Like some 550,000 other Labour party members, I have just opened the envelope with my ballot papers for the elections for Labour’s governing body, the all-important National Executive Committee (NEC), and for the 55-member National Policy Forum.
Ordinary members elect nine NEC candidates from constituency Labour parties, while the rest of the seats go to trade unions, MPs, councillors and various party sections. Whether that’s the right balance is an arcane question for another day.
What will strike members most forcefully as they read the candidates’ statements are the two sectarian slates from Momentum on the left and Labour First (“a network for Labour moderates”) on the right. My guess is that most ordinary members, unless tribally attached to those groups, will, like me, instinctively resent these slates. We all belong to one party, though that may be a tad naive since unity has been as rare as hens’ teeth in Labour’s 118-year history.
But as free thinkers, most members won’t want to be told who to vote for, nor do they want to fixedly identify themselves with the left or right of the party. The age-old tug of war between radical ideas and how far you think voters can be pulled towards radical policies defines life on the left: that constant tussle between idealism and realism occurs within each member as much as it does between its left and right wings. How much redistribution, how much equality, how much tax-and-spend dare Labour offer, and which spending priorities should come first? No one knows how far you can go without risking yet another electoral failure – the bitter lifetime experience of most Labour members, most of the time.
But there is something more shocking about the NEC candidates’ statements. There are 26 constituency Labour candidates, but only seven – seven! – mention Europe, and often only glancingly. Here we are in the midst of the greatest national existential crisis since the war, with the country divided and dangling over the edge of a precipice, months from committing mass hara-kiri over a fanatical Tory idea mendaciously missold in a referendum. And yet, 19 candidates have forgotten to give it even a passing mention.
Naturally, they all write powerfully about the savage effects of austerity – something I write about almost weekly. But they write considerably more about internal Labour democracy than about Europe. Read these statements, and there is an overpowering sense of a navel-gazing party obsessing over its internal organs despite the fact that an imminent general election may be fought over the bones of the Brexit calamity. “My own priority will be democratising and reforming our party” is mirrored in many of them. Really?
The NEC has shockingly mishandled the antisemitism scandal, which it should have stopped dead months ago. Instead, it prolonged it by defying the international definition of antisemitism. Last night Peter Willsman was, belatedly, dropped from Momentum’s slate. His statement doesn’t mention Europe, though it does boast that he has been Jeremy Corbyn’s friend for 41 years, as if nepotism was a qualification. That is partly why his extraordinary anti-rabbi rant at the NEC, recorded and revealed this week, was all the more shocking for not being cut off immediately by Corbyn and his allies.
The only Momentum candidate to mention Europe is Jon Lansman – but in exactly the same dispiriting way that Corbyn used to speak about it, talking of “working with an anti-austerity alliance across Europe” – not the existing European Union we are actually breaking from. This reticence on Europe might signal Labour’s reasonable worries about holding its Brexit-voting seats, but the strongest impression is one of absent-mindedness.
From most of these statements you can see why Labour’s opposition to Brexit has often been broken-backed, distracted and half-hearted. My own MP, shadow Brexit minister Keir Starmer, has been admirably rolling a stone uphill to get the party to where it is, with six principles that should prevent Labour agreeing to any form of Brexit damage. But too many in Labour, including its leaders, have treated it as a sideshow – which is bizarre, since Brexit chaos offers the best chance of Labour suddenly winning power.
Best and most passionately anti-Brexit on the list is Eddie Izzard, who belongs to no one’s slate: “I am a proud British European. I am a strong pro-Europe voice on the NEC.” I would like to say that I picked candidates from across the slates, but no Momentum candidate mentioned Brexit. Only six of the nine Labour First “moderates” talk of fighting Brexit – and only they get my vote, plus Izzard and Ann Black, who alas doesn’t mention it, but is a longtime neither-slate and admirable NEC member diligently sending out her own unbiased record of each NEC meeting.
What is dismal about the statements as a whole is the largely – not entirely – inward-looking sectarianism. After eight years of the worst government in living memory – which has ravaged public services, rendered the low paid poverty-stricken, dropped us from top of G7 growth to bottom as it takes us to the Brexit brink – there has never been a greater need for Labour. Every party member feels that, and is determined to get Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell into Downing Street. But Labour’s leaders need to sharpen their focus on the coming Brexit crunch that will get them there: still in his many speeches, Corbyn usually sidelines Brexit. Good grief, Labour should make mincemeat of a government reduced to talking of calling out the army to protect rationed food and medical supplies, while lorries block the motorways.
• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
