08.06.2023

Gloomy shades of death

Attended by a maximum of just 19 members, the online AGM testified to complete strategic failure. Kevin Bean reads the last rites

The demoralisation and disintegration of what remains of the Labour left gathers pace. Momentum’s cossetted team of petty careerists regularly sends out reassuring messages to a noticeably passive membership, asks for money, pleads for conference suggestions … and pretends that the left is making gains on councils and in constituencies. We all know otherwise.

Same with the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the Centre Left Grassroots Alliance. It is business as usual. The witch-hunt is ignored and the call is made to back model motions and tinker with the party’s rules. Then there is the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs. It is certainly not socialist, but nor is it campaigning. As for being a group, even when one of their own faces deselection, they look the other way. SCGers are only focused on keeping their own seats. Solidarity be damned.

To this sorry picture of decline and defeat we must add the Labour Representation Committee. It held its annual general meeting last Saturday online. Just 19 comrades attended … a figure which fell to 13 in the final session. Not surprisingly only half of the national executive committee positions could be filled. Everyone, it seems, is a chief, now that the rank and file has gone Awol.

LRC AGMs were once graced with various ‘big' parliamentary, trade union and campaigning names. No longer. John McDonnell did not show, nor Jeremy Corbyn. Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi of Jewish Voice for Labour did though … but not for long. And who can blame her.

While debate in the LRC was never at a high level, and always bureaucratically squeezed, there was at least the pretence of it. This year was utterly desultory. Under the guiding hand of Terry Conway of Anticapitalist Resistance, there was a vote on disability rights. But the give-away politically was the call to arm the Zelensky regime (including, one presumes, the fascist Azov regiment) “from wherever possible” - that and reaffiliating to the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign.

So is the LRC in favour of more arms spending in Britain? Expanding the military industrial complex? Increasing taxes to subsidise Ukraine? Such questions went unaddressed. However they will not go away.

One delusional speaker compared the role of Ukraine in this conflict with the struggle against US imperialism in the Vietnam war! But Ukraine is backed by US imperialism. Acts as a US proxy. Nonetheless, the LRC lines up alongside Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Giorgia Meloni, Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen. Another equally well informed speaker told us that revolutionary defeatism was not appropriate for the British working class, because this war was solely between Russia and Ukraine.

But where the LRC is at organisationally as a result of such crass social-imperialism was candidly summed up by Pete Firmin. Moving the main political statement, he admitted to a tsunami of resignations which has left the organisation bereft of the resources necessary to print its magazine Labour Briefing. Nor does the LRC have the ability any longer to continue with Jackie Walker’s ‘ever so exciting’ replacement, Red Line TV. No great loss for the movement. But a fitting reward for past sins.

When you cannot do the absolute basics it is surely time to put the LRC out of its misery and read the last rites. But no, like Mr Micawber they think something will turn up. Sir Keir will piss off the unions, Sharon Graham will discover political engagement and ride to their rescue, Jeremy Corbyn will make a triumphant return, etc, etc. All unlikely, all pathetic, all proof of abject strategic failure.

Previous role

Before we turn away from the death bed, however, we should do the decent thing and properly mark the passing of the LRC and all that it represents for the Labour left.

The brainchild of people like John McDonnell and Graham Bash, the LRC was founded in 2004. It was seen in some quarters as an alternative to Ken Livingstone and a left which had been badly holed when Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council on April 1 1986. Either way, the LRC attracted a good smattering of left activists, trade unionists and councillors in the period of high Blairism, when many on the left feared that Labour would be ‘deLabourised’ and its links with the organised working class finally broken. The LRC attempted to be some kind of life raft.

There was initially some studied ambiguity about strategy: its name was a conscious echo of the historical body founded in 1900, and, in the event of the total triumph of Blairism, it was suggested, the LRC could form the nucleus of a new, reborn Labour Party. Although it had affiliates and individual members who were outside the Labour Party and who claimed to be Marxist, the dominant politics and organisational perspectives were always thoroughly Labourist.

For all intents and purposes it functioned as a pressure group. Simply put, its perspectives were building the influence of the left within the party and working for the election of a Labour government, any Labour government, because the belief was that any Labour government would be a prelude to that wonderful day when there would be a left Labour Party that would commit itself to socialism … and get elected. A complete fantasy, of course. Labour governments are not a prelude to a left Labour government; no, they are prelude to a Tory government.

As for the left Labour Party committed to socialism, well that was tested to destruction with Jeremy Corbyn and the crushing general election defeat in December 2019. The LRC was never able to predict this predictable outcome, nor explain it. Hence its rapid decline and effective demise.

John McDonnell’s role in the witch-hunt perhaps best encapsulates where the categorical imperative for unity and concessions to the Labour right leads: remember how he intrigued with pro-capitalist Labour MPs and held back CLP activists who wanted to deselect anti-Corbyn MPs? Even before his abject capitulation to Starmer’s witch-hunt, McDonnell (and Corbyn, for that matter) were quite prepared to throw genuine socialists and former comrades under the bus in an effort to placate the Labour right.

The LRC’s Labourism meant they, in effect, followed suit. The influx of the Corbynistas into Labour entirely bypassed the LRC; it failed to grow in the period after 2016, when Momentum and other left currents in the CLPs were taking off. Moreover, it took no political or campaigning initiatives or an active part in the fightback against the witch-hunt. Initially the group’s leadership hoped that, if they kept their heads down, it would all go away and that the wrath of the Labour right would pass over them.

However, belatedly, when some of their own comrades came under attack, the LRC made some rather muted and timid protests, but it was a case of too little, too late: the time had passed and the witch-hunt was now in full spate. The quietist Labourism of the LRC and its uncritical trailing behind Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell was not only futile as a response to the witch-hunt, but it led them into a political dead-end.