It is a cold February night in Brighton and the Friends’ Meeting House is packed for a Momentum meeting. The room is filled with 100 people and the subject is how to encourage members of the Jeremy Corbyn-supporting group to stand for the local Brighton and Hove council. In doing so, the intention is to move forward from a bitter period of conflict in which the party in the city was suspended and reconstituted, and some high-profile Momentum supporters were suspended or expelled.
Ostensibly the keynote speaker is Chris Williamson, the Derby North MP, who acts as an outrider for the Labour leadership. But the most important speaker is Nancy Platts, just elected to the council’s East Brighton seat in a byelection and, remarkably, the only councillor present. Platts is loudly applauded when she argues there should be public ownership of rail and bus services in a city where the bus company Go Ahead Group “made a profit of £91m in a year, and yet when they don’t want to run a route, we [the council] have to subsidise it”.
Nor does she spare the council, currently run by a minority Labour administration, which should be “deeply ashamed of the number of rough sleepers in the streets”. Seventeen homeless people died on the streets of Brighton during 2017, and many of the activists present are frustrated with the way the council handles them. There is criticism of the way an emergency shelter only opens when the Met Office forecasts that temperatures will be fall below zero two nights in a row. The shelter should be open all the time, says Platts, who recently worked in Corbyn’s Westminster office. By way of solution, she holds out a broader hope to those present: “You’ve got me on the council now.”
Potted history
Created in 1950 when the two-member constituency of Brighton split into three single-member seats, Brighton Kemptown covers part of the city of Brighton as well as semi-rural suburbs and coastal towns to the east. It has been mostly a bellwether seat - except when a Conservative won in the two 1974 elections and then again when Labour's LLoyd Russell-Moyle won in 2017. The seat has always been either Labour or Conservative.
Population: 95,567
MP: Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Labour
Majority: 9,868
Brexit referendum result: 68.6% voted to remain, 31.4% voted to leave
With a general election almost certainly years away, the city’s well-organised Momentum group has decided to shift its focus. The next set of council elections are due in May 2019, when all seats are up for grabs. Labour currently holds 22, the Tories 20 and the Greens 11. Activists hope to secure at least a dozen seats for Momentum supporters in a city where Labour is expected to do well after recording 20% swings and two wins in the 2017 general election, in which the anti-Corbyn candidate Peter Kyle won Hove and Corbyn supporter Lloyd Russell-Moyle gained Brighton Kemptown.
It is a looming battle that has recorded its first scalp of sorts: a few days after the Momentum meeting, the council leader, Warren Morgan, who comes from the right of the party, suddenly announced he would step down after three years leading the Labour group, saying initially that his time as leader “must now come to an end”.
Some believe his early resignation was timed to keep the leadership of the council out of Momentum hands: Platts, who has the support of the left, is felt to lack town hall experience. The early frontrunner is Daniel Yates, who is on the right of the party but is trying to build bridges with the left.
Conciliation was not Morgan’s style: last September the Labour leader threatened to ban his own party from holding its annual conference in the city, writing to the party’s then general secretary, Iain McNicol, to complain that “antisemitism was being aired publicly in fringe meetings and on the floor of conference”. That followed a controversial fringe meeting on free speech and Israel in which Miko Peled, who is not a Labour member, said that it was legitimate to debate Holocaust denial – while equating Zionists with Nazis.
Nor was it the first time that Morgan had been outspoken in taking on the party’s left; a stance that left him increasingly isolated among local members. Brighton’s old district Labour party was suspended, along with some of its key figures, after a chaotic and at times ill-tempered meeting in July 2016 which hundreds of people tried to attend.
There was an allegation of spitting close to a member of staff – although it was hotly disputed – which was given currency by a tweet from Morgan. He returned to the theme again this week, blogging to complain “that one tweet has been used repeatedly over the past two years as ‘proof’ that I have regularly ‘lied and fabricated smears’ to discredit the left and attack the leadership nationally”.
One of those suspended was Greg Hadfield, who had been elected secretary. A polarising figure locally, he was accused of intimidation, which he denies. Hadfield says he does not know the detail of the charges against him, and he remains a key Momentum organiser with a fiery rhetorical style. Speaking to the Guardian, he was keen to sound emollient, but was clear about what he believes: “We will continue to be a broad church, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, the policies he epitomises and a socialist manifesto for our city.”
Before Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, Brighton and Hove’s three constituency parties were merged into one to form a viable unit with a membership hovering stubbornly at 1,500. The Tories held two of the parliamentary seats in 2010 and Caroline Lucas for the Greens held the third, Brighton Pavilion. Corbyn’s election as leader was transformative, however: membership has soared – each party now has about 3,000 members and each constituency organises separately since the party machinery was reinstated. But the relationship with the two Labour MPs – Kyle, who was first elected in 2015 and Russell-Moyle, who came in 2017, could not be more different.
Kyle, a former aid worker, puts some of the tension down to the fact he was first selected before Corbyn became leader; the narrow gap in time between his and Russell-Moyle’s ascent making a crucial difference. “When I was selected there were 500 members and I wasn’t the favourite before the meeting. When I became an MP, there were at least 2,000 members, most of whom didn’t feel they had chosen me.” Nor did it help, from the new members’ point of view, that Kyle backed Liz Kendall in the first leadership election, then Angela Eagle and Owen Smith in the second.
A small group of activists go canvassing with Kyle in Portslade, a lower middle class community of postwar housing nestling in the South Downs, armed with a petition for traffic calming measures on the busy, narrow Mile Oak Road. It is a studied contrast to the politics of Momentum and Kyle, not one to trim his views about the party leadership, says he is interested in “developing a winning vision for Britain; not the politics of loyalty to an individual”. The MP would not say if he believed he would be deselected in a constituency where Momentum supporters hold the majority of officer positions, but the overall view was that if a vote were held tomorrow (and in reality it would be some years away) Kyle would face an uphill struggle.
In Kemptown, on the same bright, chilly Saturday, over a dozen activists gather in the unpromising terrain of the leafy seaside village of Rottingdean to canvass with Russell-Moyle. Party members beam when they talk about Russell-Moyle’s victory in 2017 with a majority of 9,868, as if they were each responsible for a share of those winning votes. A former youth worker who also once chaired the Woodcraft Folk, Russell-Moyle describes his view of Corbyn as “well, he’s not the messiah, but he’s not a very naughty boy”.
Ironically, Russell-Moyle was imposed as a candidate on the local Labour party because the 2017 election was unexpected. But the 31-year-old told the Guardian he would submit himself for a full, competitive selection process next time because “the party was denied that last time”. Yet few believe he would face a serious challenge. The young MP is considered to be one of the newly energised local party. Meanwhile to the majority of local activists, those whose ascent came in the era of Ed Miliband – councillors or MPs – are still viewed with scepticism.
