The battle for control of Momentum, the pro-Jeremy Corbyn campaign group that grew out of the 2015 Labour leadership race, will intensify this week as results emerge of a survey sent to its 20,000 members by the Labour leader to ask their views on its future.
After a series of bitter disputes about how Momentum is organised and run and claims it had been infiltrated by Trotskyists, Corbyn contacted members before Christmas and urged them to complete a survey setting out how they think it should develop.
Insiders hope the results, expected to be shared with members in the coming days, will help to resolve the deadlock at the top of the organisation before a contentious national conference due to take place in late February or early March.
The outcome of the arcane dispute could detemine whether Corbyn can still call on an army of ideological troops to shore up his leadership or whether Momentum fades away as a political force.
Momentum has been controversial from its inception. During last year’s leadership race, Owen Smith claimed it was using Labour as a “host body”. Centrist Labour MPs frequently complain that their local Momentum group is plotting, sometimes openly, to have them deselected.
The party’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, warned that Momentum was sometimes a “rabble”, though he recanted after the group ran what was perceived as a successful fringe festival, The World Transformed, alongside Labour’s Liverpool conference.
Momentum activists have recently capitalised on their digital campaigning tools to urge members to join the Unite union to back Len McCluskey, its pro-Corbyn leader, as he seeks re-election. They are gearing up for a mass phone bank to support Labour’s campaign in the forthcoming Copeland byelection.
The World Transformed events in leave-supporting marginal constituencies are being planned in the new year to encourage new groups to get involved in politics.
However, since helping Corbyn to retain the leadership, Momentum has been riven by infighting about its future. One faction, led by founder Jon Lansman, would like to see the campaign group develop into a decentralised political organisation, radically different from traditional parties.
Under this vision, Momentum would use digital tools to throw open decision-making to every member via one member one vote and provide local groups with the material they need to conduct grassroots campaigns on broad issues such as NHS funding, rather than wrangling over a detailed policy platform.
Lansman, like Corbyn, is a veteran of Labour party struggles over many decades, but his approach appears to be backed by many of Momentum’s young members, a large number of whom are relatively new to politics.
However, to a rival group of seasoned leftwing campaigners, including Jill Mountford of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and former Militant member Nick Wrack, Lansman’s support for one member one vote was a coup, aimed at cementing his own control.
Lansman’s critics won a narrow majority on Momentum’s ruling national committee at a fractious meeting in December, for what Mountford calls “a national delegate based conference with decision-making powers”.
She and her allies would like the conference – like Labour’s annual gathering – to become a powerful forum at which delegates can agree a detailed policy platform. But to others, that strays too close to replicating the structures of a traditional political party.
Corbyn has not expressed a view about the specific structure he favours. A spokesman said: “Jeremy is committed to building a mass Labour party active in every community to win elections. He hopes Momentum can help achieve that.”
Some Momentum insiders suggested a delegate structure would be an odd way to go about constructing an organisation that is meant to funnel members and campaigning energy towards the Labour party.
Lansman’s backers now hope that if the survey shows members are overwhelmingly in favour of a one-member-one-vote approach, it could help to turn the tide at a meeting of the national committee, due to be held later this month. Some of the decisions made in December were carried by a single vote.
But other insiders said Mountford, Wrack and others have a powerful hold over the organisation and some of its members through the power of their ideology. “It’s the clarity of their lines – it’s the unwillingness to countenance any kind of soft-heartedness.”
A Momentum spokesperson said: “Giving all of Momentum’s members the chance to have a say in the future of Momentum reflects the inclusive, participatory, members-led nature of our movement.
“In 2017, we will continue to grow. Through our movement, more people will participate in politics and Labour will be helped to harness its mass membership to win power to transform Britain.”
Rumours suggest Lansman might be preparing to walk away from the organisation he founded, perhaps taking its crucial base of campaigners with him. But he told the Guardian last month he was not ready to quit, saying: “I don’t want to control Momentum. I want a pluralist organisation that supports Jeremy Corbyn, democratises the Labour party and helps us win the next general election.”
Momentum was born out of the enthusiasm that swept Corbyn to the Labour leadership in 2015. Its tech-savvy founders were behind the mass recruitment of £3 supporters who backed Corbyn overwhelmingly against the mainstream candidates, and the lively public meetings that put his unpolished style to good effect addressing packed rooms of supporters.
When Corbyn won, some assumed the campaign would be folded into Labour, but perhaps because his supporters did not believe he would be allowed to take full control, it was deemed helpful for a pro-Corbyn campaign group to continue to exist independently.
“The fact that they didn’t oddly showed a lack of confidence and a lack of competence – in a weird way they were already preparing for when they are booted out [of the leadership],” said one party veteran who knows senior Momentum figures well.
With hindsight, that approach appeared prudent when Momentum helped fend off the leadership challenge from Smith after the EU referendum result.
Since Corbyn was re-elected, some key figures have chosen to serve the cause in other ways. Momentum’s former national organiser James Schneider is now a full-time adviser to Corbyn, while another senior face, Sam Tarry, has returned to his job at transport union the TSSA.
Tarry told the Huffington Post recently: “I think Momentum has got to change. It’s got to get its house in order.”
Coming as McCluskey, Corbyn’s most vocal trade union backer, tries to secure another term as general secretary of Unite, and with Labour languishing in the polls, the bitter wrangle about Momentum’s future may provide another test of the true strength of his project to remake the left.
