WeeklyWorker

14.11.2024
Spoilsport: no interest in a party

Whimpering out of existence

The beginning of the end of all those efforts to rally what was the Corbyn movement seems to be in sight. Carla Roberts reports on the factions and the confusion

On Saturday November 9, Collective held its second national gathering - again, by invitation only and in semi-secrecy. Around 50 people met in Birmingham: representatives of the groups listed on Collective’s website,1 plus a few independent candidates like Fiona Lali of the revamped Trotskyist sect, Revolutionary Communist Party. And, although the meeting lasted over four hours, it took “almost no decisions”, we hear, with some participants describing the event as “very amateurish”.

A large chunk of the meeting seems to have been taken up by a speech from professor Nick Maynard - a surgeon who has recently returned from Palestine. No doubt this was interesting, but pretty peripheral to the task of building “a party of the left”. A short message from key organiser Karie Murphy (formerly right-hand woman of Jeremy Corbyn, when he was leader of the Labour Party) to Collective’s WhatsApp Group explained afterwards:

We agreed a date of January 18 in London for the follow-up meeting - we will set objectives in advance. We had a profound and very moving contribution from Prof Nick Maynard, a surgeon who has a long history of working in and supporting Palestine. Discussions have already started on a Collective event to support his work and publicise the harrowing testimonies that he has collected. Solidarity.

This non-committal pace very much suits Jeremy Corbyn, who did not make it to Birmingham and joined for one hour via a video call. He is dead set against Collective turning into a ‘real’ party any time soon and instead favours, in effect, an electoral alliance in time for the May 2025 local elections. He is joined in this outlook by African National Congress veteran Andrew Feinstein and former North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll.

They are the key people in the ‘localist’ faction of Collective, with all three having launched various local ‘assemblies’. We have previously reported those weird and wonderful initiatives: Corbyn has launched a monthly ‘people’s forum’ in his constituency (which is basically his MP surgery, run by his employees); Feinstein is organising a ‘local hub’ in his constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, which might or might not move towards a membership organisation of some sort; while Jamie Driscoll has gone one better and has just launched his own local ‘party’, called ‘Majority UK’.2

Although none of those three attended the Birmingham gathering, it appears that they have ‘won’ for the time being - as against those who wanted to launch a ‘proper’ Collective party immediately: ie, with a formal membership structure, conferences, branches, etc. That ‘partyist faction’ is led by former Labour councillor Pamela Fitzpatrick, former Unite general secretary Len McCluskey and his partner, Murphy, and, until very recently, journalist Justin Schlosberg (Companies House still lists him and Fitzpatrick as directors of ‘Justice Collective PLC’).

Schlosberg, however, resigned on November 5, a few days before the Birmingham meeting - with an untypically public broadside against Collective. ‘Washing your dirty linen in public’ is just not the done thing on the left (and not just the Labour left): instead, we usually have backroom deals, secret negotiations and, at best, leaks to the bourgeois press. Schlosberg explains in his angry blog post:

I’ve stepped away from Collective not because I no longer support what it is trying to do, or because I no longer believe a new party is possible. I stepped away because I don’t believe that endless talking shops behind closed doors is the way to build unity and establish a new party - especially in the face of a neo-austerity regime in the UK, an ongoing genocide in Palestine and Lebanon, and a US and UK establishment growing every more war-hungry by the day. The time, in Jeremy’s words, for “listening to and sharing a variety of views about the future of the left” is surely over. Now is the time to act … Call a national conference and launch a membership drive. Hold online elections for an interim leadership team, charged with developing proposals for party structures, rules and policies.3

He seems to have been under no illusion that the November 9 gathering in Birmingham could have made any decision towards establishing Collective as a party. This had clearly been decided elsewhere, away from the ‘children’. The Collective website now features Fitzpatrick and Murphy as the ‘directors’ of the private company.

The partyist faction had spent the last few months trying to convince the very reluctant Corbyn to jump on board the party boat. But its methods have been a touch on the unsophisticated side, to put it mildly. For example, it was they who leaked excited reports about the imminent launch of the Collective party to The Guardian after the first gathering on September 15 in London.4 Pamela Fitzpatrick declared at the tiny conference of Transform on October 19 that “the talks within Collective were aimed at setting up a new party early next year (which wouldn’t necessarily be called Collective)”.5

This faction seems to have cohered around a document entitled ‘Campaign plan: call for a new left movement and party’,6 which was apparently written by Murphy and which outlines their view on how such a party could be formed. Via petition, basically. It reads like it was written by an intern in an advertising agency, focussing as it does on the ‘messaging’, ‘timelines’ and ‘targets’ - like getting “100,000 signatories in 45 days”.

The authors also tried to appeal to Corbyn’s ‘style’ and made sure there are zero policies in it - but plenty of waffle: “Help create a credible, accountable alternative for the left. Sign this petition to demand real representation, real action and a real future for progressive politics in the UK. Together, let’s build a movement and a party that serves the many - not the few.”

The draft petition featured in the document starts, somewhat ludicrously, with: “We - the many individuals, communities and organisations that make up the UK’s labour and progressive movement - demand the immediate formation of a mass political party of the left to genuinely represent the interests of the working class and the many.” We demand it? Who exactly are we demanding it from? The state? The king? Corbyn? What nonsense.

This document and the general railroading tactic of the ‘partyists’ have - unsurprisingly - not convinced Corbyn. Quite the opposite: We understand he has been getting increasingly annoyed with efforts to force his hand. We presume he has vetoed the campaign plan, which might be the reason why it was not even put to the 50 participants in Birmingham. (There are, of course, no minutes or agreed reports of any of these developments, so we have to admit that we are guessing.)

But Corbyn’s November 1 letter to The Guardian surely is a hell of a clue. Following Labour’s budget, the letter ‘warns’ Keir Starmer: “You are wrong to believe that progressive voters have nowhere else to go. Our movement is growing every day - and you ignore the demand for a real alternative at your peril.” The interesting thing about it is who else was asked to sign: apart from Corbyn, there are Driscoll and Feinstein - plus Green MPs Carla Denyer and Sian Berry, and Plaid Cymru MPs Ben Lake, Ann Davies, Liz Saville Roberts and Llinos Medi. This clearly shows that Corbyn has no interest at all in building a new party in any real sense of the word. He is going for an ‘electoral alliance’ at best.

  1. we-are-collective.org.↩︎

  2. See ‘Hidden divisions in Collective’ Weekly Worker September 26: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1508/hidden-divisions-in-collective.↩︎

  3. jschlosberg.substack.com/p/why-the-corbyn-left-is-sliding-into.↩︎

  4. www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/sep/15/jeremy-corbyn-addresses-meeting-new-leftwing-party-collective.↩︎

  5. Email from Transform, October 23.↩︎

  6. docs.google.com/document/d/1FxCrD3OH4FVKSl-NkOfPo7xGYjNkvI6-UbopDbXwniI.↩︎