By Alan Gilbert

Labour activists need to do three things now:

• Confront the strands of antisemitism within Labour which the EHRC report has indicted – and without anyone much being confident enough to argue that Labour should challenge the report in court – by political argument, debate, and education

• Oppose the suspension mania being used by new general secretary David Evans and by Keir Starmer, in effect (at least) as a substitute for a political response on antisemitism; defend democracy, free discussion, and due process within the Labour Party

• Stick in there and remobilise the left to combat Starmer on the suspensions and on many other issues: Brexit, skycops, the pandemic, replacement of Ofsted and an end to high-stakes testing in primary schools, and more.

To do those things we need to dispute and confront two drifts: both the drive to giving up in disgust, and the drift to compliance.

Some of the left have quietly supported compliance with the suspension-mania. Some even argue that more suspensions are needed to get rid of antisemites.

A flood of suspensions without due process, and without any effort from the Labour Party leadership to confront “coded” antisemitic political cultures through political argument, will not “root out” antisemitism, but will destroy the democratic processes we need to improve the political culture.

On another wing of the argument, Tariq Ali has written on the newly-launched blog of New Left Review to raise hopes of a positive outcome from lots of people quitting Labour.

“An Independent Labour Party with even half a dozen MPs and a membership base of perhaps 50,000 – that number have left already since Starmer took over – could mark a real advance”.

Ali suggests that Jeremy Corbyn’s “Peace and Justice Project” could be a step forward towards that, although Corbyn is clear he’s not trying for a new party.

The Independent Labour Party was formed in 1893, and was one of the main forces in launching the Labour Party. It operated as a Labour-affiliated “socialist society” after 1900. In 1929-31 there were 37 MPs in the ILP subgroup of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

The ILP was disgusted by the experience of the 1929-31 Labour government, and in 1932 voted to disaffiliate. Not all its members joined the split, but it had some 17,000 members and five MPs. It was a major active force on the British left, maybe three times the size of the Communist Party.

If it could have consolidated a clear and consistent socialist program, and reoriented back to the trade unions and the Labour Party, it could indeed have produced a “real advance”.

In fact it declined steadily from the time of the split. By 1938, it was down to 2,000 members. It sounded out the Labour Party on reaffiliating, and was turned down. It jogged along, and was the biggest if not the most active of the “left groups”, for decades. Eventually it renamed itself “Independent Labour Publications” in 1975 and rejoined the Labour Party as a tiny subgroup.

It would be wrong and dogmatic to deduce iron laws about all outside-Labour political initiatives being doomed. But the net effect of the ILP’s disaffiliation was to divert and disperse thousands of activists who might otherwise have learned and helped others learn within the development of the broader labour movement.

And the ILP in 1932 had a lot more going for it than Tariq Ali’s hoped-for initiative. It had a large number of active local groups of its own. In the early 1920s it had been the dominant force in the broad Labour Party. In 1936 it was still strong enough and organised enough to be the main force in mobilising for the famous anti-fascist “Battle of Cable Street”. Tariq Ali has been out of active politics (as distinct from occasional appearances as a “celebrity speaker”) for 40 years now, since he quit the International Marxist Group in 1980. (On an issue he was right about, as it happens: Afghanistan).

The ILP’s “Socialism in Our Time” program of 1928, whatever its insufficiencies, was much clearer and more left-wing than either the Peace and Justice Project or Tariq Ali’s recent political pronouncements.

Even George Galloway’s Respect in 2004 – launched at a time when tens of thousands were quitting Labour over the Iraq war, and yet still active in and around local Stop The War groups – had more going for it than Tariq Ali’s speculation.

By Mohan Sen

A group of Labour MPs previously associated with the “Love Socialism Hate Brexit” project have relaunched it as “Love Socialism”. They argue for a left that is “green, internationalist and democratic” and seeks to advance “pluralism”. (See the article by Clive Lewis, Rachael Maskell, Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Alex Sobel in the Independent here and their Twitter here.)

Love Socialism flags up critical struggles like migrants’ rights, structural racism and climate change. The MPs driving it have a generally honourable record on such issues, and in that sense the initiative is welcome.

So is their call to “confront suppressive forces, not to pander to this authoritarian national government. Call it out… Then all who have been left behind unite, north and south, precarious and secure, rural and urban, old and young…”

And their “rejection of the top-down, bureaucratic, authoritarian tendencies in our movement, tendencies found across the party… Consensus will always struggle if decisions are top down. Instead we must empower each other with a sense of agency, to achieve our collective purpose”.

It’s clear straight off that Love Socialism does not promote “socialism” in the sense of a new society to replace capitalism, based on collective ownership and democracy. More immediately, it does not, and seems unlikely to, fight for the labour movement to pursue radically anti-capitalist policies.

It says nothing much about the dramatic crises we face, or struggles and demands to tackle them. Class, working-class organisation and workers’ struggles hardly feature in how it describes the movement it wants.

On that level Love Socialism is less radical than the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs.

Moreover, it appears to a top-down initiative itself. It is a group for MPs, with no obvious role for anyone else. How can it promote a bottom-up culture in the party? (There is an additional irony there, that a huge number of rank-and-file party members would probably agree with its broad approach.)

Despite calling for “radical constitutional reform” and “deepening our democracy, expanding it, extending power” – and saying it wants to “transform Labour” – Love Socialism has little concrete to say about the first a step of democratising the Labour Party.

This vagueness seems to extend to a whole range of urgent issues. Most glaringly, Love Socialism is saying nothing at all about Brexit!

Clive Lewis MP says it will not take a position on a Tory Brexit deal, because the group includes keen Brexiteers. What happened to “internationalism” and “confronting this authoritarian government”?

It’s worth noting that of the four MPs who fronted up the relaunch, two (Alex Sobel and Rachael Maskell) are members of Keir Starmer’s frontbrench. They went along with his decision to abstain on the Tories’ “overseas operations” and “spycops” bills.

The class-struggle socialist left should engage with Love Socialism, seeking common struggle on particular issues and debate.

Hertfordshire County Councillor and MI supporter Josh Lovell has submitted the following motion to his Constituency Labour Party (Stevenage). Please use or adapt to put to your Labour Party or union branch. To let us know or for help, email info@momentuminternationalists.org

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Services devastated, local democracy gutted. Time to fight back

Notes that:
1. After a decade of cuts, increased demand, and reduced revenue during the pandemic, local authorities face disaster.
2. Croydon is now the second council, after Northamptonshire, to invoke Section 114, indicating it will provide only statutory services.
3. Rishi Sunak has only given councils an extra £3bn – over £5bn less than the (Tory-led) Local Government Association called for as necessary to prevent further cuts, and a billion less than needed to avoid meltdown.

Believes that:
1. The government is gutting public services, driving down working-class living standards, decimating council housing and destroying meaningful local democracy.
2. Labour should start an aggressive campaign to halt and reverse this assault.
3. The costs of Covid-19 should be met by making the rich and corporations pay – not workers and communities.

Resolves to:
1. Call on the whole party and the leadership to vocally and actively campaign – using our national platform, and involving members, supporters and trade unionists in mass activity – for:
a. increased central funding for councils to prevent further cuts and job losses, immediately pushing the government for the additional £5bn the LGA has called for
b. a £10bn annual grant to fund the building of 100,000 council homes a year
c. a clear timetable to reverse all cuts since 2010, moving towards budgets meeting social needs.
2. Organise a meeting to discuss local campaigning to stop cuts and win restored funding. Invite a speaker from the trade union campaign against cuts in Croydon. Invite our Labour councillors to take part and consider/discuss how they can help.
3. Call on councillors to raise these demands in the council, and campaign to win them.
4. Circulate this motion widely, and make links with campaigners in other areas.

“This CLP expresses no confidence in Keir Starmer as leader and David Evans as general secretary”.

Where local Labour Parties have meetings in December and early January, this looks like the best format for motions.

Mostly local Labour Parties have deliberately avoided going against the rule issued by Jennie Formby as general secretary in March 2019 barring us from debating motions on disciplinary cases. In mid-November, anyway, local Labour Parties were told we could however debate motions on restoring the whip; but now those too are banned.

Those bans are wrong. One way of fighting them would be to have such a big wave of CLPs passing motions which break those bans that they become unworkable. Young Labour has tweeted about restoring the whip, been instructed to take down the tweet, and refused without incurring disciplinary action so far.

So far, however, the Labour leadership has responded by suspending selectively, a few rather than the “thousands and thousands” it has threatened. And, since many Labour Parties do not meet in December, going for a wave of motions openly defying the ban looks likely just to get left-wingers picked off, rather than to overwhelm the ban.

“No confidence” motions express the message as sharply or more so, and it will be very difficult to ban them.

The “no confidence” motions must be coupled with other motions recognising the shameful verdict of the EHRC inquiry and calling for a political offensive against antisemitism in the Labour Party. We want a political offensive against antisemitism; but we want it to be a political drive, with disciplinary measures secondary and for clear-cut cases. The current suspension-mania sends no clear political message other than a denial of democracy.

By Colin Foster

A Tory Brexit deal will probably come before Parliament in some way (see bit.ly/brx-d for the possibilities) in the next two or three weeks.

If a deal comes, it is certain to be as bad as previous Tory Brexit formulas if not worse. It is certain not to meet Labour’s six tests from 2018, on the basis of which Labour has voted against previous Tory Brexit formulas.

So, as Michael Chessum of Another Europe Is Possible has explained, Labour should certainly not vote for the deal. The straightforward response is to vote  against. An argument can be made for abstaining, so as to separate from Tory right-wingers who may vote against because they see the deal as not “hard” enough Brexit, or even run the (small) risk of triggering “no deal”; but no case for voting for.

Yet according to the Guardian, the Financial Times, etc., Keir Starmer, together with Lisa Nandy, Nick Thomas-Symonds, Jon Ashworth, and others, are set on a three-line whip for Labour to vote for the deal. The motive? To placate or conciliate pro-Brexit Labour sympathisers who voted Tory or abstained in December 2019.

The SNP has as big a percentage of habitual supporters who are pro-Brexit as Labour. They still vote SNP. Why? Because the SNP has convinced pretty much all of them that other issues on which those supporters agree with the SNP are more important (and some of them that Brexit is bad after all).

Labour must do the same, with different “more important” issues of course. The idea of voting for the final botched Brexit deal after voting against all the Brexit formulas before it takes those pro-Brexit Labour sympathisers for fools, and will convince them only that Labour doesn’t know what it’s doing.

The media report that other people in Starmer’s inner circle, Anneliese Dodds, Emily Thornberry, David Lammy, and even right-winger Bridget Phillipson, are pushing for Labour to abstain.

Through Labour Party meetings where they are held in December, and through direct lobbying of Labour MPs, activists should set up an outcry against voting for the deal.

Suggested motion for local labour parties

The CLP notes:____

  1. On 28 November 2020, the /Guardian /reported that the Labour
     leadership is “minded to impose a three-line whip in support” of any
     Tory Brexit deal tabled before Christmas.
  2. In March 2017, Keir Starmer (in his then position as shadow Brexit
     secretary) set out 6 tests as a condition of support for any final
     Brexit deal and promised that “Labour will not support a deal that
     fails to reflect core British values and the six tests I have set
out.”

The CLP believes:____

  1. Any deal put to Parliament before Christmas by the Tories will be an
     extremely “hard”, regressive, version of Brexit, paving the way for
     deregulation, and a race to the bottom for workers’ rights, human
     rights, environmental standards, food quality and consumer protections.
  2.  From what we already know, the Tory Brexit deal will not be in the
     interests of working people and will not meet Starmer’s 6 tests.
  3. Labour should take no political responsibility for a hard Brexit
     deal delivered by the Tories, and its inevitable economic and social
     consequences and should vote against it in Parliament. ____
  4. Our movement must argue for lowering, not raising borders; for
     closer international links and solidarity; for high environmental
     standards; and for the defence and extension of free movement and
     migrants’ rights.

This CLP resolves:____

  1. To write to the Leader of the Labour Party and local MP
     urging them to oppose the Tory Brexit deal in Parliament.
  2. To publicise this motion through its social media and other channels.

By Katy Dollar

Thousands of people have marched in cities across Poland in protests against a near-total ban on abortion. Poland already has some of the strictest abortion laws in the world.

There are fewer than 2,000 legal abortions a year in Poland, and the vast majority take place because of malformed foetuses, which would be illegal following the court ruling such abortions were unconstitutional. The new ruling restricts abortions to circumstances of rape, incest, or if there is a threat to the woman’s life.

Women’s groups estimate that as many as 200,000 procedures are performed illegally or abroad each year.

The demonstrations happened despite a government ban on public gatherings due to Covid-19. Poland’s Roman Catholic episcopate and the governing rightwing Law and Justice (PiS) party had been campaigning for further restrictions on reproductive freedoms. The court has been reformed by the PiS government and contains many right-wing judges loyal to the ruling party.

On Friday thousands of young protesters in Warsaw marched to the home of PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński, meeting violence from Poland’s riot police. Elsewhere in Poland protesters gathered in main squares, outside PiS premises, or near churches. Slogans such as “women’s hell” and “unlimited abortions” were daubed on church walls in Warsaw.

On Sunday 25 October protesters interrupted Mass at churches, dropping banners and staging occupations. Poland’s far-right came out to block women from protesting at some churches.

Polish socialist and Momentum NCG member, Ana Oppenheim said, “The protest was called very spontaneously, on Thursday night. When I arrived just after 5pm on Saturday, there was maybe a couple hundred people. By the time it got properly dark around 6.30, there were over a thousand of us.

“The protest was DIY, loud and angry — just like the actions happening across Poland where hundreds of thousands of people in cities and towns are demonstrating, blocking roads and interrupting church services. Pundits like to say the court ruling ‘divided Poland’, but in reality, the opposition to the ruling is overwhelming and crosses political, social, generational and geographic divides.

“I’ve been particularly happy to see the alliances of feminists and trade unionists, from farmers to miners, that are currently emerging — something we haven’t seen a lot of in Poland in recent decades. Knowing that my friends are among those marching and organising back home makes me proud, and I know they’re really happy to see that we’re standing in solidarity with them in the UK, across Europe and beyond”.

We must continue to stand in solidarity against the Polish right’s attacks on reproductive freedoms. It is part of a global attack on abortion rights.

On 22 October the Trump administration signed an international anti-abortion pledge. The “Geneva Consensus Declaration” calls on states to promote “women’s rights and health” — without access to abortion. The “core supporters” of the declaration are Brazil, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia and Uganda, and the 27 other signatories include Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Sudan, South Sudan, Libya.

Support the Labourstart campaign

After rigged elections, followed by extreme violence by security forces against peaceful protesters, Siarhei Charkasau and his co-workers joined a strike at JSC Belaruskali potash fertilizer producer to peacefully demand freedom, democracy and respect. Siarhei is an employee of Belaruskali and vice chair of the Belarusian Independent Trade Union (BITU), an affiliate of IndustriALL Global Union. Over the last two months Siarhei has been convicted three times for participation in an unauthorized public event in Soligorsk, where miners of Belaruskali had declared a strike to protest against the rigged elections. Since then, dozens of activists and strike committee members at Belaruskali have been prosecuted, threatened, fined and deprived of benefits at work for their activities. Siarhei and three of his comrades, BITU members Pavel Puchenia, Yury Korzun and Anatol Bokun are in prison now. One sentence has followed the other while they were still serving their sentence.

Support the BITU and IndustriALL demand to end the persecution of employees of Belaruskali for their participation in the strike and those who continue to “work to rule” at Belaruskali. Demand an immediate release of the BITU leader Siarhei Charkasau and union activists Pavel Puchenia, Yury Korzun and Anatol Bokun, who is a co-chairperson of the strike committee.

Support the campaign here!

Pass this motion in your local Labour party and support the health workers fight for 15%.

This BLP/CLP notes:

1.The incredibly hard work undertaken by workers in the health and care sector during the COVID-19 pandemic.

2. The lack of a real-terms pay rise for workers in the health and care sector during a decade of Tory austerity which has led to pay being eroded by nearly 20% since 2010 in some cases.

3. The staff shortages and alarming rate of staff turnover in healthcare with, for example, more than one third of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next 12 months.

4. The emergence of the grassroots campaign NHS Workers Say No to Public Sector Pay Inequality calling for a 15% pay rise across the board for all NHS workers on Agenda for Change contracts, and for outsourced services in the NHS to be brought back in house.

5. The support given to the 15% demand from Labour-affiliated unions GMB and Unite.

This BLP/CLP believes:

1. A well-funded, well-staffed, public health system, free at the point of use, is a cornerstone of a civilised society.

2. Staffing issues in the health and care sector will not be addressed without granting a significant pay rise and ending the two-tier workforce created by outsourcing.

3. Resolving these staffing issues is key to ensuring good patient care.

4. Many workers in the care sector endure shockingly low wages and should be covered by sectoral collective bargaining.

5. Our health workers deserve a 15% pay rise.

6. It is time for the care sector to be taken into public ownership.

This BLP/CLP resolves:

1. To publicly support the demands of the NHS Workers Say No to Public Sector Pay Inequality campaign and make links with the campaign locally.

2. To write expressing our support for the campaign to the Party’s National Executive Committee and the Leader’s Office in the hope that the national Party will support the campaign.

3. To make a policy submission to the Party’s National Policy Forum under ‘The health and social care system after to coronavirus’ on the principles laid out in this motion.