Labour's attempt to ditch one-member-one-vote is, of course, a massive diversion from the important debates: Green New Deal and constitutional reform... but defeating it is vital... 1/ We're not in the 1970s anymore...
2/ I fought against OMOV in the 90s, because CLPs were sparse, inactive while unions were still (just) activist organisations, whose members could pressure bureaucrats through mass action...
3/ Today, I see OMOV as vital to Labour's transition from a Labourist party to a radical social democracy ... in a networked society, with multiple forms of exploitation, the individual activist should be sovereign...
4/ There's an explicit argument from the right: empower members and you empower ABC1s over C2DEs, code for social liberals v social conservatives... so giving MPs 1/3 of the vote, and union bureaucrats 1/3 is designed to restore crass Labourism...
5/If you want Labour to become a socially conservative party, on migration, trans rights, policing etc - you have to win the argument with people who devote their spare hours to campaigning on the doorstep... give it a try!...
6/ But the progressive, radical politics of Labour's mass membership between 2015-2020 haven't gone away: they're deeply embedded in civil society...and people have other places to go, esp in Scotland, Wales, cities like Stroud, Norwich, Sheffield...
7/ Maybe the Labour right actually want the party to collapse? It would fit with the attitudes displayed in the LabourLeaks report. A hollowed out shell, controlled by right wing union bureaucrats and NOLS people from the 1980s...
8/ Ironically, the move to scrap OMOV is reuniting a left that can agree on little else - Brexit, Green New Deal, Progressive Alliance all contested, and fragmenting the SCG/Momentum/TWT wing of the party...
9/ So out of the campaign to defend OMOV, can we build something bigger, like CLPD in the 1980s? See you in Brighton!

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More from @paulmasonnews

8 Sep
What's the social-democratic answer to the care crisis? That's the question that should guide Labour today. The answer is 1/ As a universal social need, care should be free at the point of use and funded from general taxation... that's been a Labour value since the year dot...
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7 Sep
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The US far-right has hailed the Taliban victory. 'They hate what we hate, we can emulate their strategy, they bring closer the global ethnic civil war,' is the sick logic... but the parallels with Saigon are ominous 1/....

medium.com/mosquito-ridge…
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