Listening to Brent Labour thinking about tomorrow.

With the Labour Party moving to the right ahead of the next General Election I have met a great number of unhappy local members recently some of whom have left the party and are looking for a new 'home'. Others intend to stay and fight for the policies they believe in, so I was interested in last Saturday's talk by Mike Phipps of Brent Central CLP about his book 'Don't stop thinking about tomorrow - the Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn'.  The meeting was chaired by Alex Colas, Brent CLP Political Education Officer who posed several questions to Phipps before wider contributions and questions from the small audience. Several ex-Labour councillors were in the audeince but no current councillors.

 

Taken together Phipp's answers produce a narrative:

 

After the 2017 General Election although Labour lost the result was treated by the party as a victory because of its high vote for Corbyn's policies. Instead, the party should have analysed the missing demographics in its vote. Corbyn's rejection of personal attacks on rivals meant that he failed to address Johnson's dishonesty. The left no longer controls Labour Party policy but the right, bereft of policies of their own, are dipping into the left's. 

 

Starmer has developed an unpleasant, imposed regime but Labour can win the next election. The scale of the crisis means that you can't have a 'steady as you go' strategy - the crisis needs something more radical. In the recent local elections, the areas where Labour was most radical were the ones where Labour did proportionally better.  The move to the right means that Labour is losing graduate voters and the core vote is in danger.

 

Policies on housing, green transition and the NHS are important, but the real battle will be overfinancing them. The problem is that Labour is not committing to any more money. Will Starmer hit the rich or change the commitment?

 

The left needs to go on the attack over the money.

 

Differences between Welsh and Scottish Labour and UK Labour are widening with separate approaches. I don't support an alliance with the Liberal Democrats because of past history and thinks a trick was missed with the Greens in 2019. 

 

The Corbyn leadership was a once in a lifetime moment. More than 20,000 came into the party and about the same number have gone out. Some have stayed and got involved in local government, others have stepped back, and some have got involved in other parties. If Starmer fails to win a majority at the General Election, it is likely that the party will become factional.

 

The issue of the anti-semitism label should have been killed off immediately but Corbyn was poorly advised by his Comms people. After 2017 he should have brought in top-notch staff with a Chief of Staff committed to his agenda.  Instead, the staff had too many agendas of their own.

 

 Contributions from the audience were varied. Phipp's responses in brackets:

 

The fake allegations of anti-semitism were a step too far for me and I have kind of given up on parliamentary politics. Starmer is not challenging the establishment. I am despondent beyond measure. [Starmer is to the left of Blair on many issues. Labour began to lose votes under Miliband because of pro-Palestine policies. They should have been more aware of losing those votes. Surveys showed Labour voters queasy about Starmer.]

 

You said that you thought Labour would win the General Election. It is not likely to be an overall majority, and this strengthens the case for PR. What is the position of the local party on PR?  [Brent Central CLP narrowly passed a motion in support of PR. Personally in favour. Labour for PR doesn't punch its full weight and trade union support for PR has been more important. Unfortunately, after the last experience I don't think a Referendum on PR would be won.]

 

I am opposed to Starmer because he is not a good lawyer.  His record shows (e.g., Menezes shooting) that he has no moral sense regarding the big issues.

 

The reason for decline is the decline of trade unions. Need to build them up through developing single union across the sectors - multiple unions as in NHS means government/employers can divide and rule. Class politics should override identity politics.   I know others won’t agree but immigration should be opposed for class reasons as was initially the case with trade unions - it lowers wages and employers are therefore in favour. [Research evidence is that immigration does not depress wage levels.]

 

 John McDonnell gave a well-received talk here at the Learie Constantine Centre across parties. What is his role now and could the left coalesce around his leadership, particularly on economics. [Since Corbyn and McDonnell are following their separate interest of international issues and economic policy now. McDonnell is part of the old generation and there is a new generation from the Miliband era such as Richard Burgon. Such a person is more likely to come from the centre, rather than the centre-left.]

 

Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow - Mike Phipps, OR Books

 

Brent Libraries - closure or 'transformation'? Putting the record straight

 

Mike Phipps reviews Transforming Brent Libraries, by James Powney, published by AuthorHouse, and sets the record straight on an important local struggle. Reprduced on Wembley Matters with the permission of the author. Furst published on Labour Hub.

Some years ago I was involved in a small way in the campaign to prevent the closure of a local library. Frustrated at the fact that the Chair of my Constituency Labour Party repeatedly and on specious grounds kept ruling out of order my branch’s motion opposing the Council’s cuts to local libraries – the CLP Chair was himself a Councillor, never a good idea – I gave an interview to the local paper.

I said there was real anger about the library closures and it was proving to be the most toxic issue for the Party locally since the war in Iraq. I added: “I think it is inevitable that James Powney will be held personally responsible for the way he has handled these closures.”

 

Naming this local Councillor, the lead member responsible for the closures, was not mischief-making on my part. It was intended to protect the local Party from a wrong, vote-losing policy, which was allowing local Lib Dem activists to grandstand over the issue – the same party in government that was cutting local authority grants which put councils in such a desperate financial plight. “The tragedy would be that the Liberal Democrats would benefit when it is their government pushing through these cuts,” I pointed out.

 

It must have been a quiet week in Brent, which is in northwest London, because the interview was put on the front page. It elicited a phone call from the Chair of the CLP, who had never contacted me before (or since), saying how much he admired all the work I did for the Party, etc., etc., but couldn’t I just drop this issue and move on?

 

That would have been difficult. The whole library closure programme felt like a great injustice locally, given that 82 per cent of residents who took part in the consultation said they didn’t want the libraries to close. In the interview, I said: “I don’t think the consultation was undertaken seriously and I don’t think that the process whereby local groups were invited to put their ideas forward to rescue the library was taken seriously either.”

 

The contempt with which campaigners’ alternative proposals were met by Councillors responsible now seems undeniable from the latest evidence – an account by the key perpetrator of the closure programme.

 

I didn’t know James Powney had written a book about all this until I saw a letter he wrote to the Guardian last December publicising it. Transforming Brent Libraries is mercifully short at 71 pages, and self-published, for good reason. It would be hard to see this making the best-seller list.

 

As Lead Member for Environment and Neighbourhood Services in the London Borough of Brent, Powney “oversaw the successful transformation of Brent Library service in raising both the total number of loans and visitors to become one of the most successful public library services in the UK,” trumpets the opening line of his biographical note.

 

But this doesn’t tell the full story. He also presided over the closure of half of the Borough’s libraries. The scale of protests – meetings, demonstrations, media activity, celebrity involvement – within and beyond Brent was immense. Powney later refers to protesters as a “baying mob”.

 

He claims the campaign was “principally led by a small number of single issue campaigners, many of whom were not from the area.” But the anger against the closures was very local and was reflected inside the local Labour Party where Powney was a Councillor.

 

 'Pop Up' Library outside the closed Kensal Rise Library

 

One of the most contested closures was that of Kensal Rise library, originally opened by Mark Twain over a century earlier. It was located in Kensal Green ward where I was Chair of the local Labour Party branch and which Powney represented as a Councillor. Meetings were poorly attended until the closures were announced. Then angry members began to turn up in droves. At the earliest opportunity, Party members voted to deselect him as their Council candidate.

 

In the Acknowledgements, Powney writes: “In writing this book, I should acknowledge some debts, possibly including the Friends of Kensal Rise Library (FKRL) who through sheer determination and litigiousness stretched the whole saga out to make enough material for a book.” This mocking, supercilious tone towards campaigners, invariably disparaged as “litigants”, becomes increasingly wearing as the book drags on. The unfortunate Powney finds he has do a lot of ‘explaining’ of how things work to the ignorant activists, a “continuous barrage” of whom had the cheek to turn up to his Councillor surgeries.

 

Equally ignorant, in this version of events, were the celebrities that campaigners sought to “drag in” to promote their cause. They are treated with some contempt here – apparently, celebrities care about libraries only because they remind them of their childhood.

 

Creative ideas to take over the running of libraries that the Council was seeking to shed from its remit are dismissed as the interference of a “lumpenproletariat”, hopelessly tainted by association with Cameronian notions of a “Big Society”.

 

At the end of this tedious rant, Powney attempts to draw some lessons from the whole sorry experience. The main one seem to be: what a pain pressure groups are, and how unscrupulously they are prepared to exploit their celebrity backing to “magnify the noise made without any interest in truthfulness.”

But happily, “After the decision is done, those who opposed it are surprisingly forgetful of the position they took.” That can’t be right – if it were, Powney would not have been deselected as a Kensal Green Councillor by his own Party.

 

It would be unfair to blames James Powney solely for this debacle. As he rightly says, all members of the Council Executive voted the libraries project though unanimously, despite what he concedes was a “massive petition” in opposition.

 

 

Arguably the campaign against library closures and the publicity it generated contributed to the ousting of the then leader of Brent Council in May 2012. By then the issue had been in the local newspaper virtually every week for eighteen months, taking up quite a few front pages, as on November 18^th 2010, when the Willesden and Brent Times opened, under a banner headline “IT’S OUTRAGEOUS” with “Council chiefs spent more than £600,000 on refurbishing two libraries – just months before announcing plans to close them.”

 

Editor's note.  Many thanks to Mike Phipps for permission to republish this article. Search Wembley Matters for further coverage of the issue.

Jeremy Corbyn - the reboot: First priority is construction of a broad political alliance

'Concrete alliances on issues where we have agreement can be formed'

This article by two members of Labour Briefing Editorial Board is reprinted with the authors' permission.

Mike Phipps (Brent Central CLP) and Sue Lukes (Islington North CLP) suggest five priorities for the Labour leader following his re-election

The 2016 campaign for re-election may have added new members to the Labour Party and helped popularise some of our key ideas, but ultimately it was always an unnecessary distraction. The reality is that Britain and all of its key political institutions are in deep crisis. The priority now for the Corbyn leadership is to address the country, not the Party. We must now prepare to win the next General Election.

To do this, firstly, a broad political alliance needs to be constructed. Current electoral geography is against us, in particular the dominance of the SNP in Scotland, but also the expected loss of safe Labour seats resulting from the government’s  gerrymandered redrawing of constituency boundaries. Labour is going to need to work with community groups, trade unions, tenants, single issue campaigns and other parties from the bottom up on key fronts - health, education, civil liberties, housing, migrant rights.

Party patriotism cannot be allowed to get in the way of building the broadest possible unity around campaigns on these issues, on many of which there will be stronger supporters among Greens, Nationalists and even some Lib Dems than among some of Labour’s right wing. Concrete alliances on issues where we have agreement can be forged, as some members of the Shadow Cabinet are already doing. These will be popular and can isolate and expose those right wing leadership elements in all parties that reject mutual co-operation against the Tory government’s offensive.

Two institutional flaws in Britain’s inadequate democracy need to be put back on the table. The idea that this Tory government be allowed to claim a democratic mandate on just 36% of those who voted in the 2015 General Election is a scandal. To say that Labour too got away with this in the past is not good enough. The fact that Caroline Lucas, the newly elected joint leader of the Greens, has made proportional representation a “red line” in any discussion with Labour on electoral pacts makes this debate an unavoidable one for us.

Likewise, if real progress is to be made in Scotland and Wales, this could mean strategic alliances with nationalist forces if that’s what it takes to get Labour into government. For that to happen, Labour will have to stop playing “catch-up” on the national question and commit to the broadest possible devolution across the UK’s regions.

Our second big challenge: whatever problems the Party continues to face at national level, we must build on our base in local government and work with councillors to help define the agenda they need to deliver services. The work that Jon Trickett did on regional devolution in the 2015 leadership election can be taken forward, drawing on some of the new mayors, for example in Bristol, and mayoral candidates, in the North West, who are not hostile to Corbyn’s leadership.

Thirdly, we need to introduce some mechanisms for popular consultation on policy. These could be citizens’ assemblies or Podemos-style online circles to refine and develop policy ideas. While this is a radical departure in Labour policymaking, it fits in with Jeremy Corbyn’s own proposals, announced in August, to lead a digital revolution and strengthen online democracy. The aim would be to ensure that not just the leader but every policy has a mandate. Local party branches could play a key role in reaching out to ensure these frameworks have a real place in local political activity.

Fourthly, we have to have a clear idea of what kind of Brexit we want. By prioritising the removal of Jeremy Corbyn, many on Labour’s right who claim the Party did too little in the referendum campaign squandered a real opportunity to take the offensive on this issue against a Tory government that was - is - clueless on how to deal with Brexit. We must provide leadership on this: full integration into the single market must be a central goal. Bilateral trade agreements, let alone service agreements, are just unserious - the government has so little expertise on this, it is hiring expensive outside consultants to do the work. Seeking bilateral solutions can lead only to a further enfeebling of Britain’s declining industrial base. We also need to resolutely defend EU social entitlements and European Convention human rights for all citizens and residents from impending Tory attack.

Fifthly, our Party is in a mess at all levels, with the exception of the grassroots where the phenomenal increase in membership, trebling what it was 18 months ago, poses new challenges. We have to continue to encourage and listen to these new members if we are to retain them and make them active ingredients in a Labour victory. To this end, the full-time apparatus must be reshaped to ensure it is at the service of the members, helping them to play a full role in the Party, rather than playing a factional role, even excluding members from activity, as we have seen in recent months.

Jeremy Corbyn’s re-election is also an opportunity to strengthen the team around the leadership. Last year’s unexpected win necessitated a hasty pulling together from scratch of a new team, with all its inevitable teething troubles. This year’s long-expected victory should provide the impetus to recruit some of the finest experts who want to serve. We need a focused, efficient operation, outward-looking and responsive to the electorate, strategic in its vision and clear and concise in its core messages.

What about the MPs? The war in the PLP has to end. It’s appalling that Labour MPs who claim to care so passionately about EU membership have dragged us into these internal squabbles at a time of national crisis. The plotting has to stop. But if we get all these other things right, then probably some who resigned from Shadow Cabinet positions, as well as some who didn’t come on board before, will be prepared to work with us. If we are magnanimous in victory and reach out to them, then the diehards whose sole aim is to bring down Jeremy Corbyn can be isolated from the broader middle ground of the PLP.

Nothing succeeds like success. If we can go beyond the internal contest to address the concerns and win the trust of voters who didn’t vote Labour last time and now feel betrayed by the other parties, we can change the political landscape.