Labour Left Internationalists

Struggles – Internationalism – Socialism

We’re standing in the Momentum National Coordinating Group (NCG) to advocate a Momentum which mobilises, visibly and regularly, to support class and social struggles – strikes like the rail strikes and long-running food couriers’ dispute, protests like against the Police Bill.

The NCG is now being be elected by Single Transferrable Vote and in eight smaller regions. That means every vote can make a difference in help electing our candidates and changing Momentum.

We produced a longer program for the last NCG election, when we were established as Momentum Internationalists, in 2020: momentuminternationalists.org/what-we-stand-for

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Our demands and ideas: short version

We stand for:

Struggle

• A Momentum which mobilises, visibly and regularly, to support class and social struggles – strikes like the rail strikes and long-running food couriers’ dispute, protests like against the Police Bill.

• Properly campaigns for demands like a £15 minimum wage, living sick pay for all, public ownership and repeal of all anti-union laws, including by campaigns to push motions in local Labour Parties, fights for conference policy, references-back of NPF reports

• Block new council cuts and win return of funding cut since 2010. “Community Wealth Building” is not enough, and not “building socialism”

• Fight all forms of oppression and bigotry. Curb the police

• We support Proportional Representation as more democratic.

Internationalism

• Champion migrants’ rights and free movement

• Consistent internationalism: support workers everywhere and liberation struggles from Ukraine to Palestine, including by visible mobilisation for demonstrations

• Fight British nationalism

• Resist re-erecting barriers between Britain and the EU27; push towards reversing Brexit

Socialism

Socialism is not being a bit more left-wing than the Blairites, or more state activity.

Socialism means the people, led by the working class, organising to liberate ourselves from exploitation, creating a new society of common ownership and democratic planning to meet social needs.

Campaign for public ownership of energy companies and public expropriation of the banks and high finance – though those do not yet constitute socialism.

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Our demands and ideas: longer version

We stand for:

Struggle

Working-class struggle: we want a Momentum which mobilises, visibly and regularly, to support class and social struggles – strikes like the rail strikes and long-running food couriers’ dispute, protests like against the Police Bill.

Working-class demands: Momentum should much more consistently campaign to popularise demands to address the economic crisis, build the labour movement and develop struggle and solidarity – like a £15 minimum wage, living sick pay, public ownership and repealing all anti-union laws (working with existing campaigns – e.g. Free Our Unions – wherever possible and looking for opportunities to establish new campaigning networks). Momentum’s Trade Union Network should be reoriented and relaunched on these lines.

Step up the fight in Labour: campaigns to push motions in local Labour Parties, fights for conference policy, references-back of NPF reports, campaigns against the undemocratic bans and exclusions

Local government: Block new council cuts and win return of funding cut since 2010. “Community Wealth Building” is not enough. With councils getting only half the funding they did in 2010, they’re often barely able to provide basic services, let alone “build socialism” in their areas!

Fight oppression: We are socialist feminists. We fight for LGBT rights – that includes the T! We fight all forms of racism, antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry. Serious anti-racist politics must criticise and challenge capitalist institutions like the immigration system and the police. We are proud to be among the authors of the migration and policing motions Momentum has adopted for Labour conference this year, and want to make those struggles central.

We support Proportional Representation as more democratic.

Internationalism

Migrants’ rights and free movement: The platform of the Labour Campaign for Free Movement, which our candidates support, needs aggressive promotion in Labour, throughout the labour movement and beyond.

Consistent internationalism: Fostering solidarity with the struggles of workers and the oppressed worldwide, from China to the US, Sri Lanka to Sudan, Chile to Russia. Support for peoples struggling against oppression and for self-determination everywhere, from Ukraine to Palestine to the Uyghur region.

Fight British nationalism: Oppose increased military spending, Trident and NATO. Corporations leeching our public services are bad because they’re capitalist, not because they’re foreign.

Lower borders, don’t raise them: Momentum should fight for cross-border struggle to restore and extend free movement and level up rights across Europe and beyond; against the Tories’ moves to sharpen Brexit; and for moves to reverse Brexit.

Socialism

Socialism means the people, led by the working class, organising to liberate ourselves from capitalist exploitation, by creating a new society based on common ownership of productive wealth and democratic planning to curb the climate crisis and meet social needs.

As Momentum Internationalists and then as LLI, and for many of us long before that, we have campaigned to make Momentum more democratic. We welcome the recent decisions for a Momentum convention, for STV for the NCG, etc., and want to help see through their implementation. Momentum still needs democratisation; for example, NCG minutes that are prompt and informative, not cryptic and often long-delayed; and access to the NCG for motions from caucuses and local groups.

BEYOND THE WINDFALL TAX

As well as organising more protests and strikes to push up wages, the labour movement needs to fight for radically different policies. In line with TUC Congress and Labour conference decisions, our movement should campaign for at least:
• Reversing the £20 UC cut; above-inflation benefit increases
• A significant real-terms rise for public sector workers
• A minimum wage of £15 for all
• Sick pay at least at minimum wage level for all
• Rent controls
• A mass insulation program
• Scrapping all anti-union laws, to help drive up wages, conditions and rights.

Furthermore we should campaign for:
• Heavy taxation of the rich – including through income tax, corporation tax and an ongoing wealth tax – to diminish their power, reduce inequality and unlock resources
• Public ownership of energy production, distribution and supply, to decarbonise and cut bills.

Winning action to raise living standards will increase the possibility of winning wider demands including building council housing, restoring the NHS and local government, creating a public care system, and more…

We will campaign for these demands, and agitate for the whole labour movement to fight for them, writing publicly to the Labour Party [and to our union nationally].

Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85160880793

Speakers include – James Meadway, former economic adviser to John McDonnell https://www.ippr.org/about/people/staff/james-meadway

Michael Roberts, editor of “World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx’s Law of Profitability” (2018: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1216-world-in-crisis) and blogger at https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/

https://www.facebook.com/events/724760288856199/

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/labour-and-economic-policy-tickets-348649799937

Current C1.VIII.6

All powers of the NEC may be exercised as the NEC deems appropriate through its elected officers, committees, sub-committees, the General Secretary and other national and regional officials and designated representatives appointed by the NEC or the General Secretary. For the avoidance of doubt, it is hereby declared that the NEC shall have the power to delegate its powers to such officers and shall see fit. Further, it shall be deemed always to have had such power.

Add a new 7

All powers of the NEC shall not be exercised in a manner that that is, or could be seen as, capricious, arbitrary, perverse, irrational, or contrary to natural justice and due process as indicated in article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights. Any decisions taken by the NEC, or others acting on behalf of the NEC, shall not be made in a manner that is, or could be seen as, capricious, arbitrary, perverse, irrational, or contrary to natural justice and due process as indicated in article 6 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

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Constituency Labour Parties can submit either a rule-change proposal or a motion. Most, of course, decide to submit motions. However, motions will reach conference floor only if the topic the CAC classifies them into wins in the priority ballot (for six topics from CLPs, six from unions) and if the CAC does not rule them out of order for being “on more than one subject” or some other reason.

CLPs have to decide by mid-June about submitting a rule-change proposal, though if they decide not to, they have until mid-September to decide on a motion.

12 noon, Friday 17 June 2022 – Closing date for Constitutional Amendments and CLP delegations
5pm, Thursday 15 September 2022 – Deadline for receipt of motions
12 noon, Thursday 22 September 2022 – Deadline for emergency motions
Sunday 25 September to Wednesday 28 September 2022 – Annual Conference 2022, in Liverpool

This draft wording above is obviously less direct than we would wish, but it is specially designed so as not to fall foul of the “three-year rule” which would nix other wordings. The formulation “capricious, arbitrary, perverse or irrational” comes from the court in the McNicol case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelou_v_McNicol ruling that powers of the NEC must be taken as limited by that criterion.

Excluding people for articles or interviews from years ago, especially if such articles or interviews were clearly part of a process of debate, seems “capricious, arbitrary, perverse and irrational”.

Solidarity with refugees, no to Rwanda deportations

Notes:

1. The 13 April announcement by the government of yet more anti-migrant measures including a deal to remove asylum-seekers from the UK to Rwanda, military operations in the English Channel against refugee boats, and the establishment of a new detention centre to imprison refugees in the UK.

2. That following threats of obstruction by civil service unions and PCS support for a legal challenge, the government has abandoned its plans for life-threatening pushbacks targeting boats at sea.

Believes

1. That the government can be made to retreat further by a concerted labour movement campaign.

2. That refugees should be welcomed, and the anti-migrant legislation introduced over many decades rolled back.

3. That the continued drive against refugees shows that the government’s rhetoric around those fleeing Ukraine is empty.

Resolves

1. To advertise demonstrations against the government’s anti-refugee and anti-migrant plans and seek to mobilise members.

2. To issue a statement on these issues.

3. To seek to make links with unions and human rights defenders in Rwanda to resist the offshoring plan, and call on our national union to do likewise.

4. To call on the Labour Party to commit to repealing the Nationality and Borders Bill, to reversing decades of anti-migrant legislation, and to legislate for safe and legal routes for all asylum seekers; end immigration raids, detention and deportation; expand unconditional rights to family reunion; grant asylum seekers day-one rights to work, social security and public services..

5. To organise a public meeting to discuss how workers in our sector can help defy and push back anti-migrant and anti-refugee legislation, and to invite a speaker from the Labour Campaign for Free Movement.

Policing and the Right to Protest

Conference believes:

●  That the Tories’ Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts legislation is an appalling attack on human rights. Labour must campaign and pledge to repeal it in its entirety.

●  That restrictions on the right to protest from the 1986 Public Order Act and 1994 Criminal Justice Act also need abolishing.

Conference further believes:

●  That heavy policing and punitive criminal justice are not solutions to society’s problems. We must attack poverty and inequality, restore and expand social provision, and narrow the spheres in which criminal justice operates. We must push back hard against the Tory agenda for society, towards a society based on provision for people’s needs, not profit-making.

●  Labour must advocate:

○  Urgent moves to tackle police violence and abuse, including replacing the so-called Independent Office for Police Conduct with a more independent and democratic body;

○  Full accountability of police to elected local authorities;

○  Curbing police powers, including in terms of use of force, stop and search and presence in schools. General demilitarisation and disarming;

○  Addressing drug-related problems through public-health policies instead of criminalisation;

○  Provision of services so that mental-health crises are dealt with by trained civilian workers, not police;

○  A major prisoner release programme and sharply curtailing use of prison.

Conference resolves:

● That Labour will campaign for and pledge to implement such policies.

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Submitted to Momentum Policy Primary by: Southwark Momentum

Build a Welcoming Britain: Towards an Internationalist
Socialist Immigration Policy

Conference notes:

●  This government’s treatment of Ukrainian and Afghan refugees, and the Windrush scandal victims, show its policies are out of touch.

●  Public polling shows increasing support for asylum seekers’ right to work.

●  UNHCR said the Nationality and Borders Bill would “penalise most refugees seeking asylum”.

●  Making migrant workers precarious diminishes our power to unionise and fight back.

●  We applaud PCS trade unionists considering striking against dangerous maritime “pushback” plans.

●  Labour must build solidarity, campaign for migrants’ rights, and an antiracist, internationalist alternative.

Labour in opposition and government will:

●  Repeal the Nationality and Borders Bill and all anti-migrant legislation;

●  Secure an immigration system based on dignity not numerical caps, minimum income/wealth requirements, or utility to employers;

●  Allow asylum seekers to work immediately upon arrival;

●  Guarantee safe, legal routes for asylum seekers, day-one rights to education and social security, and expand family reunion rights;

●  Abolish “no recourse to public funds”, NHS access restrictions and all Hostile Environment policies;

●  Introduce a simple process for all UK residents to gain permanent residency;

●  Introduce equal voting rights for all UK residents;

●  Replace Settled Status with an automatic Right to Stay;

●  Close all detention centres; end all immigration raids, detention, and deportations, including racist “double sentencing”;

●  Support workers refusing to implement deportations, Hostile Environment measures and pushbacks;

●  Level up domestic workers’ rights to equal other workers;

●  Reenter Europe’s free movement area, and pursue free movement agreements with other countries, including in all future trade deals, with the goal of equal free movement for all.

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Submitted to Momentum Policy Primary by: Labour Campaign for Free Movement, Walthamstow Momentum

For Public Ownership of Energy

Conference notes:

Energy bills are rising to nearly £3,000 per year, leaving 8.5 million households unable to heat their homes.

Oil and gas companies have handed out almost £200 billion to shareholders since 2010.

Privatised National Grid has a monopoly on gas transmission across the UK mainland and electricity transmission in England.

The energy bill crisis highlights the need for radical measures to defend and improve living standards and exposes how our energy system is organised.

Labour’s 2021 and 2019 Conferences voted overwhelmingly for “public ownership of energy including energy companies, creating an integrated, democratic system”, and “public ownership of energy, creating an integrated democratic system; public ownership of the Big Six” respectively.

Conference believes:

Full public ownership, democratic control and radical reorganisation of the energy industry are necessary to tackle the climate crisis, and for social, ecological and security reasons. Our energy system should work for all, not just a handful of shareholders.

The leadership should immediately advocate for this as part of a socialist Green New Deal.

Conference resolves Labour will campaign for and implement:

Full public ownership of the energy industry, including the National Grid and regional distribution, on the lines of the 2021 and 2019 Conferences’ policies so it works for people and planet, not private profit.

A permanent windfall tax on oil and gas companies like Shell and BP at a 56% rate (on top of corporation tax), using revenue generated to expand publicly owned renewables, and cease subsidising energy supply companies.

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Submitted to Momentum Policy Primary by: Bristol Momentum, Stevenage Momentum and Southampton Momentum