Know when to Go Out, Know when to Stay In, and Get Things Done
By: Owen Hatherley
Tags: Revenge, Local Government, Socialism

Just before the lockdown, I went to a some rammed, stuffy rooms in Bristol to see something that was politically completely inconceivable five years ago. Here, socialist historians, tenants rights activists, self-professed communists, Labour MPs, non-binary Marxist-Leninist physicists and trade unionists got together to talk about the future of the second-largest city in the south, and about the future of the left more generally. It used the abundant community infrastructure around Stokes Croft and St Pauls (advice: if you want better community buildings, have a good riot) for this purpose. Every talk was well-attended, and many were rammed; the talks were interspersed with concerts, comedy (of a sort) and other non-obviously political events. I didn’t participate in or overhear a single conversation about the Labour Party leadership. This was Bristol Transformed 2020, and it roughly sums up the reasons why I’m not leaving the Labour Party.

Since I last used this thing to try and convince people not to vote for Keir Starmer, I’ve not seen much that has made me revise my views. Both the main candidates have been a little worse than expected, Starmer in his supine and invisible non-opposition to the government’s chaotic, ideological and bizarre response to the pandemic, Long-Bailey in her rabbit-in-headlights response to the bullying show trial of the Peston-hosted Jewish Labour Movement hustings (Starmer, to his credit, did not feel the need to implausibly claim he was a Zionist, and the ability to not answer stupid questions is one of the better things about being extremely lawyerly). Starmer’s shadow cabinet roughly confirms the optimistic view of his campaign — that his refusal to tack to the right was a matter of conviction rather than cynical selectorate-courting. It’s dominated by the soft left, far more so than Ed Miliband’s cabinet or even Corbyn’s first cabinet. The right have few positions, and one of them (Ian Murray) is by pure default, as the last man standing in Scotland, representing the famous Red Base of Morningside. Scotland and ‘Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster’ aside, there is no job for the right of the Party, nothing for Hilary Benn, Jess Phillips, Stephen Kinnock, Yvette Cooper, Wes Streeting, Neil Coyle, Stella Creasy et al. I can’t see the CDUK MPs coming back. But the socialist left are nearly as marginalised, with just three positions for Socialist Campaign Group MPs — Rebecca Long-Bailey, Marsha de Cordova and Cat Smith.

Some predictions are easy to make. There won’t be much of a bounce, and this will be blamed on the non-inclusion of the right by these MPs and their mates in the media. The soft left is necessarily amoebic; it stands now essentially on the 2017 Labour Manifesto, a document they would never have had the gumption to come to of their own accord. The pressure to shift away from it will be vast. Starmer remains hugely uncharismatic, the Facebook uncles have already started sharing memes claiming he refused to prosecute Jimmy Savile as Director of Public Prosecutions, and there appears to be zero attempt at the slightest contrition about the disastrous People’s Vote strategy, the single policy that made the biggest difference between the near-miss of 2017 and the meltdown of 2019. In fact, the biggest factional choice move seems to have been the exclusion of anyone who opposed a second referendum, whether on the socialist left (Jon Trickett) or the right (Stephen Kinnock). I’d far rather see this lot in government than the Tories, and so would you. No doubt lots of us will get our feet wet in 2024 trying to convince 60 year old men in ex-council houses that Keir Starmer didn’t help out Jimmy Savile and John Worboys, just as we tried unsuccessfully to convince them that Jeremy Corbyn didn’t in fact support Hezbollah, Hamas and the Provisional IRA.

This shadow cabinet not only shows little obvious contrition for the second referendum, it also snubs Dawn Butler, Kate Osamor and Clive Lewis. The general Zone 2 Dinner Party look of the cabinet, and its unsurprising ignoring of the young leftists elected in 2019, suggests that the two failsafe demographics that backed Labour in 2019 — the intersecting blocs of BAME voters and under-40s — are going to be taken very much for granted. The plan seems to be to win in 2024 by taking votes from the Lib Dems and to a lesser extent the Greens, while simply ignoring places threatened by the Brexit Party and lost to the Tories; a sort of ‘High Wycombe Strategy’, with no obvious idea of how to speak to Leigh or Blyth.

Where does this leave the socialist left? Nowhere much. This won’t be our cabinet, or our leadership. We can apply some pressure, and it may or most likely may not be listened to. I would like to be wrong, but I suspect COVID-19 isn’t going to win any elections for us, as anyone who remembers 2008 can tell you. The orgy of Keeping Calm and Carrying On and Cleaning for the Queen will go on and on, and fear seldom ever leads to a shift leftwards. The fact that the Tories are now literally carrying out lots of the 2017 and 2019 Manifestos has so far been noticed by nobody who doesn’t have a Twitter account. Just as much as it could be the post-Brexit Tories’ Black Wednesday, it could be their new Brexit, creating a new base, with the mass nationalisations and the enormous expansion of the welfare state credited to dishy Sunak and Battler Boris, who himself took the virus on his own wobbling chin, rather than to their ransacking of our platform. We may never see again anything like what we had for four years: the prospect of an insurgent socialist movement taking power in Britain, of all fucking places, and the main positions of state being filled by hardened class fighters and pioneers such as Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott. That should be mourned, and that’ll be long and tough. It can’t be wished back. I certainly intend to forgive absolutely nobody.

Which brings us back to where we started. I was surprised by Bristol Transformed, and by the fact just as many people were there in the first week of March 2020 as they were in 2019. It was surreal to be at this massive, young, enthusiastic, diverse, funny, non-sectarian left event while friends texted me appalling Primary results for Bernie Sanders. I think every participant who had come to Bristol from shell-shocked London and Manchester was amazed at how optimistic the event was. It drew together, as the local Transformed events do, the infrastructure we’d built up since 2015, which is roughly as follows.

Umbrellas: Momentum, The World Transformed.

Media and Think-Tanks: Novara, New Socialist, Tribune (and its reading groups), Autonomy.

Activism: ACORN, Renters Unions, Climate Change campaigns, the many ‘Labour Campaigns for X’.

Unions: Unite, GMB, CWU, FBU, and — yes — the ultraleft non-TUC unions such as CAIWU and the IWGB.

Within the Party: Young Labour, and the Community Organising Unit.

Add these to the existing organisations like the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy and the now much larger, younger and more exciting group of socialist MPs in the Socialist Campaign Group, and the left is still stronger than at any time since the early 1980s. It has a natural leadership, too, in those new MPs, mostly young, charismatic and interesting — Zarah Sultana, Sam Tarry, Apsana Begum, Navendu Mishra, Charlotte Nichols, Olivia Blake, Nadia Whittome, Claudia Webbe.

What do we do with this? I think what we do is based on what you could see in Bristol, that is: activism not in Parliament and over the leadership of the Party, which is not ours, and may not be again for a very very long time, but on a local level. It means making a thousand Prestons where currently there is one (possibly two if one counts Salford). It means a return to council housing, it means councils working with Renters Unions, and it means an end to outsourcing. It might also mean, if we are to do these, confronting not only entrenched, right-wing councils, who will fight that tooth and nail, but also, the government. Already, Sadiq Khan — the figure who by far the most resembles Starmer — has seen the government reject his GLA’s last London Plan for being too radical on climate change and balloting on estate regeneration. The soft left claim, constantly, to back Preston style municipal socialism, council housing, a clampdown on landlordism and democratised planning. Let’s see if they’ll back that right down to the wire and a confrontation with the government, because that is what it might well take. Here, defending the Community Organising Unit will be essential.

Moreover, building and helping the radical left outside of the likes of London, Manchester and Bristol is essential. There will be a Teesside Transformed, and I’m told a Plymouth Transformed, but there needs to be much, much more of these. The new leadership shows little interest at winning back what we lost in the Midlands and the North. That gives the left the field there, an opportunity we would be foolish to lose by relitigating the divide over the EU, or, even more so, by writing off everyone who voted Leave as troglodytes lost to the left. This was always suicidal, and it still is.

Similar points could be said of workplace politics. Strike action is at a historic low, and class struggle was all but nonexistent in the four years of Corbynism — not because all the energy went into it, as the sectarians will claim, but simply because it has been in constant, uninterrupted decline. The RMT will be the next target — a union that did not reaffiliate, largely because of the influence there of the sects. That left infrastructure must be used to defend the RMT if the threat to outlaw transport strikes is carried out, just as it must defend the posties and the UCU strikers in the struggles happening just before the lockdown. I would also love to see an end to the war between the established unions and the ultraleft gig economy organisers at IWGB and CAIWU, and instead, a mutual learning develop between these, as both will be under severe attack — we can already see this in the way that insecure workers will benefit little from the government assistance being offered in the lockdown.

That’s what we have. We can try to use it to try to create the next generation of microcosms, the next experiments in municipal socialism and functioning local social democracies. We have to at least try and build our own Poplar and Lambeth, our own Clay Cross and our own Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, and our own GLCs and LCCs, which have after all usually thrived in periods of Tory hegemony nationally; bases where we can show people on the ground, in reality, in real time and real experience, that things can be better, something not nearly enough people believe. The freeing up of energies that a disconnection from Parliament — where nothing is going to happen, for a long time — makes this the ideal focus for our energies for the next five years. This was always a weakness under Corbynism, and its record in local government was poor to non-existent (the Preston model, though devised by Bennites, predated the left’s capture of the leadership). Yet so far, almost the opposite has happened. There have, for instance, been pitifully low turnouts in the Labour GLA selections, despite a strong socialist platform being offered by Liam Young. These are our instruments now, and we have to try and make them work. Away from Westminster, into the Town Halls.