Marxist economist Michael Roberts (thenextrecession.wordpress.com) has long argued and campaigned to take the banking and financial system into public ownership. He spoke to the socialist weekly Solidarity about why. Cross-posted here with thanks.

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Why is public ownership of banking and finance an important demand for the working class and labour movement? What are the key arguments?

Banking is an important service for ordinary workers, households and businesses, particularly small businesses. When we get our wage packets, they’re normally paid into bank accounts, and when we conduct most of our transactions they’re conducted with bank cards or credit cards. We also use banks when we take out loans, for instance mortgages, for big ticket items we can’t afford on our monthly pay packets. It’s a service which is absolutely necessary, just as much as the health service and the education system.

Yet this service is entirely in the hands of huge great banks and other financial institutions, around the world, and in this country in particular. It’s not a public service. It’s a secondary matter for banks to provide services and loans to households and businesses; banking’s main activity, particularly in the last thirty or forty years, is using our funds and raising other funds to speculate in financial assets, in the bond markets and so on; to take commissions to organise mergers and acquisitions for companies; to engage in all sorts of corporate financial activities, and invent all kinds of weird and grotesque financial instruments people can bet in on the market. Plus a big part of what banks do now is provide tax advice, in other words tax evasion advice, for big companies and billionaires and very rich individuals to avoid paying tax in a variety of ways.

The scandals that have come out even in the last decade about what banks do in this area are just amazing. They have engaged in all kinds of tax fraud scandals. Meanwhile through all these forms of speculation and chicanery they’ve put the economy, put our jobs and services at risk, because of the risk of a new collapse in the banking system through overspeculation in finance, in what Marx called “fictitious capital”, in betting on things which supposedly represent real value but don’t necessarily do…

On top of that, bank leaders get huge payouts, incomes, bonuses, pensions, stock options and so on, for a so-called service which is not in the public interest. In fact it’s highly damaging, as we saw in the great financial crash [in 2007-8]. Even now, as we emerge from Covid, we hear that the banks are continuing to invest heavily in fossil fuels and all kinds of other carbon emission-expanding companies, rather than in tackling climate change. There’s no social control over what these institutions do.

I think those are fantastically powerful arguments for wanting to bring banking into public ownership, under the control of democratic institutions, so it becomes a public service for people, like health, like education, like transport and housing should be. While it remains in the hands of these small numbers of huge banks and their shareholders in this interconnected system, we’ll remain in this nightmare of scandals, fraud, tax evasion and speculation.

TUC Congress passed the Fire Brigades Union proposal for this in 2019, but during the Covid crisis it’s not been widely raised or even known about. How do we raise this now?

With Mick Brooks I was commissioned by the FBU in 2012 to write their pamphlet on public ownership of the banks [read the pamphlet here]. Mick died earlier this year as a result of the pandemic, but he was a fundamental arguer and supporter of this policy. The arguments we made in that pamphlet still apply, things have moved on, but the fundamental essentials still apply. It provided the arguments for the FBU to present their motion at the 2012 TUC Congress [the 2019 policy reaffirmed it] – which went through with no opposition at all. But it went through so the TUC leadership could shelve the resolution; they had no intention of putting it in any TUC programme or campaign.

The result is here we are, ten years after the end of that global financial crash and the great recession that ensued afterwards, and in some ways people in the labour movement don’t see the relevance of banking any more. It used to be the big enemy, the big thing we had to deal with. Since then, we’ve fallen back into the old position that all we have to do is regulate. The banks have to have more capital to protect us from going bust, so we need to regulate to make sure they operate in a fair and reasonable manner.

This is nonsense. The scandals have continued, never-ending. Only this week we’ve seen that two very big banks, Credit Suisse and Nomura, have lost something like $20 billion by lending huge amounts of money to a hedge fund that went bust. I always refer to a grotesque example of the failure of regulation, when HSBC, one of the big five British banks, engaged in laundering millions of Mexican drug cartel money over several years. The head of its US operations became head of the bank overall and essentially nothing was done. No bankers have been arrested, convicted or anything like that.

Regulation has failed, but alternatives like bringing the banks under popular control are not registering on the labour movement’s agenda. Other issues dominate people’s minds – Covid, precarious employment, the run-down of the NHS and other public services, the need for a proper health system in the US, the issues of austerity.

But unless we have control of the financial levers of power, as a labour movement and as a people, we’re in no position to start reorganising the economy in the interests of the people. If the big banks and financial institutions are in the hands of the private sector and billionaires, they will use their funds to invest in what capital on the whole sees as necessary, and in general that will act against the interests of the people. Banks have had huge injections of credit from the Bank of England, the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and so on to prop them up, but they’ve simply used them to speculate in markets and provide funds for big business interests that can deliver big interests and profits for them.

So this is something we must continually campaign for in the labour movement. That’s difficult. My feeling is this often produces a dead silence; that many people think yes, I suppose you’re right, but… People are thinking of other things. But also there’s a fear, of the damage it would do to the economy if we had a labour movement and a government preparing to do this. There’d be a run on the pound, we’d lose money, as if we haven’t with the global crash, then Brexit and Covid! Finance is something that frightens people, they don’t really understand it, and they’re unsure what to do about it. I’m talking about labour movement activists.

What are you calling to be taken over, which institutions?

The big five commercial and retail banks [HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest/RBS, Barclays, Santander] is what we’re talking about, those are the ones first of all we need to bring into public ownership. Also the insurance companies; it’s a scandal the way they run, with high premiums and so on, and they’re also an important part of the investment process. And then the pension funds: occupational pension funds are now just appalling; they’re now contributory pensions, not on the basis of final salary any more. What we need is one state pension fund for all, which would be far more efficient, eliminating all these pension fund managers and their fat salaries, and allow us to provide decent pensions for all.

What we don’t need to take over is small community and co-operative banks which have been or could be set up by people in different areas. Some of that already exists, at least there are still elements of it. These institutions could be coordinated with the state banking sector and actually get help from it. There are all kinds of changes taking place in banking, and yet the big banks remain terrible at providing basic services.

Some on the left argue, or half-argue, that this is too big and that public regional investment banks would be easier and do essentially the same job?

Under the Corbyn and McDonnell leadership, they were always interested in consultation and advice. McDonnell set up a banking advisory committee, and all the left economists would turn up for the discussion. The Communication Workers’ Union had raised the issue of a “post bank” which would be an alternative to the big five. All the left economists went along with a national investment bank, regional banks, a postal bank – but not taking over the big five or other institutions. The only person who mentioned that was yours truly. After the meeting was over, the two CWU representatives talked to me and said they thought a postal bank would just get annihilated by the big banks. So frankly, it’s a diversion.

We don’t need a publicly owned second eleven while the big banks stay on top and still control everything. If you look at national investment banks around the world, they’re very limited in what they’ve done. It’s just avoiding the issue. Even under Corbyn and McDonnell Labour was afraid of it, in terms of fearing it couldn’t win public support, and also not being sure it was a good idea or viable economically. [For more by Michael on “Corbynomics” and left debate on this, see here, here and here.]

Would this work if it was carried out in just one country?

There’s a particular and a general answer. The particular answer is, in short, yes. This is a major demand which should certainly be taken up by any socialist movement trying to establish a government in this country. I see absolutely no reason why it couldn’t work much more effectively than the current system, instead working in the interests of a social plan. Of course, there are more difficult questions of a wider scale, internationally, because all these banks are connected internationally. It would mean disruption of international flows of funds, though many of those flows are speculative anyway and we should be quite happy to put an end to them.

There needs to be an international economic plan, and so the banking system should be under democratic control globally. However, it seems to me there’s no reason we can’t do this in Britain, or somewhere else, and provide a marker about how things could be done in other countries too.

What’s your assessment of the experience of publicly owned banking systems in other countries?

The formerly so-called Communist countries of Eastern Europe all had public banking systems. India and other countries, for instance in the past in Latin America, have had banking systems where the state banks are dominate. The problem is these systems were entirely bureaucratic, entirely controlled from the top down, with no representation with the bank workers or the wider labour movement. They were not built into any plan for the economy, and instead were often used to provide governments with funds for corrupt activities.

So there’s a lot of bad press on state banks but on the other hand, a lot of things have been missed about state banks, even in that period. In Brazil they had a big development bank that was the only bank that provided any funds for investment. These experiments were limited, but without control of the major parts of the banking system, you can’t plan an economy in the interests of people. I always like to quote what Lenin said:

The banks, as we know, are centres of modern economic life, the principal nerve centres of the whole capitalist economic system. To talk about “regulating economic life” and yet evade the question of the nationalisation of the banks means either betraying the most profound ignorance or deceiving the “common people” by florid words and grandiloquent promises with the deliberate intention of not fulfilling these promises.

The failure of the Paris Commune, which we’ve just been commemorating 150 years on, 72 days when the workers did take power, with the first workers’ power government so to speak – that government fell because they didn’t take over the central bank, they let the Bank of France sit there, they left all the funds in the hands of capital and therefore they had no resources to support their government and take it forward. They restricted themselves by their own decision. [More comments by Michael on this here.]

I’ll give you two positive examples of successful state banks, though limited ones. In North Dakota, which is a right-wing Republican state, in the 1930s the state government set up a state bank; it’s the major bank in North Dakota. It takes the deposits of households and farmers in the state and distributes loans back to farmers and households in mortgages. It engages in no speculation in financial assets; it concentrates on providing services, and it makes a profit which is returned every year as extra revenue for the state government. During the global financial crash that bank was totally unaffected by the collapsing house of cards of all the other banking entities in the US and globally. It’s not fully democratic, but it is partly elected, and it works well.

On a bigger scale, the Chinese banking system is primary run by state entities, and it operates according to the plan set by the Chinese government. Yes, it’s top down, there’s no democratic control from below – but it does play a role in ensuring investment according to the state plan, and that played a role during the financial crash and last year in getting the Chinese economy through these crises in a better way than most. So we can see positive examples, even if they are limited or far from the democratic forms of public ownership we want.

You’ve flagged up the question of climate change. Can you say more there?

There’s just a report out which shows that the big banks and financial institutions have done absolutely nothing to shift their funds towards green investment and reducing carbon emissions. Instead, they’ve ploughed their loans back into the big fossil fuel companies, the Shells, Essos, the BPs, Exxons, all the rest of them, plus the coal industry, steel, all these high emission sectors which need to be reduced or phased out completely. The banks are carrying on merrily in face of the disaster fast approaching us, because they can make big money. We can’t change that until we have control of them.

When people in the labour movement rightly say we need a green policy, we need to end fossil fuel emissions, we need to get to zero targets as soon as possible, we need to get control over and reverse global warming as soon as possible, then the banks absolutely cannot be left out of that equation.

It’s good that a number of unions have campaigned on public ownership of the energy industry. I should also say I was impressed by the work some comrades in the CWU did to raise public ownership of the communications industry and telecoms in particular. There was another very good pamphlet that was produced [by CWU Greater London Combined telecoms branch: read it here].

Public ownership, even of the financial system, is not yet socialism. How does it relate?

How does public ownership of any and all industrial sectors relate to socialism? The basic start for any labour movement looking to move towards socialism is to take control of the means of production, or strategic sectors of them, what we used to call the commanding heights, and that must include the banks. We need to expand things we need, like public transport and housing and public services, and we need also need to close down in areas which we don’t need – like the military and fossil fuels. It’s not just a question of expanding production but of switching it onto different tracks, so it’s run for social need.

Socialism is a system where everything is commonly owned and the working people are in control of that commonly owned system, so you have production for need and transactions on the basis of money and exploitation begin to disappear, because we’re producing sufficiently for workers to reduce their hours and start to participate and live in new ways. That’s not really possible practically until we have a world government and a world economy. But you have to start somewhere.

We’re not going to have simultaneous international socialist revolutions all in the same week to achieve that. Given all the different conditions in different countries, different levels of income, of economy, even geography and climate, and of course different levels of class struggle, it’s going to be a patchwork of change. Revolutionary change won’t come in a single event, it will come in a series of waves. If the US had a workers’ government it would dramatically transform the world, provoking a series of dominoes falling. Most likely, it will be somewhere else less decisive that will start them falling. But again, we have to start somewhere.

If someone says nationalising the banks and the means of production, even with workers’ control, is not yet socialism, I agree, but the question is how do you see socialism coming about, what do you start with?

To come back to the present situation, we now face an additional barrier to raising this, in a much more conservative Labour leadership. How do we move forward?

The current leadership is just going to talk about regulation and focus on particular scandals like David Cameron and Greensill Capital. So again, we need to go back to how regulation has failed, time and time again, how all the same problems continue. We’re constantly told that the regulators need to look at things again, somehow they missed this one, and it continues.

That’s the first thing, you press that. But then also you raise it in a positive way: if regulation has failed, we need to look at some alternatives. What’s the objective? Rather than starting with “we want to take over the banks”, we begin with “banking should be a public service”, like other services that are necessary in a modern economy, so that people can have a reasonable life. Health, education, transport, housing, all these things exist or should be restored as public initiatives to meet people’s needs. Banking is one of these things, we need it to turn it into a public service, and we can provide positive examples of that, if on a small scale or with limitations. Of course then people will say how are you going to make this happen, and of course we have to say nothing is going to change unless we take control of the big five and other financial institutions.

By Joe Booth

Why am I writing this now? Because since Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh passed on April 9, 2021 so many people in the country consciously or subconsciously sent their condolences to him and gave the royal family importance. So many people including left wing, socialist republicans like Jeremy Corbyn and Nadia Whittome (MP for Nottingham East)

This has sparked so much controversy because for his long history of racism, having nazi siblings and just very simply being a member of a royal family where most people who believe in democracy, anti hierarchy and equality are rightly against, people who appreciate that are paradoxically sending out condolences and tweets that make him important in in our hierarchical society.

Of course that’s not the intention. The intention is to show politeness, compassion and also care not to create another wrong by saying how happy they are that he’s dead and that’s particularly important when fighting for a world free of all oppression, hierarchy and harm and full of plenty, freedom, security and individuality (always trying to be better and more humane than your enemies rather than just fighting them without any decided alternative).

But the problem with influential people like Jeremy Corbyn and Nadia Whittome voicing their public condolences the way they did – specifically as bad as saying “Her Majesty” and ‘all those who loved them” and nothing about other undisputed deaths and all their victims – is that had all those people collectively started a plan to say condolences if they wanted but also be very unapologetic about their republicanism, it would’ve become easier. Yes, even if April 9, 2021 wasn’t the right time, they still could’ve clarified that they were gonna be part of and aid the struggle against royal families, racism and other causes of death and for socialism and democracy – of course, so long as they explain those ideologies which was actually one of the failures of Corbynism (not yet being able to explain socialism to people).

This of course isn’t the only example of people with influence sending out condolences to their enemies: back in 2020 when Boris Johnson had coronavirus, even MP John McDonnell sent out his thoughts for Boris and his family, after all he tweeted against Boris. Obviously, there are somewhat significant differences between these 2 examples.

But hey, if Jeremy or Nadia or anyone in their defence is reading this article, don’t get me wrong: I’m still willing to understand why you felt the need for this: because lack of strength from others to properly voice opinions unapologetically. And that’s exactly why I think it’s essential to prioritise fighting the causes of these problems and for transitional demands that help us win more socialist demands in future.

But even if your tweets may have literally been just an apolitical act of politeness, the fact that you’re influential powerful people who have the capacity to say your more unconventional views means more could’ve been done. Besides, using ‘Her Majesty’ and not mentioning victims of the Royal family and other people who don’t get the same attention when they die, makes it even less about just simply sending condolences and more about actually making them seem important, even if not intended.

So in conclusion, on just one day of the year when an enemy either dies or gets sick its okay to send condolences *but* using that as an excuse to not say your real political views gives ground to your enemies and that’s a sociological fact, that’s not my own personal opinion. Feel free to disagree with me but this is a political discussion about what’s right not what’s convenient.
Besides, never at any point in your life think that by writing this article I disagree with or am more cynical about building a culture of unity, politeness and compassion. It’s exactly what I’m calling for: for a culture of unity and compassion, not a culture of naivety and compromising with harmful actions in the clothes of politeness.

For a draft example:
– “it’s very sad when any human being dies/gets sick and will always send condolences, but I’m way more concerned about deaths from poverty, discrimination, ethnic cleansing and other shit that don’t get the same attention. Let’s use this time to discuss what we think of [the relevant issue at hand] and what we want in future”

So, hope this was a good read, not too hostile and will love to hear all different ranges of opinions and perspectives and post a comment if you wish.

By Abel Harvie-Clark

Students and staff at SOAS University of London are taking on their university management management with a vision of free, liberated education. Support fee strikers by sending this letter to demand no sanctions on fee strikers, and to back the strike’s demands.

Students have been on fee strike since February for an end to student fees amongst other demands addressing Covid-19 academic mitigation, the university’s implementation of Home Office policies, and its employment practices. Since then the Unison branch has voted no confidence in Adam Habib, the university’s director, and the students’ union passed a motion demanding his permanent removal, due to his use of a racial slur and failure to address ongoing racism at the institution.

Now, the fee strike is calling for solidarity by joining an email campaign against the interim management. The SOAS WTFees campaign, running the fee strike, is asking people to send this letter to demand no sanctions on fee strikers, and to back the strike’s demands.

No sanctions is an important demand as students must not be bullied into silence by an institution whose management has lost the legitimacy to claim a penny from its students. Students have had to deal with the exhausting and stressful experience of the director’s racism, alongside the continuing institutional racism, whilst sweeping staff cuts last year have left academic staff unable to give students the support needed. Further, research from Universities Resist Border Controls has shown that 56% of international students in the UK face deprivation due to a combination of extortionate student fees and rent, and the awful No Recourse to Public Funds. 

In this scenario, it is absolutely unreasonable to force students to pay fees in order to graduate from their courses. Due to the financial pressure facing students, the university must negotiate incremental, longer term fee installments, or write off the fees entirely. In order to cover the costs of running the university, management should appeal to the government for a bailout of the higher education sector, and to underwrite all student fees, funded by taxing the richest. This should apply not just to home students (as in Scotland) but all international students too, whose fees are currently uncapped and can reach over £30,000 per year. 

Beyond fees, the fee strike has called for an end to borders and surveillance in the university. The racist and islamophobic Prevent agenda, part of the governments’ anti-radicalisation program, is still enforced at SOAS, despite the anti-colonial branding of the school. Further, Home Office monitoring of international students adds to the hostile environment, and restricts students from participating in political organising. The campaign demands non-compliance with these policies, and works with the staff unions too to achieve this.

The campaign has highlighted the need for genuine democratisation of the university, and points to direct action like the strike itself as the best way to do this. University management is significantly weakened by the recent actions of the director, has been systematically failing to implement effective administrative services throughout this year, and faces multiple struggles from campus workers organising against poor working conditions and insecure contracts. Despite this, the possibility of once again employing outsourced staff has been floated amongst a range of neo-liberal policies to “ensure financial sustainability” for the institution. Outsourcing was ended at SOAS in 2018 after an 11 year struggle by the Justice for Workers campaign, and will be strongly resisted if any attempt is made to implement it again.

Right now, fee striking students need your support against bullying management, to continue putting forward this vision of free liberated education. Join and share the email action against management, and be ready to support escalating action if needed!

From the Labour Campaign for Free movement

The latest move in the Tory government’s war against migrants – the floating of proposals to remove asylum-seekers to camps in remote locations, hundreds or thousands of miles away, while their claims are processed – is once again an outrage against human rights and the values of rationality, compassion and solidarity.

It has been condemned by numerous humanitarian and migrants’ rights organisations, by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and, though in fairly timid terms, by the Labour Party. Many organisations have pointed to the humanitarian consequences of Australia’s use of this model. As Enver Solomon of the Refugee Council put it: “We know from the Australian model that offshore detention leads to appalling outcomes including high levels of self-harm and mental illness. It is an inhumane policy…”

Rossella Pagliuchi-Lor, the UNHCR’s UK representative, pointed out that such measures will work to undermine the whole international system of protection for refugees. Sonia Lenegan, legal director at the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association, nailed the Tories’ absurd claim that such measures are necessary to protect migrants from people smugglers: “This is not a safe option, and it will be the government putting refugees’ lives at risk instead of people smugglers.” The best way to protect people is to welcome and integrate them into UK society.

Whether the proposal is to move asylum-seekers three hundred miles to the Isle of Man, a thousand miles to Gibraltar, or 4,000 miles to Ascension island in the Atlantic, it must be defeated.

The deepening sadism of the Tories’ anti-migrant policies should remind us that things will not stay still. Either we build momentum to comprehensive reverse the decades-long push towards marginalisation and demonisation of refugees and other migrants, or the downwards spiral will continue.

The labour movement must fight to win safe routes to the UK for asylum-seekers, for the abolition of all immigration detention, and for rights to family union, to work with the same rights as other workers, and to access normal benefits and public services. Our campaign continues to fight for all of these – and are pushing to get Labour to commit at this year’s National Conference.

The Labour Party has published a new complaints policy, and, at last, some information on disciplinary decisions. 356 cases have been heard by panels of the National Executive Committee (NEC) over the last ten months, since May 2020. Almost half of those (170) were in the three months May-July 2020.

94 members out of those 356 have been expelled. We don’t know for what, except that the report says 70% of the 356 cases were charges about antisemitism. On top of the 94, 43 members have been “auto-excluded” (i.e. expelled without a hearing) on the catch-all clause about “supporting a political organisation other than an official Labour one”, which makes anyone supporting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or Friends of the Earth or such theoretically open to instant expulsion. That clause was used in 2015 and 2016 to expel hundreds of left-wingers; it was then apparently sidelined, but it’s back in use now.

Socialists should start the work now for a reformed and democratic disciplinary code.

Protests against the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, mostly more or less ad hoc, continued on the weekend 3-4 April, almost a month after the Tories pushed the Bill through its first parliamentary vote on 9 March.

There’s talk of a national day of action on 17 April, but varied local protests are likely to continue too (best followed on Instagram).

The Bill limits the right to protest already hemmed in by the Public Order Act 1986 and the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. It increases criminal penalties for people who fall foul of police-imposed conditions, establishes new offences like “public nuisance”, and bans protests from a large area round Parliament. It would threaten people taking down statues like slaveowner Edward Colston’s in Bristol with ten years jail (maximum sentence at present: three months).

Two marches were held in London, the second one several thousand. There were some arrests late on in the second protest, after most people had left, but mostly the police were on the back foot.

Maybe two thousand protested in Bristol, where there have been two or more protests each week for a while now. Later on, about 10pm, some protesters blocked a motorway.

Around 300-400 marched in Newcastle, from one side of the city centre to the other and back again, without police being confident enough to intervene.

Sheffield also had 300-400. There were about 350 on the Northampton protest, about 300 in Liverpool.

Everywhere the demonstrations were mostly young, with a high proportion of women. Labour and trade-union contingents were few.

The government has set no date for the Bill to go to its next parliamentary stage, amendments in committee, and is under pressure to amend it before it returns to full parliamentary debate. The battle will continue to establish the right to protest, not just reduce the new restrictions, and activists will push unions and local Labour Parties to join it.

On 18 March the leadership of Momentum launched a “strategy document” called “Socialist Organising for a New Era”, laying out a path for what Momentum should do over the next three years. But despite running to 24 pages, it doesn’t really say.

There is plenty in the document that is not controversial and even good – that socialists should intervene in the Labour Party and try to democratise it and involve it in social struggles; that more extensive programmes of political education should be rolled out; that there should be more socialists in local government. But none of these things are new. In fact they are said by Momentum regularly, so it isn’t really clear why they needed to be said again in a strategy document released with great fanfare. There aren’t any new proposals in here; neither is there really any detail about how to achieve these things, or reflecting on how Momentum’s attempts at doing these things has gone so far. But the document does surely say a lot about the outlook of its current leadership.

Information

In a way the longest part of this 24-page document is all the things that are left unsaid. A strategy document might begin by laying out some information about how it was drawn up, where it was debated and drafted and by whom. But we don’t get any of that. As of late March 2021, Momentum’s National Co-ordinating Group has not published any minutes since early December 2020. In a democratic organisation, a strategy document establishing the organisation’s plans and orientation for a period of three years would be debated by the membership prior to being adopted and published. This hasn’t happened here. Members didn’t know the report was coming; no-one knew how to express a view about what should be in it. That raises another question: is the report supposed to be binding? Or is it just an opinion piece by some members? Why not invite debate about it?

A process of activists debating and amending a roadmap would be lengthy, and, in an organisation of about 40,000 members, it would be fairly public and noisy. But this document was drawn up in private and launched without warning. It’s a model of behaviour that fits an NGO which exists to issue reports written by a central staff or by an inner circle who are “in the know”.

Momentum is not in great health right now. This isn’t the fault of the current leadership: the pandemic and the 2019 election defeat weigh heavy. Even before the 2019 election the farcically top-down, anti-democratic way in which Momentum was run, perhaps at the behest of the Corbyn leadership, had cost Momentum much moral authority with its grassroots. These things are no secret, so there is no harm addressing them openly. Momentum’s new leadership has been conducting “Refounding” meetings – attempts to rally, re-organise and re-orient local Momentum groups. It would be useful for members to know how this has been going.

Even if the facts aren’t good, giving some facts about the current health of the organisation would create confidence. It would dispel speculation that things are worse than they really are. NGOs, charities and bourgeois parties who live and die by “optics” and can’t see further ahead than one news cycle would obviously not publish less-than-flattering information about themselves. But in a democratic labour movement organisation, whose strength relies on the confidence that the membership has in its leaders, giving the impression that the leadership is hiding bad news is damaging.

Momentum democracy

When the current leadership stood for election in 2020 as the “Forward Momentum” slate, they did so on a pledge of making Momentum more democratic. It is harder for an organisation to be democratic when it doesn’t have a thriving internal life and is beset with difficulties like the pandemic. But transparency is free, and you can do it any time. There is mention in this document of “democratising Momentum” but it only runs to a few lines:

“This summer we’ll also launch a process to collectively determine how we improve Momentum’s constitution and democracy, with deliberation conducted in local groups and proposals voted on by all Momentum members. We’ll be collectively thinking about the ways we can re-design Momentum so we can better deliver on the strategic priorities here outlined.”

The current leadership was elected on a pledge of organising a “Refounding Convention” – online, if not in person, to be held by May 2021. That was vague, but this is vaguer: “a process”, “in the summer”. It’s important for democracy that members are given proper information well in advance about exactly how they can make their voice heard. In a 24-page document about the future of Momentum, no more information is offered to members about how Momentum’s very constitution is going to be re-written. Again, the outlook of whoever wrote this is technocratic: telling members, “don’t worry, we are handling it”. If Keir Starmer sent out a circular saying “I’m going to re-write the Labour Party rulebook this summer sometime, I’ll ask you all what should go in it”, possibly the current Momentum NCG members would object.

The other noteworthy thing here is that whatever this “process” of re-writing the constitution decides, its political purpose has been fixed in advance. It’s all about delivering on the strategic priorities outlined in this document. So it turns out that this “strategy document” that you didn’t get to vote on is binding. Again: if Starmer said “Labour Party Conference this year is all going to be about the best way to campaign for a programme that I have just come up with”, people might ask: “Can’t we also change that programme?”

When Momentum was first founded in 2015, immediately the leadership started working to shut down democracy, discourage activists from organising together locally and asserting themselves. This culminated with the almost completely shutdown of democracy at the start of 2017. This was to do with making sure that there was no leftward pressure on the Labour leadership, but also a neoliberal-technocratic, NGO-style management philosophy that has become pervasive in the left. An argument we heard at the time was that Momentum doesn’t need to be democratic – all the “democratising” that needs to happen is in the Labour Party itself. We would answer: people learn by doing. If Momentum itself doesn’t model good democratic practice, what hope does it have of democratising Labour? If we want Momentum to be a force for democracy, it needs to get transparency, information and democracy right, and drop its current top-down NGO-style attitude that runs right through this document: “Your leaders will fix everything for you: await further instructions and do not bother us”.

Local government

Winning selections and getting more socialists into local government is one of the headline objectives outlined in this document. Under the header “Transforming local government”, the document says:

“As we’ve seen in Preston and Salford, committed socialists can use local government to make a real difference to people’s lives, and Momentum will support and encourage this new municipal socialist movement. We’re also assisting Momentum members to develop the knowledge and skills they need to navigate the selection process and campaign to become a councillor. We’ll continue the Future Councillors Programme and we’ll relaunch Momentum’s Councillors’ Network – a home for socialist councillors across the country, where they can debate and develop policy and explore how Labour councils can engage with and support local communities.”

There is no space here for a full assessment of Salford and Preston Labour councils. Momentum Internationalists will publish something more detailed about them at a later date. But no assessment is offered in the strategy document either (although it is 24 pages long). Salford Council does deserve credit for having extended isolation pay to workers in care homes. But it is putting up council tax and is only making no cuts this year because it has passed cuts budgets for ten years running, cutting a majority of its workforce. The much-trumpeted “Preston model” is about managing decline. That doesn’t sound much like “transforming” local government. A transformative approach to local government might involve refusing to co-operate with the government’s cuts agenda or learning from other “models”, like the Labour council in Clay Cross in the 1970s. At the very least it would involve active campaigning to stop cuts and win restored funding.

Instead, the Momentum leadership seem to take it as read that resistance is futile. That’s not an assumption that the leadership of a socialist movement should make lightly. (For more on Momentum’s approach to local government, see here.)

The rest of what this passage says focuses on the individuals who may become councillors: training and coaching them to “navigate” selection procedures. Of course councillors need training. But from a socialist perspective, when you’re talking about local government, the most important person isn’t the councillor. It’s the movement around them.

How might councillors be held accountable to Momentum and what might a “Momentum councillor” stand for? That’s an important question and it’s not addressed. There is a “Momentum Council” – Haringey Council. Since a big Momentum-driven campaign to select and elect lefties, Haringey’s Momentum council has alienated much of its grassroots leftwing support by doing things like shutting the popular Latin Village market in Tottenham, overriding the concerns of the local working-class community and many small traders.

Coaching people to act like that isn’t a winning proposition. We should coach prospective candidates to do something else instead – but what? We might suggest – building a united movement to back up the local council to defy central government; using the platform of local government to launch organising drives to build local unions and bring workers into the Labour Party; solving local problems by campaigning and mobilising people power. In short, socialist councillors should not view their power as coming from the council chamber but from the working class. They should be more afraid of disappointing the local left and workers’ movement than of central government or having the Labour whip withdrawn.

More important than “coaching” councillors is finding mechanisms of holding them accountable. Momentum councillors should set a standard of accountability to the local party – and to Momentum’s local supporters. Aside from Labour Party members, the other key constituency who should be involved in making local government policy is local government workers and trade union activists. But they aren’t mentioned.

Why write a pamphlet about Momentum’s strategy that runs to 24 pages, make “getting more left councillors” a headline theme, and then say nothing about what standards of left-wing-ness or of accountability a “left councillor” should be held to? A common way of proceeding on the Labour left is for lefties to pick a candidate on the basis of who talks left in the selection meeting, or who hangs around with the right people enough to be considered “one of us”. There’s a certain resignation that underlies these habits – everyone involved regards it as inevitable that the candidates chosen by the left in this way will eventually sell out. Momentum’s leaders should lead the way in dispelling this resignation. What the emphasis in this strategy document suggests is that the Momentum leadership share this resignation. They might “coach” some people to stand who otherwise would not have. Or they might, through “coaching”, woo some self-promoter into standing as a nominally “left” candidate. But in either case, there doesn’t seem much indication that they expect these people to have a different relationship to the broader movement once in office.

The Momentum Councillors’ Network doesn’t meet or deliberate. The reason for that is probably that any honest conversation about the record of “left” councillors in the UK would be too embarrassing for any of the participants to bear. But creating a body like that, even one that met regularly, should not be a priority. Councillors should not be encouraged to organise their own little trade union in Momentum to protect them from the membership. They should be held to account. If they want to discuss issues of policy, they can discuss them with the rest of us plebs who turn up to local Momentum meetings, or who are members of local government trade union branches. Bad enough that there is a whole bit of the Momentum NCG reserved for “elected officers”: that was always a right-wing gerrymander. Officials should be reminded at every turn that they serve the movement. A councillor has more power than an ordinary person. To also give a Momentum councillor more say in Momentum than ordinary members points in the wrong direction.

Momentum trade union network

The best idea in the document is a Momentum trade union network. Organising a left-wing network of shop-floor trade union activists is a very good idea. The Corbyn project started with that “surge” of new members into the Labour Party in 2015, bringing more left-wing politics and a desire for more activism and greater democracy. It was always a strategic weakness of the Corbyn movement that the trade unions were not similarly transformed and democratised at the same time. In the Corbyn period, this mismatch between renewed leftwing life in CLPs and an entrenched, unchallenged bureaucracy in the trade union movement meant that the trade unions returned to their traditional role as the most right wing block against leftwing changes getting voted through at Conference. It was during Corbyn’s tenure as Labour Party leader, paradoxically, that strike figures fell to their lowest recorded level. In order for the movement to be able to “use both hands”, a radical democratisation of and infusion of activist energy into the trade unions needs to come alongside a socialist political transformation of Labour.

Momentum’s strategy document talks about “working with trade unions”. That’s a common enough phrase in the movement. But it’s not precise. “Working with” the senior officials of a big union (generally unelected and on management-sized salaries) is a very different proposition from “working with” the workers they represent. Obviously, the latter is more important: but also the process of democratising and changing trade unions will entail a conflict with the existing trade union bureaucracies similar in its intensity to the fighting with the old regime that Corbynism sparked in Labour. Any trade union organisation that Momentum builds will need to be set up with that in mind.

There’s a further issue here, again to do with democracy. Most trade unions are at least as undemocratic as the Labour Party. But most trade unions, and Labour, nevertheless have much more democratic constitutions than Momentum does. It is hard to “bring democracy” into an organisation that is already more democratic than you are.

The Walton model

A note on the “Walton model”. There’s a bit in the strategy document where it says: “We’ll work to popularise organising models in Momentum and the Labour Party that prioritise working class solidarity and agency – such as the ‘Walton Model’”. Google reveals only one hit for “Walton Model”: a blogpost by NCG member Alan Gibbons written in May 2020 about how the Labour Party in Walton is active in lots of community campaigns and has held some lively cultural events. That’s good. But that doesn’t add up to a “model” that could be “popularised”. And shorthand for an idea is only of any use if people are likely to know what it means – i.e. if it gets more than one hit on Google. So why mention it at all? All it does is make the casual reader feel thick because they’ve not heard of this super-sophisticated “model”. You don’t want the leadership of a democratic organisation to sound like they’re trying to make up fancy new concepts to impress you with. It doesn’t instil confidence.

The overall impression given by the Momentum strategy document is one of vagueness and a lot of habits of thought and activity imported from liberal NGO politics, rather than labour movement organising. Vagueness almost always means going with the flow. But more than at any time in its history, Momentum needs to go against the flow. It faces a hostile Labour leadership, great pressure in local government, and a trade union movement that’s not fit for purpose. Between the lines, this document reveals a leadership hiding its intentions, hiding bad news, and keeping all of its decision-making cloistered in processes that can be micro-managed from the office. A bolder, more self-confident, more political approach is needed.

On 30 March we held a meeting in solidarity with the Indian farmers’ struggle, addressed by London Fire Brigades Union black and ethnic minority members officer Amit Malde and left-wing economist and close ally of the farmers’ movement Pritam Singh.

Nottingham East MP Nadia Whittome was due to speak but had to cancel due to illness. She sent a statement to the meeting which we republish below. Videos from the meeting and more information and updates soon. Meanwhile:

• Please sign this statement of solidarity
• Ask your MP to sign this parliamentary Early Day Motion (1278), on the criminalisation of dissent in India.

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Statement from Nadia Whittome MP

I’m so sorry I can’t be with you today, due to illness. The Indian farmers’ movement feels very close to my heart as my grandparents were farmers in Punjab.

The protests have come about because of the new exploitative farm laws. These laws will allow big companies to drive down crop prices. They threaten to leave families and entire communities without the means to live. More than 40% of people in India work in agriculture, so this is a huge issue.

But the protests also cut much deeper than just the farm laws. They have also become about the BJP and their divisive Hindu-nationalist politics and neo-liberal policies. The farmers’ movement is an anathema to their bigoted regime – it transcends caste, religious, and regional differences. Many women are at the forefront. A few months ago 250 million workers went on strike alongside the farmers. This movement provides a vision of a different India – one which can be united in its diversity.

So it is no surprise Modi’s government is doing everything it can to suppress the movement. Indian government-controlled media has demonised farmers. The government ordered Twitter to suspend accounts that tweeted support for the farmers or criticism of its treatment of them. It has shut down the internet around the protest sites, and arrested protesters, sympathetic activists and even journalists. Water cannons, tear gas and brute force have all been used against farmers.

Here in the UK, the Conservative Government is a close ally of Modi’s regime. Modi spoke alongside David Cameron when he visited the UK, our Home Secretary is an active supporter of the BJP and there are billionaire donors who bankroll both parties. In the 2019 election, Hindu nationalists mobilised for the Tories, and the Tories are responsive to their bigoted agenda, like their opposition to banning caste discrimination.

We have to expose these links and put pressure on the government over this issue. So thank you to everyone attending – we need to keep on raising the profile of the protests and showing our solidarity. Victory to the farmers!