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July 21, 2021 - 7:15am
This week it was announced that Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) is planning to ‘proscribe’ some groups on the Left of the Party. Proscription is essentially a form of banning. The groups that being expelled from the Party include Resist, Labour Against the Witchhunt, Labour In Exile Network, and Socialist Appeal. All of them have… colourful histories.
Online, many Labour figures have described this as a purge (or even, in the words of Owen Jones, “a Stalinist style purge”) and pledged to resist it at all costs. (What forms this resistance will take, other than tweeting the word “resist” are unclear.) Purge is an extreme word — especially in this context. Only a small number of members are being removed from the party, and they hail from toxic, largely powerless subgroups.
The truth is that these expulsions are overdue. After the Corbyn years, Keir Starmer and the Labour leadership need to prove they are acting on anti-Semitism. All four groups – Labour Against the Witchhunt, Resist, Labour in Exile, and Socialist Appeal – are extremists of different kinds.
Labour Against the Witchhunt, as the name suggests, was set up to call out the ‘witch-hunt’ against those accused of being anti-Semites in the party. Resist, affiliated with Labour Against the Witch Hunt, is the new mouthpiece for Corbyn stalwart Chris Williamson, an MP who lost his High Court bid to be readmitted to the Labour Party after he was suspended in an anti-Semitism row. The Labour in Exile network was set up to be a home for those expelled by “the fake ‘antisemitism campaign’ whose aim was to protect the Israeli state”.
All three groups are intertwined and are the most blatant, but by no means only, homes in the Labour Party for Corbynite true believers. Socialist Appeal is slightly different, descending from the Trotskyite Militant entryists in the 1980s. When Militant abandoned entryism in the 1990s, Socialist Appeal was one of several groups to split from them and remain inside Labour. Despite being a small, insignificant faction mostly made up of old cranks at the back of CLP meetings, Starmer wants rid of them.
What is perhaps more surprising is that other groups — arguably even further to the Left of those being proscribed by the NEC — such as the Trotskyite Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, are not also being removed.
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SubscribeOnce Labour has also expelled Momentum and all transactivist groups, and has pledged its support for the rights of women as a biological sex, as enshrined in the Equality Act, it might have gone some of the way towards making itself a credible and electable force again. Only some.
Being “pragmatic” is all well and good, amid a continuing dearth of coherent philosophical and political party underpinnings, beyond getting back into power. Many core members were quiet during things as they were – until the votes came in.