There are three stages through which every new notion in England has to pass: ‘It is impossible: It is against the Bible: We knew it before’.
—Sidney Webb
It takes less than five minutes to walk along the seafront from the Hilton Metropole to the Synergy Centre, but the distance feels like a country mile. At the Hilton, once you get past security, things are brisk and neatly organised; the air smells of timetables and lanyards. The first time I entered the Synergy Centre, where there is no security, a stranger handed me a can of Red Stripe. Woven banners and tall posters tumbled down the walls, and a vapour machine pumped low clouds across the stage. At the Hilton, drinks receptions are sponsored by institutions like the Law Society, or Boeing, or NatWest, and advertised as a ‘great opportunity to network’; at Synergy, nights tend to end with laser beams, ferocious dancing, and chants demanding the nationalisation of Greggs. ‘When people ask you where you were at the end of neoliberalism,’ cried a woman into the microphone at one of Synergy’s events, ‘you can tell them you were in a dark, dank club space in Brighton!’ The crowd let out a euphoric roar.
The World Transformed, a festival of arts, politics, music and rupture, has taken place alongside Labour’s annual conference every year since Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the party in 2015. Its big, official cousin always unfolds in a tight, semi-militarised zone guarded by armed police; by contrast, TWT, as The World Transformed is known, sprawls across the cities that host it, fizzing into gallery spaces, community centres, former homeless shelters and Regency churches. In Brighton, there were TWT sessions on the future of work, the rise of new media, reclaiming football from the clutches of corporate ownership, and luxury automated communism; there was a sensorial fashion workshop, a three-day hackathon inspiring young people to take on the tech giants at their own game, and a panel discussion entitled ‘Acid Corbynism’ in which a long-winded question from somebody representing the Psychedelics Society was interrupted by hecklers demanding that acid house be played without delay. I watched debates about the planet’s future that referenced both loft insulation and Marx’s Grundrisse, queues for a political pub quiz that stretched for block after block down Bond Street, and a rave finale featuring the Feminist Jukebox DJ collective, Horse Meat Disco, and gusts of dry ice. Anyone can come to TWT, and at every event, time permitting, everybody is encouraged to speak. Each September, the festival poses lots of questions about the moment we’re in: questions about the economy, about how we conceive of care, about the lessons of history when it comes to social struggle, about internationalism, populism and representation. But the biggest question it asks is one that doesn’t appear in the programme, and that’s whether all this – TWT’s messiness, and its massiness – is where politics is really at now, or whether, ultimately, power remains sealed inside the secure zone, 400 yards up the road.
That question has preoccupied the left for more than a century, but never with more urgency than today. TWT, and its main organisers Momentum, are positioned at the crossroads of two very different political traditions: one formal, parliamentary and focused on electoral gains, the other grass roots and community-built, anchored in the language and culture of social movements.1 As politics in Westminster jerks from crisis to crisis, patently unequal to our times, so a space has opened up for more radical currents to lap up against the citadel, potentially contaminating those within. In Brighton, a steady stream of the infected abandoned the comforts of the Hilton and made the short journey down Kings Road to Synergy, be it just to sate their curiosity about TWT and soak up some of its energy, or to proclaim, as several senior politicians did, that this was where the action was now, that what drove them forward was to be found not there but here. ‘The cosy consensus in Parliament is beginning to crumble,’ declared Clive Lewis, one of Labour’s shadow ministers, at a TWT event. For a long time, he explained, those who shared the values of TWT had been on enemy turf in Westminster. ‘We were facing uphill, and they were at the top of that hill,’ he observed. ‘Well now we’re choosing the terms of battle!’ He was buried in cheers, and nodded approvingly as he gazed around the room. ‘It’s about having local spaces where there’s an alternative to the narrow confines of corporate consumerist culture, where we talk about things like solidarity and love and respect and community,’ he went on. ‘These aren’t words that are normally associated with politics, but they should be.’ On the same platform, a few days earlier, Corbyn himself had appeared to a pounding rendition of the White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’ and the vapour machine on full whack. ‘Through the fog and through the smoke, we can see the future,’ he yelled, and the stage scaffolding shuddered with the applause. ‘There is something happening here!’
And yet just as elected representatives were making the pilgrimage to Momentum’s pulsating political carnival, so too were Momentum members heading the other way, up towards the Hilton Metropole and on to the official conference floor. There they were sent recommendations from Momentum’s leadership via a mobile app regarding which way to vote on dozens of ballots each day, concerning everything from the topics that would be selected for ‘contemporary motion debates’ to byzantine procedural issues relating to the published agenda of the conference arrangements committee. Cans of Red Stripe were nowhere to be seen. The new politics, it seemed, involved stuff that looked quite a bit like the old. ‘These things are interconnected, and they’re all necessary,’ Laura Parker, Momentum’s national co-ordinator, told me. ‘They involve very different ways of working, and depending on your background you might find one of them very didactic, or very woolly. It’s a constant tension, and we’ll never resolve it. It’s not our job to resolve it, it’s our job to be the bridge.’ That bridge, in Momentum’s eyes at least, will eventually connect groups like Demand the Impossible, United Voices of the World, the Unity Centre and the London Renters Union to the epicentre of government, and vice versa.
But building it is a hard task, especially when many of those active in social movements have good reason not to trust organs of the state, and view the Labour Party as one such organ. The success or failure of Momentum’s project will help shape the future not just of Labour, but of institutional politics in Britain; it will help determine whether Westminster, after decades of technocratic stasis that have tipped into chaos, can be refashioned into something that citizens feel they have agency over, an entity that is meaningfully plugged into the politics of their daily existence. The great unknown is whether Momentum, throughout its fight to realise this, can maintain its proximity to institutional power without becoming institutionalised itself along the way. ‘Have you heard of the Westminster Club?’ Momentum asks in one of its wildly popular short videos, against a backdrop of foppish aristocrats enjoying a ball before a horse suddenly gallops in through one of the windows and sends the revellers flying. ‘We’re crashing the party.’ The question is, what will the horse do next?
When Santiago searches back through his earliest memories, he mostly sees picket lines. He was seven years old when Augustus Pinochet, the Chilean military dictator responsible for thousands of brutal executions, was arrested by British police in 1998 at London Bridge Hospital while recovering from surgery. An eighteen-month legal battle ensued over whether Pinochet should be extradited to Spain to face trial on charges of torture, or be released on medical grounds. ‘It kicked off every day after school,’ remembers Santiago. ‘Some days we would miss school altogether, and just head to wherever we needed to be: the Chilean embassy, Grovelands [Priory Hospital], [Pinochet’s rented house in] Virginia Water, Margaret Thatcher’s house in Belgravia. We were always moving, because we wanted to make sure that wherever Pinochet went, no matter what time of the day or night, there would be Chileans outside the window shouting at him. At that age, you don’t understand all of the politics. You just know that Pinochet was a bad guy, and that he did bad things to your family.’
Santiago’s father Jimmy was the son of a high-ranking political figure in the southern Chilean province of Ñuble under the socialist government of Salvador Allende, which was overthrown by Pinochet in a 1973 US-backed coup. Like many of Pinochet’s political enemies, he was sent to a concentration camp for two years; other members of the family were killed or disappeared. Jimmy managed to get out, though, along with his mother Miriam and a scattering of relatives. ‘They turned up at the airport and were just given different tickets,’ said Santiago. ‘None of them knew where they would be going.’ Jimmy ended up in London, and then a school in Cambridge. ‘He loved the sweets in Britain,’ smiled Santiago. ‘But he always thought it was temporary. The sad thing is that for literally decades there was always a bag packed by his bedside, so he would be ready to return home. He never did.’ Instead, Jimmy stayed and started a family. Growing up among the vibrant, politicised Latin American community in London, Santiago was weaned on stories of the old country and the injustices inflicted both there and here. He can still recall the moment in March 2000 when then Home Secretary Jack Straw announced he had overruled a final court decision to extradite Pinochet, and would allow him to walk free instead. ‘Everyone was crying,’ said Santiago. ‘I turned to my dad and said, why don’t we just call 999 and ask for the police? We can tell them that Pinochet is a bad guy and then they’ll have to go and get him. My dad told me that things didn’t work like that. It made me realise what justice was, or at least what it wasn’t.’
Fifteen years later, Santiago was working as a labourer when some curious news came through. It was the mid-2010s, and the explosion of wealth inside the capital’s property market showed no signs of abating. Santiago, who lived with his family in an Islington council flat, was put to work renovating multimillion-pound houses in chic neighbourhoods like Belsize Park. ‘You see the worst excesses from that angle,’ he told me. ‘Properties were being traded and flipped faster than we could keep up with. We’d be doing a building and halfway through the job the foreman would come in and say, “The house has just been sold, so strip out all the work you’ve done because the new owner has different ideas. Oh, but keep the spiral staircase and marble walls.”’ On one occasion, Santiago was told to take delivery of a small box of hand-painted terracotta tiles. ‘The guy explained that this box of tiles cost more than they would be paying me in a year, and that my sole job for the rest of the day was just to sit next to it, making sure it wasn’t damaged.’
The obscenity of London’s inequalities gnawed at Santiago, but he wasn’t sure what to do about it. A few years earlier he had joined Labour, but in truth he often found the party’s incessant triangulation and lack of ambition to be uninspiring, and despite paying his membership dues he’d never really engaged. Those around him took little interest in electoral politics at all; their feelings towards Westminster tended to be resentful, and minimal. ‘It was despairing,’ he said. ‘One of my biggest political wake-up calls was on the day of the 2015 general election when I was working on a building site. During the smoking break I asked all the young guys if they were voting. One by one, without exception, they all went round and explained that they would be voting for UKIP. And then one by one, without exception, they all went round and realised they hadn’t actually registered, so couldn’t vote for anyone after all. It was a microcosm of everything that was wrong.’ It was a few weeks later that Santiago heard the news. Following the resignation of Ed Miliband, the Labour Party was having a leadership contest, and a left-wing backbencher named Jeremy Corbyn had just thrown his hat into the ring. Pundits thought it unlikely that he would garner enough nominations from MPs to even make it on to the ballot paper, and the bookies dismissed him as a 100–1 outsider. Most people hadn’t heard of the man. But Santiago had. Not only did Corbyn represent one of Islington’s constituencies in Parliament, but he had also been standing alongside Santiago at nearly every vigil, every protest, and every picket line that the Chilean solidarity movement in Britain had ever staged.
As the results were announced, Santiago’s family were gathered together listening on the car radio. When Corbyn emerged victorious, with a staggering 60% of the vote, every one of them joined Labour there and then. ‘We all need to commit to this thing,’ said Jimmy. ‘Santiago, you need to be involved.’ They asked around to see if there were any volunteering opportunities available, and were eventually sent an address in Soho where, apparently, the seeds of a new political organisation, built out of the Corbyn leadership campaign, were being sown. ‘I didn’t know what it was,’ remembers Santiago. ‘The first day I turned up there, it was horrible. Four people I didn’t know in a room, arguing about things I didn’t understand: arguing in the morning, arguing over lunch, arguing when we came back in the afternoon. At one point they seemed to remember I was there, handed me a spreadsheet of local Corbyn supporter groups from the leadership election, and told me to ring them all up and ask if they wanted to become a Momentum group. “What’s a Momentum group?” I asked? “No idea,” came the reply. “Just ring them.”’ When Santiago got home, he complained to his mum that the whole thing had been a waste of time. But later that evening he received a text from one of the four founders of the new group – Adam Klug, a teacher from Birmingham. ‘I’m sorry today was so shit,’ it read. ‘We understand if you don’t want to come back, but please give us another chance.’ Fuck it, thought Santiago. One more day. Four years later, he had become one of Momentum’s senior co-ordinators as well as an elected Labour councillor in Islington.
Momentum means different things to different people, which is the source of most of its strengths and many of its weaknesses. It has been called shady, suicidally inclined, deeply sinister, neo-Marxist, neo-fascist, and a cult, labels that all reveal a great deal about the labellers, and nothing whatsoever about Momentum.2 In early 2018 the group released a loving, soft-focused video montage on social media featuring many of the insults that have been hurled in its direction by critics ranging from Labour Party grandees to Conservative Home Secretaries – which, from Momentum’s point of view, is not much of a political range at all. Alongside each quote, it showed a steadily rising membership tally, all the way up to 40,000. ‘Thank you to everyone who helped get us this far,’ the video concluded, with a heart emoji. ‘If we didn’t count, if our ideas didn’t count, no one would attack us,’ Laura Parker told me. Joe Todd, Momentum’s head of press, agrees. ‘You have to understand that if the Sunday Times, for example, do a takedown on us, then on the Monday we will email that round to our supporters, we will publicise it, we will use it,’ he explained. ‘It’s like proof of concept for what we’re aiming to do.’
So what is Momentum aiming to do? Formally, the organisation operates on three levels: it works to defend Jeremy Corbyn and the wider leftist project within the Labour Party; it campaigns to ensure that a leftist Labour government wins power nationally; and it seeks to bring together autonomous, grass-roots movements and the Labour Party as a whole. Its tactics are wide-ranging, from attempting to win positions of influence inside the Labour apparatus to training left-wing activists in and around the party, as well as coming up with innovative campaigning methods to win public support – not only during national and local elections but all year round, and on an assortment of social and political issues. ‘We are political outsiders inside a parliamentary democracy,’ says Laura. ‘To change this country you have to come through the floorboards and come through the ceiling, and we are doing both.’
For Laura, Momentum is the product of a double crisis: one of capitalism, which erupted so visibly in 2008, and one of the social-democratic left, which failed to provide a convincing narrative of why the crash occurred, or a vision of what lay beyond it – omissions which in the decade that followed wiped out support for major market-friendly, centre-left political parties across Europe. In its protean mission, and its relative flexibility about the tools and methods needed to implement it, Momentum also reflects many of the core dynamics of our political moment. A more insecure world, promising an uncertain future, and the erosion of material foundations – stable communities, stable jobs, stable homes – that might once have anchored us to certain political identities, has fuelled what the cultural theorist Jeremy Gilbert calls a new era of political ‘reversibility’, intensified by the rise of social media platforms that enable large numbers of people to swarm rapidly together around specific political flashpoints before dispersing. Swings between different parties at recent elections – Labour voters in Tilbury moving to UKIP, UKIP voters later swinging behind the Conservatives, the Conservatives haemorrhaging support to the Brexit Party, the fall and rise of the Liberal Democrats, or Scots handing the SNP a crushing victory at Westminster in 2015 only to swing back towards Labour and the Tories two years later – indicate that what were once enduring, tribal loyalties are now being replaced by political affiliations that are faster, looser and more contingent.3 Momentum’s approach – speak to anyone, convince everyone – is designed to exploit the potential of this newly febrile political environment.
But since its inception, there has been persistent infighting within Momentum over what sort of organisation it should be: either a mirror image of Labour itself, with a traditional membership structure, policymaking bodies and lots of federated local groups that each send delegates to national meetings, or a more unconstrained and agile organising platform that can be used at different times for different objectives, with direct democratic input from its supporters: occupying banks in protest at fossil-fuel financing one day, for example, and ensuring that a left-wing slate gets elected to the Yorkshire and Humber branch of Labour’s National Policy Forum the next. After a particularly intense period of turmoil in late 2016 and early 2017, marked by accusations of entryism and personal power struggles, a survey of all members on the issue helped the latter model win out, and it was quickly enshrined in a new constitution. That puts Momentum in the position of not just campaigning against what it regards as stale forms of politics, particularly within the Labour Party, but also being able to present itself as a living example of an alternative means of political organisation at a time when all traditional parties, not just Labour, are in desperate need of original thinking. Before 1997, modern general-election turnout in Britain had never dropped below 70%; since 1997, it has never exceeded it. ‘People felt aggrieved that their communities and their lifeworlds were being transformed because of political decisions that had been taken by someone, somewhere, but not by them; decisions over which they had not been consulted and for which nobody seemed to be accountable to them,’ says Gilbert of the popular disenchantment with formal politics which contributed to the EU referendum result. ‘Unless Labour can really grasp the nettle of our democratic crisis, proposing new processes and new experiments which could build, at local, regional and national levels, democratic institutions worthy of the twenty-first century, then ultimately such grievances are only going to fester.’4 At its best, Momentum is what such an institution might look like.
Not that it felt like that in the beginning. ‘We were making mistake after mistake,’ said Santiago, ‘learning everything the hard way and doing everything from scratch.’ He was splitting his week now between construction work and Momentum, and although the scale of the organisation’s aspirations was thrilling, the practicalities of getting it off the ground in the face of an unfriendly media and a largely hostile Labour Party bureaucracy took a heavy toll. ‘There would be haggling for four hours over the wording of a single tweet; meanwhile all the basics of just registering ourselves legally as a company and so on got forgotten. The senior guys were careful not to give too many people access to the contact database at first, so we wasted enormous amounts of time having to get the most simple communications signed off and sent out by those at the top.’ When I asked Santiago if it felt like the start of ‘a new kind of politics’ – Momentum’s slogan – he laughed wryly. ‘It’s easy to forget how depressing it all was in those early months. Corbyn was getting slaughtered in the press each day, we were as well, and the money we needed to build Momentum wasn’t there. At that point I think everyone was low and thought this could fail.’ Rachel Godfrey-Wood, another early volunteer who went on to become Momentum’s lead co-ordinator, also remembers that siege mentality. ‘There was a strong sense of it being all on us, because we couldn’t necessarily rely on anyone else,’ she told me. ‘It was clear that the project was in a very vulnerable position. But actually, that helped build a strong sense of collective support, a feeling of “this is it, we have to make it work”. I actually found it an incredibly positive and inspiring atmosphere.’
What turned Momentum’s fortunes around were events orchestrated over two successive summers by its political adversaries in an attempt to kill off the nascent rise of the Labour left. First, following the Brexit poll in June 2016, members of the Parliamentary Labour Party forced a vote of no confidence in Corbyn which triggered another leadership election; Corbyn won by an even bigger margin than before. Momentum was able to tap into the anti-establishment enthusiasm that had fuelled his original campaign, lobbying Labour Party members, conducting an impressive social media campaign, and staging a series of meetings and rallies; its membership rose to 20,000 people, with ten times as many registered supporters. Just under a year later, with her party posting double-digit leads in opinion polls, Theresa May went back on her word and called an early general election in the hope that it would dramatically increase her majority and wipe out Corbyn; instead Labour posted the biggest increase in its vote share since 1945, and May lost her majority. Momentum had a transformative impact on that election, and the result had a transformative effect on it in return. 100,000 people used the organisation’s ‘My nearest marginal’ online tool to find out where pro-Labour campaigning would be most effective in their area; Momentum volunteers knocked on 1.2 million doors on polling day itself, and twenty-five out of the thirty constituencies that Momentum targeted were won by Labour, an astonishing success rate for an election in which the party were widely predicted to lose existing seats rather than gain new ones.5 In the aftermath of the result, the organisation’s profile rocketed, and its political rivals stared on with a mixture of horror, fascination and envy. The Financial Times noted that Momentum had ‘outgunned the Tory press’; Business Insider claimed it had ‘won the battle for the soul of the Labour Party’; the New Statesman suggested that it was ‘the future of political organising’.6 ‘How Momentum delivered Labour’s stunning election result,’ declared a headline in the Independent, ‘and how the Tories are trying to copy it.’7
More meaningful than the bald statistics was a vitality to Momentum’s campaigning style that won plaudits across the political spectrum. Before the general election of 2017, Labour had to all intents and purposes given up on the notion of persuading citizens on the doorstep: the job of activists was reduced to merely asking select individuals who they planned to support on election day and mechanically recording the answers on a data sheet to enable an efficient ‘get out the vote’ effort when the time came. Borrowing directly from the ‘big organising’ tactics adopted by the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in America, with whom the group has developed strong links, Momentum’s alternative approach was to knock on every door and talk to every voter: an effort not just to reach people who had fallen through the cracks of Labour’s record-keeping, but also to normalise the everyday practice of having political conversations, wrenching electioneering back from a distant, professionalised realm and replanting it in the day-to-day. As Becky Bond and Zack Exley, who both worked on the Sanders bid, explain, ‘small organising’, based around promises for change that are modest at best and an expectation of popular apathy among the target population, ‘works well enough when incumbents want to maintain the status quo, but it isn’t big enough to challenge the establishment … When organisers figure out how to integrate the huge opportunities that new, social technology provides with effective peer-to-peer organising principles and practices as part of a smart, centralised plan – that’s big organising. And it’s the way we can win the political revolution.’8 At the general election of 2017, Momentum put those principles into practice, and the influence its activism model had on those who witnessed it first-hand was lasting. ‘More activists than I’ve ever seen in a constituency election were swarming around the place … Feck me, they were young!’ remembers Julian Jackson, who was based in Lewisham (a Labour stronghold) but encouraged by Momentum to campaign for the election in nearby Croydon, held by the Conservative housing minister Gavin Barwell.9 ‘We were laughing and bandying repartee between us. There were positive vibes all round. Horns honked. Passers-by demanded stickers. There was an incredible diversity of experience, life stories.’ Labour ended up winning the seat from Barwell with a majority of over 5,000 votes.
And so from strife, Momentum swelled, with membership passing the 30,000 mark. Some of its new supporters were existing Labour members, already well versed in the often labyrinthine world of party administration. Many more were from a typically younger cohort that had come of age either in the New Labour era, when the closest most left-wing activists got to party conference was a heavily barricaded protest pen, or, slightly later, from those who were at university in the early 2010s – when the coalition government’s tripling of tuition fees sparked a large, dynamic and confrontational student movement, one that dovetailed with waves of anti-austerity campaigning pioneered by imaginative new organising platforms like UK Uncut. This was a generation more familiar with direct action and being kettled by the police than it was with constituency meetings, minutes and minutiae. It was also a generation for whom the Labour Party’s leftist leadership, despite their status as upstart interlopers among mainstream political commentators, was not an entirely unknown quantity. Very few Labour MPs ever took the trouble of standing by students who occupied their academic buildings, often at great personal risk, in protest at the financialisation of their education; Corbyn and Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell, however, were among them. ‘You’ve sparked off a new generation of political activism,’ McDonnell told students at University College London when he visited their occupation, lending its radicalism a degree of institutional legitimacy – albeit from a then-marginal corner of the parliamentary party. More than half a decade later, Momentum became the means by which some of that legitimacy was paid back.
*
As the influx of members continued and the organisation’s core team outgrew its initial Soho home, so a nomadic march through unlikely office spaces began: from Soho to the Waterlily, a wedding venue and banquet hall in Stepney Green; from the Waterlily to spare rooms at the headquarters of the Transport Salaried Staff’s Association, a trade union based in Euston, which were temporarily available thanks to construction work being carried out at the station as part of Britain’s high-speed rail project; from the TSSA to a few rooms at the back of Aldgate East station; and from Aldgate to the Cypriot Centre on north London’s Green Lanes, up past the ocakbasi restaurants and the Wood Green retail ziggurats, all the way out towards Bowes Park and the thundering North Circular ring road. Officially, Momentum’s home here comprises a pair of adjoining rooms at the back. One is laid out with two rows of desks and laptops, decorated by a Meghan Markle face mask propped up in the corner and a map of Cyprus painted on the wall. The other consists of a single desk wedged in the middle of five unused snooker tables, bordered by a parade of small, dreg-filled coffee cups from the basement canteen. Unofficially, the organisation often spills out across the building’s maze of pale green hallways, and it’s not unusual for meetings to creep into the dining hall, or the music room, or the smoking terrace overlooking the car park where some of the centre’s regulars boom Greek classics from their vehicles. When I sat down with Beth Foster-Ogg, who at the age of twenty-one is the lead organiser responsible for training Momentum activists up and down the country, it was in a large, echoey teaching space featuring an old-fashioned blackboard and a preacher’s pulpit adorned with a Bible verse, ‘Blessed are they that hear the Word of God and keep it.’ Around it someone had written the words ‘compassion, care, gratitude, appreciation’. Beth mulled on the vista for a few moments, then took a photo on her phone. ‘I like that,’ she concluded, after another pause. ‘We should come to this room more often.’
In an organisation with a lot of overlapping missions on the go, Beth is uniquely placed to command a view of how they all, in theory at least, lock together. Like Santiago and Rachel, she was one of Momentum’s earliest volunteers back in those heady, halting days when it was ‘all energy, no plan’. The group formed a tight bond, she said, which helps explain why, after deciding to begin a university degree in September 2016, preceded by five weeks of backpacking around Cuba, she had an abrupt change of heart upon hearing news of the post-referendum leadership challenge to Corbyn. ‘There aren’t many places in Cuba with Wi-Fi,’ she told me. ‘It was a few days after the referendum vote, and when I found a hotspot and turned my phone on it just exploded with messages. I rang Adam [Klug, the Momentum co-founder], which cost me a fortune, and I was like, “What the fuck is going on?” He told me that it seemed likely there would be a leadership election, and I said to him, “Well if there is, then tell me, because I don’t feel like I can miss this. If it happens, I’ll come home.”’ Two days later, Beth was riding a horse through the tobacco plantations around Viñales, west of Havana, when her phone rang. It was Emma Rees, another Momentum co-founder. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You need to come home.’
For Beth, who had spent some of her teenage years working with the community-organising movement Citizens UK in her home neighbourhood of Hackney, east London, the most interesting dimension to Momentum – and its most likely path to having a real impact – was always training, and she threw herself into it with zeal. ‘One of the biggest problems we face in society is that generally we just don’t know how to relate to other people in a non-friendship or non-work context,’ she told me. ‘The core training for community organising is essentially about how to hold those conversations: how we discover other people’s interests and motivations and what we have in common, how we can channel that into projects, how people gain the confidence to take on leadership roles in their communities. And so training helps achieve specific goals, but it’s also a catalyst for lots of other good things happening. It’s about activating people.’ Beth and Momentum try to activate people in different spheres, each of which offers a useful window on to what Momentum is trying more broadly to accomplish.
The first of these spheres is Labour itself, which accounts for much of the opprobrium the organisation receives from other wings of the party and regular headlines decrying the ‘hard-left takeover’ of constituency groups. One of Momentum’s training sessions – delivered directly or, more commonly now, via Beth’s ‘train the trainer’ events that teach activists how to go back and deliver the sessions themselves in their own areas – is called ‘How the Labour Party works’: it’s billed as a guide to navigating this ‘sometimes intimidating machine’. If Parliament, as Aneurin Bevan put it, acts as a ‘a social shock absorber placed between privilege and the pressure of popular discontent’, then the Labour Party – one of the two great forces that have shaped modern parliamentary history – can hardly be immune from the charge that it too is capable of functioning in such a way as to suppress radical change. Prominent political commentator and Labour member Paul Mason argues that ‘One of the last-ditch trenches to defend the British elite has always been the Labour Party’; by equipping members with the tools necessary to influence and democratise the party’s many complex institutions, Momentum’s hope is that some of those trenches can be vaulted.10
The second sphere is general elections: Beth’s training on ‘persuasive conversations’ – providing attendees with ‘a simple framework for communicating political ideas with people who may have very different preconceptions and background knowledge’, the bedrock of the ‘big organising’ model – reached more than 3,000 people over the six-week campaign in 2017, and many others since. It’s based around a cycle of responses that Labour activists might elicit when beginning political conversations, be that on the streets in the run-up to polling day or in the pub with colleagues after work, and the best way to engage with them: acknowledging someone’s initial reaction, isolating their specific political concerns, then addressing key issues associated with them before asking for support. Not everyone will be persuaded into supporting Labour, but the hope is that at the very least stock replies to political questions – ‘I don’t trust any politicians’, ‘I’m not interested in politics’, and so on – progress towards something more insightful and potentially more empowering for all concerned. ‘How the Labour Party works’ and ‘Persuasive conversations’ are Beth’s staple training sessions; what excites her now, though, is pushing some of their techniques in new directions that travel past both Labour and Westminster.
Hamilton House is a scruffy, sparky community space cum 1970s office block that lies in the Stokes Croft area of Bristol.11 On a Saturday afternoon in August 2018, I sat in one of its upper-floor meeting rooms and watched as Beth addressed a group of about twenty current and aspiring local councillors from across southern England, and encouraged them to think about what power looked like in their communities. ‘Who are the gatekeepers in your area?’ she asked, pacing the stained carpet tiles with a casual, self-deprecating assurance. Alternating expertly between mild cajoling and intensive flipchart-scrawling, she divided the attendees into two sides and invited them to role-play a scenario which pitted community campaigners against elected councillors in a struggle over the rehousing of refugees. Most felt more comfortable in the former role; those playing the councillors seemed paralysed by bureaucratic restraints, and unsure about how far they were allowed to break them. ‘In the past, when we’ve done this, I’ve seen people shouting at each other, walking out, coming close to tears,’ Beth confided. ‘It’s about getting you to question how, as a councillor, you see yourself in relation to the community. Is the community a partner, something that is a part of you and that can direct you, or is it something separate?’ She shared an anecdote about a campaign in Hackney that she had participated in regarding unsafe housing for children, and detailed how she had tried to get the local church on board. ‘We had meetings with the priest and got nowhere,’ Beth explained. ‘One day as I was leaving, the woman who serves the tea and coffee at the church came up to me and said, “Why are you bothering with the priest? I’ll sort this out for you.” That woman knew all the parents, she knew all the kids through the Sunday school, and she knew how to tell the priest what to do as she had been working with him for twenty years. She was the real gatekeeper to that institution, and she had relational power there. When you map out power in your community, think of people like her.’
At Beth’s instruction, each of the attendees drew stick figures on pieces of paper and used them to identify the building blocks of their personal stories. In the wrong hands this could have lapsed into a David Brent tribute act, but Beth was careful to avoid any hint of corporate away-day cringe. ‘Some commercial training sessions are all about teaching you how to project your voice when speaking in public, or how to use confident hand gestures,’ she said. ‘But the best way to persuade someone of anything is to tell them your personal story. No one can argue with your personal story, and it’s something that people remember, so draw on it.’ I sat with a small huddle of Labour councillors, all of whom were very much part of the political minority in their respective regions, and watched as they wrote down sentences describing their values, their heritage, and their hobbies and interests, before linking these personal elements to sources of local power that lay outside of formal council structures. Among them was a twenty-six-year-old woman who represented a deprived ward near the racecourse in Newbury, one of the most affluent towns in Europe; every other member of the parish council that she now sat on was male, and over fifty. ‘You have this feeling of powerlessness when you’re surrounded by white-haired Tories,’ observed another woman, who had recently won a seat on the Conservative-dominated borough council in Worthing. ‘What I’ve realised, and what this training has helped accentuate for me, is that there’s all this power that resides outside the town hall, and that we need community activism to change things.’ She told us that she had been forming a tentative relationship with Acorn, the communal tenants’ union. ‘We need partners like that to stir up trouble with,’ she concluded. ‘In a nice way.’
Finding partners to stir up trouble with, in a nice way, could be the unofficial motto of Momentum. It’s especially important for those in the movement who, like Beth, are interested in stuff that currently happens outside of the Labour Party – the solidarities formed and battles waged inside workplaces, schools, universities, hospitals, housing estates, small towns and city neighbourhoods across Britain – and want to embed some of that within the party’s internal infrastructure and sense of purpose. ‘My life mission within Momentum is to build an activist base that is highly educated, skilled and engaged, and just does things,’ Beth told me. ‘It’s about politicising people but not in the sense of getting them to just vote Labour or even jump on a bus down to London to join a protest. Politics is a mum having a picnic in their local park with other mums from the area, and talking about how to change things. It’s about people becoming activists who are already embedded in their communities. It’s basically about becoming an active citizen, which is something that as a generation we don’t have a lot of experience of.’
That third sphere of Momentum training that Beth was concentrating on in Bristol – local councillors – is really about finding a way to reach across into a fourth sphere, a far more amorphous one, where people are organising politically in ways that have nothing directly to do with either democratising Labour or winning elections, people like the ones already mentioned in this book. Most of Momentum’s members have lived through thirteen years of Labour government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and recognise that having a Labour prime minister is simply not enough if your aim is to build a new kind of politics; according to Momentum’s internal mission statement, the group cannot hope to ‘transform Britain only through policy at the top – we also need a direct, bottom-up politics which empowers individuals to take power for themselves and make a difference in their communities now’.12 And across the country, there are already projects under way by local Momentum groups that in their scope and structure bear more resemblance to a movement like the London Renters Union or a political education programme like Demand the Impossible than they do to other organisations traditionally affiliated to national political parties. In Lancaster, for example, Momentum members have founded a club that enables locals to access affordable food that would otherwise have been thrown away. In Doncaster, Momentum has thrown its weight behind campaigns against exploitative loan practices by the ‘rent-to-own’ appliance retailer Bright House, and in Chorlton, as Beth Redmond recounted in Chapter 1, local Momentum members are now organising film nights, football games and karaoke – a recognition of the fact that politics is culture and, as Raymond Williams put it, ‘Culture is ordinary: that is where we must start.’13 Momentum has launched a mass email initiative enabling members to share campaigning advice, supported Picturehouse cinema workers fighting for a living wage in south London, and collaborated with the food workers’ union, the BFAWU, on its McStrike protests; Momentum’s video on the subject, in which McDonald’s staff complained of inadequate first-aid procedures and revealed the burns they’d received while cooking burgers, was watched by over 2 million people including a quarter of the company’s UK workforce.14
Digital campaigning – short films, viral social media posts, comic memes – is a big part of how Momentum tries to intervene in broader ‘movement-building’ issues, be that confronting the rise of the far right (Momentum recently released a video charting the history of the ‘43 Group’, for example, a movement of Jewish ex-servicemen who broke up Oswald Mosley’s fascist rallies in the late 1940s) or challenging different forms of social discrimination. Anti-Semitism, an issue where the response of the party’s leadership has been poor, is a particular focus. ‘The first three to five seconds are the most important, because you’ve got the whole Internet to compete with,’ said Paul Nicholson, who makes up one half of Momentum’s video team alongside Emile Charlaff; they describe themselves as being among the most apolitical staffers in the office. ‘But what really pushes the film, much more than how nice or pretty it looks, is the argument. You want people to connect with that strong idea and then feel the urge to share it with friends and say: “You see? This is what I’m talking about. It’s this.”’ With the help of a volunteer database of supportive production experts, the pair have scored some spectacular viewing figures: during the general-election campaign, one video – an imagined conversation between a parent and daughter in the ‘Tory Britain of 2030’ that culminates with the child asking, ‘Daddy, why do you hate me?’ – was watched 8 million times alone, and on average their clips reach about 11 million unique users of Twitter and Facebook every month.15 ‘We’re offering people a tool to help them express their political opinions, rather than trying to force our message down their throats,’ said Emile. ‘What made me happiest with that particular video,’ added Paul, ‘was that people were sharing it by tagging their parents and adding comments like “That’s why I’m voting Labour, wow.”’
A few days after meeting Emile and Paul at the Cypriot Centre, I travelled down to the banks of the River Lea, near London’s Olympic Stadium, to watch them shoot their latest video. This one wasn’t about Labour, Westminster or elections; instead its subject was to be transphobia, and a comparison between the frenzied discourse around trans issues now and the moral panic about gay rights whipped up several decades earlier. Many of Momentum’s films rely on amateur actors – the young star from that ‘Daddy, why do you hate me?’ clip was the flower girl at Paul’s wedding – but this one was being anchored by a celebrity face: Juno Dawson, the bestselling young-adult fiction writer who came out as a transgender woman in 2015. Juno carried a salad packed inside a Haribo box (‘My dad used to work for Bassetts, so I do have a crazy sweet tooth,’ she admitted), and picked at it thoughtfully on a canal-side bench as she read through the script and tried out different tones of voice for the narration. ‘We’re going for mildly exasperated,’ suggested Paul. ‘Imagine you’re speaking to your slightly racist grandma.’ I was handed a light reflector to hoist aloft and we attempted a few takes, each of which was swiftly interrupted by either passing cyclists, passing boats, inquisitive security guards or strong gusts of wind. ‘It’s a gentle pace,’ said Emile. ‘Sure,’ nodded Juno. ‘A dawdle.’ She began another walk to camera and delivered the opening lines: ‘With the current debate around trans issues, is anyone else getting a sense of déjà vu? Like haven’t we done all this before? For years there was scaremongering about gay people. That they would “come for your children”. That it was a mental illness. That if we let gay people marry, next we’d be marrying animals. And don’t those people look ridiculous now? Same-sex couples can get married and – spoiler alert! – the world didn’t end …’ Juno’s hair blew into her face, and so she stopped and asked Paul if they were supposed to be aiming for the reverse-Beyoncé look. ‘That’s fine, we’ve got it,’ he said. ‘Let’s finish off the rest of the script up on the bridge.’
Later, when I saw the finished video, I was impressed.16 Juno’s lines had been spliced with a rapid-fire showreel of snippets from talk shows, news programmes and popular culture: Question Time, Groundhog Day, Margaret Thatcher and Homer Simpson all made an appearance. ‘Can we not waste time creating material for, you know, those montages that we’ll look back on in twenty years’ time and think “what the hell were they thinking?”’ she asked viewers, with not a hair out of place. The film then cut to a red-faced Piers Morgan fulminating about whether recognising trans identities was equivalent to him declaring that he was an elephant and going off to live in London Zoo. Coming in at just over two minutes, the whole thing was short, funny and persuasive; perhaps most importantly, it was also grounded in a recognisably online visual culture that was instantly familiar to its target audience. ‘Often, TV adverts don’t transfer well to the Internet,’ said Emile. ‘We’re coming from the starting point of “what would a good video on this topic look like if it was made for social media?”’ Within a few months of its release, Juno’s film had been watched nearly half a million times on each of Facebook and Twitter.
The problem is that, video viewing figures aside, measuring Momentum’s impact on the battle against transphobia, or, for that matter, on food poverty in Lancashire, loan sharks in Doncaster, or any of the ‘movement-building’ side of the organisation’s activities, is a great deal harder than counting the number of seats they’ve won on Labour’s National Executive Committee or the votes their motions have secured at party conference. Those relatively intangible goals of organising around and intervening in broader issues – of finding partners to make trouble with – are always in danger of being sidelined in favour of immediate challenges which are more quantifiable, and seemingly more urgent. ‘If you don’t do the long, slow-build movement stuff, if you don’t try to spread that cultural hegemony, then when a future left-wing government marches to the top of its hill and turns around, it will find that no one is there to defend it,’ says Laura Parker. ‘So education and movement-building isn’t separate from our ultimate purpose, it’s part of that purpose. The thing is that hegemony is like tomorrow. It never arrives.’
In the late nineteenth century, the modern labour movement recognised that progressive politics had to stretch beyond the confines of a monthly meeting or occasional election campaign: more than a hundred years ago cycling groups, rambling clubs and socialist choirs all formed part of the radical firmament.17 But these initiatives were often paternalistic rather than democratic, a trend that deepened with the development of local Labour groups into highly tuned polling engines. ‘On the whole,’ argues Tom Blackburn, a Momentum member in Manchester, ‘Labour’s constituency parties (with honourable, if usually isolated exceptions) have served primarily as narrowly focused electoral machines for getting out the vote – very often controlled with a stifling iron grip by MPs and their allies – rather than taking on the mantle of organising and solidarity work among the local community … and addressing how working and marginalised people might free themselves from the fetters that constrain their personal development and deny them the opportunity to meet their full human potential.’18 Decades of late-capitalist logic and many years of austerity have served to atomise communities and intensify those fetters, but for many on the left, Momentum – forever seduced by relatively more straightforward tasks – is not doing enough to reverse the trend. ‘I came from a social movement background, not an internal Labour Party one, and I’m still very social-movementy,’ Santiago told me. ‘We need to guard against being more and more internal. All of the crises over the last few years – the general election, the leadership elections, Labour committee votes, the really antagonistic internal debate over how Momentum is organised – they have all forced us in that direction. Those things always feel so precarious and down to the wire, and so we’re always being pressured to turn inwards.’ While lavishing effusive praise on the digital team, he flagged up Juno’s transphobia video as a perfect example – not of Momentum reaching out into an ambitious new world of grass-roots organising, but of the group’s limits being revealed. ‘We’ve become excellent at doing certain things, like putting out funny, snappy videos that engage people on difficult topics, and so the temptation is to keep doing it – we’ve got that bit nailed,’ Santiago argued. ‘But it’s on the surface level, and the question is how do we do the more time-consuming job of actually building links with the communities who are leading these discussions, how do we get to the point where, if a community has a problem, the Labour Party becomes their first port of call? It’s really difficult, and at the moment I think nobody has the answer.’
A praetorian guard for Corbyn’s inner circle, or a transformational outrider, enlivening politics from below?19 ‘Momentum is the consequence of the tension between those two things,’ says Rachel. ‘Without it, we wouldn’t be Momentum.’ But maintaining a balance isn’t easy, and the nearer the Labour left inches towards formal power, the more often that tension will reach boiling point. In 2018 Momentum released a video calling for more police officers on the streets, a response to Labour’s leadership announcing that reversing austerity-driven police cuts would be a key plank of its policy programme. On the ‘social-movementy’ side of Momentum’s support base, where experiences of the police have often been marked by racism and violence and where many believe a drastic reduction in the policing of marginalised communities is necessary, there was immense disquiet; after a noisy backlash, Momentum quietly deleted the film. In Haringey, London, where Momentum now dominates the Labour-controlled council, campaigners fighting to save the Latin Village at Seven Sisters were infuriated when council leader Joseph Ejiofor – who also sits on the National Co-ordinating Group, Momentum’s highest organ of authority – insisted that the demolition and redevelopment of the market area would continue as planned, and refused to consider an alternative community blueprint for the area. Local activists, many of whom are members of Momentum, demanded to know why the organisation’s most prominent faces seemed to be maintaining a conspicuous silence on the matter.
‘Some of the most exciting ground-level activism right now is rooted in opposition to state logics of power, and those people are not excited about Corbyn or Labour,’ says Ewa Jasiewicz, a writer, union organiser and campaigner involved in an array of social movements and who has also worked with Momentum; she describes herself as having a ‘foot in both camps’. ‘It’s problematic because there’s a danger that Momentum just comes to be seen as this golden treasure trove of activist capital or a supply line for disputes, something that can be called upon whenever bodies are needed for a picket line. But that’s not how you build relationships, it’s not how you organise.’ Ewa fears that with its strong links to the Labour Party and heavy focus on internal reform, Momentum may at best have enabled a sort of fast-track route for activists into representative politics, which is not the same thing as helping to reshape politics from the bottom up. ‘The kind of community organising Momentum talks about is already happening, independently of Momentum or Labour, and what it needs is solidarity, not co-optation by a political party; once something becomes branded by an institution, institutional needs will always dominate,’ she told me. ‘Momentum says it wants to bring the grass roots up to the seat of power. But if you don’t trust that seat of power in the first place, that doesn’t feel very encouraging.’
That last point goes to the heart of a bigger question facing both Momentum and the party it is trying to transform: just how renegade does Labour’s leftist leadership really want to be, and will it prove renegade enough for Momentum’s supporters – never mind those grass-roots activists outside of Momentum that the organisation hopes to connect with? Current evidence is mixed. When Labour’s manifesto for the 2017 general election was unveiled, the Institute for Fiscal Studies described its proposals as the most radical tax and spending reforms in more than seven decades. The research outfit claimed that Jeremy Corbyn’s wing of the party was offering not just an alternative to austerity, but ‘something much, much more dramatic than that – an alternative to the form of market capitalism practised in this country for at least the past forty years’.20 This was true, although how profoundly different that alternative looked depended very much on your starting point: scrapping university tuition fees, renationalising railways, and raising taxes on corporations and high-earners was radical by the standards of Britain in the late 2010s, but not by the standards of many other European countries in the late 2010s, nor indeed by those of Britain itself before the 1980s. In some ways, the manifesto’s fairly unremarkable social-democratic policy suggestions exposed nothing more than the radicalism of late-capitalist norms; as Lorna Finlayson, a lecturer in philosophy at Essex University, contends, ‘the significance of Corbynism has less to do with Corbyn or his politics than with what it discloses about the political system in which we live, widening an already growing gap between the reality of that system and the story it tells about itself’.21 Arguably the most militant aspect of Corbyn’s election campaign was the one he identified himself in his 2017 Brighton conference speech, when he observed that the political centre of gravity ‘isn’t fixed or unmovable, nor is it where the establishment pundits like to think it is. It shifts as people’s expectations and experiences change and political space is opened up.’
But plenty on the Labour left, and Momentum, want more: not merely a return to social democracy, but a new politics, as revolutionary in its own way as Thatcher’s disembowelling of social democracy was forty years ago. Partially foreshadowed in ‘Alternative Models of Ownership’, a report unveiled by shadow chancellor John McDonnell a few days after the 2017 vote, this new politics has more ambitious components: a shift away from financialisation towards a more co-operative economy, for example, an embrace of automation in the workplace, and the equitable distribution of subsequent productivity gains through the means of a shorter working week and a universal basic income.22 Some have called this ‘incremental utopianism’: an attempt to shape the future rather than to ‘resurrect a discredited pre-Thatcherite corporatist past’.23 These kinds of forward-looking ideas, whether one agrees with them individually or not, should be a vital part of our public discourse as Britain looks beyond late capitalism, as should the question of whether such transformations can be achieved within our traditional political system at the hands of traditional political actors – or whether the institutions and participants of formal politics in Britain need to be reimagined from the ground up. But despite commentators often asserting that the rise of Corbyn since 2015 was solely a function of him being in the right place at the right time, implying correctly that deeper socio-historical forces are at work here, most media coverage of the Labour left rarely finds room for any such debate. We get told a great deal about Corbyn’s allotment, his past associations with foreign figureheads, and his sartorial choices. We hear much less about the extent of his political aspirations, and – more importantly – the aspirations of those who propelled him to the leadership.
Despite being a parliamentarian, Corbyn’s own roots lie in grass-roots campaigning: from anti-apartheid activism to the Palestine solidarity movement, as well as the protests against Latin American dictatorships that brought him into contact with a young Santiago all those years ago. In 1983 he was elected as representative for Islington North and swiftly set up shop in the caretaker’s flat above a former co-operative music hall named the Red Rose on Seven Sisters Road, which hosted bawdy music and comedy nights; in order to reach his office, Corbyn often had to jostle his way through a group of drunks to climb the stairs.24 He gradually gained a reputation as an outspoken backbencher, but was always at his most comfortable far away from the bars and benches of SW1A, ideally traipsing the back alleys and council estates of his constituency and getting waylaid by impromptu encounters with residents. ‘Every single person you meet knows something you don’t,’ he once claimed, and that mindset has persisted throughout his ascension to leader of the opposition, even as the trappings of state – the Privy Council, weekly knockabouts at Prime Minister’s Questions, state banquets with the queen – have rarefied his professional surroundings beyond recognition.25 Of the two occasions upon which I’ve met Corbyn for any significant length of time – once by chance when he knocked on the door of my rented flat while canvassing for the 2018 local elections, and the other when we sat down for a scheduled interview in his Westminster office – it was the first that made him far more comfortable. Having walked up three flights of stairs bathed in flickering municipal disco light, he bumbled into our tiny living room with no introduction and cheerfully plopped himself down on a manky second-hand chair matted with cat hair, complimenting everything and politely ignoring both the large damp patch above his head and a lingering smell of weed. His wife, Laura Alvarez, who owns a fairtrade coffee business, followed soon after, and the pair plunged into an easy, free-ranging discussion about Middle Eastern politics, social care and the British media while glugging cups of tea. Corbyn seemed relaxed and entirely without airs, graces or awkwardness, a long way from the tetchy mood that sometimes characterises his broadcast interviews. Whereas most politicians, especially very senior ones, have to perform a clumsy, ersatz authenticity when meeting members of the public in their own realms, I got the sense that if Corbyn had the choice he would always rather be here: enquiring about the pot plants and scribbling earnestly in his notebook, rather than being stuck in the House of Commons where the ambience and rituals reek of institutional power on somebody else’s terms.
A few weeks later, when we sat down at his desk in the Norman Shaw buildings overlooking Victoria Embankment, Corbyn was in high spirits. In the news that day, the grilled-chicken chain Nando’s was furiously denying reports that the Conservative Party had been planning to offer young supporters a discount card for their restaurants in an attempt to compete with Labour’s membership growth, prompting much mirth on social media.26 ‘I can officially confirm that Nando’s haven’t offered us a sweetheart deal,’ he grinned, passing me a bowl of fruit. ‘The Nando’s question is now closed.’ He leaned back in his chair and grew more serious. ‘It’s about offering young people some hope,’ he told me, when I asked why younger demographics were overwhelmingly abandoning the Tories and embracing Labour under his leadership. ‘I grew up in an age where I had free healthcare, free education, and most of my generation never had any real concerns about housing – we thought “well, we’ll get somewhere”. We didn’t feel that housing was something that we would never be able to sort out. I now meet forty-year-olds who wonder where they are going to live.’ Corbyn’s Labour Party, he told me, was one that recognised not just the limits of market forces but the corrosion their logics can induce. ‘I don’t use the words “competition in education”, I use the words “inclusivity in education”, as with health and other things, and that is a deliberate and very conscious choice,’ he said. ‘New Labour was very much about the Third Way, which was essentially a gigantic accommodation with financial interests.’ He insisted that making an accommodation of that sort shrinks the scope of political possibility. ‘We don’t triangulate. We don’t spend our whole time sitting around working out some mathematical equation: if I hack off X, that will please Y, which will irritate Z, but Z will support me because I’ve hacked off X,’ Corbyn explained. ‘We’ve managed to reach beyond the notion that it’s all about managerial ideas.’ I asked him for examples of how a new political settlement, orientated away from perpetual competition, would feel different to those who lived under it, and after running through a fairly predictable checklist of investment, jobs and economic progress, Corbyn’s eyes lit up with genuine enthusiasm. ‘Music, art, dance, theatre,’ he concluded, naming aspects of our lives that can, or in his opinion should, exist beyond the market. ‘Human beings are naturally inquisitive and creative. And [at the moment] we stifle it out of them.’
It’s a line that could have been lifted straight from Momentum’s mission statement, or the programme for The World Transformed. Given that Momentum emerged out of Corbyn’s initial leadership campaign, it’s no surprise that the organisation’s belief in pushing politics beyond Westminster – indeed beyond conventional electoral strategies at all – should harmonise so closely with Corbyn’s vision, nor that both are rooted in that ‘big organising’ model of change. When I asked him about this, Corbyn reminisced on his teenage years in the 1960s devoted to the painstaking production of anti-racism literature. ‘I would stay up all night at home with a hand duplicator, and I could produce 2,000 or 3,000 leaflets, or more than that if you halved the paper,’ he said. ‘I would hand-guillotine them after I’d rolled them off the machine, or put them through twice if it was a two-sided leaflet, then keep adding in the ink. If I was really good, I could probably turn out 6,000 leaflets overnight. And we’d then go and deliver them, or give them out in shops or pubs, as our way of mobilising people. Now I have 1.7 million Twitter followers.’ He looked out the window, and shook his head incredulously. ‘Today we have a combination of cutting-edge social media and public rallies which would have been pretty much the norm in the nineteenth century,’ he smiled. ‘We can organise a demonstration, tweet it out, and people come.’
Elliot Dugdale grew up in Chippenham, the same Wiltshire town in which Corbyn was born and spent his early years. The twenty-six-year-old found it a politically lonely place, with ‘no visible trade union movement, none of those institutions of the left that connect you with the cultures of socialism and the labour movement’. Like Santiago, Elliot joined the Labour Party in the pre-Corbyn era because he thought it would be a transmission line to radical action, particularly regarding the iniquities of the financial crisis. ‘I couldn’t have been more wrong,’ he told me. Instead, in common with so many of those at the heart of Britain’s new left politics, Elliot found his political home in the student movement of 2010, and the way it brought together different strands of progressive thinking, organising outside of party politics. ‘There was a lack of dogmatism, a tendency to experimentation,’ he remembers. ‘Politically, people aren’t satisfied any more with standing aside and letting other people do things on their behalf.’ Today, Elliot is one of the main organisers behind TWT, and views it as a means of not just exposing ordinary citizens to the formal Labour Party, but also exposing the formal Labour Party to ordinary citizens. ‘TWT is about raising the collective knowledge of our movement through people coming together and engaging with each other,’ he claimed. ‘But it’s also about ensuring that ideas generated at the grass roots have a forum in which they can be raised with those who have power and authority, who are actually making policy decisions. If we do an event on housing, for example, and we have a big speaker from the shadow Cabinet involved, we will put them on a platform with people who know about housing in Britain today – and that doesn’t just mean housing experts, it means those who are living the reality of housing and are involved in struggles on the ground around it, because they have knowledge that academics won’t. So it’s a political education event, but the education runs both ways.’ Hope Worsdale, another senior member of the TWT team, told me that the festival pointed towards a politics that was less transactional. ‘For years party politics has been dominated by a certain way of doing things that is all about votes, and about data sheets, and about short-term election cycles,’ she said. ‘Something different like this is quite alien to people, but if we don’t build a grass-roots movement that creates and sustains a new political culture, then ultimately there is no point in Labour winning.’
Does Corbyn see things the same way? Recently, in a huge nod to Momentum, the party announced that it was setting up a ‘community campaign unit’ to help organise political movements at the local level, and funding it to the tune of several million pounds. The hope, explained Labour official Richard Power Sayeed, was that eventually ‘when you think of Labour, you won’t imagine rows of MPs on green leather benches, or a smartly suited minister chatting to a reporter. Instead, you’ll think of activists reinvigorating their estate’s tenants association, while others organise their co-workers and stand with them on picket lines.’27 Under his watch, Corbyn told me, ‘the Labour Party will increasingly become involved in a lot of things that we would never have been involved in before.’ He pointed out that the party was established ‘as a coalition between intellectual socialists, community activists and trade unions’, and declared proudly that ‘Labour today is a mass organisation in a way it hasn’t been for a very long time.’
But for all that, there remains the contradiction at the heart of the party’s messaging regarding just how radical a Labour left government might be: is it a ‘common sense’ revival of social-democratic principles, or something bigger? Momentum, which at the time of writing has fifteen paid members of staff and derives 95% of its income from members, is trying to tip the balance in ways that go well beyond Corbyn, McDonnell and the individuals surrounding them, ensuring that Labour remains a vehicle for radical economic and political transformation – for something more than centrist consensus with a kinder face – long after the current generation of leaders have departed. In May 2019, it announced that for the first time it would start directing its campaigning muscle towards persuading senior figures to adopt more ambitious pledges in its next manifesto, including a green new deal for the economy; ‘Radical and transformational policy can’t only come from the halls of Westminster,’ a spokesperson for the organisation insisted.28 Their pressure may be paying off. When Conservative chancellor Philip Hammond warned that Labour was an ‘existential challenge to our economic model’, for example, Corbyn responded that Hammond was ‘absolutely right’.29 But while common-sense economic reforms are achievable through Parliament and politics as we know it, a truly existential challenge to our economy, and the wider social and cultural structures that underpin it, will not be. Labour should be ‘in and against the state’, John McDonnell has argued, implying both confrontation with institutional power and at least some adaptation to it. Where that adaptation leaves Momentum – and TWT, and all the social movements from which Labour’s young left flank have arisen, and which, as Ewa Jasiewicz pointed out, remain wary of state institutions and the hierarchies and bureaucracies they wield – remains to be seen. Will a meaningfully ‘new kind of politics’ ever really be possible, after all?
*
On a bright Saturday lunchtime in spring 2019, a couple of blocks north of the Synergy Centre, two people in their mid-twenties climbed the facade of a Barclays bank branch on North Street, and used string and gaffer tape to affix a large black banner across the entrance. On it were printed the words ‘STOP FUNDING FOSSIL FUELS’ and a bastardised version of the Barclays logo – a reference to the fact that Barclays is the worst bank in Europe when it comes to environmental finance, funding £67 billion worth of fossil-fuel projects over the previous two years alone.30 A staff member scurried out to investigate, peered up at the banner, and then swiftly withdrew back into the building, locking the large double-fronted glass doors behind her as she went. The banner-hangers, who were both members of the climate action movement Extinction Rebellion, let out a cheer, as did an older man with a drum set who had maintained a faintly ominous beat throughout proceedings, and a young girl who was dancing with no little panache to the beat and helping scrawl chalk slogans on the pavement. So too did Amelia, a musician, teacher and single mother, and an organiser with a nearby branch of Momentum.31 Amelia had driven a bunch of ‘Stop Funding Climate Change’ placards over from Hove for the event; the leaflets which were supposed to accompany them, she explained bitterly, were currently marooned at a Parcelforce depot in Crawley. That misfortune aside – ‘Bloody privatisation,’ she muttered, with feeling – Amelia seemed delighted. ‘To be honest I didn’t know if they would turn up today,’ she confided, gesturing at the Extinction Rebellion activists who were now eagerly engaging in conversation with curious passers-by and disgruntled Barclays customers searching out a side entrance. ‘All these kids, they’ve put us to shame. They’re the real leaders.’ She told me that when she had first suggested partnering with Extinction Rebellion on an action like this, some other Labour members had looked askance at her, arguing that the upcoming local elections were a higher priority. Amelia snorted. ‘We have to do both,’ she retorted. ‘There’s no point fighting to get socialist candidates on the council if the whole planet is about to go up in smoke.’
As we spoke, other Barclays branches in more than thirty towns and cities across the country, from Edinburgh to Falmouth, Norwich and Merthyr Tydfil, were being similarly breached, bedecked and occupied by an alliance consisting of Momentum, Extinction Rebellion, and People and Planet, a network of anti-poverty and pro-climate-justice student campaigns. In Salford, activists staged a ‘die-in’ outside the Barclays entrance; in Plymouth, protesters sang a rewritten version of the Supremes’ ‘Stop! In the Name of Love’ as they set up camp at the front door. ‘Who would have thought you’d ever see these guys together on the streets,’ mused Jake Woodier to me in Brighton, with a satisfied smile. Jake is the campaign co-ordinator for the UK Student Climate Network, the organisers behind a rolling wave of walkouts by schoolchildren to demonstrate against climate change, and he had spent a lot of time thinking about the nexus between institutional politics and direct action. ‘Bankrupt Climate Change’ was Momentum’s biggest effort to date at showing it could operate in both domains and serve as a useful bridge between them, and the Extinction Rebellion activists I spoke to were suitably impressed – especially by a public intervention from John McDonnell the previous day urging all Labour members to participate. ‘The shadow chancellor of the exchequer just called on people to occupy branches of one of Britain’s biggest banks,’ reflected one of them.32 ‘I mean, that’s quite something when you think about it. Labour’s climate policies are not good enough, but perhaps they’re moving in the right direction, and you’ve got to salute Momentum for helping to make that happen.’ But he went on to tell me that he was not a member of the Labour Party and still refused to see Labour politics or Westminster as an effective route to change. ‘I don’t think they’ll ever be as radical as we need them to be, and I’m not going to spend the limited time I’ve got in the evenings trying to move pro-Corbyn motions in my local Labour Party,’ he said. Amelia, for her part, insisted that a Labour left government was exactly what change looked like. ‘For me, the purpose of Momentum remains the same as it was on day one, which is very simply to put JC in Number 10,’ she told me. ‘That has to be the ultimate goal.’
As things fall apart, Momentum’s greatest potential lies in proving that politics can flourish in the gap between Amelia and the Extinction Rebellion activist; that alongside the inhabitants of all the other crevices neglected by market liberalism, the denizens of this one can play a leading role in the fight to remake the future. Their aim is not to convince social movements that institutional politics is the answer, nor to persuade Labour devotees that elections are meaningless, because neither claim stands up to any scrutiny. It is to retool everyone within those two poles in order to help them better navigate a new political landscape, one in which the distinctions between them will perhaps feel less significant than they do now. Along the way, like a horse bursting through a window and landing in the middle of a genteel get-together, they hope to illuminate the absurdity of what came before. ‘Down by the seaside,’ wrote journalist Marie Le Conte, in a piece about the moderate, centrist Labour politicians in Brighton who found themselves left behind in the shadows of TWT’s energy and ideas, ‘these MPs and fellow travellers … had their drinks receptions and cosy dinners, and made peace with their own irrelevance.’33 Elliot, the TWT organiser, said that coverage of the festival in the traditional media is growing more positive every year, as journalists on the party-conference circuit adjust to a new reality. ‘The fact that it’s not just the same familiar seven faces on a stage doing the same thing again and again with complimentary wine at the back, most of them haven’t seen anything like it in their lives before,’ he told me. ‘They see the excitement at our events, and the numbers, and the fact that it’s this place where grass-roots activism is being platformed, and they just think “what the fuck is going on!”, and that works for us. It helps send the message that the centre is dead, and it won’t be coming back in the way that it was.’
At the London Marathon in 2019, a runner dressed as Big Ben got stuck as he reached the finish line. A video clip on BBC News, which lasts for forty-two painful seconds, shows volunteers attempting to bend and manoeuvre the man’s outsized costume under the last set of overhead advertising hoardings, as the Palace of Westminster’s famous spire smacks repeatedly, and futilely, against a plastic board. For the past few years, the real Big Ben has been clad in scaffolding, while the House of Commons is intermittently disrupted by water leaking into the chamber; as our old politics crumbles, the gods are writing the metaphors for us. ‘The kids who are walking out of school on climate strikes have a hugely radical understanding of the way that politics works, and they recognise that our democratic processes and structures as they stand are designed to uphold the status quo,’ said Jake. ‘These are the children of the financial crisis, who know that they will be worse off than their parents, know that they’ll never own a home, and know that on current trends they will probably live to see the end of humanity. So for them, for us, politics is not a game, it’s reality, and that’s reflected in the way we organise – relentlessly, radically, as if our lives depend on it.’ For Momentum, ‘a new kind of politics’ must mean a politics that speaks to the generation Jake is talking about; anything less would fly in the face of simple, pragmatic common sense.