LABOUR’S PROSCRIPTION of three more groups met with opposition from the NEC left but was pushed through with very little discussion allowed.
The Labour Left Alliance and the Socialist Labour Network are banned owing to their close links to groups that attracted proscription last year.
In that round, the long-established and openly Trotskyist Socialist Appeal was banned while this time round the the more deviant Alliance for Workers’ Liberty was banned as “entryist.”
Labour opinion opposes these proscriptions — not necessarily through any sympathy for the features which distinguish them from mainstream left-wing opinion — but on principle and precisely because the target is not these groups themselves but unity and the left as a whole.
Momentum — which has so far escaped proscription — made the point that the move has absolutely nothing to do with winning elections.
True enough, but from the Labour right’s point of view, purging the party of any association with left-wing ideas is about winning an election on the only basis on which they want to win.
Already, in 2017 and 2019, Westminster Labour — as the shock troops of a multi-factional and big business-funded Labour right wing — proved they would prefer to lose an election rather than win, as Tony Blair said, on a left-wing programme.
There is a clear hypocrisy in proscribing organisations as “entryist” when defecting Tory MPs are welcome and returning renegade SDP splitters are rehabilitated.
Thus there is a certain injustice in proscribing Socialist Appeal which is distinguished from other Trotskyist groups precisely by its long-term and principled support for Labour under all circumstances.
We are accustomed to Starmer’s cynical abandonment of the policies on which he was elected but Rachel Reeves’s pathological resistance to offering any support for the idea that public service workers, or workers in general, should be given a pay rise was especially dispiriting.
When Momentum said: “Starmer should be setting out an inspiring socialist alternative to soaring bills and energy crisis, not fanning the flames of internal party conflict,” it highlighted Westminster Labour’s not-so-covert opposition to anything that might mobilise independent working-class political action.
But it is on foreign and defence policy that the present Labour leadership is so insistent on mimicking the Tories. Hence the special venom reserved from anyone who deviates from the Nato consensus.
And there is a certain irony in banning the AWL which specialises in finding ostensibly “left-wing” arguments for mimicking imperialism on everything from Nato’s wars through to the character of Israel’s apartheid regime.
Perhaps from a different perspective Nato’s “left-wing” cheerleader Paul Mason joins us in opposing their expulsion.
Labour’s founding character, as a federal assembly of trade unions, co-operatives and socialist organisations of various and tangled lineage, has always been its strength. Whenever the right wing — whose existence in the working-class movement is a natural expression of the imperialist nature of Britain’s social formation — wins an advantage it imposes administrative restrictions on the left.
Hence the decades-long battle to exclude the communists who were at the foundation of the party; hence the measures against Aneurin Bevin and Michael Foot and other left-wing MPs. Hence the bid to destroy Jeremy Corbyn and the mass movement he exemplified.
Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald split the party to form an anti-working class austerity National Government. Renegade “social democrats” split Labour to form the SDP, merge with the Liberals and ally themselves to Cameron’s austerity Tory government. The Westminster Labour faction sabotaged our chances of a left-led Labour government under Corbyn.
Labour’s right are always at the service of the ruling class.
Working-class and socialist politics today is about finding the unity needed for change.
