ON MONDAY night Labour Party staff prevented its London regional executive committee (REC) from voting on a motion in solidarity with Jeremy Corbyn.
That staff would cancel the Zoom meeting co-hosting rights of a meeting’s chair in order to sabotage a motion shows that the lockdown has increased the centre’s power to dictate to the members. This has disturbing implications well beyond the Labour Party.
As soon as the EHRC report was published, Labour asserted that its report and conclusions were not up for debate — a shockingly authoritarian position.
Branch secretaries were instructed to ensure the report was not publicly discussed and members warned that responses deemed inappropriate would result in disciplinary action.
The suspension of Jeremy Corbyn showed exactly how ruthless Keir Starmer intends to be, and gifts the right grounds to call for further suspensions on the shallowest pretexts, as with Blairite journalist John Rentoul’s demand that John McDonnell be booted out.
How should the left respond? What can injunctions to “stay and fight” mean, if most conduct that could be defined as fighting is liable to get members forcibly ejected?
The response must involve building unity across the left inside and outside Labour in defence of Corbyn and the mass socialist movement he led, which is already badly fragmented and risks disappearing altogether.
There is scope to challenge the way the EHRC report has been misrepresented, such as over its finding that in most of its own samples those accused of anti-semitism were treated unfairly by the party.
But members should also challenge the leadership on democratic grounds. MPs under Corbyn made no secret of their loathing for the mass membership, slandering them as entryists or bullies. Corbyn began to democratise the party, and it started to matter what positions were taken by constituency parties or at conference.
The right is seeking to reverse all this and reduce members to footsoldiers who can follow orders but cannot be trusted to make decisions. The subtext is that the members are a rabble who should leave politics to the professionals. It must be challenged at every level of the party.
Outside formal party structures debate is freer. The rallies in defence of Corbyn are a platform to promote the political movement built up since 2015 and its relevance to Britain in the age of Covid. Starmer’s Labour has no solutions to a capitalist crisis. The left does, and must make the case for them.
Above all, we must make this a battle over freedom of speech. Not in the sense the right exploits the term to justify abuse, but over our right to debate serious questions and to contest claims made about us or others — basic rights that are being bulldozed.
That involves acknowledging that parts of the left have indulged in a politics that trawls social media looking for supposed heresies, that is far too quick to no-platform others, that even appeals to state and corporate power to police and discipline debate. Within Labour, this has resulted in honest disagreements between activists being turned into disciplinary questions.
This is bad politics, weakening our ability to argue with real opponents and alienating anyone unaware of the rules of a complex and ever-changing game. And it has normalised the extreme intolerance for alternative opinions being used by Starmer to smash the Labour left, and by the Tory government to restrict access to anti-capitalist or anti-racist material in schools.
The left must rebuild a mass culture of democracy and debate. We can work to build it in community-based campaigns such as the People’s Assembly, in union branches, even in Morning Star readers and supporters’ groups.
However exasperating the antics of conspiracy theorists, we should remember that if we grant corporations and capitalist states the power to determine the limits of acceptable opinion, it is the left that ends up silenced. With Marx and Descartes, we must stand by our right to question everything.
