Campaigning has started for the local elections on 6 May, which in one form or another cover almost every area, since they combine polls due in 2021 with those postponed from May 2020. Official rules already allow canvassing as long as we abide by the 2-metre distancing rule.

From 29 March, when people will be allowed to gather socially in groups of six or two households outdoors, the same rules will apply to political campaigning. Campaign literature must be collected or dropped off, however, without people meeting indoors, and planning meetings must be virtual.

A first thing to talk about is the series of online meetings, poplar100.com, to mark the 100th anniversary of the Labour council in Poplar, east London, defying the government over social spending and winning.

The National Audit Office reports that 94% of councils are cutting services in 2021-2, and two dozen or so are in or near financial meltdown like Croydon council. Despite huge government spending on items like private-sector Test and Trace, central government funding will not cover councils’ extra spending and reduced income in the pandemic.

Some local campaigns are developing against particular cuts, like the one against the closure of John Carroll Leisure Centre in Nottingham. Often, however, cuts budgets and poor local Labour manifestos have gone through over the heads of local Labour Parties. Even in Leeds, with some left-wing local Labour Parties and big cuts by the Labour council, a general alternative to cuts and an adequate Labour democracy remain to be fought for.

Dozens of local Labour Party officers, across the country, were suspended in and around December for allowing debate on issues like the removal of the Labour whip from Jeremy Corbyn. A few have been reinstated, but most are still in limbo. According to LabourList their cases will be heard by NEC panels by the end of March.

In response to an enquiry from Emily Thornberry MP, G4S have confirmed that many of their staff operating virus Test Centres are employed on zero hours contracts and have no rights to company sick pay. If these staff have to isolate, then at best they would be paid £95.85 a week Statutory Sick Pay.

Stuart Jordan from the Safe and Equal Campaign explains: “Many Test Centre workers are employed on super-spreader contracts without occupational sick pay or job security. If they have suspected infection they are in an impossible situation: either isolate and face severe financial hardship or go to work and perhaps infect others.

“In effect, NHS T&T is a system for concentrating together all the people in the country with suspected coronavirus infection and getting them to file past an army of workers who cannot afford to follow isolation rules. By using outsourcing firms that employ their workers on these super-spreader contracts, the government have created potential Corona hotspots at every Test site. This £37 billion disaster may actually be a net contributor to the spread of this virus.”

Paul Edwards, G4S HR Director for the UK and Middle East, replied to an inquiry by Emily Thornberry: “Due to the unpredictable and, so far, short term requirements of these contracts, most of the staff operating at the Covid-19 testing sites are agency workers provided to G4S, supplied and employed through a number of temporary employment agencies.

“For the remaining staff (namely management and security staff), these individuals are engaged on fixed term contracts or casual worker agreements (flexible hours contracts where staff choose which hours/shifts they work).

“In the circumstance of employees of G4S needing to self-isolate for reasons of exposure to Covid-19, in line with Government guidance, these staff would receive company sick pay or statutory sick pay. This depends on arrangements in their employment contracts”.

The good news so far from vaccinations does not guarantee safety. Measured Covid infection rates across the world, and across Europe and South America, have been rising steadily since mid-February, and daily world death rates are running higher than the April 2020 peak. We demand that governments requisition Big Pharma’s patents to enable rapid vaccine roll-out across the world. Safe and Equal is campaigning for full isolation pay for all and to bring social care into the public sector.

• More at safeandequal.org

www.poplar100.com

Below is the model motion for trade union branches from the Poplar Rates Rebellion centenary committee:

This union notes that in 1921, the east London borough of Poplar fought back against the unfair rating system that penalised poor boroughs at a time of high unemployment and extreme poverty. Thousands of people protested and after the Labour council refused to collect and hand over part of the rates, thirty councillors [including members of our predecessor union/s]* went to prison. Their defiance won an important victory, forcing the government to change the rating system to make rich boroughs pay more in and poor borough get more out.

This union further notes that a series of events is being held this year to celebrate the centenary of the Poplar rates rebellion. 

This union believes that there are many parallels between the situation that Poplar faced then and the situation that we face now, and that we can take inspiration and learn lessons from their successful struggle. 

This union resolves to:

1. support and publicise the Poplar100 events

2. invite a speaker from the organising committee to a future meeting

3. donate £x to the centenary events organising committee 

* include the wording in brackets for RMT, Unite, NEU, CWU, GMB, USDAW, NUJ
More information, contact and payment details here: www.poplar100.com

Sign the petition here

On International Women’s Day, Hollie Cameron, a young, working-class, Scottish socialist woman was informed by the Scottish Executive Committee (SEC) of the Labour Party that they were withdrawing the party’s endorsement of her candidacy for the Glasgow Kelvin constituency in the upcoming Holyrood elections.

We call on the Scottish Executive Committee (SEC) to overturn its decision and reinstate Hollie as the democratically elected Scottish Labour candidate for Glasgow Kelvin.

Having been successfully interviewed by the SEC, Hollie was democratically elected by members from across Labour’s broad church as Glasgow Kelvin’s candidate, with no votes against. During Hollie’s campaign for selection for the Glasgow Regional List and for Glasgow Kelvin constituency, her position as a 2014 Yes voter and her current views on the constitutional question were made clear. However, the focus of Hollie’s campaign was to be on a socialist coronavirus and climate recovery for Scotland.

Hollie took part in an interview with a journalist at The National outlining her perspective on the constitution and the democratic rights of people in Scotland. Running in a constituency where over 60% voted for pro-independence parties at the last Holyrood elections, the aim of this interview was to get Labour’s message to a significant constituency who have stopped listening to the party.

Following the publication of the interview, Hollie was called to an interview with the SEC and was subsequently informed that her candidacy would no longer be endorsed by Scottish Labour. As at the time of writing, we have not been told the basis in the party rule book on which this meeting was called and the decision made. As at the time of writing, neither Hollie nor the CLP has received written confirmation of the outcome and the reasons for it.

Glasgow Kelvin CLP secretary was then informed that a candidate will be imposed on the constituency. This is a further attack on the CLPs democratic right to decide its candidate.

We call on the SEC to reinstate Hollie immediately.

By Steve Michaels

It is almost nine months now since the Forward Momentum slate won a landslide victory in the vote for a new Momentum National Coordinating Group (NCG), with a promise “to develop a truly effective and democratic Momentum that wins in the Labour Party and builds power in our communities and workplaces”.

The new administration could reasonably claim that circumstances have been difficult. Much of the time since July 2020 we’ve been in lockdown or near-lockdown, with few street protests and Labour Parties meeting only online.

They could argue that the best anyone could do in the circumstances would be to reassemble and begin to remobilise the Labour left which had been dispersed and demoralised by the December 2019 election defeat and Jeremy Corbyn’s resignation, and then silenced by Labour meetings being shut down from March to July.

They have done some things. The Momentum office has given help to some local Momentum groups in remobilising. It announced a national anti-evictions campaign. The main reason why there has been little Momentum activity on that front is that the government has continued the evictions ban, and the Acorn “community union” has covered most of the action there has been.

The Momentum office has announced a “policy primary” to decide which motions Momentum backs for Labour conference 2021. The procedure is labyrinthine, and creates worries about central vetting and selection of options with little open debate before an eventual membership referendum; but there’s some movement forward from Momentum’s previous policy-making for conference, which has been strictly top-down (as in opposing debate on Brexit in 2017) or null (as in 2019).

So far so good. But not very good. Not for an organisation which in 2019 advertised 40,000 members, and which when the new administration took over had 20 paid office staff.

Momentum Internationalists has no paid staff (everything is done by volunteers after their day jobs), no proper membership system yet, not even a bank account. But on many fronts we’ve been able to do more than Momentum, with its much greater accumulated resources.

Momentum groups should push for the Momentum leadership to open out its decision-making more, and to give more to supporting out-in-the-world activity by local Momentum groups. And – or so I think the rest of this survey will prove – we should push them to take up many political issues Momentum has ducked. Or at least to open up for debate on them.

There were sizeable protests on the streets in the first few months of the new administration in Momentum: Black Lives Matters protests (the biggest were before Momentum’s change of leadership, but others continued after), and three big health workers’ protests over pay. Momentum wasn’t visible in those protests.

Unlike Momentum Internationalists, Momentum has little habit of organising public meetings (Zoom meetings under current conditions) to discuss issues or events. So its political output can be assessed from its Twitter account, or even from its Twitter account since 22 December 2020, when it gave a list of its achievements since the new management.

The main Momentum website changes little from month to month, and carries almost no response to the world around it. If you dig deep enough, you can find National Coordinating Group minutes there. But they add little.

A flurry of NCG minutes were posted in July 2020. After minutes were posted early each month, until 5 December 2020. Since then, nothing. Has the NCG stopped meeting? Has the leadership decided to stop publishing minutes? Or (despite those 20 paid staff) have they just not got round to it? We don’t know.

The old NCG was poor at publishing minutes. But the new NCG minutes are little more informative than the old ones. Much of what we can read is on the lines of “SB noted meeting with the Comms Working Group”, which helps us not at all.

The 5 December minutes do signal some debate on the idea of campaigning for the Labour Party to have an elected General Secretary and elected Regional Directors. They tell us that the NCG decided to campaign for an elected General Secretary (there were a few tweets, but no more) and to leave on the table the idea of campaigning for elected Regional Directors, and that a few NCG members abstained in the vote on both propositions. They don’t give us enough information that local Momentum groups could get into the debate and shape it.

The 22 December list of achievements cited:

• Helping getting a relatively good result for the left in the October-November Labour National Executive (NEC elections). (Presumably Momentum’s large e-list helped. It’s not clear Momentum did more than transmit the election material produced by the NEC candidates’ campaign).

• Organising primaries for the Young Labour committee elections. (But, as far as we can make out, those primaries had a very low voter turnout).

• Assisting local groups.

• Supporting the campaign to restore the whip to Jeremy Corbyn.

• Getting more Momentum people selected as council candidates.

• Opposition to evictions.

Tweets since then have backed the student rent strikes and the British Gas and Sage nursing home strikers. They have denounced the government over the public sector pay freeze, the failure to tax big business, Napier Barracks, free school meal provision, and the attempt to deport Osime Brown.

They have criticised the Labour leadership over the suspensions of CLP officers, the shutdown of the Community Organising Unit, the Liverpool mayor fiasco, and the new restriction on electing CLP delegates for 2021 conference.

Again, so far, so good: but much of that was retweets, and really it doesn’t amount to more than one enthusiastic Twitter user might do if they no longer have to commute and so now have more time to tweet or retweet after their day job.

There has been nothing on many issues. Nothing about antisemitism in the Labour Party or the EHRC report. Nothing about Brexit, or Keir Starmer’s shameful decisions to back the Tory Brexit deal and then drop his previous promises to defend free movement, or his “flag-waving” turn more generally.

Nothing about the arrests and trials in Hong Kong, or the movements in Myanmar and India. Nothing about the persecution of the Uyghurs. Very little, and that mostly of a “we hope Biden now comes good” type, about the dramas in the USA. Nothing about the spate of victimisations of trade-union activists in schools over recent months.

There have been tweets about local government, and about the pandemic, but politically poor, and unconnected with any real discussion or debate in Momentum.

For a long time Momentum had, pinned to the top of its Twitter feed, a video criticising the Tories over the pandemic on the grounds that they had not shown “strong leadership”. That is no longer pinned to the top, but the general line remains that it’s a matter of “strength” rather than politics – that bourgeois governments elsewhere know what to do, only the Tories are poor-quality Tories, showing “indecision and weak leadership”.

Also remaining is the idea that a “strong” government in Britain could at will do what, say, Australia’s government has done. (Australian prime minister Scott Morrison is just as right-wing as Johnson, but that’s not mentioned).

Actually, Australia’s much lower death toll is most likely explained by Australia being a remote island with rigidly closed borders. Britain cannot at will be made a remote island, and anyway Momentum (luckily) doesn’t even call for rigidly closing borders, contenting itself with a general call for “strength”.

The left has little leverage on making Tory governments more or less “competent”. But we can and must fight, and possibly win, on a whole range of left-wing or social demands addressing the pandemic.

Diluted versions of the central call for adequate isolation pay have appeared in a couple of retweets, but no-one could say Momentum has campaigned on that.

Apart from isolation pay (in diluted form), none of the other vital demands have appeared in Momentum’s output: requisitioning of Big Pharma, of the medical and PPE supply chain, and of private hospitals; bringing social care into the public sector, public-health test and trace, public quarantine accommodation for people otherwise trying to “self-isolate” in crowded housing, workers’ control of workplace safety.

As we’ve seen, new-regime Momentum describes pushing for more Momentum people to be selected as Labour council candidates as one of its prime achievements.

Indeed, on 19 February it retweeted a message from Laura Smith looking forward to “a new era of municipal socialism”.

One measure of that is that it cited the election of the Fabian Sidney Webb to the then London County Council in 1892 as a great historic model. 

Really to usher in a new era, some accounting for recent history would be useful as well. A “Momentum council” already exists – in Haringey – and has not behaved in a meaningfully more left-wing way than other councils. What it has done most notably is support a development programme to bulldoze the popular “Latin Village” market in Seven Sisters, in the face of much criticism from working-class residents locally, and from the left nationally. If that is what it means to have Momentum supporters running a council at the moment, then – to put it mildly – some sort of policy change would be required before we could have confidence that electing Momentum-backed candidates might create a “new era of municipal socialism”. A public debate that acknowledges past failings in local government and steers a new course would help here: none has yet taken place. 

At least the 1892 LCC didn’t have to deal with centrally-imposed cuts. The “new era” talk loses grip when we look at the financial crisis facing many Labour councils now. With incomes having slumped and costs risen from the pandemic, Luton’s Labour council has already declared huge cuts, and Croydon’s Labour council has called an emergency halt to spending (“Section 114”). Other Labour councils will follow unless we have a big and urgent mobilisation to force more money from central government. But nothing from Momentum on that.

Momentum’s output has also failed to report or comment on the cycle of CLP AGMs which started in November. Labour right-wingers are claiming many victories, and they have certainly had some. In other CLPs the left has held its ground or even advanced. Momentum should be in a position to give us some overview, and to help local left caucuses. But not a word.

Time to go back to that promise: “to develop a truly effective and democratic Momentum that wins in the Labour Party and builds power in our communities and workplaces”.

The opening statements from a recent debate on the issue.

By Alison Brown, South Area Secretary of Unison Yorkshire Ambulance Branch (pc)

The Labour Party and Labour activists at every level must campaign in support of NHS workers’ full pay demand of 15pc.

15pc or £3,000, whichever is higher, is the demand put forward by grassroots health workers’ network NHS Workers Say No. Unite and the GMB have backed 15pc. The RCN, the biggest union among nurses, is calling for 12.5pc.

The Labour leadership has nodded towards support for the health workers – but been vague on the increase it proposes. Now Keir Starmer and Shadow Health Secretary Jon Ashworth are saying that it should be “at least” 2.1pc.

Even this welcome statement from left-wing Labour MPs, backing NHS workers’ strike action if it comes, does not mention a figure, calling only for a “proper pay rise” and “fair pay”.

Like many other groups of workers, NHS staff have experienced large real-terms pay cuts over the last decade, in some cases more than 20pc. 15pc is an eminently moderate demand to make up that lost ground.

This in a situation where inequality has increased significantly and the rich got even richer. UK billionaires have increased their wealth by a third, or £40 billion, during the pandemic, and the Resolution Foundation estimates that the wealth held by the super-rich has been underestimated by £800 billion!

Over years the labour movement has allowed the aggressiveness of the Tories and employers to create a situation where any real-terms pay increase at all – or even any improvement from a dire first offer – is seen as a victory, even after many years of pay cuts. We need to break out of that and start to win decent pay rises for as many workers as possible.

Constituency Labour Parties and union branches should pass motions backing NHS Workers Say No’s full demands (model motion here) and push the party nationally and the leadership to do the same – and build campaigning links with health workers in their area.

Please move this as a motion, if necessary an emergency motion, in your Labour Party (or adapt for use in your union branch).

Support the health workers

Notes

1. That despite the exhausting and dangerous work undertaken by health and care workers during the pandemic, the government has proposed a 1pc pay rise for NHS workers and nothing for care workers. This comes after a long period of falling real wages, with a cut of nearly 20pc in many cases according to the GMB.
2. The staff shortages and alarming rate of turnover, with the RCN finding that over a third of nurses are thinking of leaving the profession in the next 12 months.
3. The emergence of grassroots network NHS Workers Say No to Public Sector Pay Inequality, which is campaigning for 15pc or £3,000, whichever is higher, and for outsourced services to be brought back into the NHS. Unite and GMB have expressed support for 15pc, while the RCN is calling for 12.5pc.

Further notes

1. That during the pandemic inequality has increased. UK billionaires have increased their wealth by £40 billion. The Resolution Foundation estimates that wealth held by the super-rich has been underestimated by £800 billion.

Believes

1. That all workers should get a decent real-terms pay rise, particularly after the most sustained fall in real wages since records began. Refusal to give a decent increase to key workers who have risked their lives during the pandemic is particularly glaring.
2. That in addition to reversing privatisation and outsourcing in the health service, social care should be brought into the public sector and provided as a free public service, with high standards and parity of pay, terms and conditions with directly employed NHS staff.
3. That the government should take wealth from the rich to fund wages, services, jobs and benefits society needs.

Resolves

1. To support NHS Workers Say No and their demands, publicise their campaigning including this petition https://www.change.org/p/claps-don-t-pay-the-bills-give-all-nhs-workers-a-15-pay-rise-nhspay15, make links locally and invite a speaker.
2. To call on the party to support the campaign and the demands in this motion, writing to the Leader’s Office and the NEC and including this motion.