“We’re looking at an approach of one foot in the party and one foot out of the party.” Momentum vice-chair Harriet Protheroe Soltani is one of thousands of young political activists energised by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership who are now reassessing their relationship with Labour.
The 26-year-old, a tenants’ rights activist, is helping to “refound” Momentum for the post-Corbyn era.
It will still campaign to influence Labour policy. But it will also be involved in more direct political activism, such as resisting evictions. “It’s about doing the organising work, and creating a movement that stretches across workplaces and communities,” she said.
“The support that we’re trying to give to Momentum members at the moment is to help them set up their own tenants’ union branches locally to them, train them in tenants’ rights, which we’ve been doing alongside London Renters Union; and also just building the political education around the history of housing and tenants’ struggles in the UK and where we need to go next.”
Like many on the left of the party, Protheroe Soltani is concerned that Keir Starmer is taking Labour away from the radicalism that saw Corbyn hailed by the Glastonbury crowd in 2017 – despite the fact that Starmer played down policy differences during his leadership campaign.
“It’s quite evident to people on the left of the party that they feel they’ve been lied to: and they expected more and better of Keir,” she said. For her, the Labour leader’s decision to suspend the party whip from Corbyn over his response to the Equality and Human Rights Commission report on antisemitism in the Labour party, after Corbyn was reinstated by the national executive committee (NEC), was “the nail in the coffin”.
Since then, Labour MPs and members have been barred from discussing Corbyn’s suspension or voicing solidarity with him by the general secretary, David Evans – a move which was criticised by Momentum as an attempt to stifle debate. The group is now campaigning for the post of general secretary to be directly elected by members, claiming Evans – Starmer’s preferred candidate – has become a “factional player”.
Meanwhile, Boris Johnson has been using the language of a “green industrial revolution”, a concept that featured heavily in Labour’s 2019 manifesto – even if the government’s version is on a much smaller scale – and has ditched the rhetoric of austerity, if not the reality.
Starmer’s team insist they have spent the past seven months re-engaging with sections of the electorate that had rejected the party in recent years, and introducing Starmer to the public: not an easy task with the nation in the grip of a pandemic. And they promise he will set out a more positive prospectus in the new year.
But leftwing activists point to issues including the “spycops” bill and the recent Jamaican deportation flight, where they claim Labour has not been vocal enough in its opposition to the government. Even on the awarding of lavish contracts for medical supplies to contacts of Conservative ministers, on which shadow cabinet office minister Rachel Reeves has been relentlessly critical, some leftwingers complain Starmer’s team are still pulling their punches.
“It’s been framed in terms of ‘you’ve wasted money’. Let’s call it what it is: corruption,” said Corbyn’s former policy chief Andrew Fisher. “There’s a lack of political analysis, of framing the debate.”
Citing Starmer’s decision to abstain on the government’s three-tiered Covid restrictions, he said: “There’s been a bit of an abstention on making an argument – on taking a stand.”
“Young people came back into the Labour party under Corbyn because he talked about things like low pay, renters’ rights, abolishing tuition fees: Jeremy’s victory in 2015 came about because of the material reality of Britain,” Fisher said.
“For a lot of these young people, they were saying, ‘someone’s speaking up for my needs for the first time’. Those sorts of young people will find other things to do.”
James Schneider, who was a co-founder of Momentum before working closely with Corbyn as his director of strategic communications, said he and many of his colleagues on the left have taken their energies elsewhere.
He is now working with a group called Progressive International, which among other projects is coordinating a global campaign to force Amazon to treat its workers better and pay more tax.
He cited renters’ unions like Acorn, climate campaigns, and upstart trade unions winning victories against gig employers. “We need the party, we need to engage with the party, and we’re part of the party; but it’s not like the leadership is going to do it for us – far from it,” he said.
Starmer’s pitch to the electorate, he argued, had been “we’re the nicer part of the establishment, you can trust us”.
The left remains a force among the membership: the Grassroots Alliance slate, backed by Momentum and other leftwing groups, took five of the nine seats for constituency party representatives on Labour’s ruling NEC at recent elections.
But the lack of an annual party conference – replaced by a series of online speeches and panels – has made it hard even for party veterans to judge the mood.
In parliament, Rebecca Long-Bailey’s sacking in June after she shared an article about Maxine Peake that contained an antisemitic trope, dispatched the only member of Corbyn and John McDonnell’s socialist campaign group in the shadow cabinet to the back benches.
The campaign group has increased in size since the 2019 election, which saw victories for several leftwing candidates favoured by Corbyn’s team, and includes more than 30 of Labour’s 200 MPs. But the group is now firmly back in its pre-2015 role as a backbench ginger group, lobbying the leadership – including calling on Starmer to reinstate Corbyn.
When they look back over Corbyn’s period in charge, even some of his staunchest supporters believe that by the time of last year’s general election, the project had been dragged too far from its radical roots by the drawn-out wrangling over Brexit.
Andrew Murray, chief of staff to Unite general secretary Len McCluskey and an adviser to Corbyn, said: “Jeremy did best when he was an insurgent: an outsider. When he got painted into a parliamentary corner, as part of the obstructionist establishment, it was like Samson having his hair cut off.”
Like a number of Corbyn’s closest allies, Murray believes a different approach to the fraught issue of Brexit after 2017 could have kept the flame of Corbynism alive.
“I think there was a view: ‘We have a hung parliament, Brexit divides the Tories, Theresa May has got no way forward; if we just oppose oppose oppose, we can bring her government down, and have an early general election, which we can win.’ And that wasn’t a mad position to take but clearly it was wrong. We just followed that line into the parliamentary weeds, and got stuck there. Completely stuck there.”
Losing the enthusiastic young campaigners who had powered him to the leadership was one of the pressing motivations behind Corbyn’s ultimate decision to plump for a second referendum, but Protheroe Soltani said that her activist friends barely mention Brexit now.
Some had drifted away to Plaid Cymru, she said, making her worry about next spring’s elections to the Welsh assembly. But she’s going to stay. After last year’s general election defeat, she realised that “we couldn’t allow ourselves to not keep organising and not keeping fighting for the really important things that we need to see. In my opinion, centrism won’t give us the solution.”
