No, Canary, a launch date hasn’t been set for Labour Coup 2.0

I draw your attention to the disclosure note at the end of this article.

I wrote yesterday about a piece of drivel on the Canary purporting that the pre-arranged results of the US presidential election had accidentally been released by a television station in Tennessee. This morning, one Carlyn Harvey has published an article at the Canary titled “A launch date for the Corbyn coup 2.0 has just been fixed, and guess who’s leading the charge?”.

Harvey’s article isn’t as bad as Gay’s article yesterday, but it is still pretty poor. I do wonder, though, if the line being taken in this article — that there is another coup plot coming to a head against Jeremy Corbyn — is going to be received more favourably than yesterday’s suggestion that the presidential elections were being rigged in favour of Hillary Clinton.

Assume the brace position as we find out whether Marcus Brutus was invited to give the keynote at the Rome First conference in late 45 B.C.

The group Labour First has announced the launch date of its Corbyn coup 2.0. And the keynote speaker at that launch event is none other than Labour Deputy Leader Tom Watson.

What will follow in the article is a sort of syllogism. Labour First are holding a meeting. Labour First don’t like Corbyn. Tom Watson has removed leaders before. The only possible conclusion is that Tom Watson is going to give a speech at Labour First’s conference about removing Corbyn in a coup.

It’s going to be a long day, isn’t it?

Labour First has not announced the launch date of a coup†. It has announced the date of its annual conference. The news here seems to be ‘moderate‡ Labour MP attends gathering of moderate‡ Labour members’.

In fact, the group is so keen to get its ‘moderate’ machinery cranked up that it moved the planned event from 2017 to 26 November 2016. Just so it can “hit the ground running in the New Year”.

Good grief! An organisation being organised! Yes, Labour First has goals for the Labour Party; it has a view of what it should do and how it can win elections.

The next section of the Canary’s article is called ‘A Party Within a Party’. It’ll be of no surprise that the Canary doesn’t like the moderate‡ part of the Labour Party, so I won’t belabour the point.

And on 3 November, the Wirral Momentum Twitter account posted the latest email Akehurst had sent out to Labour First members:

I’d like you to think about that for a moment. The author, who presumably has pretensions to journalism about the Labour party, follows or reads the Wirral Momentum Twitter account, but has not signed up to the Labour First email list. This almost bothers me more than the Canary’s politics; it’s the low standards of journalism. You can sign up to Labour First’s email list and you can sign up to Momentum’s email list without endorsing either, but because you want to know what’s going on in the Labour party. You could also take a look at Grassroots Labour, Compass, Progress, Labour Together, or the other groups in and around the Labour Party and movement.

I’d suggest — I’d hope! — that someone who wants to cover what’s going on in the Labour Party would be keeping an eye on groups like this. I appreciate that not everyone has the access that a newspaper with offices in London will do, and so they may not have the inside track. Indeed, I think I’m right in saying that part of the Canary’s pitch is that they’re not part of the traditional elites that run the country. That means that they have even more need to do the boring, unglamourous spadework of journalism: trudging through email lists and press releases and Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. Instead, this article gives the distinct impression of the writer and the outlet having found something that meets with their biases that acts as a nice peg on which to hang a hat.

Onto the content of the email. The full text is helpfully available from the aforementioned Wirral Momentum’s Twitter account.

He also advised members on Constituency Labour Party (CLP) meetings. He urged CLPs with more than 500 members to opt for “a traditional delegate-based General Committee structure” for meetings. Rather than ‘all-member meetings’.

In his email, Akehurst claimed that selecting delegates to represent the CLP is a more “realistic” option for those with a larger number of members.

Outrageous. It may make more sense to have smaller, local meetings with a reporting structure than to have meetings of five hundred people at once.

It may be (only may; I don’t know either way) that Akehurst believes, apart from being what seems like a pretty reasonable organisational choice, that Momentum is more likely to do well with an all-member set-up than in the GC based structure. That possibility seems to pass the author by.

We then have more coverage of what was in the Labour First email. To be clear, that is the Canary quoting from a Twitter account’s screenshot of Labour First’s email. I’m putting it in here as I think it does provide context for the next section.

He also addressed the election of delegates by CLPs to the Annual Labour Conference. He asserted:

“The election of Annual Conference delegates by CLPs will be very competitive next year as the Hard Left will be seeking to change the party rulebook to their advantage at Conference 2017.”

Finally, he explained why his focus on delegates was so important. Members need to start thinking about “who the moderates are” in their CLPs, he wrote. Because “the key objective” of Labour First is to ensure that the majority of delegates at the conference are “moderates”.

Shocking, I know; Labour Party group wants people who agree with it to go to the conference that sets the direction of the party.

The next section is called ‘Stacking the odds against Corbyn’

Akehurst acknowleged that stacking the conference with ‘moderate’ delegates would help win key votes suited to that agenda.

Stacking? Stacking the vote is signing people up to a political party so they will vote for a given candidate in an internal election but not really take further part in the party. ‘A part of the Labour Party that I don’t like working to win an election’ is not stacking. It is ‘a part of the Labour Party that I don’t like working to win an election’. Sometimes, people just disagree with you, and aren’t underhanded about it.

Essentially, following the failed Labour coup this summer, Akehurst is planning to ensure the system is set up in such a way that Corbyn — and his 300,000+ supposedly ‘hard left’ supporters — can’t get anything done.

Potato, po-tah-to. Momentum will want conference to do things they like. Labour First will want conference to do things they like.

And Watson’s appearance at the event is not surprising.

I agree that it’s not surprising. Indeed, if you look at Labour First’s voting guide for the 2015 deputy leadership elections, they say (emphasis added)

The Deputy Leader infamously tried to explain awaythe immense support for Corbyn as the result of “Trotsky entryists” twisting the arms of voters. He was also found to have made false claims about the Corbyn-supporting group Momentum.

Deputy Leader
For the Deputy Leadership, none of the candidates are problematic but Tom Watson has a particularly long-standing connection to Labour First and has spoken at our events.

As I said above, ‘moderate‡ Labour MP attends gathering of moderate‡ Labour members’.

So seemingly, the Corbyn coup 2.0 is on its way. But the plot of 2.0 is more nuanced than the last attempt at an all-out overthrow. In a recent article for LabourList, Akehurst noted that “politics is a marathon not a sprint”.

I still don’t think it’s news that people who specifically say they don’t like Jeremy Corbyn don’t like Jeremy Corbyn, or that they would try to oppose policies they dislike and promote policies they support. This isn’t, though, a coup, or plotting for a coup, or anything else. This really is just an email from Labour First about its annual conference, and the Canary’s inability to see anyone it dislikes doing anything without assuming that cloaks and daggers are nearby.

And now, the long game of his ‘moderate’ cause is absolutely clear.

Holy plotting, Batman! People in politics have political views!

In short — and congratulations if you’ve made it this far — it seems to me that the Canary has assumed that Tom Watson is going to Labour First to talk about removing Jeremy Corbyn as leader by underhand means. Quite apart from everything else I pick up on above, they have not found anything to suggest anything other than a moderate‡ speaking to moderates‡. Labour First are just as entitled as anyone else to organise themselves. You may not like what they like, but that doesn’t mean they are ogres. It is possible — plausible, even — that there will be plotting going on. There is nothing in this article, though, but innuendo; as ever, we are left asking, 'where’s the beef?’

Notes

† If we’re being finickity (and, let’s be honest, I am tediousness incarnate), it’s definitely not the start date of the coup; it would be the start of plotting the coup. Julius Caesar received his warning from the soothsayer about the Ides of March before the fateful day itself (at least, he did in Shakespeare’s telling); the plot dates from then. The start day of the attempted coup would be the fifteenth of March. Returning to the Canary, we cannot even say that the start of the plot dates from Labour First’s conference, as the plot would already be in motion.

‡ Depending on taste, substitute ‘moderate’ with ‘right of party’, ‘red Tory’, or ‘class traitor’.

Disclosure

I worked at Weber Shandwick Public Affairs in London from 2006 to 2007. Luke Akehurst, who is mentioned in this article, was a director at Weber Shandwick Public Affairs while I worked there. I also hosted Luke’s websites when he was running for Labour’s NEC.