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Trans Exclusionary Moderate Labourism

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By Ruth Cashman & Kas Witana candidates for Momentum NCG

The government have leaked plans to drop changes to the Gender Recognition Act to The Sunday Times. Changes drawn up under Theresa May’s government would have streamlined the legal process of changing a birth certificate by removing some barriers like medical diagnosis and lengthy and intrusive evidence procedure. Consultation on the updated Gender Recognition Act (GRA) closed in 2018 but the government has since dragged its feet on implementing it following a spectacular and well-organised backlash from opponents.

Labour seem to be doing their best to avoid taking a position on the issue, raising concern that previous support for changes to the GRA have been dropped. Labour’s shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds criticism of the government was to say it was wrong to announce changes to an “extremely sensitive” policy area by leaking them to a newspaper.

This is a terrible failure in solidarity for our trans comrades. Not only should we campaign for changes to the GRA, but we must also go much further.  The labour movement should be looking to integrate fights against oppression and bigotry into the broader class struggle. We should support changes which make it easier, cheaper and less degrading to change our legal gender. Self-declaration helps trans people by removing some difficulties in social recognition of their identities, helping to counteract their marginalisation. We must challenge misinformation and scaremongering about single-sex spaces. It is austerity and chronic underfunding that endanger domestic violence services and refuges, not trans women. We must campaign for better provision of holistic gender identity services and trans healthcare, which are currently seriously underfunded and inaccessible. This should be provided in an NHS in public ownership, with adequate funding and under democratic control.

Unions, the Labour Party and the labour movement must organise to tackle transphobia, sexism and harassment at work and in wider society. We have signed the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights pledges as an act of solidarity and recognition that trans people in the party and in the wider labour movement are facing a sustained period of abuse and opposition to their rights and dignities. However we have serious reservations about pledges 8 and 10. We feel that these run contrary to democratic norms and in fact do very little in terms of challenging and overcoming transphobia that does exist within our movement. The problem of transphobia in the party is not overcome by expelling X transphobes but by a serious political intervention & equipping activists with the tools to educate those around them and change people’s minds on this issue.

Labour Left Porkies – Momentum needs to get its story straight on policing

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By Ruth Cashman, candidate for Momentum NCG

The murder of George Floyd has sparked a global movement against police brutality and racism. Floyd’s death is not even the most recent a long line of police killings of black people in the USA. African Americans have suffered 30 police shootings per million since the start of 2015, compared to 22 per million for Hispanics and 12 per million for whites. The movement, which builds on years of Black Lives Matters organising in the US is raising politics that seemed unimaginable until recently. A majority of Minneapolis City Council has pledged to dismantle the local police department, to be replaced by “new model of public safety”. We don’t yet know what this will mean. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had already said he would divert money from the city’s police department to social services.

Momentum rightly reacted to the global protests with support. They released a video “Spot The Difference” outlining racism in the British criminal justice system and that racist policing is not an exclusively American problem. Nothing in their reaction has acknowledged the failures of the Labour left on policing since 2017. Under the left’s leadership Labour adopted a generally “pro-police” line, including campaigning vocally to increase police numbers.

In 2017 Labour’s manifesto promised 10,000 more police officers and 500 more border guards. In 2019 the party promised to top the Tories’ police recruitment by 2,000.

In the intervening two years more police was a major campaigning demand for Labour; sometimes it seemed like its only campaigning demand. In 2019 there was a day of action against police cuts. Many left-wing policies included in the 2019 manifesto were never even mentioned before then, let alone campaigned for.

Tellingly, for instance, the party never demanded the restoration of all the funding councils have lost since 2010 until it appeared in the 2019 manifesto. More police – but not reversing the council cuts which have devastated our communities!

Under left-wing shadow Justice Secretary Richard Burgon, Labour rightly criticised prison privatisation but said nothing about the crucial issue of reducing the prison population, let alone anything more radical (it was just about hinted at the in the 2019 manifesto). Nor did it discuss ending the disastrous reality of most drugs being criminalised.

At the 2019 London Labour conference, a delegate from Haringey, a young, BME, migrant woman, spoke against a “more police” motion and was heckled repeatedly – though she gave as good as she got and, despite losing heavily, made the case effectively.

In the face of a pro-police stance from our left-wing leadership, much of the left went quiet. Some endorsed the “more police” line: most notably Momentum, who repeated promoted the demand and produced a video bracketing the police with firefighters and health workers and describing them as “heroes”. In 2017 Momentum promoted the Tory Police Cuts Calculator criticising Tories for defunding the police. In 2019 Momentum released the “You Are A Socialist” video, giving the police force as an example of socialism in action!

There is nothing wrong with changing your mind or an organisation changing its position. Hopefully the current movement will educate people on the role of state apparatus like the police in repression of working class struggle and oppression of minorities. But Momentum must be honest about its position and why has it changed. Are we the Momentum that supports the defund the police movement or the Momentum that calls for more cops on the street? Labour and Momentum activists cannot take part in and cheer on anti-police demonstrations without fighting for our party to adopt an adequate stance on crime and policing.

This is doubly important because under Keir Starmer the party seems likely to adopt even more regressive positions. His record as Director of Public Prosecutions was not good; and he has already criticised protesters for their disposal of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston.

There will be different views on the left about how comprehensively we want to see the police force as it exists transformed and/or abolished or replaced. But central to the debate needs to be the idea, at the moment largely absent from the official labour movement, that the police as they exist are fundamentally one of the problems confronting working-class people (particularly black, brown and migrant working-class people), not part of the solution.

The labour movement needs to drop the “more police” line, advocate serious measures to rein in police repression, violence and bigotry, and argue to radically transform society to at the very least radically reduce their role. Socialists in the labour movement must urgently engage with the anti-police movement now burgeoning to launch a serious debate about the demands we need.

Get in touch: info@momentuminternationalists.org

A charter for Momentum Democracy

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Momentum’s democratic structures have never really ‘worked’. In 2016, Momentum had an elected national committee which provided local groups and regions with representation, but this was mismanaged so badly that it descended into acrimony. In January 2017, a ‘coup’ by the leadership abolished all of the democractic structures and promised an ‘e-democracy’ which simply never happened. 

For more than three years, Momentum has been reduced to a top-down mobilising vehicle for campaigning in internal and external elections, in which the only structure has been a ruling body (the National Coordinating Group, or NCG) which is unaccountable between very occasional online elections. 

We enter the debate about Momentum’s future with a draft Charter for Momentum Democracy, including specific suggestions for a new constitution that will revitalise Momentum and build up the left in this new political era. 

These ideas haven’t come from nowhere, and they aren’t set in stone. Most of them were submitted to the NCG in a motion from Dudley Momentum activists in 2018, and we want to use them as a starting point among supporters in Zoom meetings and Forward Momentum discussions. 

  • Ensure that a clear majority of the NCG is directly elected by members under a more pluralist voting system. The full NCG should then have full control of all key decisions, which must be made through accountable and transparent processes. To make this happen, the NCG should use online methods to meet more frequently than it currently does in person.
  • Significantly increase the size of the NCG. The NCG will then elect the organisation’s day-to-day leadership, which can be recalled and mandated by the wider NCG. Fortnightly minutes of NCG meetings should be published and viewable to members, including details about how individual NCG officers voted on issues.
  • Put in place transparent, democratic, and, where possible, localised processes for the selection of left candidates in internal party elections. No more job interview-style panels. 
  • Empower local Momentum groups, ensuring they get the resources, training and help they need to develop and campaign effectively. This will involve a portion of membership funds going to established local groups that provide campaign and community action plans.
  • Allow local group Secretaries to have direct access to their membership database, as CLP Secretaries do.
  • Establish regional/national councils with delegates from local groups, trade unions and affiliated campaign groups. These councils should meet quarterly to produce regional reports, coordinate between local groups for more effective region-wide action, build regional training and support events, make decisions (e.g. on backing local candidates), and ensure elected regional NCG reps are kept accountable in the national decision making processes.
  • Kick start the process of building and formalising open, democratically-run liberation and youth groups – e.g. BAME Momentum, Women’s Momentum, LGBT+ Momentum, Disability Momentum, and Momentum Youth and Students – and promote candidates from under-represented communities. 
  • Look at ways of devolving management away from the London office wherever possible (e.g. to the regional councils and liberation groups), to empower members and take advantage of the local knowledge and talent we have in our movement. No more selection impositions. We must also better engage members, making the most of the Momentum Votes system, while also going beyond the existing, insufficient “e-democracy”.
  • Crucially, we need to establish a sovereign, decision-making annual national conference, with delegates from local groups, trade unions and affiliated organisations.

If you think these initial proposals would make a positive difference, share them with your local Momentum group or put them on social media.

If you want to be part of the debate about the future of Momentum democracy, you should sign up now to both Momentum Internationalists and Forward Momentum.