Momentum, the grassroots movement set up last year to support Jeremy Corbyn, held an emergency meeting in central Liverpool on Tuesday night that attracted about 130 members, the biggest turnout yet, according to the organisers. It was no ordinary meeting. It was nothing less than the opening round on Merseyside of the renewed fight for the leadership of Labour. In a rallying call on Facebook, the group said: “We have to mobilise to keep Corbyn, strengthen the left and keep the party from falling apart.” I was in London because the evening before I had been in Parliament Square with the thousands who had turned up to voice their support for Corbyn as the parliamentary Labour party was calling on him to resign. But I asked my colleague Frances Perraudin, based in Manchester, if she would attend the Liverpool meeting, held at Unite headquarters. There, Edd Mustill took aim at the parliamentary Labour party’s coup attempt, saying: “It’s a childish tantrum that will, if we let it, tear the Labour party apart.”
While warning members not to take another Corbyn victory for granted, Mustill told them that if they played it right, they would “smash it”. The leadership challenge adds urgency to this Labour and Liverpool project. The entry into the race of the MP for Wallasey, Angela Eagle, puts Merseyside at the centre of what is shaping up to be one of the most fractious Labour contests since the days of Militant in the 1980s. An early sign of this – and potential trouble for Eagle – came when the deputy chair of the Wallasey constituency party, Paul Davis, told BBC North West Tonight: “Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t been given a chance to be a good leader. If you are being stabbed in the back all the time by your own people on the Labour benches, it’s very hard to get your message across. So yes, I do think he’s a good leader.” I hope to go to Wallasey within the next 24 hours to try to gauge whether Eagle does face a revolt in her local party. Could any members of that constituency get in touch?
And there are the bigger picture questions. Will Liverpool fall in behind Corbyn again? Or has his support eroded, amid scepticism over his chances of winning a general election, poor performances at prime minister’s questions and resentment over his half-hearted European referendum campaign? I would like to hear your views. In a phone interview councillor Barry Kushner, who represents Norris Green, said he voted for Corbyn last time but thought it might be harder for him this time, describing the mood on Merseyside as “mixed”. Kushner got in touch with me as a result of last week’s piece, in which I talked to councillor Peter Mitchell. Kushner did not know who he would vote for when it came to the leadership. It depended on who the alternative was, he said – but Tom Watson and Angela Eagle, the names mentioned at the time we spoke, did not feel to him like ones to take the party forward. As the member of Liverpool city council’s cabinet responsible for jobs, Kushner expressed concern about the impact of the leave vote, saying that the injection of EU funds had helped mitigate some of the effects of the Conservatives’ managed decline of Merseyside.
Brexit put some major projects at risk, he said. On Tuesday, I wrote a piece saying that Corbyn remains well-placed to win the leadership because he retains the support not only of much of the grassroots but also the unions, including Unite and GMB. Among those speaking at the Liverpool Momentum meeting on Tuesday night was Rhea Wolfson, the Momentum-backed candidate for a place on the Labour national executive committee, which helps govern the party. She said it was significant that the biggest unions had come out for Corbyn. “The Labour party is the political expression of the union movement and the moment we forget that is the moment we lose the soul of the party.” Her prediction for the campaign: it’s going to be “messy and its going to be quick, so we need to be ready for it”. Frances, attending on our behalf, reports that at the meeting, there was concern that Momentum did not have access to lists of local members. Someone else argued that mandatory reselection of MPs, something Corbyn had ruled out at the start of his leadership, needed to be brought to the table: they referred to those MPs hostile to Corbyn as “this treacherous bunch”.
One attendee proposed that the group stage a protest in support of Corbyn in central Liverpool: “The people in Parliament Square, while the rats were inside – sorry to use unparliamentary language – while the gentlemen and ladies were inside committing treachery, that sets us a challenge in Merseyside.” A member from Eagle’s Wallasey constituency said: “There’s talk that Angela Eagle will be one of the people standing against Jeremy. If she does, we will be ready.” The group agreed that they would make representations to their MPs in person at their surgeries, and would hold pro-Corbyn demonstrations this Saturday and outside the Labour party conference in September. Despite a few voices arguing that Momentum should stand simply on the policies on which Corbyn was elected, the meeting ended with the group voting overwhelmingly to adopt a motion to ban zero-hours contracts, introduce a £10 minimum wage, create 2m jobs in the public sector, build hundreds of thousands of council homes a year, introduce rent controls, increase taxes on the rich
, bring the banking sector into public ownership, increase education funding, restore and increase benefits and reverse cuts to the NHS. There has been a lot of criticism that the London rally, held the evening before, was dominated by the Socialist Workers party (SWP) and other leftwing groups. But I was there – and while there were members of the SWP and other veterans of decades of leftwing infighting, the rally was dominated by young activists brought into politics last year after the Conservative general election win and inspired by the Corbyn campaign. These people see Momentum as a broad social movement. The sense that the rally was dominated by the SWP can be explained partly by its members bringing their own banners, but also by the “Corbyn In, Tories Out” placards they produced and that carried an SWP logo, which many of those present waved. Momentum, short of cash, apparently failed to make placards of its own. But, with the unions backing Corbyn, funds for campaigning are likely to become more readily available.