It is very significant that, when Roy Hattersley compares the growth of Momentum to past “crises” of the Labour party, he doesn’t mention the rightwing treachery and deceit of the Social Democratic Party, when, at the beginning of the 1980s, 28 MPs who had stood as Labour candidates formed an anti-Labour parliamentary party (“This is Labour’s greatest crisis. Time to fight back”, Comment).
So it is not surprising that he is threatened by a group loyal to the Labour party’s manifesto and elected leader, both of which came as a shock to the “New Labour” right that thought it owned the party now (and which, ironically, was too right wing for Roy Hattersley when he was still active).
Many Labour members, whom Hattersley would call “extreme left wingers”, don’t think that a party within a party is the way to go.
However, we need to remember that, while Momentum is bureaucratic on principle, with committee meetings, minutes taken, “you are out of order, comrade” and all the rest of it, a less-visible rightwing Labour party within a party has grown up since Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader.
Without Momentum’s bureaucracy, they meet for coffee or the stereotypical dinner parties or understand each other so well that they don’t need to meet at all to know what to do – the ideal self-managed conspiracy.
John Wilson
London NW3
Roy Hattersley rightly argues that Labour needs “politicians of principle to defend their aims and values” and that “politicians have a duty to defend their beliefs”.
Would these be the same politicians whose principles and sense of duty compelled them to acquiesce meekly to the democratic claims of a referendum corrupted by lies and misinformation and submit to a will of the people that is nowhere coherently articulated, yet whose expression may, supposedly, be uncontroversially derived from an absurdly reductionist binary?
Stuart Parker
Rotherham
A few days after the 2010 election, I joined the Labour party. My branch, Crouch End, in Haringey, north London, was moribund: there were no meetings, we had no MP and no councillors.
A young climate change activist, Natan Doron, was almost singlehandedly trying to rebuild the party. Five years later, we had an MP and three councillors – Natan, Jason Arthur, a black teacher who had grown up on a council estate, and Sarah Elliott, who had defected to us from the Lib Dems. Their service has been exemplary and it is with sadness that we have observed in recent months how divided and factional Haringey Labour has become.
That winning team and the branch and CLP officers who got them elected have been forced out, democratically, of course, but, because of a loophole in the rules, Momentum has been able to campaign for its candidates for months, while sitting councillors were forbidden from contacting members until four days before the selection meeting.
We are now in the position where we have a council candidate living nowhere near the Crouch End ward (which voted nearly 80% Remain) who has tweeted that “liberal Remoaners are capitalist stooges”.
It will be instructive to see how such Dave Spartisms go down with voters in May and whether the new regime will take aim next at the disloyalty of our excellent MP, Catherine West, who defied the leader’s three-line whip to vote against article 50.
Linda Grant
London N4
