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TWO responses have emerged on the left to the decision of Keir Starmer to bar Jeremy Corbyn from continuing to represent Islington North as Labour MP.
They have been neatly expressed. Take first Jon Lansman, Momentum founder, who I first encountered when he ran Tony Benn’s narrowly unsuccessful campaign to be Labour’s deputy leader back in 1981.
Jon’s persistent campaigning on and for the left through sunshine and rather more rain should command general respect.
He is unswerving in his view that the road to socialism lies first of all through the democratic transformation of the Labour Party.
In that sense if one were to render an earthly representation of Sisyphus, it might look a lot like Jon.
Anyway, Jon’s take is — condemn Starmer’s move against Corbyn but protect the Labour left. He wrote on Labour List that barring Corbyn was “an act of factionally motivated victimisation” against a politician who “appeals strongly to some — to many in fact.”
Nevertheless, he urged Corbyn not to respond by standing as an independent in Islington North at the next election.
“As a Labour Party member and … as a former Labour leader, he would continue to be able to speak out on anything he chooses and would have far greater weight than any back-bench independent MP lucky enough to be elected would ever have,” he writes.
Lansman adds, saliently, that “the alternative is probably that thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Labour Party members will be expelled for supporting an independent parliamentary candidate in Islington North.
“That, of course, is what members of the faction that Keir Starmer has put in charge of running the Labour Party on his watch are hoping for.”
The same concern worries Momentum. They are right.
Peter Mandelson, Starmer-whisperer-in-chief, offered the Daily Telegraph a primer on the Labour rule book, reminding Corbynites that if “they organise and support a candidate other than the person who is standing for the Labour Party, they automatically and immediately lose their party membership. Would that be a terrible thing? There would be few thousand fewer Corbyn supporters in the Labour Party.”
Speaking to the Observer, Lansman went slightly beyond far-from-misplaced anxieties.
“We have to move on from the Corbyn era. We’ve got to focus on the future and the future is not really about Jeremy Corbyn and Islington North,” he said.
The merits of this position are obvious from any perspective that gives the Labour Party the central place in the struggle for socialism, and therefore prioritises maintaining the best possible presence for the left within it.
There is a very different viewpoint available, however. Max Shanly is a less well-known figure than Lansman but a leading rank-and-file activist on the Labour left in recent years and a protege of the late eminent Canadian Marxist Leo Panitch, himself a close friend of Ralph Miliband who lived long enough to be disappointed in the latter’s sons. Like Lansman, Shanly is worth listening to.
He makes two points. One is that the changes wrought by the Starmer faction make a left revival in Labour impossible.
He instances the new nomination rules for Labour leader which set a parliamentary threshold so high that no future Corbyn could ever get over it, the interference in candidate selection which will leave the PLP left bereft of reinforcements and rule changes making a left majority on the party executive unattainable.
It could be countered that Corbyn’s election as leader was an impossibility too. Capitalist crisis can indeed force unexpected shifts, but it’s unwise to bank on the impossible twice in one political lifetime.
Shanly’s second point is more controversial — it is that the Socialist Campaign Group of MPs is a busted flush, ideologically incoherent and stuck deep in the mud of labourism.
“As an organised body of people they aren’t agents of socialist transformation,” he wrote of the Labour left. “They’ve neither the will, the creative capacity, or strategic orientation necessary to achieve it. It’s sad but it’s true.”
Max also announced that he has left the Labour Party. It is easy to see the merits of his case too. Most obvious routes for a left comeback in Labour have been blocked pretty comprehensively.
And it is hard not to be disappointed in the Socialist Campaign Group’s response to Starmer, and the lack of a lead offered by any institution on the left, come to that.
So the left faces catastrophe if it obsesses about Corbyn, at least to the point of supporting him in an independent electoral contest; or it faces disaster if it continues to fold in face of the Starmer-Mandelson offensive.
One leads to mass expulsions, the other to mass resignations. Both have already occurred, of course, in numbers.
Both Lansman and Shanly could be right. But these are platonic insights unless they transition into something like a plan.
Suggestions:
First, just walking away from Corbyn, should he decide he wishes to remain an MP, is scarcely an option. Yes, his re-election would be mainly symbolic but no less significant for that.
Most Corbynites, remember, were attracted by his programme but are not wedded to the Labour Party.
Should he stand, a win against the Starmer candidate in Islington will have powerful resonance and offer an important measure of vindication.
Second, Corbyn himself could help by urging, as Ken Livingstone did when running as an independent for London mayor in 2000, that people should avoid excluding themselves from Labour during the campaign if possible.
Third, beyond Corbyn, focus more on the exclusion of union-backed individuals from consideration as Labour candidates. This is an issue which can unite the left with affiliated unions and perhaps force a Starmerite retreat.
Lord Mandelson has been dining with the prospective Labour candidates produced by Starmer’s gerrymandering, doubtless as a last line of vetting.
This is his description of the company he is keeping: “The guy sitting beside me yesterday was somebody who’d worked in banking, and was now a venture capitalist investing in new start-ups who’s standing in South Wales.
“They’re business people, they are professional people, they are people who work in public services. They are a real cross-section of people.”
In fact, they sound like a cross-section of the clientele of Mandelson’s consulting business.
Given that the reluctance of the Liberal Party to choose trade union candidates for Parliament was a factor leading to the establishment of the Labour Party to begin with, this is a signal matter for the party’s future as any form of class project.
Fourth, address the present chronic lack of leadership coming from left MPs for the most part, or anywhere else.
Strategy isn’t a luxury, and endless retreat isn’t a strategy. Few indeed will sign up for a leaderless struggle against an implacable Labour right wing.
Set out a perspective. Identify the key Corbyn-era policies to promote. Bring together the constituencies being dragooned into choosing unwelcome candidates. Unite with such unions as will to defend democratic principles.
The crisis will not be swiftly resolved, but that would be a start.