Momentum

Brexit and fighting the far right

Stopping Brexit isn’t anti-fascism Callum Cant takes issue over the 9 December counter¬demo The Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA) are obsessed with trade unions. When their march was blocked in October, their leadership couldn’t stop themselves from fantasising about beating up organised workers. For many of their supporters, the organisation’s high point was when a DFLA group launched a serious physical attack on RMT members in a pub in Whitehall. The essence of their politics is a hatred of the organised working class. This is not a new dynamic – indeed, Clara Zetkin wrote about the...

Due process and a fair hearing

There is now a single unified “left” slate for the expanded Labour Party National Constitutional Committee. With the backing of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, Momentum and several smaller organisations, this slate will probably receive many Labour Party nominations and the majority of the delegate votes. The opposing slates from Labour First and Open Labour are yet to write anything publicly on what they see as their role on the NCC. The united left candidates have co-signed an article for the Labour Hub website. Some of what they have to say is promising if vague. Other questions...

Due process, not personalities

The rancour that has been produced by the upcoming nominations for the expanded National Constitutional Committee has reopened the row between the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) and Momentum. The Centre Left Grassroots Alliance, which included both organisations in its negotiations, was unable to reach an agreed slate. Depending on who you believe, CLPD then released the details of their preferred slate, as agreed or without agreement. There is now an ongoing back and forth as to why Momentum were unable to agree to the slate which now has the backing of the Labour Representation...

Democracy review in danger?

As we go to press (17 September) the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Labour Party is finalising the Party’s Democracy Review which will be voted on at conference. Both Momentum and the press have jumped on rumours that the unions will attempt a “power grab” for the selection of leader. The five biggest unions have apparently come to a compromise position on the election of Leader in the case of a vacancy. According to the Guardian the change would stop someone from both the far left of the Parliamentary Party and from the right being able to stand. A proposed increase in the...

Stop Brexit! Fight Poverty!

At its conference on 22-26 September Labour has the chance to galvanise its new and enthused activist layer into becoming a serious force against the Tories, their disastrous policies for working-class people pushed through over eight years. To do that Labour needs to overhaul its democracy and commit itself to a radical programme. Top of the kind of political shift Labour needs to make is on Brexit. With over 100 motions submitted by local Labour parties, it is likely that t full debate on Brexit and the demand for another referendum or “People’s Vote” will be aired at the conference...

Yes "smash Israel" is antisemitic

The Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) has decided to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in full. This is a step forward for Labour but only after weeks of indecision, confusion and lack of leadership in a row which may have caused a great deal of damage. In adopting the IHRA definition, the NEC added a qualifying statement stressing that freedom of speech should be allowed in relation to criticism of the Israeli government. But the IHRA should not be an impediment to free speech unless it is used cynically or...

Brexit and the labour movement

We oppose Brexit. We oppose it in the name of the rights of the three million EU migrants currently in Britain, our workmates, our neighbours, our friends, our fellow trade-unionists. To defend their right to reunite their families. To sustain the right of others across Europe to come to work and live in Britain, and the right of British-born people to go to work and live in Europe. We want more open borders, less fences and barbed-wire and barriers between countries. The technologies and productive capacities of today indict the division of continents into walled-off nation-states. Socialists...

Anti-IHRA lobby is defence of left antisemitism

The decision by an “emergency meeting” hosted by Camden Momentum to call a lobby of Labour’s National Executive on 4 September, to oppose the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, is toxic. Momentum activists have linked their opposition to the IHRA definition to the lack of internal democracy in Momentum. But justifiable anger about the way Momentum builds and then promotes its slates for the National Executive is being used to promote the worst views of left antisemites. The meeting agreed a statement, of which the only part to suggest any kind of democratic reform is a call for...

60% chance of no-deal Brexit? We say “No Brexit”!

Liam Fox, the international trade secretary in charge of negotiating with the WTO, has said it is a 60% probability there the UK will leave the EU without a deal. According to the Sunday Times (4 August) Fox put the chances of a no deal departure at “60-40”, squarely blaming the “intransigence” of the European Commission. In response to increasing belligerence from hard-line Tory Brexiters on the one hand, and a Treasury report which said a “no deal Brexit” would cost the UK an extra £80 billion in borrowing, Theresa May said “no-deal” would not be the end of the world. The need for Labour to...

What Labour's code of conduct omits

Antisemitism, in Europe anyway, is thousands of years old, and has taken many different forms. Since the 19th century, it has a “left-wing” variant, in which anticapitalist feeling is directed against Jews as easily-targeted scapegoats for capitalism rather than, or as well as, against the impersonal and relatively-complicated real mechanisms of capitalist exploitation and oppression. The Stalin regime in the USSR coined (in 1949-53), and a range of groups self-defined as left-wing have promoted (especially since the 1970s), a new sub-variant, in which Israel is demonised as the world’s great...

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