Mick Hartley

It all seems to have started with a disillusioned piece a couple of days back by Laura Catriona Murray, daughter of Andrew Murray (friend of Seumas Milne, defender of North Korea, leading member of the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain and chief of staff to Len McCluskey at Unite). She was unhappy about the way Momentum, once a beacon – or so she thought – for a new gentler kind of politics under the inspiring leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, was being taken over by Trotskyists.

To anyone who knows anything about Corbyn, his supporters or the British hard left, this was, of course, no surprise at all. And the irony of this, coming from Andrew Murray's daughter, was irresistible. First up to point this out, yesterday, was Nick Cohen – Marxist-Leninists are now the Labour party’s moderates. And now David Aaronovitch joins in with his Times piece this morning – Labour is just a carcass for Trots to feast on:

In essence Momentum was a Jeremy Corbyn support organisation set up by old Bennites like the veteran Jon Lansman and young social media activists. With its attractive lack of discernible discipline or programme it swiftly imagined itself to be a light-on-its-feet left-wing movement for the modern era. A steering committee made up of Mr Lansman and people he liked ruled with a rod of jelly over the nascent organisation. Let a thousand flowers bloom! Let a million campaigns affiliate! Let people make decisions online concerning Momentum’s activities!

For some reason the standing committee felt that to be a proper force it had to have a national committee made up of all kinds of representatives. Maybe it was a condition of fundraising and proper governance. And that was where the inevitable happened and the Trots moved in.

This next statement is just a fact: the revolutionary far-left believes as a condition of its existence that it must build the revolutionary vanguard party. This is exhausting and lonely work and if you have to do it from first principles — creating a party called something like The Revolutionary Socialist Party — obviously futile. But if someone else sets up something much bigger and you can take it over, together with its existing membership, then that’s much less clearly pointless.

The way you manage this is by being the people who always turn up prepared with arguments, motions and nominations, who get there first and leave last. Anyone who has been part of a neighbourhood action group is familiar with the psychology; there’s always one indefatigable bully. What happens if you’re that bully is that you get your people elected as delegates from one lower meeting to another higher meeting and so on upwards until you control the whole thing. And now instead of a Leninist sect you have a vanguard party.

That was exactly what the Momentum argument was about — would it be run by a delegate structure, favouring the old Trots, or by an amorphous online consultation, thus favouring whoever was doing the consulting? Laura Catriona Murray was on the losing side and she now regretted ever letting non-Labour Party members into Momentum at all. If things went on the way they seemed likely to, she concluded, “it will be a husk of a movement, nothing but a famous name and a huge database of disenchanted and disenfranchised members”.

There are some ironies here. Her hero, Jeremy Corbyn, as I wrote last week apropos of his love for Castro, is an uncertain champion of democracy. And her father (for whom she is in no way responsible) is Andrew Murray… If Ms Murray had been under any doubt about the pernicious nature of Trotskyism she didn’t have to consult the fable of the scorpion and the frog, she had only to ask her father.

This is what runs Labour at leadership level now, a roiling quarrel-in-progress between far-leftists….