Rival Conferences

Grassroots Momentum vs Official Momentum

At Monday night’s monthly meeting of my local Momentum group, the first item on the agenda was an invitation to comment on the two conferences that had taken place in the past month. One was the so-called ‘Grassroots Momentum’ event, the other was the Annual Conference of the official Momentum movement.

The first took place at the venerable Conway Hall in Central London. One hundred and thirtyfive participants signed in at the door. It was claimed that they came from about fifty local Momentum Groups.

The second was held in a grotty abandoned warehouse in a sleazy part of central Birmingham and about 500 Momentum members signed in.

At Monday’s meeting the tone of the comments from the elderly Marxists who had been at both events reflected a sense of baffled resignation. There was much more detail offered on the manoeverings at the Grassroots event, while the absence of conventional debates at the Annual Conference clearly foxed them.

They were expecting that there would be a fierce debate on the new and very contentious Momentum Constitution at the official Conference and when it wasn’t they couldn’t work out what was going on. They disliked the short speeches from the platform that opened the conference. In particular they grumbled that John McDonnell had said nothing new or particularly radical. As far as they were concerned the official Momentum Conference was a talking shop that didn’t put any meat on the bare bones of McDonell’s economic policies or put forward any specific policy proposals.

And that was about all they had to say, apart from shivering at the memory of the unheated and semi-derelict venue that had frozen all the passion out of them. All in all, apart from the routine insults and slanders about Jon Lansman’s disinclination to hand over the reins and the finances and the database of Momentum to genuine radicals like themselves, the Annual Conference was given a very easy ride. In fact, the comments on the Official Conference were more or less an afterthought since, out of the dozen members present, there were five or six who had attended the Grassroots event because they had been very angry with and opposed to the new Constitution that had been introduced without debate on January 10th.

However, although all the participants were as opposed to the new constitution as they were, they found the Grassroots Conference a disappointment and a puzzle. The key objection to the new constitution was that, as of July 1st. 2017, it requires all members of Momentum to show that they were also members of the Labour Party. If they are not, then their membership will be cancelled as of that date.

After expressing satisfaction that the our local Momentum banner had been shown at the Grassroots Momentum event, the comments centred on the attempt of those present to agree and implement an alternative structure for the organisation.

As far as I understood, apparently the platform party was defeated when they proposed that only accredited delegates should have votes on the question of structure. The proposed structure would have had a delegate-based conference with non-voting visitors. This was abolished. Instead the conference voted to allow a One Member, One Vote structure where everyone present could vote. Further confusion followed when after a vote it was discovered that the result was 85 vs 83. Since apparently only 135 people had signed in, this was a mystifying result, but however one that the platform party and conference allowed to stand. I could be wrong about this because those who had been there were very uncertain as to what had actually happened.

There was an important debate about whether this Grassroots organisation was a ‘split’ from ‘official’ Momentum, or still part of the whole. This was not resolved and as one person said, the result was that if this was not a split, then ‘they weren’t doing what they were doing!’.

The people who had been there agreed that it had all been was very indefinite with there being no shared idea or agreement as to what this new organization should do.

In the end a Committee of twenty people was elected to meet every six weeks. Five out of the twenty were members of the (Trotskyist) Alliance of Workers’ Liberty or A.W.L.

Again, the remit of this Committee was not specified or discussed, as far as those who had been there understood.

One interesting revelation was that the costs of the Grassroots Conference had been met — out of his savings — by Matt Wrack, the General Secretary of the Fire Brigades Union! He also expressed the hope that the FBU would affiliate to Grassroots Momentum.

The final comments from those who attended the Grassroots Conference summed it up as ‘A bit of a shambles.’: shallow discussions and not many of them, the ‘same people’ elected (though I don’t know what exactly that meant), and very little chance for networking with people from elsewhere in the country.

All of which suggests to me that Grassroots Momentum has not gained any traction, shows no sign of political, organizational or personal dynamism, and is unlikely to provide any worthwhile help towards getting Jeremy Corbyn into Number 10. From their track record over the past two years, however, it is fairly clear that those ‘same people’ will continue to use their decades of disruptive experience to be a constant bloody hindrance to the rest of us.

Sent from my iPad