What is the Labour Party playing at?
In January a small group of entryists staged a classic Militant-style coup at the AGM of my local branch Labour Party , stuffing the meeting with previously inactive members who didn't know what the issues were and were instructed to vote for a slate. About 40 people turned up - the usual attendance is less than 20 - and at least 15 of them don't normally go to meetings.
As usual they used untruths and half-truths to get the gullible to vote for their slate. New members were asked to come along "to help Joan" (our MP and also a ward member) "... to clear out the Trots". By "Trots" they meant the recent ward officers, most of whom are not and never have been Trotskyists.
OK, that is how Party business is often done and we can't really complain - it was all legal, if a bit close to the edge, and we might have done it to them in different circumstances. It was galling, especially as the branch has been very well run recently, we nearly doubled our membership, we donated more money to the Constituency election fund than any other ward, and we campaigned effectively during the election (not that there was much point in a seat as safe as ours).
But what sticks in the throat is that they felt it necessary, and were able, to get a central party official (i.e. national party, not the constituency or London Region) to chair the meeting. She was obviously on their side from beginning to end. It's a bit stiff when someone you have never met or heard of before turns up, announces they are taking over your meeting, and then presides over, one of her mates getting elected - most of whom you have never met nor heard of before.
Why should the NEC (or was it the NCC - it wasn't clear to us exactly who appointed her - she just barged in and took over) take an interest in one branch? Isn't it a vast waste of resources to have the national party micro-managing the election of almost powerless ward officials?
We're not talking about a Borough or even a Constituency Labour party here - but a Branch Labour Party, a tiny, almost meaninglessly unimportant body, one of thousands in the country, organised round a local council ward, about the size of a Church of England parish. You could fit the whole population of the area in a west-end theatre, and all the Party members on the stage.
If anything they went too far - it backfired at the end and the GC delegation was split between the two slates. It looks as if 3 or 4 of their plants woke up to what was going on and changed sides.
Some of the older members were near to tears. They didn't know what had hit them. They turned up for a Labour Party meeting and found themselves confronted by a bunch of arrogant, gloating estate-agent types ripping the local Party apart in order to get their own cronies onto such interesting and vital political posts as Political Education Officer. Since the meeting some of the drummed-up claque have complained to me about some of the policies of the new management in our local party - closing the Labour Club, preventing member participation in the running of the party, dropping traditional campaigning for mass phone-ins - and they obviously didn't realise that they had been voting for them only a few weeks before.
I am a member of the Labour Party. I vote Labour, I raise money for Labour, I campaign to get Labour candidates elected. It sickens me to see the establishment within the Party - the full-timers whose wages are paid by my subscriptions - trying to control every detail of the affairs of one local branch, an unusually active and well-run branch at that, in the safest Labour constituency in the south-east of England. Why do they bother? What do they get out of it? How to they find the time? Don't they have better things to do? Shouldn't they be helping to organise the party towards winning the next election? Shouldn't they be concentrating on marginal seats? Why are they behaving like 1977-vintage Student Union Millies carving a vote over a pint of lager?
The whole thing was a pathetic waste of time and effort. It was insulting to Party members who have worked hard and well for the Party for years and now find the very people they have slogged their guts out to get into Parliament or onto the Council turning round and denouncing them as Trots. What kick do they get out of wasting our hard-earned party funds on grinding their heels into the faces of every party member who wishes to think for themselves instead of slavishly following the central line?
It's a bit like the two sons in Jesus's parable - their father told them both to go and work in the field. One said yes, but didn't. The other refused, but later changed his mind and did the work anyway. Which was the loyal son? We hold reselection meetings and then turn out to campaign for the person we failed to get deselected. They vote to reselect the candidate - and then don't bother to campaign come the day.
Who are these entryists?
I suspect they call themselves "New Labour" and think of the rest of us as "Old". We call ourselves the "Left" and say that the coup-merchants are the "Right". They call themselves "Modernisers", we call them "Centralist control freaks". They call us "Trots" we call them "Stalinists" (OK, actually we call them "Bonapartists" but they don't have enough history to know what we mean by that and anyway the "S" word gets their backs up really badly.)
These labels don't really describe the differences between the factions which are much more to do with personality and style than with politics.
They are much more likely to wear suits and ties to meetings and we are more likely to wear T-shirts. They are more likely to shave, we are more likely to grow beards.
They tend to be people who think that loyalty to the Party requires loyalty to whoever its leaders happen to be at the moment. (An utterly immoral attitude typical of Tories or worse.) We are more likely to think that loyalty to the Party is loyalty to its principles.
They enforce their idea of loyalty by suppressing open debate within the party, trying to channel discussion into closely managed "policy forums" with hand-picked members who can be directed by the leadership and ignored if they refuse to take dictation. We are more likely to want to bring things out, to have the argument, to wash our dirty linen in public. In a fallen world that's the only way you will ever see that it is clean.
A large minority of both groups are Christians - that's a big turn-around in the Party in the last twenty years, I'm no longer the only one who dislikes Sunday morning political activities because I need to be in church - but they are different sorts of Christians. "New" Labour is packed full of high-church Anglicans, Anglo-Catholics and English Roman Catholics. The Left, when it is Christian, is much more likely to be Evangelical. They tend to be theologically liberal. We have a few real Calvinists.
Strangest of all, there seems to be an alternation of generations between the groups.
The so-called "Left" are mostly in their 30s and 40s, with an old guard in their 70s and 80s. The main power-base of the so-called "Right" is among members who are in their 50s and 60s, but they also appeal strongly to the younger new members in their 20s and early 30s. (Although I suspect that the very youngest members - the teenagers - are moving to the left again. But it is to early to tell).
Don't ask me why that is... maybe people who had their first experience of Labour politics under a Tory government were desperate to get back into power at any price, whilst those of us who knew Labour governments in our youth can see what's wrong with them as well. Or maybe it's just that each age cohort joining the Party naturally rebels against the previous one.
Nowadays the word "Trot" seems to be used to mean "anyone who disagrees with the 'Party into Power' line". It is used to describe anyone from Anarchists to old-fashioned Christian Socialists. There are so-called "Trots" who have been squeezed out of the Labour Party and gone to join the Liberals. There are even one or two who joined the Tories. The real Trots - the few real Trots from the 1970s still in the Party, the ones who recanted before they were kicked out by the Kinnock juggernaut - are as often as not eager modernisers and keen supporters of Tony Blair. They spent the 1970s and 1980s trying to take over the Labour Party for Socialism, and when they succeeded they found they didn't care for Socialism any more. Hundreds of them are on local councils, usually as "New Labour" clones. Some of them are in Parliament. At least one is in the House of Lords.
They turned their coats, floated or climbed to the top of the dungheap and are now taking their revenge on those who opposed them all those years ago. Having lost, grown out of, or betrayed their principles for "power", they have retained nothing but a set of techniques for taking control of political parties from the inside. They rig Party meetings because that is all they know how to do.