Momentous Muddle

Neil Faulkner on Momentum and Brexit and free movement

Since the election of Jeremy Corbyn as its leader, the main fracture-line in British politics has run through the middle of the Labour Party.

On one side is the main weight of the party apparatus and most of the party’s MPs, MEPs, and councillors. They form an unreconstructed neoliberal bloc; whatever their protestations, they are essentially Blairite supporters of austerity, privatisation, and war.

On the other side is the bulk of the party membership, much of it new, much of it young, though with a good number of reinvigorated older activists – the result of the great ‘Corbynista’ surge inspired by the Left’s capture of the leadership, which has seen party membership treble to more than half a million. This represents a sudden, unexpected, and hugely significant rebooting of the grassroots socialism of the party’s pre-Blairite past.

This contradiction is as old as the Labour Party. Throughout its history, the party has been divided. There has always been a Labour Right, concentrated in the upper levels, accommodating to the demands of the system and ‘the national interest’, and always a Labour Left, stronger in the lower levels, reflecting the aspiration for radical change in the interests of working people at the base of society.

This contradiction – the very essence of Labourism – plays out in all arms of the party. It is now playing out inside Momentum, the movement set up after Corbyn’s election to organise ordinary members in support of the Left leadership.

The main reason for the Momentum bust-up is not the antics of small, secretive, entryist sects, as Owen Jones among others would have us believe – though they are indeed an unwelcome presence. The main reason is that Momentum has a top-down ‘accommodationist’ leadership that is at odds with much of the membership. And this is so because Labour’s eternal contradiction – between Right and Left, nation and class, sell-out and reform – has its reflection in the politics of Momentum.

‘Accommodationism’ is an ugly word. It is plucked from the canon of ancient sectarian disputes. Apologies for that. Its value is that it precisely describes a widespread political phenomenon. Here is an example.

The Far Right is peddling Brexit and racism. The Traditional Right, represented by Theresa May and her Tory Government, is parroting the Far Right line on both, banging on relentlessly about immigration. New Labour, of course, capitulates to the racism.

Carwyn Jones, Labour’s Welsh leader, for example, has just attacked Corbyn for refusing to join the anti-migrant chorus, saying, ‘We have to be very careful we don’t drive our supporters into the arms of UKIP.’

Andy Burnham, the former Labour leadership contender, has gone much further, announcing that ‘there is nothing socialist about open borders’, that free movement has been ‘defeated at the ballot-box and is no longer an option’, and that ‘our reluctance in confronting this [immigration] debate is undermining the cohesion of our communities and the safety of our streets’.

The pressure on the chain – pulled by the Far Right – extends all the way to Momentum. There has been no overt support for anti-migrant scapegoating or stronger immigration controls (so far). But there has been ‘accommodation’ to the rightward pull on the question of racism. It takes two forms. One is silence. The line is: don’t mention immigration. The other is imitation. The slogans of the Far Right are picked up and waved around with the font colour changed to red.

The disease has now reached The World Transformed, which, having organised a brilliantly conceived and executed ideas festival during the Labour Party Conference last September, has evolved into the ideological arm of the Momentum leadership. Momentum and TWT have announced a series of nationwide events and debates to coincide with the Government’s triggering of Article 50.

The name for these events? ‘Take Back Control’ – the political slogan of the Leave campaign in the EU Referendum. ‘Take Back Control will be about reclaiming the narrative and opening up the negotiations,’ explained one of the organisers. ‘This is our Brexit.’

But it is neither our slogan nor our Brexit: both are the territory of the Far Right.

Worse still is the claim from another of the organisers that Corbyn’s re-election as Labour leader and Trump’s election as American president ‘are all part of a revolt against politics as usual’. He continued:

Individuals have felt powerless for decades and are starting to reassert themselves. But taking back control is not the preserve of the Right. We want to see a Great Britain that takes power back from the economic elites Trump and Farage belong to.

Individuals are not ‘starting to assert themselves’ when they vote for a tax-dodging billionaire like Trump. Let me spell this out more fully.

Trump is a ranting racist, a misogynist and self-confessed abuser of women, a bully who taunts the disabled and the bereaved, a serial liar, a man proud of his bigotry, his hatred, his contempt for most of humanity. The 63 million Americans who have just voted for this political psychopath were no more ‘starting to assert themselves’ than the 12 million Germans who voted for Hitler in 1932.

To put Trump in the same sentence as Jeremy Corbyn is not only crass: it is very dangerous, since it conflates Right and Left, and spreads political confusion and disorientation.

Perhaps the worst of it is the reference to ‘Great Britain’. Chilling echoes here of ‘Make America Great Again’. Again, let me spell it out.

The Far Right programme centres on nationalism and racism. You cannot fight the tidal wave of reaction that is now sweeping across the world by parroting the slogans and adopting the ideas of the Left’s most bitter enemies.

An old Russian revolutionary once argued that the litmus test of a socialist is that she always stands foursquare with the most oppressed, the most victimised, the most persecuted. In all the fanfare around Momentum/TWT’s programme of events, I can find no reference to racism, immigration controls, the rights of migrants and refugees, and the cardinal principle of free movement. This, in the circumstances, in the current climate, is a gross betrayal of socialist principle.

It is an omission hard to square with the motion just passed at Momentum’s National Committee, which resolved unequivocally:

1. To campaign for Labour to resist the growing pressure to cave in on freedom of movement and migrants’ rights.

2. To campaign to defend and extend freedom of movement in the context of the Brexit negotiations, including the establishment of a Labour movement-based campaign for free movement and working with existing campaigns.

This resolution appears to have been ignored totally by a Momentum leadership desperate to accommodate to anti-immigrant racism by ducking the argument.

There is a desperate need for the Left to build a counter-pole to the racist pull of the Far Right – a mass movement of solidarity with migrants and refugees, of opposition to racism and the immigration police, a movement that will defend free movement, and, on the basis of class unity at the bottom of society, fight for radical change in the interests of the great majority.

Neil Faulkner is a Marxist historian. His new book, A People’s History of the Russian Revolution, will be out on 20 January.