21.01.2016

Missiles and meetings

Paul Demarty asks if the Labour left can press home its advantage

Of all the issues which divide the Labour leadership from the bulk of the parliamentary party, there is one which just refuses to go away: the decision on whether to renew Britain’s Trident system.

And, while we sort of get it - Blairites and soggy Labour centrists alike are committed to the defence of the realm and all that - it still strikes us as a most peculiar hill to die on. This ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent (which can only be launched with American say-so) is worse than useless against the enemies we are told we face nowadays (shadowy international terror networks). No end of career military types can be found grumbling that there are more practical uses for a 12-figure sum of pounds sterling than spunking it away on a weapon which cannot be used without operational go-ahead from the States, or without inducing a nuclear apocalypse.

Yet here we are. Jeremy Corbyn and his circle are under intense pressure to wave through this little bit of pork-barrel spending. He has already failed to get it to conference floor once, but is unlikely to fail again next year; so the policy is under ‘review’. Initially this review had Ken Livingstone’s fingerprints all over it - Livingstone is increasingly playing the part of a leadership enforcer, which must be a novel experience for him, but it has been handed off to Emily Thornberry, who got in so much trouble for tweeting a picture of a suburban house draped in English flags, and has described herself as a Trident ‘sceptic’. Very good.

No review, of course, should be allowed to pre-empt people from blurting out more or less ill-considered proposals in the meantime. We note that the (thankfully now retiring) GMB union general secretary, Sir Paul Kenny, has returned to the issue, calling a ‘conference’ of workers in related industries to ‘discuss’ the issue. We already know the answer they will come up with, which is the answer Sir Paul wants.

“Everybody keeps talking about the wonderful principles of Trident [sic!], but there are tens of thousands of jobs involved in Britain,” he said in a GMB press release. “If anybody thinks that unions like the GMB are going to go quietly into the night where tens of thousands of our members’ jobs are literally swannied away by rhetoric, then they’ve got another shock coming”. Such is the moral compass of Kenny, a man happy to accept a bauble from her Maj, and prioritise his members’ right to work on weapons of mass destruction over all the workers of the world’s right not to get vaporised in nuclear fire.

Corbyn’s bright idea for a compromise, meanwhile, is to build the submarines, but not purchase any warheads, and use them for ... what, exactly? Novelty cruise holidays? It is, of course, true that very many big-tick bits of military spending end up with ... counterintuitive results (the case of the state-of-the-art aircraft carrier floating around without any resident planes springs to mind). It is considered good form in the industry, however, to at least pretend that billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is to be spent on something useful, rather than just on creating pointless jobs for Kenny’s boys. It seems Corbyn still has much to learn about the hypocritical decorum of bourgeois politics.

Momentum

At the base, however, things are looking a little rosier for the leader. Labour membership statistics show a near-twofold increase since the start of the leadership contest, bringing the total close to 400,000. Peter Mandelson claimed, not long ago, that 30,000 long-standing members had left since Corbyn became leader - the actual figure is 13,000 (perhaps he misheard?).

This, as much as anything else, is hard proof of the significance of Corbyn’s election as leader. For decades, the membership of the main parties has been sliding downwards. The Labour Party has suffered most particularly under Tony Blair and after, where the achievement of apparently total central control robbed local parties of the rights they were able to offer prospective members (pick your MP, send someone to conference, and so on). Meanwhile, fringe parties have relatively prospered - recent membership figures for Ukip, the Greens and the Scottish National Party are 47,000, 65,000 and 110,000 respectively. (With 54 seats in parliament, you can hardly even call the SNP ‘fringe’ any more.)

The main bourgeois parties (including, for present purposes, Labour) have come to rely not on mobilising people at the base, but on addressing the population ‘directly’, which is to say, through the mainstream media. Thus the crypto-racist Powellites that once were found in every Conservative Association in the land, and the sentimental socialists in Labour constituencies became liabilities. Corbyn is an act of revenge by grassroots Labour members and supporters against the technocratic, sneery machinations of central office, who tried to save the village by burning it.

It turns out that their efforts have failed, and the Labour left now has its tail up for the first time in 30 years, and has captured the leadership under its own steam for the first time ever. The question then arises: what do the Corbynistas want? What is their programme and their organisation? To the former, we are confident in saying that they are mostly of one mind with their anointed leader on his squishy left Labourism. As to the latter, the organisation of the insurgency for now is Momentum.

Momentum is in an odd position at the moment. It has pitched itself, as all such things must, as a grassroots campaigning organisation; but any organisation, by definition, begins as the initiative of a small group of people who are necessarily self-appointed. We were thus greeted at the outset with promises that Momentum would set up “democratic governance” structures in not too much time.

Exactly what those were to be remained obscure until very recently, but moves are being made to set up a provisional national committee, with a familiar-sounding structure to those who have been around the block in the past few years - a large body, with representatives from the regions (England) and nations (Scotland and Wales), with a mandatory 50% quota of women, and proper obeisance paid to the panoply of contemporary identity politics.

All this stuff is a bit cloak-and-dagger at the moment - public notices are entirely absent, with emails sent out to regional organisers. From what we have seen, this body was supposed to have its inaugural meeting last weekend, but it was delayed due to disagreements over how the delegations were to be constituted.

Whispers reach us that this hinged ultimately on the question of Labour membership - ie are Labour non-members entitled to take positions on leading committees of Momentum? Are they even entitled to vote? It is possible, of course, that the rumours are untrue; but that is what happens when you insist on keeping the wider world in the dark. In any case, we know very well that comrades from the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party, Left Unity et al have been involved with local Momentum groups, urging a course of orienting to ‘the struggle’, whatever that happens to be this week, rather than getting stuck into ‘internal’ battles.

In truth, those who want the opposite - to set up Momentum as an unambiguously Labour organisation, even applying for status as an affiliated socialist society, rather than as some vague pool of human resources to staff various demonstrations - have the right of it. The great opportunity of the Corbyn ‘event’ is to build a nexus of permanent organisation against the attacks of the ruling class, and (dare to dream) for something else, even if that is left Labourism. The problem with demonstrations, strikes and the like is that they end, one way or another. They are great things, sure, and there should be more of them, and they should be bigger; but after they are done, we all go home, until the next one.

Many of the bright young things that make up Corbyn’s Lenin Levy will be horrified by their first contact with Labour Party politics; they will have the rulebook thrown in their faces. They will be stitched up and beaten down. All this is a given. Yet - helped along, hopefully, by the other generation of Corbynistas, disaffected former members returning to the cause - they will learn to fight, and then to win. It will be an education in politics - struggle in the true sense, for something that matters.