Lockdown Labour
JVL Introduction
For Labour to be effective as a social movement, Mark Perryman argues, it has to connect individual and collective action with a politics absolutely rooted in locality and community.
Labour has failed to do this. Corbyn’s promise of a ‘different kind of politics’, which attracted hundreds of thousands of loyal supporters, simply failed to materialise.
“Labour has remained an organisation of the few, a self-selecting, privileged activist class, “argues Perryman – and that is true so often whether it is the left or the right in control locally.
It has to be reinvented and Perryman offers some thoughts as to how a Community Labour Party might evolve out of the coronavirus crisis.
This article was originally published by Renewal on Thu 2 Apr 2020. Read the original here.
Lockdown Labour
The Labour Party that emerges from the coronavirus crisis needs wholesale change of its organisational culture. Mark Perryman explains why and how.
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Sorry, but I find all these articles are ignoring a fundamental blind spot.
It is no good brow beating about how unfair the Party is or how crap they are until we look at the mechanisms that have allowed these people and their ideologies to get entrenched and run rings around the rest of us.
For example: how can you understand the extent of underfunding of the Complaints department when you have no idea of the size of that department or its structure?
The Labour Party publishes no form of org chart of its staff, even though members pay their salaries.
What about the recruitment process that clearly doesn’t rule out conflict of interest and cronyism?
Another example: look at the structures in place that act as possible bottlenecks for internal justice and equality. Take the Conference Arrangements Committee: comprises six committee members to process and decide which motions and rule changes go through to Conference from up to 650 CLPs. We know the CAC are lobbied by PLP, Lords, CLPs, Socialist Societies and Unions. How can they be impartial? We don’t know, beyond word limits etc,.how they decide what goes through and what doesn’t. They don’t routinely publicise when they meet and no official agendas or minutes are kept. And we, stupidly, ELECT these people.
Rules changes: the three year failed rule change reigns supreme, preventing the democratic debate if anything that fails to gain enough traction to be voted through by conference. You could have a rule change that favours some aspect of BAaME inclusion etc. But if the whities in the party don’t like it… In the bin for three whole years, till it can be submitted again. Whose to say the CAC don’t rejected it due to lobbying by anti BAME sources… no matter how morally right on it might be.
Until we pick apart these structures, rules and processes, the Labour Party will be a sham party at best.
I was surprised myself at how unconnected I felt to my local branch when newly joining and attending meetings last year. I made efforts to talk to people at the end of meetings but too short a time and late in the evening meant it wasn’t satisfactory. I put every ounce of energy I had after a debilitating virus to canvass locally and in marginals. I felt a great sense of connection especially with those coming from far and wide to the marginals. Since then, the result of the GE, the vote of new Labour leader and the damning Report on what was going on behind the scenes at the same time as the PLPs betrayals I slowly lost the fight. Then CV 19. I haven’t heard a word from my local branch at all. The connection has completely been eradicated, for what it was worth at the time. I left the LP in April unable to belong to something I felt were not standing for my values and beliefs anymore. I have been political in various ways for a number of years but my experience has left me wondering how on earth young new members with little involvement in party politics would find the inner resources to function in such a disconnected lack of care about each member local branch wherever that was. It is in our connection with each other that we maintain the energy to carry on in a world that is increasingly difficult for many.
I agree that until the party moves away from “ pavement politics “ we will never win an election.
The party has become the home of North London pseudo intellectuals who pontificate on issues of which they have no real life experience and have thus alienated many less privileged people !!
The new GS, David Evans, is on record as proposing to delete all elements of representative democracy from the party. (see skwawkbox 26-5-20). He likens CLPs to ‘trotters independent trading’ by comparison with the wonders of Marks and Spencer – that alleged miracle of capitalist efficiency (which rings a little hollow when you look at current business comments, or indeed at the fate of M&S clothing (especially ladies’) since the 1990s; the acme of trendy youth-chasing faddery and abandonment of a reliable traditional market! The very name of his organisation – the Campaign Company – tells us what he is after: the modelling of the LP as a capitalist corporation. Members are to be relegated to the position of unpaid volunteers with no influence on, let alone control of, policy. If really lucky, one of us might get a gong after several decades.
Unfortunately, Mark Perryman equally sidelines policy, let alone the foundations of socialism in the long term needs of the working class as a whole (ie, across the world). The lapel badge may be stylish, but by itself it stands for no policy at all. Indeed, his condemnation of GC meetings and of LP delegates as ‘privileged’ descends to low forms of populism. But in the absence of serious policy development on the part of socialists, the rise of nationalism will lead to continual wars, probably on a world scale. Neoliberalism, which is equally imperialistic in its foundations as we have seen in the NATO powers’ aggressions since the 1990s through the wanton destruction of Libya, is equally catastrophic.
Let’s take our eyes off the pavements and look towards the stars before the capitalist colonisation of space plunges us into further wars.