By KD Tait
Reports that rebel Labour MPs are preparing ‘truce’ plans if Jeremy Corbyn is re-elected are designed to dilute Corbyn’s programme and prevent the membership asserting their democratic rights. The vehicle for implementing this continued sabotage is the parliamentary party and their allies in the party’s apparatus. The immediate task after the election is to decisively change the balance of power between the parliamentary elite, their allies in the party apparatus and the new mass membership.
From day one of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, his enemies in the Labour Party have tried to get rid of him by any means possible. Having failed to force him to resign, the leadership challenge was their next, but by no means their last, tactic. Now, realising that their stooge, Owen Smith, is most unlikely to win by fair means, the architects of the coup have resorted to foul.
Not content with removing voting rights from 130,000 new members, found guilty of joining the party since January, they have now started a purge of longer-standing members and supporters; thousands of members and registered supporters have been suspended or otherwise denied a vote.
The scale of the purge reveals not only the extensive powers of the unelected full time officials of the party, who can suspend, expel or deny membership, but also their political allegiances. No wonder many of the HQ staff wore black to Corbyn’s inauguration speech.
It also makes clear that completing the transformation of the party that was begun with the election of Jeremy Corbyn will require a lot more than just countering the arguments of right wingers like Luke Akehurst. It is the full time apparatus of party and union officials, the Labour Bureaucracy, to be more precise, that holds together and coordinates the more public figures such as MP’s and councillors. Right now, via the Compliance Unit, it is coordinating teams across the country who are using social media to identify likely supporters of Corbyn who they can then target for suspension.
Of course, the Labour bureaucracy does not operate in a vacuum, and neither is it restricted to the Party. Although it was the General Secretary, Iain McNicol, who angered many with his appeal against the High Court’s decision to grant 130,000 new members a vote, he was defending a decision made by the NEC. That was a decision supported by both union members and Momentum-backed members like Ann Black.
Labour Party staff have reacted furiously to suggestions that their purge might not be entirely impartial. McNicol claims the party only acts on serious cases but this does not stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. Is he seriously suggesting that there are 50,000 (and counting…) racists and reactionaries in the Party that the rest of the membership have somehow not noticed?
In a party that has grown so explosively in the last 12 months, there may indeed be a few undesirables, certainly there have been proven cases of former Tories joining the the Party in the past, but this cannot account for the scale of the purge. Moreover, the procedure itself is unacceptable; victims of the Compliance Unit are not told what their “crime” was and cannot appeal within the timescale of the leadership election. For example, the General Secretary of the Bakers’ Union, Ronnie Draper, was suspended last week because of unidentified posts on social media. In the Compliance Unit’s opinion, these showed that he did not “share the aims and values of the Labour Party”. Quite rightly, his union complained of such “disgraceful treatment” of its leader, but the same is happening to tens of thousands of less well-known members.
The extent of the purge, not to mention the spurious ‘justifications’, could clearly undermine the legitimacy and integrity of the whole election. That raises the question why the Party’s officials are acting in such an indefensible manner? It can only be understood as part of the multi-pronged campaign to undermine and eventually remove Corbyn from the leadership.
The purges are intended to discredit Corbyn supporters as twitter trolls, “Trotskyist entrists”, Green Party infiltrators, in other words, people who don’t ‘belong’ in Labour’s ‘broad church’. This angle will be reinforced by the recent YouGov poll claiming to show Owen Smith has a clear lead amongst pre-2015 members. The message is clear: “real” Labour Party members don’t back Corbyn and the Party’s officials are just trying to keep an alien ‘Corbyn cult’ at bay.
In fact, many of the “new” members are people returning to the party, socialists driven out by Kinnock’s purges and Blair’s neoliberalism, wars and invasions, which were hated and opposed on the streets by the mass of Labour members and voters. This was what reduced the membership to less than 200,000 and lost two general elections. The truth is that the Labour bureaucracy would rather that than see the membership grow to 600,000 if that means ditching “New Labour” policies.
While there are some who hope that Corbyn can actually be defeated in the leadership election by purging his supporters, like the headbangers in the PLP who have been talking to the Telegraph about splitting the party, stealing its assets and name and so on, they are a minority. The majority follow the strategy of the “sensible” right, which is “stay in and fight”. That means continue to sabotage Corbyn and his front bench supporters in the Commons and use the Party’s structures to delay and obstruct the implementation of democratic reforms and radical policy changes.
In this strategy, the purges serve mainly to whittle down Corbyn’s majority. Even if a Smith victory cannot be gerrymandered, depriving Corbyn of an overwhelming mandate would be a step forward. If they can then deny him a reliable majority on the NEC, they hope he can then be forced into a series of compromises that preserve the stranglehold of the bureaucracy and the PLP over policy and party structures.
All those who want to turn the Party into an active campaigning force that can stop the Tories in their tracks, here and now, will have to break the power of the Party bureaucrats and the right wing MPs. It is clear these officials, like the antiCorbyn factions in the PLP, are institutional defenders of capitalist interests within our party. Only when their power to purge and sabotage is broken will it be possible, with a tsunami of mobilisations to break the Tories and bring to power a Labour government that will meet the full the needs of working people, whatever the cost to the rich and powerful.
No more compromises
The strategy of the party apparatus, the PLP and the Labour councillors who accept the need for cuts, is to paralyse any positive campaigning by Corbyn and his supporters. They have already done this for over a year. By continuing, they hope to dishearten and demoralise the new members to the point where they give up and leave again. At some point they plan, as Tom Watson has already mooted, to restore the old regime of PLP-dominated selection of the leader and the shadow cabinet. In this, they will be backed by right wing General Secretaries of the unions.
That is the “sensible” right wing policy for restoring the Kinnock- Blair-Brown-Miliband heritage. It does not mean there will be no more radical initiatives to split the PLP, seize the role of official opposition, or use the apparatus to steal the party name and its material resources, desperation can drive people to strange, even self-destructive actions.
It does mean that we have to be ready for both possibilities. What is excluded is that the right will accept a Corbyn victory and settle down to loyally implementing what the membership has voted for twice. They won’t submit in the Commons, in the council chambers or in the Party HQ, let alone in the press and broadcast media where they will always receive an eager welcome.
The unprecedented mass meetings up and down the country, bigger than those in 2015, show that we can reelect Corbyn, even in the face of scandalous gerrymandering. If the bureaucracy goes further and finds a way to give it to Smith then a veritable uprising of the membership is inevitable. Obviously, in the last weeks of the campaign, all our forces must be working to get out the vote. But at the mass meetings and in conversations with supporters we also have to prepare for taking measures that will put a stop to the sabotage and call the saboteurs to order in no uncertain terms.
Starting at the top, McNicol and his unit must go and all staffers at Party HQ must be asked to declare their loyalty to the members’ choice; in short, shape up or ship out. Tom Watson should certainly be expected to consider his position.
The MPs who have tried to de-select Jeremy after less than one year in office but who object to being re-selected themselves every five years must be forced to face their own constituency memberships in fair contests with other candidates.
Most importantly, if we want to see the Corbyn movement’s policies adopted, then offering compromises, inviting the rebel chiefs back into the shadow cabinet, accepting the purge as a fait accompli or leaving the spies of the “Compliance Unit” in power, would be a recipe for defeat.
Jeremy should use his leader’s speech at conference to announce the opening up of the party’s policy forums to the membership in a widespread review and development of the party’s programme. This must include party bodies down to branch level and directly involve the trade union affiliated membership as well. It should culminate in a special conference to adopt the new programme and a charter of members’ rights. Many of these things have been promised by Jeremy and John McDonnell and now they need to be implemented. They will have the overwhelming support of the membership.
The task of the members, once the branches and constituencies have their right to meet restored, must be to make sure that at AGMs, delegates and officers who respect the members’ wishes and the policies repeatedly called for by Corbyn and the majority are elected to General Councils and Constituency Labour Parties. Renewed local party leadership bodies and the NEC need to begin a huge involvement of the new membership in all the party’s campaigning, not just in electioneering, important as that is. A process of political education, cultural and popular media development and policy formulation will be essential. Last, but not least, once the purges have been stopped, the drive for a million Party members must be resumed. Together with the trades unions, the Labour Party must become a mass social movement, taking on the Tories on every front and fighting for socialism in our time.
A shorter version of this article subsequently appeared in print in Red Flag issue 7. It can be read here
