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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