On Friday evening in the Windrush Lounge at The World Transformed conference in Manchester, British socialism was autocannibalising. No more comrade this or comrade that. No other little politburo manners. In a storage unit in an industrial estate – this was the lounge – Max Shanly, an influential left-wing activist and former Momentum bureaucrat, was jabbing his finger in the direction of Alan Gibbons, an independent councillor in Liverpool who is involved in building Jeremy Corbyn’s new party, which is for now confusingly named Your Party. ‘You are one of the select few!’ Max said. ‘You are the Comical Ali of Your Party!’
Max’s issue – in fact it seemed to be an issue for most of the 50 or so people who had assembled that evening to discuss the new venture’s organisational structures – was that from the promise of Your Party’s founding had emerged an undemocratic and Stalinist horrorshow of which Corbyn is the ineffective and reluctant icon, puppeteered by advisers who want another doomed crack at power. ‘There are people at the top of this party who want by hook or by crook to remain the hegemonic force in it,’ Max said, referring I think not just to Alan but to Karie Murphy and her allies, who came under repeated attack during the evening, and at the wider conference. Murphy was Corbyn’s chief-of-staff when he was Labour leader, and to British socialism’s various factions today she is a kind of Beelzebub figure.
From then it was war, Russian style, by strike and sabotage
The wild hope around Your Party turned foul a few months ago after some internal tensions became external. Alan is somewhat at the centre of that. Back in June, he drafted a proposal for the ‘organising committee’, which sits at the core of the apparatus, suggesting Corbyn be the party’s sole leader, cutting out Zarah Sultana, the anti-Zionist and anti-Nato Member of Parliament for Coventry South, who had apparently been offered the position of co-leader in return for her joining. In response, Zarah’s backers wrote their own proposal and got it put to an internal vote where it was approved. She immediately announced that she was co-leader on social media, which displeased Murphy and her allies. From then it was war, Russian style, by strike and sabotage.
The details of the fighting dripped into the press, and now once happy supporters are questioning the entire project. To Alan’s left was Mish Rahman, a former member of Labour’s National Executive Committee who quit the party in April and vowed in an open letter to dedicate his god-given energies to removing Keir Starmer from office. Mish, who is now a member of Your Party, couldn’t understand why the so-called ‘Gaza independents’ or ‘independent alliance’ MPs were being allowed into the new organisation. ‘No one gives a fuck about the independent alliance,’ he said, and Max agreed. ‘They’re not socialists,’ he said. ‘They’re not really even progressives.’ (On this he’s correct. The Gaza independents include landlords who voted against putting VAT on private schools.) ‘But hey,’ Max continued, ‘Jeremy Corbyn is happy, so I suppose we should bend over and let the socialist movement get royally fucked!’ ‘Saints and messiahs – that time is gone,’ said Mish. In Alan’s view: ‘You don’t write people off straight away, there’s a period of transition when people reexamine their politics.’
And so in this unwelcoming lounge, strip-lit, overbusy, leaden with vibrating anger and decorated with El Lissitzky inspired banners of arrows and triangles, things fell apart. Fiona Lali, an up-and-comer in the Revolutionary Communist Party, sat to Max’s right. ‘The momentum into the founding conference has been lost,’ she mourned. Towards the end of the session, audience members made contributions which descended into shouting. ‘I’M NOT ATTACKING KARIE MURPHY!’ someone said, after Alan had accused them of doing so. ‘Some of the language being used is not on,’ Alan told the room. That was the first day of the conference.
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