi, or transwoman rejoice at the election of either homophobe?

The power feminism that celebrates the Tory leadership contest allows basically reactionary political ideas to clothe themselves with a bit of post-60s diversity. In this respect it is analogous to campaigns for Muslim leaders or gay CEOs. It provides an easy option for those who want to feel the world is changing for the better without having to exert any energy to make it do so, as well as for those who fear that if the world actually did get better this might not be good news for their bad balance.

This should not be news to anyone vaguely on the left. If anything it is the kind of question which marks out the boundaries of the left. Most people, however, have no fixed politics of any kind. And there is a debate to be had with them about how best issues around gender, race, and sexuality are addressed. And here the argument has to be made and won that the only way to make progress in these areas in a way that actually makes life better for the bulk of the population - rather than holding out the largely illusory hope of 'making it' to a place amongst an elite - is as part of a movement that recognises the way these concerns intersect with class, and which organises and campaigns on the basis of all of them.

Which is why, of course, the battle for the institutions of the labour movement matters.

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.