Momentum

Socialism is more than public funding

Socialism: where has it actually worked? Momentum and their hot new video are here to explain. You Are A Socialist Where has socialism ever worked? ? Posted by Momentum on Thursday, 9 May 2019 And where has socialism worked? Everywhere! Everywhere? Yes, that’s right everywhere! Doesn’t it seem a bit weird that socialism has worked everywhere and everything is still so shit? And what are fighting for now? I’m pretty sure the video has got some details wrong here. We probably should have been warned when socialism as “pooling our resources” and “working together” was illustrated by Momentum with...

New move from Left2030

Left2030 is a website and statement set up a few months ago by people on the anti-Brexit left of the Labour Party – generally the soft left, with a scattering of more radical people. The initial signatories include Paul Mason, Zoe Williams, Paul Hilder, Michael Chessum, Sam Tarry, Mary Kaldor, Manuel Cortes, and Luke Cooper, and Labour MPs Clive Lewis, Alex Sobel, Paul Sweeney, Rachael Maskell, and Preet Gill. The founding statement has lots of nods towards what sound like good political positions, which is good, but much of it is fairly unclear. Also, strangely given who set it up, it refers...

From St George to Xi Jinping

The Times (18 May) has splashed our denunciation of the wearing of the old Russian imperial emblem, the St George Ribbon, by some members of Lewisham Momentum. The incident is only a specially gaudy display of the general political trend of the section of the Labour supposed-left which gravitates around the Morning Star. The Morning Star is the continuation of the Daily Worker, which for decades from 1930 was a mouthpiece for the regimes of Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev. It saw the old USSR as “socialist”. It based that claim largely on the fact that all sizeable industry in that regime was...

The story of the St. George ribbon

‪More on Lewisham Momentum and the New Stalinism here. ‬ And here ‬ At the AGM of the official Momentum group in Lewisham, south London, on 7 May, most of the organisers were proudly wearing, and handing out for others to wear, Russian military insignia: the ribbon of St. George. This isn’t the first time Stalinoid elements within the left have worn this symbol of Russian militarism: Eddie Dempsey (an RMT member who declared as a platform speaker at a “Full Brexit” event that the working class hated, and was right to hate, “the liberal left”) wore it while visiting pro-Russian gangsters in...

Nothing to report?

Since September the CLP (Constituency Labour Party) representatives on Labour's National Executive Committee (NEC) have all been broadly on the left, 8 of them supported by Momentum and all 9 by the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. After the September NEC, when they first took their places, they produced a single report of the meeting. They promised they would do that regularly going forward. In principle a joint report reflecting shared views would be a useful complement to individual reports from each member. But in fact only Pete Willsman and Darren Williams (longer-term NEC CLP reps...

Laura Murray and complaints

The appointment (on 25 April) of Laura Murray to Head of Complaints for the Labour Party has real problems, whatever merits she may have. Murray has been defended by Jon Lansman, chair of Momentum: “I can’t think of anyone better for this role. She’s developed wide knowledge about it [antisemitism], deeply wants to root it out, has engaged and worked with Jewish communities”. Jeremy Newmark, former chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, has described her as “responsible and fair”, and defended her against charges that, intervening from a position in the Leader’s Office, she pressed complaints...

Moving on from “target Barclays”

Momentum recently announced a new campaign “Bankrupt Climate Change”. It is good that they are campaigning on climate issues. The way they are doing so lets Labour off the hook, and is inadequate and undemocratic. It nonetheless provides opportunities for building a socialist environmentalist campaign. In their mobilising call, Momentum organiser Aliya Yule said: “Rather than digging more coal mines, or drilling more oil fields and building more pipelines, we need to radically transform our energy infrastructure, and build a green economy for the many. Labour have quite ambitious plans for...

Jon Lansman on Labour's antisemitism "tragedy"

Jon Lansman talked to Solidarity . You've said that the concern about antisemitism in the Labour Party is based on realities, not something contrived or invented. Why do you say that? Because I've seen loads and loads of cases at the National Executive, and I know them to be real. I also know that those cases are very rarely to do with Israel-Palestine. I also have plenty of evidence on my own social media, although I try not to look too much at that because it is so unpleasant. I follow the advice of many others who get abuse on social media, and try to ignore it. In short: the evidence of my...

Momentum, Tribune and Brexit

This is in some ways the biggest crisis of parliamentary politics ever in British history. Brexit dominates politics in a way no issue has done since, perhaps, the miners’ strike of 1984- 5. Yet the biggest Labour left grouping, Momentum, has remained silent on Brexit. In October-November 2018, after some pressure from activists, Momentum ran a consultation of its members on Brexit. The consultation was not a conference with debate, motions, amendments, votes. That’s not Momentum’s way. It was an e-polling exercise. It showed 82% of Momentum members thinking Brexit a bad thing, and 81% saying...

Shun Red London!

We have published an online briefing which brings together images and other evidence to show how the Red London group operates and trace the development of the witch-hunt against the AWL. Red London is a Facebook page which deploys unevidenced smears rather than polemic against people they politically oppose. Its administrators are anonymous. The group also builds support for contemporary Stalinist state formations (e.g. North Korea, China), praises “High Stalinism” (the USSR in the 1930s and 40s) and is strongly aligned with the Communist Party of Britain, and its paper the Morning Star. RL...

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