Panic argument used to justify Momentum coup

Submitted by martin on 24 January, 2017 - 7:05

Suzanne Gannon, a Momentum member and not a co-thinker of ours, has written an interesting report on her blog (http://creativepens.net/momentum/democracy-and-momentum/, 23 January 2017) of a "Yorkshire and Humber Regional meeting yesterday [22 January] with fifteen comrades from eight branches across the region and a staff member from Momentum’s central office in attendance".

The line from the Momentum office there is reported as: "that the actions taken by Jon Lansman and the handful of Steering Committee members who agreed with him were 'absolutely necessary' and 'had to be kept' secret as they were being cooked up because Momentum was... 'on the verge of being proscribed by the Labour Party' (the representative from Momentum HQ said this no less than five times in the meeting — I was counting)...

"The supporters of Jon Lanman’s actions repeatedly used phrases such as 'had to', and resorted to quasi-legalistic scare tactics that claimed without dissolving the old structures and imposing the new constitution on members without consultation, that somehow Momentum itself was 'illegal', or that at least 'the National Conference would have been illegal'."

The coup was necessary to forestall the Momentum conference "because Momentum allows anyone who is eligible to be a member of the Labour Party and a supporter of its principles to be a member (just as the Socialist Education Association and other affiliated socialist societies do), [so] 'there was a real threat of non-Labour members having influence' over Labour Party policy. When it was pointed out that the Fabian Society, Labour First and Progress all do devise and promote policy within the Labour Party, and that they allow members to be part of their organisation who are not Labour Party members, we were told that somehow Momentum fell into a different category because we were so big".

These scare, or panic, tactics fit ill with the facts:

1. The Labour Party abolished its "proscribed list" in 1973. With hundreds of thousands of democratically-minded new members, and many of the unions on side, moves to bring it back could be fought.

2. The expulsions so far have not been on the basis of "proscription", but on the basis of vaguer, catch-all clauses in the Labour Party rulebook. As it stands, the Compliance Unit can summarily expel whomever it likes, with only the vaguest justification. The coup won't stop the Compliance Unit expelling Momentum people if it wants to.

3. The Labour Party will proscribe Momentum and expel all its 21,000 members? Really?

As Suzanne Gannon rightly comments: "If indeed, this was a genuine argument, why was it not put before the membership? Why were we not allowed to know about any of these so-called dangers and allowed to debate how to deal with them?"

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