On Momentum’s decision to endorse Salma Yaqoob to be Labour candidate for WM metro mayor: there’s no issue with people joining, or rejoining, Labour, even if they’ve recently stood against it in elections, if they’ve made a genuine political reassessment and changed their minds.
It is a bit galling, though, to see Momentum immediately endorsing those people for candidacies, when it barely lifted a finger to defend people who’d been Labour members for years and were summarily expelled by the Compliance Unit for being associated with far-left groups.
It also seems like an affront to its own democracy that Momentum nationally (on the basis of what, exactly? A decision made by unelected staffers?) has endorsed Yaqoob, despite the fact that many Momentum groups and much of the left locally are already backing Pete Lowe.
It’s to Yaqoob’s credit that she broke with Galloway over the issue of Assange, but she was still a leading figure in and key architect of the whole Respect project, which was based on opportunistic appeals to communalism rather than class politics.
When an existing Labour MP, Naz Shah, has also said that Yaqoob was complicit in a foully reactionary misogynistic campaign against her, you’d at least expect some more deliberation and debate to go into the decision to endorse Yaqoob than has apparently been the case.
Overall it seems like another example of the institutions of “Corbynism” promoting people on the basis of a) profile and b) an assessment of how uncritically loyal to Corbyn they’ll be, rather than rank-and-file democracy and genuine movement building.
