Speculation (probably concocted) in the Telegraph and the Daily Mail about a “Corbyn-exit” from the Labour Party has started a new round of debate between “quit” and “stay and fight”.
Solidarity backs “stay and fight”. Jeremy Gilbert’s 'Why we shouldn’t leave the Labour Party' article for Momentum has lots to recommend it. Momentum hosted him, with members of its National Coordinating Group, MPs, trade unionists, and others, for an extended Twitter discussion on 6 January.
Gilbert argues that while membership of the Labour party is individual, it is not about individual consumption of the politics of the leadership at any given time. The issue is not so much the Labour party promising various measures, as what people within the party do collectively.
If the labour movement is to be meaningfully different from liberalism then, as Gilbert rightly says, we should not be “working with a conception of politics which is basically the same as that of the elite professionals who staff our more progressive newspapers, the office of the Leader of the Opposition, and the PR departments of some of our more enlightened corporations”.
But he also gives this valuable focus on collective political action, as against individual disgust at or liking for this or that leader, a skewed electoralist focus, making it depend on the electoral system rather than the Labour Party’s links with the bedrock labour movement.
“You are making a fundamental philosophical mistake. You are thinking of the Labour Party like a football team that you support, but might stop supporting. But in an electoral system like ours, the Labour Party isn’t the team; it’s the very pitch upon which the game is played. To leave the party is not to make an effective point of principle: it is merely to concede the entire match to the opposition”.
“Ultimately, in a political system like ours, there are only two good reasons to be a member of the Labour Party: because you recognise that no other party apart from the Conservatives can form a government, and that a Labour government will always be preferable to a Tory one. As long as those two facts are true, it makes no sense to leave”.
And if Labour is to win an election: “The only way a party can hope to form a government under our system is by winning a plurality of votes in a majority of constituencies, which inevitably requires such a party to span a wide spectrum of political opinion. Inevitably, this will result in internal conflicts, and a situation in which different political tendencies will have to fight it out for supremacy within parties”.
Gilbert is right that it was naive to believe that Corbyn could switch the party quickly into a unified “vehicle for socialism”. Some of the political confusion and demoralisation among the “returners” or new members of 2015-7 is down to false expectations of easy and quick success. As he says, five years was never going to be long enough to transform a party that had been in the control of the right since the late 1980s.
He misses out, however, on the fact that five years was long enough at least to make sizeable democratic reforms, and the Corbyn leadership largely failed on that. Corbyn and McDonnell had for decades argued for conference sovereignty; but under their leadership, policy still largely came from the “Leader’s Office” and from “announcements” by ministers. Despite Labour conferences getting much bigger, conference decisions were still taken only as advice. As the Labour left regroups, it needs to rediscover the battle for democracy and conference sovereignty.
That Gilbert has not “got that” is shown by his opening sentences, which say to people who quit because of the Labour leaders’ opposition to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel that they are right to be shocked. The composite passed by Labour’s 2021 conference (and much lauded by most of the left, though not us) did not affirm BDS either; and the Corbyn leadership opposed BDS. Gilbert mentions neither fact, referring only to a majority for BDS in an opinion survey of party members. As if conference debates and decisions rank lower than random opinion surveys... (Solidarity campaigns vigorously in the labour movement and on the streets for Palestinian rights, but opposes BDS).
Gilbert is right that Starmer wants left wing members to quit, but our aim should not just be to replicate the hope of the 2017 election and turn it into 1997. Our aim should be to win a majority for socialist politics within Labour, and to use the fight to win that in order to win a majority in the working class and society.
Gilbert invokes the principle of solidarity against individual moralising, but his solidarity is focused on electing a left wing majority on Labour’s National Executive, not on workers’ struggles and what can be done at grass-roots level.
Solidarity has called for “making Labour the party of strikes”: turning Labour Party resources to support strikes - as many in the Sheffield Labour Parties have backed the couriers’ dispute - and convincing militant rank and file trade unionists to join Labour and broaden their fight within the party. We also want Labour positively to help start fires of industrial action wherever workers are ready.
The Corbyn leadership gave some warm words, and some MPs made their way to pickets, but mostly not Corbyn himself; and Corbyn-Labour, too, never campaigned to back strikes. The leadership would tell us “join a union”, but never got round to engaging much with union struggles.
The shift has to be won at grass-roots level: it is not guaranteed by a left-wing top leader, nor doomed by a right-wing one. The more it is won, the more we can democratise the trade unions and their links with Labour party, and thus transform socialists prospects within the Labour party.
Gilbert demotes the link with the trade unions as a key reason for staying in the Labour party. They barely get a mention. For Gilbert, the driving force for being in the Labour party is to get something, anything, that can defeat the Tories and the nationalist right.
For him, there is a coalition of people in the Lib Dems, the Greens, Plaid Cymru, and the SNP to be made for that purpose, but in the meantime we must stay with Labour to make formalising the coalition even possible. Gilbert is a long-time proponent of a “progressive alliance” in order to win proportional representation.
Gilbert’s section headlined “Stay and Sulk” recommends that sulking, rather than decrying it. “Direct engagement with local parties... since 2015 has often been fairly futile, especially in constituencies with a sitting right-wing Labour MP [who will surely defeat the left]”. Instead, Gilbert says, leftists should “have been building autonomous organisations for political education, occasional campaigning and general cadre-building, rather than dragging new members with us to dispiriting and tedious branch and constituency meetings”.
So the left in, say, Lewisham Deptford, or Streatham, or many others, should never have bothered? We should leave the CLPs to the right? “Cadres” are better “built” by talking among ourselves rather than getting in there and battling the right wing? And that goes for right-dominated unions, too? Unison leftists should never have bothered campaigning to win their union’s National Executive?
The kernel of truth there is that the left could have built (and in fact can still build) genuine Young Labour groups on a constituency level, with their own life, distinct from the standard party routines (which are poor, but, it has to be said, by no means necessarily worse than some standard Momentum meetings). Sadly, for now, the national organisation of Young Labour, though still on the left, seems to exist largely on social media, with no real drive to build locally.
Gilbert makes staying and sulking a positive value: get on with political work in other spheres of your life, but keep your membership, so you can help the left in internal elections and help win the next general election. Momentum’s own presentation of “stay and fight” recommends tenant organising, trade union work, and other campaigns, but little sense of linking Labour activity with these campaigns.
In Socialist Worker, Nick Clark disputes Gilbert by saying again and again the real struggle lies outside parliament and that Labour was central to neither the Black Lives Matter demonstrations nor the climate strikes. What about the fact that, though the Black Lives Matter protests and the climate strikes were tremendous, little ongoing week-to-week organisation has come out of them?
No one argues that street protesters should put all their eggs in the Labour basket. Neither should activists put all into the basket of turning up to one demonstration after another with pre-printed placards. (And in fact, the SWP did not even that with the BLM protests: they were scarcely seen). Week-to-week work to transform the labour movement has to be central.
