WeeklyWorker

Letters

YP Plymouth

Your Party’s regional assembly in Plymouth on Saturday November 8 was attended by around 70-80 people by my rough count - a fair few coming from the rest of Devon or around Cornwall. The demographics fairly strongly leaned towards ‘older’, but there were a dozen or so young people present.

I was there openly as a member of the Democratic Socialists of Your Party and handed out fliers with some of our proposed amendments ahead of the meeting, which were well received and commented on throughout the event. Other notable organisations present were the Democratic Bloc, who had a pile of printouts by the door (barely touched, mind you) and at least one person each from the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party in England and Wales, whose papers were being sold at the event.

We were told that the national leadership had not intended there to be a Plymouth assembly and that the local volunteers had planned to organise one on their own initiative, paying for everything out of their own pockets, and this was eventually ‘officialised’ by the national leadership. The meeting started with a video message from Corbyn and Sultana and then an explanation of the now familiar process of sitting in small circles, discussing each founding document in turn, with ‘facilitators’ taking notes and ensuring equal participation delivered by the seeming ‘facilitator-in-chief’, who only went by the name ‘Crow’.

The discussion was then due to begin on the constitution, at which point Crow decided to replace the facilitator sitting in my circle, saying they’ll be switching facilitators between the groups throughout (this didn’t happen, as it turned out). The first topic was that of the name, since it was at the top of the constitution document and the discussion quickly turned to whether it should include ‘Socialist’ - the chief facilitator promptly interjected to reframe the question rather dishonestly as a “choice between new ideas and ways of doing things or old dogmas”, and wanting to be openly socialist or communist apparently meant choosing the latter.

This set the tone for much of the assembly, with some at times rather hostile and dishonest framing of proposals being made. There was no realistic way to meaningfully discuss the documents section by section and instead the discussion was loose and unfocused, moving from topic to topic, depending on whatever was being brought up or caught people’s eye when flicking through the documents. I felt the facilitators abused their position to dominate the conversation in groups and shape the narrative in order to lead to predetermined outcomes.

Multiple people admitted to not having read any of the founding documents and others expressed disinterest or being overwhelmed by the topics being discussed. Nonetheless people made the effort to start leafing through the documents and raised legitimate concerns about sections that jumped out to them, with the facilitator repeatedly dismissing them as somehow already dealt with and not needing to worry ourselves about. Unfortunately these reassurances seemingly worked on some people, who were happy to accept that their ‘well-meaning leaders have everything in hand’.

When concerns were raised about where our feedback and ‘consensus positions’ will go and what will happen to it, we were reassured that a black box ‘algorithm’ will create a ‘word cloud’ of the most popular suggestions that the ‘sortitioned’ at the founding conference will be able to discuss, much as we did today. When I asked how they are expected to turn that into a real founding document when they will only be attending for half a day before switching out with another set of sortitioned, or if they will just be expected to clap and cheer for whatever is placed in front of them, I was told by Crow that they will amend them by consensus and they will be voted on online, while referring to the founding conference verbatim as the “national rally”.

Undeniably the general mood was often quite conservative and tailist, seeking lowest-common-denominator politics. Labourism is still hegemonic in Plymouth and, unlike what the reports from some other assemblies have indicated, there was very little anger at the leadership over the founding process. Instead there was actually an applauded statement of gratitude to Jeremy Corbyn and “that other one” (presumably Zarah Sultana) for “giving people hope and making this happen”. There were numerous warnings against using the word ‘socialism’, as it would be “exclusionary” - so people need to be tricked and led by the nose to our politics by stealth. There was pushback to this from people who saw that dishonesty can only lead to losing people’s trust and that not calling ourselves socialists or communists won’t stop the media from calling us such - a chief concern of the ‘soft left’ types present. A number of statements seemed generally hostile to politics as such, calling for us to be ‘less political’, to not be a party at all, etc.

Despite this several of our demands were very positively received, achieving ‘consensus’. These included the demand that MPs receive a workers’ wage, for 50% of members fees to go to local branches, for regional bodies to only be established bottom-up rather than top-down, for the central executive committee to exclude MPs and council people altogether and be fully member-led, or at least not have reserved positions for them, as well as opposition to witch-hunts and bans on membership of other organisations. Opposition to stewardship of the party by the Independent Alliance MPs after the conference was also met with support, as were calls not to join coalitions or enter government with other parties, so that we are not left managing capitalism and implementing austerity.

The political statement was broadly panned, but with different reasons given. Some groups described it as lacking detail, and in dire need of a concrete definition of socialism, making explicit opposition to capitalism, commitment to defence of trans people and migrants in particular, and explicit opposition to Zionism and support for Palestine, while other groups criticised it for being too long, vague and repetitive, favouring instead a two paragraph max commitment to “social justice and equality”.

Opinions on the leadership were also mixed: while it seemed no-one supported a single leader, there were differences of opinion on whether co-leaders or collective leadership would be better, with the position of “at least two” being settled on. Several groups had discussions on the use of sortition, with some seemingly ending up divided (some were against, while others were in favour), with two or three groups even feeding back that they supported sortition for all future conferences.

Ahead of the final section of the assembly, when each group would have a spokesperson providing feedback to the rest of the assembly on what their group had discussed, it seemed for a moment that I would be the one delegated to speak - at which point Crow suddenly became concerned that it would be better for a woman to speak and pressed the microphone into the hands of an unwilling attendee instead, who graciously passed the microphone to me after introducing some of our group’s points.

Given this, it was unsurprising when it turned out later that the volunteers setting up the assembly were drawn from Roger Hallam’s Assemble: hence a total hostility to votes of any kind, and really to politics as such, plus lots of horizontalist consensus-building and ‘assemblies’, consisting of trading anecdotes over tea and biscuits. Perhaps most disappointingly of all, the assembly concluded with no move to gather people’s contact details or establish a local branch of at least the attendees local to Plymouth. Instead we were treated to an impromptu slam poetry recitation and invitations to ‘another assembly’ next week - this time with glossy leaflets from Assemble advertising it as their own event unconnected to Your Party.

As a final comment on the assembly format as such, the event structure didn’t really let people mingle outside their small groups and no concrete amendments or proposals were made that I have any trust will make any impact on the founding process. Rather than people walking away with any åwarm feelings of shared purpose and community, more than anything else it felt atomising and isolating.

Rafał B
Plymouth

Trust the media

Following their role model - minister for Nazi propaganda Joseph Goebbels - the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) never grows tired of accusing the democratic media of being “the lying press”. Then as now, the goal is to sow distrust in the media and to spread the perception that it broadcasts disinformation and conspiracy theories - or better: conspiracy fantasies.

The real Nazis of the 1930s, as well as today’s neo-Nazis and rightwing populists, know full well that in modern democracies the role of the media in democratic opinion-forming processes remains crucial. Without a free press, there is no democracy. Destroy the media, and you can destroy democracy - that seems to be the strategy.

For any democratic orientation, citizens need information they can trust. If this information is incorrect, deliberately falsified or manipulated, democracy has a problem. In other words, people must trust the media and rely on it as part of the democratic decision-making process.

Yet the relationship between information and trust itself can become problematic - especially when information is no longer solid, or when people no longer trust it. Through far-right propaganda, a wealth of false information circulates online, spreading easily, widely and rapidly. At the same time, TV channels and newspapers - despite some shortcomings - remain largely reliable sources, as established journalism continues to offer quality reporting.

To discredit this, the far right has popularised the expression, ‘fake news’, applying it to various forms of dubious or false information. Politicians such as Donald Trump have also used ‘fake news’ as a weapon to discredit opponents and unsupportive media. Meanwhile, social science distinguishes between false misinformation, which may be based on error, and disinformation, which is deliberately spread.

Conspiracy theories - conspiracy fantasies - are a special form of disinformation. They are semi-plausible narratives, used to explain evil by attributing it to a powerful and clandestine actor, who supposedly conspires with others and is allegedly responsible for social ills or catastrophes.

If the impression takes hold that fake news lurks everywhere and that established journalists are manipulating the population - as the ‘lying press’ narrative claims - the vital mechanisms of democratic publicity are undermined. Survey data from countries such as the USA or France have indeed shown declining confidence in established media in recent years. In many of these countries, the political public sphere is more polarised than in Germany, making it easier for ideological camps to form around specific media outlets. In such environments, far-right ‘filter bubbles’ foster selective trust - while democratic media are framed as part of an opposing camp, accused (as Trump constantly does) of spreading “fake news”.

The situation in Germany is somewhat different, although tendencies toward political and media polarisation have also existed here for years. The neo-fascist AfD in particular has altered public debates. Nevertheless, there remain cohesive forces at the centre of the political system and public life that have, so far, limited the extent of polarisation.

Germany’s multi-party system tends to push political parties toward the centre. And, when it comes to major issues - environmental crises, health concerns, political scandals or economic instability - most Germans still tend to trust the media. This is precisely why the AfD constantly attacks Germany’s public broadcasting system. However, changes are visible - the AfD’s anti-media propaganda has had some effect. In previous years, trust levels hovered around 70%; now they have declined to 61%. Far-right propaganda is working - to some extent.

Rightwing propaganda manifests in the accusation of the ‘Lügenpresse’. This has been promoted by far-right populists and extremist actors in Germany - especially since 2014-15, during former chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy - and it played a central role in the far-right Pegida platoons. In the most recent survey (end of 2024), 20% nationwide agreed with the statement that the German media “systematically lie” to the population - up from 14% two years earlier. Neo-Nazi and AfD propaganda is working. About one in five people in Germany holds an extremely negative view of the media’s work - a phenomenon media experts call media cynicism.

For journalists - many of whom see themselves as factual, critical observers and as a counterweight to the far right - such insinuations are frustrating, even if only a minority endorses them. Still, there is approval of some well-known conspiracy fantasies in Germany. For example:

The proportion of Germans who believe in such conspiracy fantasies is consistently lower than those who assume collusion between politics and the media. Belief in conspiracy fantasies fluctuates, but has declined over time. Only about 6% consider it “probably true” or “certainly true” that the USA staged 9/11. Meanwhile, around 9% of Germans believe the rightwing extremist theory that there is a “strategy for the abolition of the German people” driving immigration. Belief in conspiracy fantasies and approval of media cynicism are both more widespread among AfD supporters than among those who sympathise with democratic parties - no surprise there.

Unsurprisingly, younger and less-educated people are often more careless about verifying their information sources - and less able to distinguish far-right misinformation from factual reporting. Encouragingly, however, Germany’s 18-29-year-olds show higher confidence in democratic media than older generations.

Many Germans are aware of the problems posed by digital platforms, Telegram groups and ‘alternative’ rightwing media. A large portion of the population recognises misleading news and understands the need to be cautious about certain sources. Most people also draw from multiple sources of information. Germany’s public broadcasting services remain a cornerstone of the country’s media stability - which, by international standards, remains high, though showing a slight decline in confidence.

Overall, despite all the negative developments - the influence of the neo-fascist AfD, neo-Nazis and rightwing propaganda - Germany’s overall news consumption remains relatively stable. So far, the neo-fascist AfD - unlike their great idol, Joseph Goebbels - has not succeeded in convincing the German public that the country’s democratic news outlets and quality media are ‘the lying press’.

Unfortunately, this does not mean the AfD will stop trying to annihilate Germany’s public broadcasting system, to infiltrate and hollow it out from within, or to continue its relentless campaign to discredit and manipulate the country’s democratic media.

Thomas Klikauer
Germany