LABOUR’S membership is at its highest in modern times. A week after the 2015 general election, party membership stood at 221,247. By August it was at 292,000. By November, two months after the leadership election result, it was at 380,000. Now it is more than half a million.

But there was a problem — certainly if you asked seasoned constituency activists and doorstep campaigners. New members weren’t turning up at meetings, they certainly weren’t out on the knocker. They’d joined the party to vote for Jeremy Corbyn and that was where their commitment stopped. A YouGov study in January said they were far more likely to tweet about their favourite causes than do anything that involved leaving the house.

That should have been concerning news for Corbyn’s supporters too, who would soon find their man running into difficulty if they couldn’t mobilise people in Labour’s rather boring structures.

But as plotters began to use the party structures against Corbyn — trying to keep him off the ballot being just one example — members began to take the structures seriously. Elections to the national executive committee, which rarely enthused members in the past, are now the subject of a social media storm.

And locally, two party sections have come under the spotlight for “takeovers” from the left. Both were subsequently suspended by Labour HQ amid allegations of “bullying” and “intimidation.” Both also, as it happens, have MPs who are reportedly worried about being deselected.

One is Brighton and Hove, which unusually meets as a party of three constituencies and is the largest party unit in Britain. Only one of the area’s three MPs, Hove’s Peter Kyle, is Labour. But it is a hotbed of activism.

On Saturday July 9, over 600 members turned up at the city party’s annual general meeting to elect new officers. Though security at the venue, the Brighton City College, reportedly tried to bar people from entering and considered closing down the whole event, almost all managed to listen to the speeches and vote.

Left candidates swept the board — no doubt helped by left group Momentum’s holding of a pro-Corbyn rally nearby shortly beforehand. This was in spite of council leader Warren Morgan having written to “moderate” members endorsing the opponents of each of the Momentum-backed candidates, saying that the group planned a “takeover.”

Successful candidates included Greg Hadfield, a former Fleet Street journalist and local paper editor who was elected secretary.

For many observers outside the city, the results were the first thing they heard until 8.25pm, when council leader Morgan tweeted: “I’m very saddened that our MP [Peter Kyle] and our party organiser were abused at the AGM today, and I’m sorry that venue staff were spat on.” As the story began to spread, it wasn’t long before local member Matt Tully realised Morgan’s allegation referred to him.

In a statement published on new secretary Hadfield’s website, Tully says that he did indeed have an altercation with a caretaker at the venue but strongly denies spitting or any aggression. He said a man called Jack, identified by others as paid Brighton Labour organiser Jack Spooner, raised the spitting allegation first. Tully says Spooner said he “would be kicked out of the Labour Party,” before Spooner “backed down and told me he never said I had [spat at the caretaker].”

Later on, Tully alleges, Spooner told him that he “wouldn’t be surprised if the results of the votes are null and void … that’s what I think should happen.” That is, indeed, what happened, when the Brighton party was suspended on July 14. Spooner did not reply to a request for comment, directing us to a party spokesman who said: “We do not comment on ongoing investigations.”

But while council leader Morgan was busy tweeting, some of his council colleagues and fellow “moderates” had headed to the Grand Central pub near Brighton station.

It so happened that two London-based Momentum activists in town for the lunchtime Corbyn rally had chosen the same pub as a dinner spot. They were Seema Chandwani, the secretary of the Tottenham

Constituency Labour Party, and Michael Calderbank, a researcher for trade unions in Parliament who used to work for John McDonnell.

Chandwani said they were approached by two men who got “right in our face” and one of whom shouted: “Do you both work for fucking McDonnell?” The men “started to threaten us with physical violence.” On his website Hadfield alleges that the main perpetrator was a “moderate” named Harris Fitch, but the Star can’t confirm this and Fitch did not respond to a request for comment.

Morgan did not reply to the Star’s request for comment on the abuse, but his colleague Emma Daniel tweeted that we had been “hassling” Morgan over the spitting incident — which we were not aware of at the time.

Neither Morgan nor Daniel replied to subsequent requests for comment. It remains a mystery how Daniel was led to believe this, or why the leader of a Labour group was so willing to speak out about an incident of disputed veracity, but not about a hate crime allegedly committed by one Labour member against another on his patch.

Less than a week later on July 20, Wallasey CLP — now-withdrawn leadership challenger Angela Eagle’s constituency — was also suspended.

The CLP has a tumultuous history. In 1987 members selected Lol Duffy, of the far-left Socialist Organiser group, as their candidate.

He lost after neighbouring candidate Frank Field publicly denounced him for his Marxist views. When Socialist Organiser was banned by Labour’s national executive in 1990, Duffy publicly severed all his links and went on to win the nominations of 70 per cent of Wallasey’s branches for the 1992 nomination.

But when a national executive “panel” intervened to interview prospective candidates, Duffy was kept off the shortlist. According to Mike Marqusee and Richard Heffernan’s book Defeat from the Jaws of Victory, Eagle was declared the winner in spite of a majority of ballot papers being returned blank — which according to party rules should have invalidated the vote.

On the BBC’s Daily Politics on July 14, Blair-era cabinet member and Labour peer Tessa Jowell said Eagle had “faced homophobic abuse” at the Wallasey AGM on June 23 — when in fact Eagle was not present. This was the same meeting where members agreed to write to Eagle urging her to continue to support Corbyn’s leadership — only for Eagle to declare herself a candidate against him on July 20. Subsequently some branches of the CLP passed motions of no confidence in Eagle, with members saying they could move to deselect her before the next election.

But two local members told the Star that no-one had raised allegations of homophobia before Jowell’s TV outburst. “The only time it became an issue is after Angela declared herself a candidate,” one said.

Subsequently, a complaint was lodged with Labour’s north-west regional office, which is understood to be under investigation.

The allegations were strongly rejected by newly elected CLP chair Kathy Runswick, a former vice-president of public-sector union PCS. She said: “If there is someone who did this, they deserve what they get. But to call us all bullies and homophobes absolutely outrages me and upsets me.”

A statement from the Wirral Young Labour group said a “small group of individuals” had attempted to “force their own agenda” at CLP meetings — suggesting similar acrimony to the officer elections in Brighton. Eagle herself says her opposition in Wallasey comes from “a tiny minority of people who were thrown out in the 1990s, who have come back” — presumably referring to Duffy’s supporters.

But Runswick says: “This alleged takeover didn’t happen.” Of the main positions only one had a contested election, with other leftwingers stepping in where there were vacancies. Some Momentum-backed candidates even stood down when it became clear that others were after the posts, she says. Eagle did not respond to the Star’s request for comment.

Like Brighton, members in Wallasey face an indefinite curb on meetings and participation in national structures. While Labour has spent the past 10 years begging for members to get involved, it now seems to be signalling a return to the days when local fixers would deny membership applications on the basis the party was “full.”

To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, perhaps it’s time for party bigwigs to dissolve the membership and elect another.

• Conrad Landin is the Morning Star’s industrial reporter.