Mish Rahman's defeat in the Labour NEC election is a step backwards for the left
The two-yearly elections for Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) and other positions (results out on 1 September) show a continuing drift to the right.
In 2020 the left won five seats in the NEC constituency section to three for the right, and one for Ann Black (reckoned as “centre”). This year: four left, four right, and Black.
The right also won the Young Labour seat on the NEC; with backing from Unison and GMB, Elsie Greenwood beat incumbent Lara McNeill.
Turnout was down again. In 2018, when the left won all nine seats (under a different voting system), it was about one-third; in 2020, 25%; this year, 16%. The right-wing’s lead candidate, Luke Akehurst, lost votes (21,000 in 2020, 14,000 this year), as well as the left sagging.
The evidence is of demoralisation and disengagement, rather than a coherent swing to the right.
In 2018 and previously, most people voted solidly for the left or solidly for the right. The vote has become more scattered. In both left and right slates the top candidates get around four times the vote of the lower scorers, and the flow of preferences shows quirks, for example some from Luke Akehurst to Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi.
The replacement on the NEC by Wimborne-Idrissi of Mish Rahman, who had, with Gemma Bolton, been the most active of the 2020-2 NEC left, is a step back.
Wimborne-Idrissi is articulate and energetic — she was a member of Workers’ Liberty’s predecessor in the 1970s, before disappearing from politics then reappearing in Jewish Voice for Labour — but she is chiefly known for denying or minimising antisemitism in and around the Corbyn movement. Momentum cited her failure to commit to trans rights as reason for not backing her.
Elections for the reconstituted Labour Students (which was controlled by the right through the Corbyn era, then disbanded in 2019) were won by the left, but on a low turnout (about 500 votes total).
Turnout for the Young Labour elections was also low, about 4,000. The left retained control, but the particular “left” which runs Young Labour had even before 2019 reduced it to less life than it had under right-wing and mixed administration before Corbyn.
If an impulse from the unions, even an imperfect one, can now revitalise the Labour left, then the right wing’s base can be shown to be quite narrow.
But a new left will have to be more internationalist, more oriented to independent working-class action, more democratic-minded, than the left which keeps Young Labour lifeless or denies antisemitism as a problem.