Stephen Pollard
Momentum, the group set up to entrench Corbynite control, these new Labour members have changed the party from top to bottom. To anyone who lived through the 1980s, what is happening now is horrifying.
Militant was a Trotskyist entryist group which attempted to take over the Labour Party. It always denied being an organised body, arguing that it was simply a newspaper. The Liverpool Labour Party – and thus Liverpool council – was controlled by Militant and in 1982 the local Liverpool party agreed to set a deficit council budget, which was illegal. As a result, a Labour Party inquiry held that Militant was a “separate” and “distinctive” body and membership of Militant became an expellable offence.
The notion that a former member of Militant, who has never publicly recanted that membership, could end up as general secretary of the Labour Party says almost all that needs to be said about the state of the party today. Because Labour is now in an incomparably worse position than it was in the 1980s. Organised and threatening as Militant was then, it controlled only some local constituency parties and never had full control of the National Executive Council. And the leadership fought it day and night.
Today, the hard-Left has control of the leadership, the NEC and the party bureaucracy. And it is tightening that control with every passing day.
In the 1980s, Militant were the outsiders and their influence was destroyed when Neil Kinnock became leader and dedicated himself to expelling them and restoring the party to the mainstream.
Now the reverse is true. The leadership is entrenching the hard-Left, and plans to remove those mainstream MPs and members who fight them. Indeed, even when the leadership feels the need to respond to allegations that it is soft on extremism, its behaviour shows that it is not serious.
Take the ongoing issue of anti-Semitism. Jeremy Corbyn claimed that he would be a “militant opponent” of it (no pun intended, one imagines).
But in reality, the Corbynites are not remotely interested in tackling the issue. They couldn’t be because to do so would require acting against fellow hard-Left extremists. All they really want to do is neutralise it as an issue that is causing damage.
Earlier this month, for example, Labour appointed a dedicated in-house legal counsel specifically to advise on antiSemitism cases. Sounds great. But the man appointed, Gordon Nardell QC, is himself reportedly a former Militant member.
AS Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger put it, Mr Nardell had “made worrying statements on social media and was identifiably connected to organisations and individuals that seek to deny the anti-Semitism problem”. His appointment left her with “no faith in the objectivity of the process”. The worrying truth is that the official opposition is now an extremist party in every significant sense.
Yes, it still has many moderate MPs and members. But they are political prisoners – albeit willing captives. Trapped by their refusal to risk their careers and leave, they are now members of a party that has long since left the mainstream.
Ms Formby is one of them – but she is far from alone.
‘The hard-Left controls Labour leadership’